Members of the Sarawak delegation in a group photo in front of the Shanghai SKY SOHO.
KUCHING: The need for green construction around the world has experienced a two-fold growth over every three years according to the World Green Building Trends 2016 Smart Market Report.
This rate of growth is projected to gain an additional four fold increase in the years to come across some geographical regions including Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa while regions across the U.S, Germany and the U.K would sustain their rate of green building.
The realisation of this need prompted Sarawak officials to go on a study trip to Shanghai since the city is highly ranked in green and smart building technology in the Asian region. The one week study trip which was jointly organised by the Ministry of Local Government and Housing and the Sarawak Housing and Real Estate Developers’ Association (SHEDA) started on October 22.
The delegation visited a world-renowned Pritzer Prize winning architect’s designed ‘green building’, Shanghai Sky SOHO. Situated near the Shanghai Hongqiao transport hub, the Shanghai Sky SOHO is a large development which comprised a compelling mix of office and retail space consisting of twelve stand-alone buildings interlinked by sixteen sky bridges to create a dynamic yet streamlined space accents ‘connectivity’.
The energy saving ‘green building’ with a LEED gold Pre-certification encompasses approximately 350,000m2 of gross floor area. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is a third party verification system for green buildings developed by the U.S Green Building Council (USGBC). The LEED certification helps to identify how environmentally friendly and sustainable a building really is. LEED takes into account metrics such as water efficiency, energy efficiency, CO2 emissions reductions, indoor environmental quality and more to determine whether a building is worthy of LEED certification and at what level. LEED is one of many third party verification programmes, but it is considered one of the very best in the world.
According to the management of Sky SOHO, the building has an advanced air purification system to effectively filter out 90 per cent of atmospheric PM2.5 which far exceeds the national standard. Moreover, it is equipped with a pure-drinking water five-layer red filtration system that even meets the water standards for astronauts.
In order to reduce energy consumption, Shanghai SKY-SOHO has combined building information modeling systems to establish a new generation of intelligent building energy management.