Author(s): Yohan Kim
In the context of vertical urbanism, there has been growing interest in skyspaces within high-rise buildings, which accommodate various programs typically found at ground level by incorporating the city’s infrastructure into the buildings. These skyspaces help facilitate natural ventilation and enhance occupant experience, as they can provide semi-conditioned spaces when properly designed. They foster interaction with the natural environment in buildings where occupants often feel disconnected from it due to sealed designs and challenging environmental conditions on higher floors. Double-skin facades (DSFs) have proven to be an effective sustainable design strategy for providing natural ventilation in high-rise office buildings, as they can regulate high wind pressure and harness it to draw fresh air into the buildings. DSFs can also create skyspaces by widening the cavity space between the two skins (e.g., inhabitable DSFs in Shanghai Tower), allowing cavity depth to vary along the perimeter of the high-rise. This study draws on previous research on the design of DSFs for natural ventilation in high-rise office buildings, where DSFs were mainly considered both airflow paths and wind buffers to create desired airflow distributions that facilitate natural ventilation. As an alternative approach to integrating DSFs into high-rise office buildings, this study leverages DSFs to provide skyspaces within the widened, occupiable cavity space. Although various studies have examined skyspaces, sky courts, and sky gardens, these features are often treated independently from the buildings, and their impact on airflow behavior in adjacent indoor spaces has not been fully investigated. This research seeks to bridge the gap in designing fully integrated, naturally ventilated inhabitable DSFs in high-rise office buildings and to explore potential inhabitable DSF design configurations, including occupiable cavity depth and skyspace location. Specifically, the study analyzes airflow behavior, with a focus on the higher floors of a hypothetical high-rise office building, where wind effects are more pronounced, and assesses the natural ventilation potential of various design configurations. As an early-stage investigation, this study presents preliminary results, and further simulations will be conducted to enable more in-depth analysis. Despite these limitations, the framework establishes an approach that can be applied to other skyspace typologies.
Volume Editors
Reed Kroloff & Francisco J. RodrÃguez-Suárez
ISBN
978-1-944214-52-4