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I want to give you an example of how we integrate not just architecture and engineering, but also psychology, sociology, law, and cultural issues. This integration is an important part of our planning, particularly in places like India, China, and the Middle East where we're doing very large master plans. We have a new cadre of cultural planners that we're bringing in that are working directly with the engineers to figure out how even the symbolism of the engineering and the form of the building relates to the cultural ethic.
Consider, for instance, Kansai Airport. Kansai Airport is the longest building in the world, and it had the potential to create huge amounts of mass on this site. It's also on an island that tends to sink. The island was created when the Japanese residents tore down a mountain in the middle of the harbor to build an island on which to put the airport because they didn’t have any other flat land. So the building's weight and the mass were challenges.
Arup worked on this project with Renzo Piano and a number of other professionals. We had to determine how to reduce the weight and human scale with a building of this size and make it work for all of its inhabitants. We decided the inside of the roof should function as an airplane wing. The air comes down cloth wings, which creates turbulence and hits the floor. Meanwhile, moving the cloth wing a little bit makes a dramatic effect that creates a more human, intimate scale as it's going on. The air is picked up at the floor level and brought back out. So the world's longest building has no internal ductwork in it.
The project achieved huge savings for sustainability in terms of the manufacture of the ductwork and the shipping cost to get it there, thereby dramatically reducing the operating cost of the building. Kansai Airport became one of the most flexible buildings in the entire airline industry because you can put walls anywhere—the air is coming from below and the ducts pull it back out to the system.
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What we didn’t anticipate, but we next capitalized on, is the fabric on the cloth wing bounced light really effectively so that we were able to reduce the illumination investment by two-thirds. So when we talk about integrated design, we have everybody at the table focusing on the problem to be solved. And that has huge consequences for sustainability. If you can save weight, if you can save energy from the light, or mechanical systems, then you can also improve the quality of the human environment. That, for us, translates into the gold standard.
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