Kengo Kuma’s green office will be a walk in the park

With its vast amount of greenery, both inside and out, Kengo Kuma’s upcoming Habitat Park is designed to offer a much more pleasant workplace than a regular office building. It will also include a sustainable design, including an interesting cooling central atrium called the Green Lung.

The tall building will be located in downtown San Jose, California, and will include a glazed facade with shading shutters that will be torn apart by many plants and other greenery.

Its interior will have an area of ​​1.3 million square feet (approximately 120,000 square meters), located on 20 floors and will consist mainly of office space and retail space. However, it will host a number of small parks and green terraces, as well as a large green roof garden and another garden area on the lower floors, which is designed as a covered veranda for the public.

In addition, the building will be centered around the so-called green lung atrium, which will be used to maximize ventilation and natural light everywhere in a similar way to SOM’s “breathing building”.

“Park Habitat breathes with a huge vertical yard called Green Lung,” explained Westbank, which is developing with Urban Community, Peterson and OPTrust. “The biophilic position of the building is systematic and performative, not just metaphorical: the shape and proportions of the space rely on wind pressure in tandem with working facades, heat and vegetation to draw air into the space during the day and wash air and heat at night – architectural inhalation and exhalation of a 24-hour cycle. The green lungs bring light deep into each floor and surprise like a vertical garden penetrating the building’s atmosphere. “

Park Habitat is part of a larger Net Zero development in San Jose and is also planned for LEED Platinum standard for green building. In addition to efforts to maximize light and ventilation inside, water use will also be a key issue, making sense of all this greenery, and plans call for the reuse of water and treatment systems, plus non-drinking water will be used for irrigation. .

Although connected to the grid, solar panels will produce little energy, while energy-efficient heating and cooling systems will complement passive ventilation systems. The press release also mentions low-carbon building materials, but at this stage we have no additional information on this aspect.

Construction work on Park Habitat began recently and should be completed in 2025.

Sources: Park habitat, Western Bank