Urban Sequoia Now: A Carbon-Absorbing Building Design
SOM has spent the past year refining Urban Sequoia—a radical re-imagination of the architecture and construction of buildings and cities—to create a design that is buildable right now.
At COP27, the 2022 UN Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) presented Urban Sequoia NOW—a design, readily constructible today, for a building that will sequester carbon throughout its life cycle. Created by a global interdisciplinary team at SOM, the design was presented by partner Chris Cooper in the Buildings Pavilion Auditorium.
There is an urgent need to rethink the design and construction of the built environment. Only 3% of the planet’s surface is covered by cities, yet the world’s urbanized areas generate about 75% of all global carbon emissions. And, to accommodate increasing populations, the United Nations has predicted that another 230 million square meters of building stock will be needed in cities by 2060.