Innovative tall buildings with spherical shape: functional design and building services integration

Geometry and shape have notoriously great influence not only on the aesthetic but also on the performance and the engineering of every building. This particularly when the dimension and the volume become pretty high as well as the geometry is unconventional. Tall and huge buildings are currently based on pyramid or conic shapes, while spherical buildings are very uncommon, though they offer very interesting perspectives in terms of urban, functional, architectural and engineering solutions. An innovative and very promising design step is to consider this particular kind of tall and huge buildings, like great containers for some smaller multifunctional buildings, to be built inside their volume upon special platforms working like ‘sphere’ storeys. Moreover one of the great advantages provided by a ‘sphere’ is the concentration of several buildings within a single volume, so reducing the land use. These topics have been recently investigated within CIS-E of Politecnico di Milano. The present paper reports on the results concerning the study performed on the functional design, the inside distribution, the natural lightning modeling and the envelope design and maintenance, as well as the problem of their energetic planning and building services integration, with particular focus on those aimed at energy consumption reduction, maintenance and exploitation of renewable energy sources.