INDIA TOWER: India’s Greenest Skyscraper?
by Jorge Chapa
Green skyscrapers seem to be all the rage these days, and now India is jumping on the bandwagon with FXFowle Architects’ India Tower, currently being built in South Mumbai to house a new Park Hyatt Hotel. According to the designers, India Tower will be the greenest skyscraper in the entire country, boasting rainwater harvesting, green materials, and a possible US LEED Gold rating.
Strikingly similar to Tianjin’s ‘Pile of Boxes’, the 60 story, 301 meter tower is subdivided into different modules, each slightly rotated to the next. Each module is meant to signal a change in function of the tower, one being a hotel, the next residential units, one next a retail area and so on. In terms of green features, the structure would integrate everything from common-sense green strategies like shaded windows, natural ventilation, and proper site orientation and zoning to green technologies such as rainwater harvesting and eco-friendly materials.
It is a good thing that developers and architects are trying to minimize the resource consumption of skyscrapers. We’ve seen some rather innovative examples in the past, some going as far as designing a building around sustainable features, such a wind turbines, like in the case of Castle House in London. Most of those have been in the United States or Britain, with a few lofty renderings coming from Dubai, so it is great to see interest in sustainable architecture in other parts of the world. The building is expected to be finished by 2010.
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I am not against being Eco-friendly but i strongly feel that you are missing the point,
1) If you know the area where the building is going to come, up you will realize that only a certain class will be able to afford it (simply going by the real estate prices and hotel rentals), which means that the building actually caters to a section of people who have a lavish lifestyle, or should i say, believe in over consumption, which is in complete contradiction to your own ideas of environment and sustainability.
2) The construction of the Tower of that scale is against the CRZ (coastal regulations zone) that is a policy to ensure the safeguard of flora and fauna from intense building and construction activity, and limits building heights within 500 mts from the coast to about 24 mts. (G+7)
3) The tower also completely ignores ideas of Heritage properties around, the ground plus 4 buildings along the Queens necklace are from the Art Deco style and are of heritage importance to the city.
4) lastly being next to the sea, the amount of sheer resources the tower will demand for its maintenance will shock you, (please find out the amount of money spent by each building along that stretch to protect itself from corrosion).