Commerzbank Tower, Germany - Architect: Lord Norman Foster
As a consequence, would towers be incompatible with sustainable development and energy performance? This is an important issue. Many possibilities for improvement deserve further study. Firstly, integrated design of an office tower is essential, and can lead to energy savings up to 30%. Secondly, it seems to be essential to partition office space to enable standalone and independent operation depending on the use made of them, resulting in large potential energy savings. In order to do so, early cooperation (regarding integrated conception) between building final users and the project management team is necessary. Furthermore, the choice of high performance offices equipment has a strong influence on reducing internal loads and energy use..
Finally, the study could be broadened to include other aspects of sustainable development that have not yet been taken sufficiently into consideration: space management (densification), location of the tower in the town, and problematic of user transport and associated services, taking account of grey energy contained in materials, health impacts; all these parameters should be taken into account and put into parallel with the energy balance of high rise office buildings.