ABSTRACT
Designed by William Le Barron Jenny and engineer George B. Whitney, the Home Insurance Building, completed in Chicago in 1885, is generally regarded as the world’s first skyscraper where the load-bearing capacity of the façade was liberated by a structural steel frame. Compared to load-bearing high-rise structures, such as the 17-storey Monadnock Building lightweight steel construction provided a number of sustainability benefits. The traditional strategy to reduce these cross-wind oscillations is by stiffening the structure. However, this can involve thousands of tonnes of extra steel and concrete, bringing with it reduced building efficiency, increased cost and increased embodied carbon. Like all buildings, tall buildings utilise energy and generate greenhouse gas emissions not only during their operations but across their entire lifecycle, from the extraction of the raw materials needed for construction to the disposal and recycling of materials after demolition. This complete boundary, encompassing all the activities related to a building’s creation, use and removal, is known as cradle-to-grave.
