Review On High-Rise Housing Projects in Istanbul: Toward A Sustainable Architecture

Abstract

Emerging with population growth and developing technology as a result of industrial revolution, rapid and unplanned process of urbanization has led to rapid depletion of natural resources in the physical and biological environment. In consequence of urbanization, lack of urban land and accordingly excessive rise of land prices has resulted in vertical construction. In the phases of design, construction, use and demolition, high-rise buildings, consuming much more energy than low-rise buildings, have led to significant changes in the city skyline with increasing numbers of them. In this context, the concept of sustainability matters to efficiently benefit from high-rise structures and to minimize the degree of damage to the natural environment. With the rise of vertically dense structuring in the world, high-rise buildings have become more questionable and requested the answers of how the buildings can be designed to care of human needs. Therefore, green building practices paying attention to ecological data have entered as an important parameter of vertically dense building design. Resulting from such reasons as diversifying and increasing user requirements in recent years, developing construction technologies, increasing of the density in urban centers and the rise in the land values, the number of high-rise buildings has begun to increase rapidly. Green building designs, being important input for the vertically dense housing design and its derivatives are among the images and discourses used as a marketing strategy. A significant part of construction projects in Istanbul, claims that they place emphasis on the use of natural building materials and energy efficiency to associate themselves with sustainability discourses. The developers of these projects use LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) or similar international green building certifications as a tool of presentation and promotion of the project. For many segments of society, sustainability is transformed into a perception management gathering terms, such as green technology, renewable energy and smart building. In this respect, the paper aims to evaluate the development of high-rise buildings in Istanbul on Metrocity Millennium Towers (2001), Sapphire (2006) and Varyap Meridian (2009) projects in the context of sustainability principles and practices. These projects describe three different processes and applications of sustainability. The main aim of the paper to discuss the efforts of transformation from solid structures to sustainable buildings based on various images and discourses related to high-rise building projects.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sace.18.1.16598