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The three current popular architectural trends are height, sustainability, and bio-inspired design. Skyscrapers over 2,000 feet, such as Burj Dubai, are becoming more common. Sustainable construction includes environmentally friendly materials and design decisions to minimize carbon footprints. Bio-inspired design involves buildings that resemble nature and integrate living systems.
At the forefront of contemporary architecture, there are many trends, but three stand out: height, sustainability and bio-inspired design. Many future architectural trends are likely to unfold, but these three are currently popular and will likely remain so for some time, especially sustainability.
Height-wise, a new movement towards skyscrapers over 2,000 feet appears to have begun in the late 2000s, launched in part by the construction of Burj Dubai (“Dubai Tower”), a huge tower in the Arab Emirate of Dubai, near Saudi Arabia. Burj Dubai also heralds what is likely to remain a popular future architectural trend, bio-inspired design, as the floor plan resembles the structure of a lotus flower. When completed, Burj Dubai will be at least 818m (2,684ft), over half a mile and approaching a kilometer in height.
Over a dozen more super-tall buildings are planned around the world by the 2010s. The 1776-foot (541 m) Freedom Tower, for example, will be built on the former site of the World Trade Center towers. The tower is expected to be ready for occupation around 2012. Another super-tall tower, Al Burj (“The Tower”), is slated for construction in Dubai. This tower is expected to be 1,400m (4,593ft) tall, dwarfing the Burj Dubai and raising many new challenges for designers and engineers. The height can always be increased or decreased before construction is complete.
Another of the future architectural trends that are beginning to manifest themselves today is sustainable construction. Sustainable construction includes environmentally friendly materials and design decisions made by builders to minimize a given structure’s carbon footprint. Since humans spend on average around 75% of their time in buildings, even a small increase in efficiency can translate into large energy savings and ecological value. Strategies include passive solar building design, which takes into account the sun’s path to minimize the need for artificial heating and cooling, excellent insulation, solar roofing panels, solar heating for swimming pools and other high-volume water applications, and many others.
Future bio-inspired architectural trends include buildings in ways that resemble nature, whether for aesthetic, practical or environmental purposes, or actually integrate living systems into the building, again for aesthetic, practical or environmental purposes. For example, the new San Francisco Academy of Sciences has a “living roof,” designed to absorb rainwater that would otherwise disrupt the city’s drainage systems. The Al Burj tower will include Hanging Gardens. Further future architectural trends could involve the effective integration of agriculture into urban environments through indoor farming, also called vertical farming.
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