February 11 2009

Beijing Blazes with Cooling Towers

The world is fascinated by the sight of a beautiful, modern, piece of architecture going up in flames almost instantly. The pictures, videos, tweets, blogs and news flurries are abuzz with raw feeds for the gawking masses to peruse. Thank goodness for connectivity and distributed networks! But who could have imagined the maelstrom of data would present an opportunity to scope out a massive installation of 100 rooftop cooling towers!

A coworker pointed out the cooling towers today after his visit to one image gallery from the Beijing Blaze. Take a look at the cooling towers in the foreground of the image below. The photo is perfect. The burned Koolhaas building in the background a perfect analogy for the rejected heat being pushed out into the atmosphere from the the 100 cooling tower units on top of that physical plant building. Every action as a consequence. In this case you can witness the brutal nature of moving thousands of tons of BTUs from one system, the building interior, to another, the exterior environment, and vice versa. Entropy will have its revenge.

I don?t question the need for cooling towers, but hope that designers out there understand real consequences of our decisions. Enjoy hunting for the next most conspicuous building system!

February 11th, 2009 at 5:04 AM. Posted in Industry + Practice. Share this post.