Can tall buildings ever be sustainable? It's a simple question that poses a very complicated set of opposing answers. Perhaps the traditional view of tall buildings is that they are a largely unsustainable form of development. This is a viewpoint easily served by the scarring experience of many of the failed tower blocks of the fifties and sixties and the corrosive urban and environmental conditions that came with them. Moreover, critics point to a slew of familiar social and environmental evidence as justification ranging from energy inefficiency, poor life expectancy and overheating risk to physical anonymity, economic severance and social polarisation. Even Ken Shuttleworth, one of the designers of London's "Gherkin" tower, famously decreed that era of the glass skyscraper is, or at least should be, dead.
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