Design-led innovation and sustainability

Located in Athens, Greece, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC) is a modern monument to the values of culture, learning and humanity. The new cultural centre is funded entirely by the philanthropic foundation established in 1996 to perpetuate the legacy of the wealthy Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) supports projects that are expected to achieve ‘a broad, lasting and positive impact for society at large’.

It was this vision that led to two important drivers for the project’s design. The SNF wanted something that would inspire and benefit all Greeks, not just the minority of opera buffs and bibliophiles. This meant extending the uses of the building, and making it and the surrounding park as accessible and attractive to the public as possible. Secondly, from the start, there was a determination to achieve the highest levels of sustainability. A target was set (which has now been achieved) to make this one of the first buildings in Greece to achieve the US Green Building Council’s LEED (leadership in energy and environmental design) Platinum standard. This was made difficult by Athens’ hot and humid summers, and by the overriding need to conserve scarce water supplies.

A dramatic view

The site chosen was a large plot (to include a 21-hectare public park) in the southern district of Kallithea, which translates as ‘beautiful view’. Kallithea was once a major port for Athens, but rapid urban development in the 20th century detached the site from the water. The project’s architect Renzo Piano resolved to restore this connection visually if not physically. He conceived the idea of an artificial hill on which a sloping park would be created, rising 30 metres to a large public space on the roof of the opera house, with views out across the water, and a view in the opposite direction to the ancient Parthenon, an earlier monument to Greek learning and humanity. He also envisaged a huge 400-metre-long by 30-metre-wide seawater ‘canal’ along the south-west side of the park, prevented from physically connecting to the sea only by a modern ring road. This would also help to create a cooler microclimate for the site.

A key to meeting the sustainability objectives was to make the building as close as possible to carbon neutral. This meant a combination of designing the building and its systems to use as little energy as possible, and harnessing renewables to provide a substantial part of that energy. For the latter, the engineers made a bold claim at the design team’s first workshop at the start of the project: with Athens’ intense sunlight, a sufficiently large array of photovoltaic (PV) cells could provide all the renewable energy that the building required, thus eliminating the need for unsightly wind turbines or less efficient ground source heat pumps. If the cells could be mounted on a canopy over the opera house, this could also provide shade for the rooftop public space and help reduce solar gain in the building below, as well as providing a striking distinguishing feature for the centre, visible from a distance. The canopy became a key feature of the project.

The engineers’ initial concept was for a tensegrity structure – one where rigid struts taking compression are connected by thin cables that are always in tension, which produces a light structure with struts that appear to float in space. With help from the University of Cambridge, where a prototype was created and a PhD thesis prepared, all was proceeding satisfactorily and by summer 2010 the final construction design phase was just starting, but the architect Renzo Piano was not happy. In the 1970s, he had made his name (with Richard Rogers and Arup) designing the Centre Pompidou in Paris, with a design that turned the building inside out and introduced the public to exposed services and structure. With the SNFCC he wanted the opposite: a simple canopy, with no overt details of struts, cables or associated services.

Piano called a meeting of key members of the design team to his head office in Genoa, Italy, to brainstorm a solution. He wanted a structure that would be durable in a marine environment, support the weight of the PV panels under seismic loading, and protect against sun and rain, with a perfectly smooth underside with no visible joints and an exceptionally thin edge. It had to ‘float’ over the opera house with a minimum of heavy columns. It had to be capable of being built, and demonstrably so in order to give contractors sufficient confidence to submit competitive tenders. The design also had to be complete and ready to go to tender within eight months, as the client was not prepared to delay.

Finding ferrocement

Options for the surface finish including plywood, steel, aluminium, ceramic and conventional reinforced concrete were debated and discarded, and eventually ferrocement (ultra-thin reinforced concrete) was chosen. It was a bold choice: apart from Renzo Piano, who had built his yacht in ferrocement, none of the design team had direct experience of the material. Although it was invented in the 1840s and used intermittently since the 1940s, it had never been used in the way envisaged for the cultural centre. Expertise and research were limited, there were no appropriate codes for guidance, and time was quickly running out.

Initial evaluation showed just how suitable the material was in this context. It is straightforward to construct, with multiple layers of wire mesh, a conventional cement/fine sand mortar that covers the mesh by just three millimetres, and the top surface is finished with a plasterer’s trowel. It is highly durable and requires no over-cladding panels, which could degrade, warp or deteriorate over a long design life. It is well suited to prefabrication and seamless splicing: the small diameter (as little as 0.8 millimetres) and close spacing of the wire mesh and bars means that only small overlaps are needed to maintain structural continuity over the splices. Plastering techniques help to create smoothness across joints. It can be formed into curved shapes and – most importantly – it is (at only 20–25 millimetres) an order of magnitude thinner than an equivalent reinforced or post-tensioned concrete structure. It also has a better strength-to-weight ratio, so reduces the load on the opera house beneath.

Some UK expertise was brought on board, notably independent consultant Patrick Jennings and the University of Manchester’s Paul Nedwell, and the project’s engineers learned the artisan skills of making ferrocement samples in the university laboratories. More than 100 large panels were then produced for extensive testing at the National Technical University of Athens.

Meanwhile, the structural form was developed: an upper and lower shell separated by hidden steel bracing spanning in both directions, with shells coming together at the perimeter to produce the sharp edge required by the architect. Adding to the challenges of design and analysis were the non-linear characteristics of ferrocement, including micro-cracking and long-term creep, as well as the arduous loading criteria, particularly from large horizontal and vertical seismic movement. No suitable software was available, so the engineers developed their own in-house software from first principles. To convince everyone, particularly sceptical contractors, that it was buildable, a full-scale 15 metre by 6 metre prototype of a section of the main canopy was constructed and load tested by local labour.

Efficient design

The ‘floating’ effect 14 metres above the opera house is created by supporting the canopy on 30 slender cylindrical steel columns, braced by diagonal cable ties. Designing a connection detail between the column heads and the canopy proved the greatest engineering challenge of all. All of the inverters and transformers for capturing energy from the PV cells and converting it to high voltage are contained and hidden within the canopy.

Two factors threatened to limit the power output from the PV cells on top of the canopy: the limited efficiency of available units, and the need to leave space between the cells for maintenance walkways. The first was addressed by specifying outputs beyond what could be achieved, in the (correct) expectation that designs would improve by the time of procurement. The second led to a laminated glass coating, allowing each cell to carry the weight of two booted workers carrying a spare cell. The glass slightly reduced the efficiency, but this was heavily outweighed by allowing the cells to be closely packed with just a small separation for air flow. The final result is a 100 metre by 100 metre PV array made up of 5,560 panels delivering 1.3 MW (megawatt) of power, and expected to generate 2 GWh (gigawatt hours) per year, similar to powering 650 UK family homes. Additional power will be required from the grid at peak times, but at other times the PVs will feed surplus power into the grid.

The key to seismic protection for the building is the network of 320 pendulum base isolators underneath it, which reduce lateral seismic loads by 80%. Underlying soils are a mix of liquefiable sands and clays that can be softened. The building was effectively isolated from these by piles down to bedrock, but the artificial hill had to be protected with reinforced earth-retaining walls and localised stone columns sunk into the existing ground. A ‘buffer zone’ isolates the building from the hill.

The buildings themselves are much more conventional in design than the canopy, mainly using reinforced concrete, Greece’s most common building material. As part of the sustainability strategy, the buildings are, where possible, ‘layered’ like onion skins, with the most sensitive, carefully controlled environments (such as the rooms containing precious manuscripts) at the centre and rooms with greater tolerance to variations in temperature and humidity on the outside. Shade reduces solar gain, in particular the canopy over the opera house and carefully designed, retractable roller blinds on the glazed façades. The sloping park, which rises over the top of the library in the form of a grass roof, improves thermal insulation. Good insulation, low-energy lighting and extensive use of a highly efficient displacement ventilation system help to keep energy demand down. Air conditioning is still required, but its efficiency is increased by the use of heat recovery chillers. These recycle the heat rejected by the air conditioning to pre-heat domestic hot water from 20°C to 47°C, leaving conventional gas-fired heaters to do the rest.

All of the plant had to be hidden, with only limited space. Grey-water (all waste except from toilets) collection tanks are in the undercroft, and the large air intakes are through gratings in the park floor in the ‘buffer zone’ where the park joins the library roof. The chillers are discreetly located by the car park. In the vicinity of the opera house auditorium, the plant also had to be silent, leading to large low-ventilation ducts requiring relatively little fan power.

The net effect of all these measures is an estimated reduction in annual energy consumption of more than 40%, compared with a ‘standard’ building with an identical geometry and in the same location. The 1,400-seat auditorium had a successful ‘test run’ in November 2016 when it hosted a speech by then President of the United States, Barack Obama, and the centre is due to be commissioned in stages over the early months of 2017, after which it will be handed over to the Greek State.

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This article has been adapted from "Design-led innovation and sustainability", which originally appeared in the print edition of Ingenia 70 (March 2017).