Now in its 20th year, the COTE Top Ten Awards program honors projects that protect and enhance the environment through an integrated approach to architecture, natural systems, and technology.
A recently released study, entitled Lessons from the Leading Edge, reports that design projects recognized through this program are “outpacing the industry by virtually every standard of performance.”
The design of the BRB embraces the moderate climate of Ireland. By locating low-load spaces along the perimeter of the building, the project is able to take advantage of natural ventilation as the sole conditioning strategy for the majority of the year and is supplemented less than 10% of the year with radiant heating. Due to this approach, 45% of this intensive research building is able to function without mechanical ventilation. This is an extremely simple, yet radical approach and is rarely implemented to even a modest extent in similar laboratories in comparable U.S. climates.
The CSL is an education, research and administration facility at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. Designed to be the greenest building in the world, it generates all of its own energy and treats all storm and sanitary water captured on-site. The CSL is the first and only building to meet four of the highest green certifications: the Living Building Challenge, LEED Platinum, WELL Building Platinum, and Four-Stars Sustainable SITES. As an integral part of the Phipps visitor experience, the CSL focuses attention on the important intersection between the built and natural environments, demonstrating that human and environmental health are inextricably connected. Exploratorium at Pier 15; San Francisco / EHDD
The Exploratorium is an interactive science museum that also demonstrates innovation and sustainability in its design and construction. The building takes advantage of the historic pier shed’s natural lighting and the 800-foot-long roof provided room for a 1.3 megawatt photovoltaic array. The water of the bay is used for cooling and heating. Materials were used that are both sustainable and durable enough to withstand a harsh maritime climate. The project is certified LEED Platinum and is close to reaching its goal of being the country’s largest Net Zero energy museum and an industry model for what is possible in contemporary museums.
H-E-B at Mueller is an 83,587-square-foot LEED Gold and Austin Energy Green Building 4-Stars retail store and fresh food market, including a pharmacy, café, community meeting room, outdoor gathering spaces, and fuel station. It serves 16 neighborhoods and is located in Mueller, a sustainable, mixed-use urban Austin community. Strategies include a collaborative research, goal-setting and design process; integrated chilled water HVAC and refrigeration systems; the first North American supermarket propane refrigeration system; optimized daylighting; 169 kW roof-top solar array; electric vehicle charging; all LED lighting; and reclaimed water use for landscape irrigation, toilets, and cooling tower make-up water.
Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation; Berkeley, CA / Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects
Founded on the conviction that design can help address some of society’s most pressing challenges, the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation at UC Berkeley is devoted to introducing sustainable design innovation at the core of university life. The project provides a new interdisciplinary hub for students and teachers from across the university who work at the intersection of design and technology. It is designed as both a collaborative, project-based educational space and a symbol to the region of the University’s commitment to sustainable innovation, modelling high-density / low-carbon living and learning by reducing energy use 90% below national baseline.
The result is a compelling report. It reveals that these high-performing projects skew small. That performance gains and metrics, particularly real-time performance metrics, are improving each year. That the leading projects tend to be expensive. On average, they come in at $537 per square foot. “The cost data shows us that we need more compelling examples of lower-cost, higher performance projects,” Hosey says. Clearly, more exemplars at greater scale, type, and cost variation would be beneficial to both the profession and the market.
This report has been produced as the AIA Committee on the Environment celebrates its 25th year. Its longevity is peculiar, in a certain way, because so many of its leaders over the years have suggested that real success would mean the group’s obsolescence. (That includes me: I served as an Advisory Group member for AIACOTE, as well as its chair, in 2007.) If and when the AIA and the profession fully embrace the integration of design excellence and sustainability, we have long argued, then COTE’s reason for being might evaporate. Unfortunately, we’re nowhere near that.
First, this leading edge program—and the projects and the teams who create its recognized exemplars—should be more visible and accessible. The report suggests an “online portal that updates Top Ten performance analysis every year; [a]n annual education track at the national convention with ten sessions featuring deep dives into the winners; [r]egular or occasional conferences devoted to the leading edge of sustainable design; [c]loser study of the effects of the size, structure, and culture of high performance design firms.” The online portal would allow these exemplars to be living, real-time examples of what’s working and what’s not. Tracking how architecture functions for the people who use it would be a tremendously valuable tool for owners, occupants/users, and designers. Another? It is long past time that these measures and metrics be fully integrated into the AIA Honor Awards. To be clear, the COTE recognition program was started because Honor Awards were a beauty contest that neglected performance. In this century, that weakness persists: while a few of the COTEmeasures were finally integrated into the Honor Awards starting three years ago, the associated performance metrics are requested but not required. (This leaves it up to the jury to decide whether attractive buildings that are regionally inappropriate—or worse—can earn recognition. Thus far, few entrants have provided metrics and the program does not publish the information that winners provide, as Top Ten does.)
Design excellence without accountability is far short of excellence. And isn’t excellence—actual functioning excellence in architecture, the kind that shows the relevance and leadership of the profession itself—precisely what the AIA Honor Awards are meant to recognize?
Last year we covered the work of Rich McCor, aka paperboyo. Now, as his Instagram account approaches 170k+ followers, Rich tells ArchDaily how it all started, what keeps him going and how he's made his hobby into paid work. It began with one photo in London when I turned Big Ben into the London Eye. From there I created a series of photos from London, which then led to brands sponsoring me to create images for them in Europe and then from the start of this year I've been able to travel further a field with tourist boards. It's been great to transform familiar sights into something different and it's even more fun watching someone's reaction when they see my photos. I really enjoy it when other tourists come up to me and ask what I'm doing. When I show them the photo their faces go through a transition of confusion, to smiling and then laughing.
I've had a jam packed year so far – I've been to Hong Kong, Singapore, Nanjing, Val d'Isere, New York and Las Vegas with tourist boards, a few other destinations with brands. I've also given a couple of talks on how I've been able to turn a hobby into paid work
I don't tend to post photos of myself on my Instagram but I do get recognised occasionally when people see me holding up the cutouts in front of my camera- they recognise the style of photography and then ask me if I'm paperboyo. The sweetest example of being recognised happened in Singapore; I ordered room service and started to chat with the lady who kindly brought it up. I mentioned that I travel, take photos and post them on Instagram. She told me that she's following a travel blogger who she recommends and so took out her phone, opened Instagram and showed me the account. I blushed – it was my account. When I told her, she blushed. That was a really cool moment to know that someone the other side of the world was enjoying the photos
I'm really happy with the Statue of Liberty weightlifter photo. It's an idea I had for a while and couldn't quite get right with the real statue in New York so when I went to Vegas I made sure to try it again. I posted it on Independence Day which I think helped it become one of the most liked photos on my Instagram. I also love the Marina Bay Sands Hotel photo where I turned the famous hotel into a vintage key. The hotel loved that photo too and they invited me to stay there.
I have some nifty tools that help me so the process of cutting out the cutouts isn't as fiddly as it may look, but the doing ones with people's facial features is tricky. I posted a David Bowie tribute silhouette on the day he passed away which was a delicate one to cut.
Although it opened in 2011, YOTEL New York feels like it belongs in 2084, the same year the science-fiction film Total Recall is set. Quintessentially futuristic, the original cult classic starring Arnold Schwarzenegger features robotic police officers, instant manicures, hovering cars, implanted memories, and skin-embedded cellphones. Its protagonist, Douglas Quaid, is a construction worker obsessed with vacationing on Mars.
One could easily imagine Quaid staying at a Martian outpost of YOTEL, a “minimal-service” hotel modeled after Japanese capsule hotels, which provide a large number of extremely small modular guest rooms for travelers willing to forgo all the services of a conventional hotel in exchange for convenient, affordable accommodations. These kinds of automated-service hotels may be a trend into the 2020s, but are they really hotels of the future?
Located in Hell’s Kitchen near Times Square, YOTEL’s flagship property has 669 “cabins” spread across 60 floors, each cabin with a futon-style bed occupying most of its scant square footage. It has an ultracontemporary all-white design that glows radioactively with neon-purple mood lighting; automated check-in via self-service kiosks; and YOBOT, a robotic baggage handler that stores and retrieves guests’ luggage.
When most people stay at YOTEL, they believe they’re witnessing one of the hotels of the future. But when Ron Swidler, principal of branding at Chicago-based hospitality design firm The Gettys Group, stayed there, he saw something else entirely. To start with, no one was actually using the YOBOT; although it looked cool, it felt more like a gimmick than a service. That was also the case with automated check-in, which failed when his kiosk encountered a software error. And in the two days Swidler stayed at the hotel, he never came in contact with a person working there. “Here I was in an environment that was meant to be representative of a leading-edge hotel experience, but it was missing an important component: hospitality,” Swidler says. “The future of technology and the role it plays in hospitality should allow for personalization and customization that combines computing power. What we need to consider is how can we use technology to enhance the guest experience while still allowing for a human connection.”
In 2015, The Gettys Group designed the AC Hotel Chicago Downtown, which features wireless service buttons called “Kallpods” that guests can use to easily summon a staff member when they need service; the grand ballroom at the Marriott Manila, with its 176 programmable “pillow” lights in the ceiling that can change to any of 360 different colors to match the moods of meetings and events; and The Godfrey Hotel Boston, where guests can use their personal mobile devices to stream photos, videos, and music directly to their rooms’ 55-inch televisions. (All three hotels were designed using Autodesk AutoCAD Architecture.
“I’m a big believer that technology should be used to aid the hospitality service experience, not replace the hospitality service experience,” says Swidler, a self-described “early adopter and technophile.”
He’s not alone. Although novelty lodgings like YOTEL will continue to open on the premise that technology is an end, not a means—Japan, for example, recently opened the Henn-na hotel, the world’s first hotel staffed entirely by robots—many hotel designers are laser-focused on integrating technology and hospitality in ways that amplify service instead of merely automating it.
“If you spend a lot of time reading TripAdvisor reviews like I do, you know that aesthetics rarely get mentioned as a driver for someone’s stay,” Swidler says. “Instead, comments primarily focus on service. So if you look at guest expectations of design, it’s design of an overall experience, and a hotel’s differentiation is the delivery of that experience.”
One property whose design perfectly embodies this ethos is the Renaissance New York Midtown Hotel, which opened in March as New York’s first interactive “living” hotel. Designed by Jeffrey Beers International in collaboration with digital design firm Réalisations Inc. Montréal, it leverages innovative technology to enhance the guest experience in support of the Renaissance brand’s mission: “Helping the next generation of business travelers discover unexpected cultural experiences.”
Highlights include a four-story LED board atop the building that displays a digital clock over the surrounding Garment District; an elevator bank showcasing digital imagery timed to change with the opening and closing of the elevator doors; and a “digital tapestry” that leverages reflective wallpaper, motion detectors, projectors, and 3D cameras to capture and project data and movement occurring in the surrounding corridor. A dynamic patchwork of digital artwork that spans the length of an entire city block between the hotel’s main and satellite entrances, the tapestry morphs in response to human movement and touch.
Renaissance New York Midtown Hotel digital clock. Image Courtesy of Renaissance
The tapestry’s centerpiece is the Discovery Portal, a digital alcove with hologram projections on the floor and a large screen on the wall. When guests stand on various holograms, they activate content on the screen that helps them explore the area around them: Standing on one hologram, for instance, will unfurl a menu of attractions located within a 10-minute walk of the hotel; standing on another will reveal nearby attractions that are open at night. For more information, guests need only raise their arm and point at the desired content on the screen.
“Every time they come to our hotel, we want guests to experience something they haven’t experienced before,” explains Renaissance New York Midtown General Manager David DiFalco. “Technology is a catalyst for that.”
The Discovery Portal doesn’t replace traditional human concierges; rather, it supplements them, as guests who desire personalized recommendations and a human touch can visit the sixth-floor lobby to consult the hotel’s “Navigators”—in-the-know neighborhood experts trained to make recommendations for restaurants, bars, and attractions that only locals would know
Renaissance New York Midtown Hotel Discovery Portal. Image Courtesy of Renaissance
“On the one hand, you’ve got the technology that makes you feel like you’re in an advanced, brand-new property with a lot of great features in it,” DiFalco says. “But at the same time, there’s not so much technology that it prevents you from interacting with staff. Because our people are always the most important asset we possess inside our hotel. It doesn’t matter how cool your technology is or how nice your design is; if you don’t have good people taking care of your guests, they’re not going to come back.”
Whether talking about Discovery Portals, YOBOTs, or any number of emergent hospitality technologies—such as beacons, keyless room entry, or in-room virtual reality—the negotiation between high-tech and high-touch service is constant.
“While a lot of technology has great PR value, we don’t know yet whether there will be guest satisfaction that comes as a result of its integration,” Swidler concludes. “So anything more than the most conservative solutions takes a leap of faith.”
