The Future of Skyscrapers

Slated to reach 99 stories in height, the Pertamina Energy Tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill will transform the skyline of Jakarta, Indonesia, as it becomes the city’s tallest building upon completion. But, as Scott Duncan, a design partner of SOM and the lead architect on the project is quick to point out during the Future of Height session at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore, height is not the only attribute of the mega-tower that makes it noteworthy, amongst the long line of skyscrapers around the world. In fact, the Pertamina Energy Tower, when completed, is positioned to become the world’s first supertall tower in which energy generation and environmental factors, not the structure, are the primary considerations for the overall design.

“Buildings that you see dominating our skyline often allow structural considerations to become major drivers for design. For the headquarters of Pertamina, Indonesia’s state-owned energy company, we thought about shifting the main design driver to energy, instead of structure. Jakarta is a very challenging place for tall buildings because of its soil, so it is not like we threw all of the structural considerations entirely out, but we didn’t allow them to be the primary drivers,” says Duncan.

As one of the major design vehicles behind the project, the vernacular architecture of the Indonesian archipelago became a source of inspiration for the design of SOM’s tower, in terms of its lessons in sustainable responses and its potential in harvesting energy.

Duncan recalls specific elements within a typology of a North Sumatran house that the design team at SOM studied as part of the overall environmental response strategy for the Pertamina Energy Tower.“We were looking at the way in which the North Sumatran building is a direct response to its environmental comfort,” recalls Duncan.

“Obviously, the tall roof is well suited for shedding monsoon rain but the arching of the roof upward at the end is also an entirely functional affair because it draws in the prevailing winds, capturing them and accelerating them in a very hot tropical climate. The side walls are porous; the entire building is raised up to allow the air to flow beneath and to allow for flooding to occur without compromising the building structure,” he adds.

These vernacular strategies and responses to the regional environmental conditions became the driving forces behind the design of the tower and the planning of its site. To mitigate the issue of flooding within the already fragile infrastructure of the city, Duncan and his team came up with an idea of a ‘sponge’, lining the perimeter of the site with a series of recharge wells that can absorb and recycle the runoff water and release the water back to the ground, when appropriate, to refill the water table.

Images © SOM