The New York Times Headquarters by Renzo Piano Building Workshop is a shining example of the future of skyscrapers: Tall buildings that use less energy and promote better health for their occupants. Most of these next-generation designs have yet to top off in North America, although Europe does boast a number of examples. Standouts like Foster & Partners' missile-shaped icon for Swiss Re, which opened early last year.

Yet all these towers owe a debt of gratitude to an unlikely pioneer in an even less likely place: Piano's Aurora Place, whose elegant, curving shafts grace the skyline of Sydney, Australia. Not only does this commercial, mixed-use project break ground in key sustainable concepts such as natural lighting and ventilation, but it even anticipates the advances so highly touted for the New York Times project.

And it opened more than five years ago.

If New York pays little homage (or attention) to Sydney, no worries, mate. Everyone else is. And to underscore the success of Aurora Place, the building works very well, says its tenants, and it's still winning awards -- it snagged two more just over a year ago from the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, including an unprecedented honor for its multifamily component. A look inside Aurora Place helps uncover why it could be a seminal green skyscraper that spurred similar efforts in London, New York, and elsewhere.

Groundbreaking Green Ideas

Beside reinventing a previously underutilized corner of Sydney's central business district, Piano's concept also reinvented how towers function and the way people work within them. For example, the curving building is largely naturally ventilated, with operable glass louvers at apartment balconies and in the winter gardens used as breakout space for office tenants. A double-glass skin technology, using ceramic fritted low-iron glass, allows maximum views and daylighting within the floor plates while stabilizing interior temperatures. The frit varies from 40 to 80 percent. Also controlling sunlight are automated roller shades by Nysan, a Hunter Douglas company, which are integrated into the envelope detailing -- and into the building management system (BMS).

In a few years since Aurora Place opened, these elements --sky gardens, transparent double skins, and fresh air -- have become commonplace elements for new tower schemes. Most proposals, however, lack the curvature and elegantly dissolving edges that Piano created.

In fact, Piano's concept was as much about sculpture as it was about modulating the indoor environment. At the time, Piano aimed to use the fritting, the solar shading, and even the operable louvers as an "ever-changing screen" to viewers outdoors. "It will look different in the morning, in the afternoon, in shade. It will look different from the Botanic Gardens" nearby, he said in 1999.

Piano's goals for the project were embraced by all the major collaborators, which included global development firm Bovis Lend Lease, Group GSA (design development and documentation architects for the commercial and residential projects together with HPA Mirvac), and Innovarchi (a Sydney-based architectural firm with principals Ken McBryde and Stephanie Smith). "We were on the same mission," said McBryde last fall. "We test and test ideas, dump them if they don't work, or save them. We won't start until we have the idea right."

For example, Innovarchi cites the building's widespread use of breakout spaces featuring gardens or green elements. While today such spaces are de rigueur, five years ago their worth was far from universally accepted. Piano's plan -- which called for two garden spaces on each floor -- was considered downright extravagant. The financial sense to this plan has been proven now, however, according to owner Commonwealth Property Investment Trust, which points to the record prices paid for the apartments and top commercial tenants landed for the office tower. Occupants note that the gardens have become hubs for communication and creativity, and in building surveys they cite the winter gardens as one of the main attractions of the building.

Building-wide Solar Control

Similarly, the aim of providing building-wide solar control, controlled centrally, was (and still is) a relatively new one, especially at this scale. Managed by Scott Turner of the Nysan Asia Pacific, the challenging job required the engineering team from Hunter Douglas' Nysan solar-control experts to develop custom circular brackets that would fit within Renzo Piano Workshop's design. An additional hurdle? They weren't brought onto the job until it was largely completed, adding time pressure to an already exacting task. The shades featured PVC-coated fibreglass fabric in a linen color and a 5% openness factor.

The control system was likewise custom-created, and considered both aesthetics and usability. Piano wanted the blinds to be motorized, lifting simultaneously in the morning to create the appearance of the building waking up. To allow for more individual control, engineers designed secondary override controls for the fully automatic blinds, allowing the system to be flexible to layout changes on each floor. Perhaps most important, the control system was designed to allow updates, ensuring controls can be changed in response to ever-advancing BMS technology.

Given the demanding nature of the tenant makeup, which included not only law firms and banks but also private owners, maintenance of the radio-controlled blinds was another critical factor. Upkeep was a second significant consideration for the building owner, who resisted motorized blinds initially due to the anticipated costs of operating and cleaning the units. To cater to both concerns, the system was designed so that workers can easily remove the nearly silent blinds from nylon tracks if they require adjustment. Motors were designed with plugs that allow them to be disconnected without rewiring.

In the end, the system required collaboration among a group of international partners, with design and extrusion coming from Nysan Asia Pacific, additional design, bracketry and control systems coming from Hunter Douglas' Nysan unit in Canada, and fabric sourced from Mermet in France (a global leader in shading fabric purchased last fall by Hunter Douglas).

A New Image -- and New Direction

In ways both artistic and technological, Piano's treatment of Aurora Place broke the mold for urban mixed-use towers. And his pioneering advances go much deeper than the striking louvered façades gracing the curved towers. Indeed, the very functionality of these buildings -- made real in large measure by Piano's collaboration with the engineering firm Arup -- helped to define what it means to be labelled a "green skyscraper" today.

Today new tower designs are challenged to be more transparent, to admit more light, and even to let wind rush through their interiors. Thanks to the ideas built into Aurora Place, tenants and occupants of new buildings around the world rightly expect the opportunity to adjust their own environment as they see fit. Bridging an artistic vision and new kinds of technology, Piano brings modern tower dwellers somehow closer to the earth itself. And it's not surprising that this designer, whose work blends a practical rigor with exuberant imagination, has helped make valid the unlikely notion of a green skyscraper. "Architects have to dream," Piano said recently in an interview about his body of work in London's The Guardian. "We have to search for our Atlantises, to be explorers, adventurers, and yet to build responsibly and well."