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posted by CoolHand on Sunday April 05 2015, @07:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the i-like-my-buildings-like-i-like-my-women-curvy dept.

Skyscrapers often darken adjacent neighborhoods with their shadow. Here's an innovative approach that uses reflection off one tall building to fill in the shadow cast by another. In the example given, the shadow from the first building typically falls over water so it doesn't affect a neighborhood. There is an animated gif in the article at weburbanist to illustrate the technique.

With downtown densification usually comes a lack of light in surrounding spaces, leading one architecture firm to develop the world’s first algorithm-driven strategy to allow a tower to fully shed its shadow. Architects of NBBJ developed this set of adjacent skyscrapers that work in tandem to eliminate shade year-round in the spaces between them, proposing the pair for a prominent site in central London.

This building design technology might go a long way to preventing a catastrophe, as happened in another article on which weburbanist reported.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @11:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @11:11AM (#166917)

    Ha, very funny! Discussing "architecture" and "simple" in the same sentence.

    How about a software analogy? Architecture is a little like designing/developing software for managers that don't fully understand their own business process--the program spec becomes a moving target. There are a lot of stake holders involved in putting up large buildings and most of them are not architects.

    In the article, the concept is extrapolated to a whole row of towers, each filling in the shadows for the next (except one on the end).

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday April 06 2015, @06:54PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday April 06 2015, @06:54PM (#167088)

    I was going to post that there's always one last tower with an uncompensated shadow.
    I suspect people will observe that concept and just resort to the technique proven by decades of megalopolis construction: build as big as you can on the lot you have and don't give a shit about the guys behind.