Eastgate Center

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Eastgate Center

The Eastgate Center is a shopping and office center in Harare , Zimbabwe . It was designed to be completely cooled by natural convection and was probably the first office building in the world to use natural cooling in such a sophisticated way. It opened in 1996 on Rubert Mugabe Avenue and Second Street and has 5,600 square meters of retail space, 26,000 square meters of office space and 450 parking spaces. In 1999 it was shortlisted for the world's most important architecture award , the Aga Khan Award for Architecture .

The cooling system of the Portcullis House in London, which was completed in 2001 and also architecturally remarkable , is based on the system of the Eastgate Center.

Function of the cooling system

A bionic office building with ventilation elements based on the termite principle was built in the Eastgate Center. The building can now be used on a daily basis with practically no heating or ventilation system. This works with the help of air shafts that form a coherent system. In this way, cool air is fed into the system from the atrium, which can then reach the individual rooms through openings in the baseboards. The building also has 48 chimneys, in which the air masses passively, as with termites, heat. These air masses are sucked off after heating and stored in concrete. So it is still available at night and in the morning when there is little or no sunlight. Thanks to this bionic concept, the monthly electricity consumption of this office building is around half that of comparable buildings in Harare.

Web links

See also

literature

  • "Sustainable Architecture", The Architectural Review , UK, Sep 1996.
  • Baird, George (2001). The Architectural Expression of Environmental Control Systems . Spon Press. ISBN 0419244301
  • Gissen, David (2003). Big and Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century . Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 1568983611
  • Werner Nachtigall : Building Bionics: Nature - Analogies - Technology . Springer-Vieweg-Verlag, 2003, ISBN 978-3-540-88994-6 .

Coordinates: 17 ° 49 '53.4 "  S , 31 ° 3' 9.3"  E