Here’s a list of some of the world’s most technologically advanced buildings that push the envelope when it comes to responsiveness, well-being, sustainability and construction costs.

The Top 10 Technologically Advanced Buildings:

#1 The Edge by PLP Architecture

Described as the world’s greenest, most intelligent building, Deloitte’s new Amsterdam head office, the Edge, has received the highest sustainability score ever awarded by the British rating agency BREEAM. The building, designed by PLP Architecture, uses technology to achieve an unprecedented level of resource efficiency, but also create a collaborative work environment in tune with its users. Its LED panels pack about 28,000 sensors that track motion, light, temperature and humidity, creating a unique artificial neural network.

Surprisingly, the building comprises only 1,000 desks. The concept of hot desking–using desks only when they’re needed– increases occupancy efficiency and boosts productivity. The rest of the spaces designated for work are informal meeting spaces and lounge areas.

A smartphone app, developed with Deloitte, is connected to the building which directs you to a free parking spot, finds you a free desk and caters to your preference in lighting and temperature.

#2 Taipei 101 Tower by C.Y. Lee & Partners

Named for its 101 floors, Taipei 101 held the record as the world’s highest building for six years after its completion in 2004. Its sustainable construction has also made it the world’s tallest green building. The building received LEED Platinum Certification in 2012 and has some of the most advanced disaster prevention features ever built.

Taiwan is heavily affected by typhoons, which makes building tall buildings a tricky business, to say the least. Massive storms hit the East Asian coastline each year, bringing wind and rainfall strong enough to take down entire buildings. Taipei 101 tackles this with unprecedented inventiveness. The building’s most notable engineering feature is its tuned mass damper. This element functions as a large pendulum that counterbalances the sway of the building by swinging in the opposite way on hydraulically controlled suspension cables. This movement is controlled and reacts precisely to the movement of the building.

#3 Apple Campus 2 –Cupertino- by Foster+Partners

Apple’s new spaceship-shaped campus in Cupertino, California, has been a hot topic of debate in the AEC community ever since the release of its first images. The heavily-publicized project has a ring-shaped layout enveloping a patch of greenery. It is outfitted with solar panels and will be powered mainly by an “on-site low carbon Central Plant”.

Foster+Partners included a 100,000-square-foot fitness center, 300,000 square feet of research and development facilities, and two miles of walkways and running paths for employees, underground parking, as well as an orchard, meadow and pond. The staff can also navigate the campus on bikes, electric golf carts and commuter shuttles. The building will feature the world’s largest panels of curved glass which will limit glare and provide views of the outdoors from any location inside.

The project received some criticism due to its inward-oriented design that reflects Apple’s notorious secrecy. Some critics have called it ““anti-urban, anti-social, and anti-environmental”. As the first images and impressions of the completed building emerge, we are curious to see if the project will fulfill its ambitions.

#4 Bullitt Center by Miller Hull

The Bullitt Center in Seattle features several systems that make it one-of-a-kind and justify its status of the world’s greenest commercial building. A third of the building’s roof is covered in photovoltaic panels that produce around 230,000 kilowatt-hours per year. Rainwater is collected in a 56,000-gallon cistern and reused throughout the building. It features composting toilets and none of the 350 common toxic chemicals, including PVC, lead, mercury and BPA.

All systems are monitored and the real-time measurements of indoor air quality, energy consumption and photovoltaic power production are available to visitors. One of the most prominent features of the building is the fact that these innovative engineering solutions are visible and celebrated through the building’s architectural style.

#5 Powerhouse Kjørbo by Snohetta

Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta undertook a renovation of an existing 1980s building in Bærum, just outside Oslo, and transformed it into the world’s first “energy positive building” (EPB) or “net positive” building. The 200,000 kWh of on-site photovoltaics produce twice as much energy required to meet the needs of the building. According to predictions, the building will generate enough power in the next 60 years to cover the total amount of energy used to manufacture all the building materials, as well the construction, operation and waste disposal. This is something that is often omitted when considering energy efficiency of contemporary buildings that strive for sustainable performance.

#6 Ten Thousand by Handel Architects

Ten Thousand Santa Monica is a 283-unit, 767,240 square-foot residential tower in Los Angeles comprising four crystalline masses topped with a dramatic angled roof. The building offers an amazing array of tech-infused amenities, including a relay delivery robot named CHARLEY programmed to navigate the building, deliver packages, meals, drinks, etc.

Each resident has an iPad mini that features the Ten Thousand app. They can access the main menu and choose the item to be delivered by CHARLEY. Besides providing connection to the delivery robot, the app also integrates a beacon technology system throughout the building that predicts the residents’ needs. The residents can also use the app-based valet system to pay for training sessions, drinks at the bar, reserve private dining rooms and event spaces, request vehicles, and pay rent.

#7 Ng Teng Fong General Hospital by HOK

The Ng Teng Fong General Hospital is a community college science building in Singapore that uses 38% less energy than a typical Singaporean hospital and 69% less than a typical U.S. hospital. Its design, conceived by HOK, is based on passive sustainability principles aided by several active systems that curb its carbon emissions and power consumption. It is rare for buildings of this type to achieve net zero energy.

The hospital also is the first medical campus to combine continuing care from outpatient to post-acute care in Singapore. Its focus on patient well-being was the driving force behind many of its features, including its heavy reliance on natural ventilation and the presence of vegetation throughout the campus.

#8 Bahrain World Trade Center by Atkins

The 50-story Bahrain World Trade Center (BWTC), known as the country’s first ‘intelligent’ building with integrated SMART IT systems, boasts a unique feature – 3 huge wind turbines tying its two sail-shaped volumes together. The 29 meter wind turbines, each supported by a 30-meter bridge spanning between the two towers funnel and accelerate the wind going in-between the sails. The building is the first building in the world to incorporate this type of technology–and at this large a scale– into its design.

The development also incorporates the use of heat recovery systems, variable-volume chilled water pumps, energy efficient fluorescent lighting, solar-powered roads and amenity lighting, as well as reflective pools at the entrances which provide local evaporative cooling.

#9 IBM Watson IoT HQ by Universal Design Studio

IBM’s new headquarters in Munich is the company’s largest investment ever in Europe, and will serve as a research hub for artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and Blockchain, among other things. The building, designed by Universal Design Studio, will gather software engineers, programmers, architects, designers, cognitive scientists, researchers and clients working together to bring cognitive computing to IoT. Distributed across more than 25 floors, collaborative spaces will be equipped with IoT devices, occupancy sensors, and voice activation automated interfaces.

As one of the most technologically advanced buildings it can automatically adjust temperature and lighting to users’ preferences, and detect free spots which enables hot-desking. Server rooms are left visible to show the technology driving the experiences communicating transparency and openness.

#10 Sacramento Kings’ Golden 1 Center by AECOM

The solar-powered Sacramento Kings’ Golden 1 Center by AECOM is the first arena of its size to use a displacement ventilation system that directs fresh air upward from floor openings under the seating, instead of pumping forced air down into the arena from overhead diffusers. This kind of ventilation allows for cooling only the space around people instead of the entire building, which makes it more efficient and flexible compared to other ventilation systems. This means that the arena maintains stable temperatures at all times and during both hot and cold-weather sporting events. There is no need to pre-cool the building, so the building can host two events on the same day.

Furthermore, the air conditioning can be crowd-sourced, which means that the audience can use an in-game app to mark whether they’re too hot or cold in real time. The arena is the first to receive approval for the use of this kind of technology, and the first LEED Platinum–certified NBA arena expected to curb its carbon emissions by 24 percent compared to its predecessor–the Sleep Train Arena. The structure is powered entirely by a 1.2-megawatt solar array installed on its roof surface, and an 11-megawatt solar farm located 40 miles away.

Which technologically advanced buildings do you know?

The post 10 of the World’s Most Technologically Advanced Buildings appeared first on Archipreneur.

by Zach Mortice

From this perspective, Redshift’s list of the most innovative architecture documents a different ethos. The concerns demonstrated here (housing inequality, the future of the global economy, the elastic nature of “innovation”) are not going away. They may even be amplified by the changing political tides that will have to wait a few years to see their expression in architecture. Rest assured, it’s coming.

1. Northerly Island by SmithGroupJJR/Studio Gang Architects (Chicago).

Technically completed in late 2015, this former airport-turned-wetland-peninsula took a while to grow into itself. But by summer 2016, Northerly Island had matured into an urban wildlife habitat like no other: a reparative landscape on Lake Michigan framing a great city’s skyline amid rolling hills, marshlands, prairie, and the call of ducks and herons. It’s a stunning example of adaptive reuse, using a landscape-architecture toolset to repair disused infrastructure.

2. T3 by Michael Green Architecture (Minneapolis).

Wood-structured high-rises fight climate change by sequestering carbon over the building’s lifetime, using wood beams that are lighter than steel but just as strong. Made of mass timber, Michael Green Architecture’s seven-story, 220,000-square-foot T3 office building became the largest contemporary wood-structured building in North America this year. The warm, wood-grained interior would’ve baffled the steel-and-glass modernists—the columns and room spanning-beams nod to tradition while resurrecting wood as a new standard-bearer for progressive design.

3. Starter Home by the Office of Jonathan Tate (New Orleans).

Home ownership, the middle class that has relied on it to build wealth, and the traditional starter home are all on the wane. So Jonathan Tate’s first step in lowering barriers to entry was astoundingly simple: “The first thing we do,” he says, “is eliminate the embedded cost in the land.” Tate custom-designs homes for the discarded, irregularly shaped lots that all cities have: disused parking lots, alleys, slivers of land next to waterways. These houses could be a single cross-section of a full McMansion, each uniquely suited to “leftovers” tossed aside by the real estate market.

4. Via 57 West by BIG (New York City).

Rising from a rectangular base, this multifaceted addition to Manhattan’s skyline, by one of the world’s wittiest and most experimental architecture firms, gets its unusual shape by lifting up one corner of the building to a 450-foot peak. The building hybridizes the typical high-rise profile with a European-style perimeter courtyard apartment block. With New York beset by champagne flute-thin apartment towers for a mostly anonymous globe-trotting elite, Via 57 West is a more public-minded project that works at the scale of the street.

5. Carmel Place by nArchitects (New York City).

Carmel Place is New York’s first micro-unit apartment building, a much-theorized building type that’s mostly illegal due to zoning restrictions. nArchitects’ project—made of 65 steel-framed modular pieces stacked like LEGOs, with a classic New York skyscraper setback profile—required zoning exceptions, both for the minimum unit size and maximum density of units. But its studio apartments, as small as 260 square feet, could model a pressure-release valve for New York and other cities where housing is scarce and space is at a premium.

6. Jeddah Tower by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia).

Even in an age of rapidly multiplying cloud-piercers, everything about the Jeddah Tower is superlative. Currently under construction, the 3,280-foot skyscraper will be the tallest in the world by more than 500 feet, and its observation deck on the 157th floor will be the highest in existence. It may reference desert-plant fronds, but what’s most fascinating about Jeddah Tower is how vulnerable the ultra-high-rise typology looks today. Its best patrons (Middle Eastern oil regimes and China) are beset by low oil prices and economies built on infrastructure that has expanded too quickly. In that light, this gilded crystalline refuge might be the final exclamation point at the end of architecture’s sky colonization.

7. Mercedes-Benz Stadium by HOK (Atlanta).

The design of sports stadia is a conservative game, more often concerned with conjuring up red-brick visions of yesteryear than blazing new paths. But HOK is building a $1.5 billion faceted glass and metal jewel for the Atlanta Falcons, forging new precedents for event architecture. Its signature feature is a retractable roof made of eight panels that open and shut like a camera lens. Its designers are forgoing a monolithic media wall and instead installing a 360-degree halo-shaped media screen that’s five stories tall and 1,100 feet long—triple the size of existing NFL stadium screens, according to Fast Company.

8. Cricket Shelter Farm by Terreform ONE (Brooklyn, NY).

Not many foodstuffs can beat crickets for their efficiency in converting energy into protein. And not many carbon-efficient food systems are as untouched by architectural investigation as insect farming. The Cricket Shelter Farm is a pavilion made from hundreds of plastic jugs connected via tubes. Its sculpted curves and composite cellular components advertise a brave new world of low-carbon protein production. The pavilion certainly has a strong aesthetic presence, but Terreform ONE’s Mitchell Joachim says most of his design concerns were purely functional. For Joachim, a baseline belief for all design is that “the form must embed desire,” which takes on unique meaning when you’re talking about a food source that has to overcome cultural taboos and some stomach-churning to get to the supermarket.

9. Botswana Innovation Hub by SHoP Architects (Gaborone, Botswana).

With its Botswana Innovation Hub, SHoP offers its vision of a developing-world collaborative research facility—one with a design that would be just as at home in Silicon Valley. The complex, created to support innovation and research, is arranged as a set of three long, rounded bars connected by walkways and landscaped courtyards. The mega-complex, now under construction, has the sleek profile of a starship—albeit one that can collect rainwater and solar energy, and will be covered in an “energy blanket” shaggy green roof.

10. Pennovation Center by HWKN (Philadelphia).

At the University of Pennsylvania’s Pennovation Center, you can code an app, build a robot, or sequence DNA. An all-purpose research and entrepreneurship hub, it’s accessible to both students and outside groups. Its labs and machine-fabrication workshops give second life to an old brick DuPont paint-research facility—a clever example of adaptive reuse. The north façade is made up of triangular steel and glass shards that frame a set of stadium-style stair seating for aspiring TED Talk-ers. “Many people talk about disruption, but most innovation comes out of evolution,” says HWKN’s Matthias Hollwich. “You take ideas and regenerate them with incredible new properties that lead into the future, and that’s what we did with the building.”

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This article originally appeared on Autodesk’s Redshift, a site dedicated to inspiring designers, engineers, builders, and makers.

Zach Mortice is an architectural journalist based in Chicago.

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However, some architecture firms are utilizing their high profiles, international success and the influx of talented, young designers to establish in-house research divisions and incubators that support the development of new ideas in the AEC industry. The following five companies are consistent in pushing the envelope and helping architecture adopt some of the latest technologies:

Our top 5 most innovative architecture firms list:

#1 BIG | Bjarke Ingels Group

One of the most renowned architecture firms in the world, BIG, is a great example of architects keeping step with pop culture and new business trends. Both their design and company culture reveals a nimbleness and experimental attitude that allow them to explore different avenues for practicing architecture. BIG’s founder, Bjarke Ingels, is a rare example of an archipreneur attuned to the latest media trends and business strategies. He embraces social media, invests in new enterprises, and implements innovation in his projects.

Recently, BIG teamed up with aerospace organization Rumlaboratorium, the Danish Technical University and artists from realities:united to launch a Kickstarter campaign to design a prototype of a unique steam-ring generator that would be part of the “cleanest power plant in the world.” The initiative shows a readiness to invent and extend their involvement in the construction process to engineering. In 2014, they launched a new division within the company and called it BIG Ideas, which was intended to act as a research and development lab where the firm could create products and new building materials. Several other independent projects are currently underway, many of which are focused on finding new engineering solutions to be incorporated into BIG’s projects.

#2 SHoP Architects

SHoP Architects and SHoP Construction (SC), collectively known as SHoP, are among New York’s 10 largest architecture firms. What makes them stand out among other mainstream architecture firms is their interest in addressing the gap between real estate development, architecture and engineering. A hybrid business model allows them to function as a combination of a real estate development firm, a think tank, and a one-stop shop for clients.

Five people with individual backgrounds in design, construction, business, marketing and development founded the firm in 1996. The team was led by Gregg Pasquarelli, who had previously worked as an investment banker on Wall Street. They first experimented with trading fees for equity on their Porter House project, and went on to develop several other projects, as well as their own, and collaborating with other architects.

SHoP is a trailblazer when it comes to redefining the way architecture is practiced. They are rethinking the role of architects in the project development process and looking for ways to get more autonomy, better pay, and innovative design projects off the ground, all while cutting construction costs through smart fabrication.

#3 Perkins + Will

Perkins + Will is one of the United States’ leading architecture firms in healthcare design, delivering buildings that focus on better patient experience and high performance. Their new in-house Innovation Incubator program aims to “foster, through micro-grants of money and time, a culture of innovation, creativity and experimentation by supporting small research projects proposed by individuals.” So far the program has awarded more than 150 groups of participants with the most innovative proposals.

The firm also formed 10 laboratories this year, which are focused on sustainability issues, resilience, the human experience, the design process, and mobility. Their annual design competition encourages talented designers to experiment. Design solutions selected through the contest are often further developed through the Innovation Incubator system.

#4 NBBJ

One of the first architecture offices to fully embrace Virtual Reality (VR), Seattle-based NBBJ, developed its self-contained venture Visual Vocal to build a VR platform integrated into the firm’s design process. By using VR, NBBJ hopes to speed up collaboration and communication between designers and allow them to make decisions based on client feedback. The new productivity tool will allow architects to build VR versions of 3D models that can be explored on a smartphone.

Together with mobile and cloud-based solutions, VR is expected to replace conventional communication such as email. The team, led by John San Giovanni and Sean House, raised $500,000 for Visual Vocal, which will be developed as a tool not only for architecture but also for other industries. Future plans for these platforms include solutions for working in the aerospace industry, product design, and biotech.

#5 HOK

Recently, HOK partnered with the Biomimcry Guild in order to foster bio-inspired innovation in the field of architecture. The partnership began in 2004 and the two companies have collaborated on several projects since, including HOK’s proposal for the “City of the Future” competition in 2008.

“We believe biomimicry will not only help us significantly reduce the environmental impact of our projects, but also has the potential to help define a whole new sustainable standard for our profession,” said HOK Sustainable Design Director, Mary Ann Lazarus, “Because biomimicry addresses critical environmental issues at the habitat scale, it gives us lessons on how to achieve significant results even restorative outcomes at all scales.”

HOK is also a great example of an architecture firm embracing new media tools, as one of the most active users of social media in the architectural industry. The firm launched Life at HOK in 2008 as a supplementary resource to the company’s main site. It is an employee-authored blog, dedicated to showing the processes behind their projects and office culture. HOK employees from around the country post different types of content, such as links to YouTube videos, Facebook profiles and Flickr images. The site aggregates several social media platforms and encourages feedback and interaction with and between its users.

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These five most innovative architecture firms are consistently showing a readiness to adopt new design and communication tools, design strategies, and business models. This attitude allows them to remain flexible and absorb various cultural and technological shifts instead of simply trying to keep up with the world. Which other architecture firms do you find innovative?

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