The new Cinépolis Headquarters above the city of Morelia, Mexico makes a strong statement of Mexico’s strides toward sustainable building. The main office anchors a low-slung campus set on a 24-acre hilltop site. The bold design by KMD Architects is complimented by sustainable features like a green rooftop park, water catchment, natural cooling, and energy-efficient systems. Of course, the 41-meter cantilevered office is the real star of the show.
Cinépolis is the fourth-largest movie chain in the world and wanted a complex that offered a creative, forward thinking approach to their built environment. The main office building sits four stories high, with the 3rd and 4th floors offset and hung over the land, making this one of the largest cantilevered building spans in the world.
Advanced automated lighting, AC supplemented by natural cooling, and water systems help reduce resource consumption. The design was sensitively placed on the land to disturb only 10% of the site. The operable windows reduce air conditioning costs in the building, and the building even offers a terraced garden on its rooftop – the perfect place in which to unwind and look out over the pristine desert beyond.
[...] take a piece of paper and roll it into a tube to make it stronger. The design abandons traditional office space partitions and opts for open work, meeting, and social areas that are architecturally connected. [...]
Owen66,
I fully agree with you about the need to design buildings that do not need copious amounts of material to make them work, but that is a small part of the building’s environmental footprint. A large role in building/design will be needed to radically improve our existing building infrastructure- but human are nomads, and our cities are projected to increase in size dramatically in the next few decades. New building will happen at an ever increasing scale.
We celebrate the best designs to encourage best practices for all forms of construction. It will be a shame if when our new buildings become old they failed to provide us with essential environmental and quality of life benefits as we have witnessed so much in the past few decades.
how much extra (unnecessary) material when into resisting moments that would not have been needed had it just been set on the ground? doesn’t seem too “green” to me. of course, as an architect, i have to acknowledge that any new building is more harmful than restoring or reusing an existing building. lebbeus woods has a good essay on architecture being equated to war-like acts.