Carbon Capture: The Latest Architecture and News

“Constitution Gardens will become a biodiversity hotspot on the National Mall,” said Adam Greenspan, FASLA, design partner at PWP Landscape Architecture. “We will create a garden, based in nature, while respecting the historic design.” Constitution Gardens in Washington, D.C. opened in 1976 to commemorate the bicentennial of the American revolution. Concepts outlined in the McMillan Plan and designs by Dan Kiley and SOM shaped the landscape.

But over the past forty years, the gardens fell into disrepair and became a pass-through site on the way to other more popular destinations on the mall. Now, the second phase of a three-phase plan to revitalize the garden has been approved by the Commission of Fine Arts and National Capital Planning Commission. The design by PWP Landscape Architecture and Rogers Partners Architects will create a “new ecological landscape” designed for people and hundreds of plant and animal species.

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COP28, or the 2023 United Nations Conference of the Parties, was held in Dubai between November 30 and December 13. The annual meeting gathers representatives from 198 countries, as well as industry leaders to discuss and establish strategies to limit the extent of climate change and its adverse effects. The ultimate goal of these meetings is to find ways to limit the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times. At the moment, the global temperature rise is already at 1.2 degrees Celsius. As the construction industry at large accounts for 39% of global emissions, architects and planners have a shared interest in the results of thee international summit, Read on to discover some of the key takeaways of COP28.

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Stefano Boeri Architetti, together with a multidisciplinary team including ARUP, Fabio Novembre, and Balich Wonder Studio, has unveiled the design for the new Milan Stadium, named the International Forest Stadium. The project, located in the San Siro area of the city, was presented to the public on the occasion of the competition announced in 2019 by the Inter and Milan teams. The stadium is envisioned as an integral part of the “Sport and leisure district” system, an extensive masterplan measuring over 800 hectares, planned to transform the San Siro district into a center for excellence in the context of European sports.

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In a presentation at the Buildings Pavilion Auditorium during COP27, the UN Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) presented the Urban Sequoia NOW concept. The proposal, developed by an interdisciplinary team at SOM, represents a design that can sequester carbon from the atmosphere throughout its lifecycle. The design can be implemented with today’s technologies. This represents SOM’s concept of going beyond net zero carbon by combining multiple strategies: reducing embodied carbon, generating energy, absorbing carbon, and increasing the typical 60-year lifespan of the building.

YuHao Li and Rui Wu were recently awarded third place in the 2014 eVolo Skyscraper Competition for their proposal of a skyscraper that grows. Using 'carbon capture', an emerging practice aimed at capturing and containing greenhouse gases, Propagate Skyscraper uses a simple, vertical grid scaffold to act as a framework for building, or growing, the volumes. "Ingredients for material propagation" are supplied through the scaffold, while its actual pattern of growth is defined by environmental factors (such as prevailing wind and the saturation of carbon dioxide within the immediate atmosphere). Although each resulting structure is distinct in formal expression, the structure maintains a regular spatial organisation, allowing it to be easily occupied and adapted.

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