The Effect of High-rise Construction on the Environment's Robustness and Sustainability

The robustness and sustainability of environment are two important standards in urban design and architecture. High-rise buildings because of their height can have considerable effects on these two standards. Compact development is one of the solutions to achieve the sustainable environment. According to the studies, after the excessive occupy of space in the horizontal development and its side effects, vertical development is one of the solutions to gain sustainable environments. As a result of increasing population and consequently environmental problems at the moment, the use of sustainability index in urban design gets more emphasis than before. Generally speaking, sustainability is about life quality and its aim is increasing the quality level for future generations. High-rise construction can be operated as a response to the turbulent development in our cities. Some exports believe that the high- rise construction has more potential for improving the sustainability. In other words, by high-rise constructing, model of city leads to functionalism and from this perspective optimal use of land will be achieved. Besides of the social benefits, on one hand, compact city model can have some environmental interests with it. On the other hand, decreasing the robustness of the floors, with increasing the height of a building, are one of the challenges against high-rise constructing. The Robustness is a quality factor, which can lead to a sustainable place. As a result, the goals of both of them are in the same direction, but their solutions are contradictory in some cases. In most of the time the variety of uses in higher levels of a high-rise building is more limited than the diversity in the lower floors. When a space responses to variant expectations of users; it has an acceptable level of robustness quality. As it mentioned, the designers have suggested some solutions to reach a relative sustainability and robustness in building that in some cases they are parallel and in some other cases they are inconsistent. With respect to mentioned contents, the necessity of the investigation of high-rise building's theoretical principals and its design concerning the robustness and sustainability standards would be clear. The ultimate purpose of quality, called robustness, is achieving the ability to change its own functionality, without an alteration in its identity specifications. Paying attention to the variety of users’ expectations in high-rise buildings is as important as the same parameter in other types of buildings. It is because of the higher density of population in a limited space. Also, from the visual sight, the height factor has a meaningful permeability on human imagination of the space and this can be effective on the building function. In the medieval, the church building was the highest in the town and the same pattern continued until the industrial revolution, when the commercial buildings got more important than the others. Nowadays, highrise buildings, far from their economic role, are understood mainly as urban elements. In this paper we focus on the relation between the level of sustainability and robustness, with increasing height of the building. The problem is explained by investigation and comparison of each the concepts. Definitions and concepts of sustainability, unlike the robustness, attributed a wide part of topics to themselves. In this paper the relationship between sustainability and high-rise constructing is studied in environmental and social context. However it should be noted that there is a positive interact between environmental, economic and social elements in a sustainable building. It should be noted that the majority of investigations presented in this paper will be discussed in building scale, like the dimension proportion, but some of them could be used in the level of urban design too; such as designing semipublic spaces for apartment. In this article it is supposed that it’s possible to optimize the robustness and the sustainability with increasing the height of building simultaneously. If the constructing and equipping steps in a building get divided to three parts of design, construction and use, some solutions could be applied to improve the place functionality although it should be mentioned that the solutions are expressed to use while designing. Moreover to apply such changes successfully, some constructing needs must be considered. Therefore some of these obligations are presented in this study. It is tried to introduce robustness and sustainability concepts individually, and then some solutions are suggested. It is all done with analytical- descriptive approach in the library, with the aim of discussion about the level of relevant indicator's affects and the quality of their interactions on sustainability and robustness of building.