A Tall Building Ethos of Integration

The last decade has seen great design opportunities for tall building construction around the globe. The best designs represent a new generation of skyscrapers that go beyond willful preconceptions of building form and iconography, trying instead to simultaneously address interrelated issues of program space utility, structural efficiency, and environmentally sustainable systems. The resulting identities of these towers are unique because of their search for the intersection of spaces tuned to people's needs, expressive optimized structures, and high performance, site-responsive systems. This paper, through examples of recent SOM towers, both built and unbuilt, will discuss how a design becomes content-driven, how ideas create value, and how the typology of the tall building is advanced through the integration of architecture design and engineering systems.