Better! Cities & Towns blogger Steve Mouzon “created a small firestorm” when he tweetcast Leon Krier’s critique of highrises at the CNU conference. Here he elaborates, giving “Six reasons why high-rises will become uninhabitable’.
Here’s No. 6:
Elevator motors consume more energy than any other single piece of equipment in a high-rise building. In a period of unaffordable energy costs, people would only be able to occupy floors as high as they could physically climb. For most people, that limit is a climb of 4 or maybe 5 flights of stairs, resulting in a city that looks much more like historic London, Paris, or Rome than Manhattan or Vancouver.
Maybe we should design staircases so they didn’t look like communist-era bunkers. I live in a new mid-rise building (only 8 stories) and everyone takes the elevator because the stairs are so ugly.
And I’m not sure where that stat came from. From what I could find, elevators only consume 5-8% of most buildings total energy. Significant, but still dwarfed by heating/cooling.
We have cheap hydroelectricity here and we have the sea close by that we can heat exchange with. There is also the ground to heat exchange with. I agree it would be nice to open a window in my office building. Condos allow windows to be opened, why not office buildings?
Probably better overall building management.
Historically, HVAC systems are large in scale – newer buildings may be able to selectively section off tenancies or floors depending on a tenant’s preferences.
i.e. it’s inefficient to turn up the AC to cool an office tower if half the windows are open.
For example, in 1974 (?) TD Tower, the air conditioning is sectioned for the upper half of the tower and the lower half of the tower – so if an office tenant needs the AC turned on over a weekend during the summer (when it is normally turned off and the place becomes a sauna), the tenant must pay the extra cost of cooling the entire top or bottom half of the tower.
Some condos may have individual heat pumps within each unit for AC (this is common in Toronto), so the AC is individually controlled and building systems are not strained if the windows are left open.
It would be really great to have a real discussion on this rather than talking point twitter wars.
For one, elevators can and are being made more efficient.
http://gigaom.com/cleantech/kone-to-launch-more-energy-efficient-elevators/
I suspect if energy is really expensive, elevators can be run slower or less often to conserve even more energy. They could also not stop at every floor on the way encouraging people to walk two or three floors up. On the way down, they could stop at every floor to recover more of the potential energy. What is really needed is comparing the energy used by elevators in higher buildings that enable higher density over that of lower buildings with lower density that require energy intensive surface transportation.
Lighting is a non issue now that LED lights are able to replace more energy intensive ones.
It is also hard to believe that buildings could not withstand more insulation as it tends to be really light or even reflective foil to reflect more of the light to reduce heat.
Trying to sell people on a future of energy poverty is not a winning proposition for urbanists. The fact of the matter is that humanity has within easy reach all of the energy that we could ever need to maintain a widespread technological civilization. We call this source of energy the ‘sun.’
The change that is coming is that we are no longer going to get energy through complex inefficient chemical processes involving the extraction of hydrocarbons that cause massive pollution. But assuming that this means the end of affordable energy is pessimistic in the extreme. Peddling this kind of doom and gloom “Manhatten will be uninhabitable, Vancouver a ghost town!” is done purely for shock value and is actually detrimental to the cause. Doom and gloom messages just encourage people to act foolishly.
Are some high rises badly built? Yes. Will their occupants have to deal with rising energy costs? Absolutely.
But uninhabitable? I sure wouldn’t bet on it.
The legions of people heading up Grouse mountain would beg to differ that limit to the amount people will climb 4 or maybe 5 flights of stairs. Anyway, the alternative in a low energy city without tall buildings would be walking great distances. Someone needs to do some math here.
I understand building codes demand fire-proof stairwells…. but I happen to live in a 1920s 3-storey walkup with a beautiful, grand central staircase (with skylight). It makes walking up 3 flights of stairs a joy. It would never be built today.
My previous 1970s apt had the typical bunker stairwell (if you could find the stairs) and it sucked. I don’t have an answer, but it seems clear we’ve made using stairs an undignified, unpleasant experience in the name of fire safety; wishing there was a better compromise.