Limitless ambition: a snapshot of other developments
Limitless’s latest project is one of its most ambitious. Announced in mid-February, it involved the company entering Jordan’s growing market for the first time. The $300 million project, called Limitless Towers, comprises twin structures that will eventually soar 200 metres above the capital city of Amman. It will include the world’s highest suspended swimming pool – a glass-bottomed structure linking the two towers 125 metres above ground level, providing swimmers with a vertiginal view of the city below. The towers will begin construction in October 2008 and will be fully operational three years later.
Yet it’s the sustainable metrics of the new project that most excite global city planners. Limitless Towers will be the first green building to be constructed in Jordan, adopting energy saving and water recycling systems that ensure it receives Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (Leed) accreditation. The Leed rating system was established by the US Green Building Council in 1998, and now covers 14,000 projects in 30 countries. A new agency rating, Leed-NC 3.0, is expected to be adopted soon, which will demand a significant reduction in greenhouse gases below a set level.
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"Communities are more than just places where you live and work – it’s also about making people committed to the place where they live"
Dusan Mills, Limitless |
Dusan Mills, head of development at Limitless, notes that the company has a sustainability checklist that it applies to every one of its projects. "We have a score card with metrics that we apply against all of our buildings. There are three major themes at this stage. The first is the basic environmental aspect: new urban projects demand large amounts of land, so we try to incorporate the natural surrounding environment as much as possible." That stage is vital – the one thing that can never be changed about a building or city is the designated use of the land on which it sits. The second aspect links energy and water efficiencies with the broader concept of resource sustainability – ensuring, for example, that air conditioning in a new city complex is distributed from a single, central source (which typically cuts air conditioning energy use by upward of 25%) rather than multiple sources, and that workers within that city can travel to and from their offices as quickly as possible, in a way that cuts carbon emissions to a minimum.
Creating community
Finally there is a factor that is often overlooked, yet which is crucial to the long-term viability and sustainability of any new city: community formation. Limitless’s Mills notes how vital this is to the development of any new city. However green or sustainable a new town or building complex is, its compelling attributes are rendered less than useless if no one covets a job or a home there.
"Communities are more than just places where you live and work – it’s also about making people committed to the place where they live," says Mills. "Sustainability is a wide-ranging concept, but when distilled it’s all about three main criteria: cultural and social, environmental, and economic sustainability. Those three themes interweave with one another, creating sustainability together. You can have buildings that are as green as you can imagine, and which are incredibly efficient, yet which are so sterile that no one wants to live there."
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Saeed Ahmed Saeed, the Limitless CEO, leads the drive for green development |
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Mills points out a conceit within the architectural community – that new buildings and urban concepts are often considered successful only if they win awards. Less emphasis is placed on making them culturally and socially sustainable places to live. That problem is seen in many planned cities, from the endless roundabouts of New Delhi and the vast, dehumanizing avenues and isolated ministries of Islamabad, to the bland isolation of Adelaide and Brasília. Perhaps the most visible example of poor economic and social sustainability can be viewed in Paris, whose oldest and most venerated arrondissements, or city districts, are packed with wonderful social diversions – cafés, charcuteries, boulangeries, small parks: places to live and breathe and hang out. Yet just a few kilometres away sits the vast, hulking La Défense complex, in the western region of Neuilly-sur-Seine. It won numerous prestigious design awards, yet it’s also a socially alienating place, and even dangerous to go to at night – an empty structure full of intimidating dark corners.
Limitless’s patrons hope to avoid falling into this sort of trap. The company’s website stresses the inclusiveness of their real estate developments, focusing if anything more heavily on the cultural and economic aspects of their vast projects, which include a $11 billion canal project in Dubai, a $12 billion urban community in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and another $12 billion mixed-use urban project in the Indian IT services capital of Bangalore.
The company is also headquartered in one of the world’s best and best-funded centres of sustainable design. Both the United Arab Emirates and Dubai – the largest and most powerful of the UAE’s seven emirates – have taken the lead in recent years on global urban infrastructure sustainability. The vision has percolated down from on high. In October 2007, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum decreed that all urban structures in Dubai must from January 2008 be built as per environmental-friendly green building standards. A month later, the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates set out those targets: all buildings must cut standard levels of both water and energy use by 30%, with lighting costs cut by 9%. In January, at the World Future Energy Summit, Sheikh Mohammed went a step further, announcing that the UAE would invest $15 billion in the promotion of green energy – another huge step forward when it comes to ensuring that a city’s carbon footprint is kept to a minimum.