Perforated buildings act as lungs for crowded cities
Urban planners are carving invisible highways through the sky to prevent skyscrapers from suffocating cities with stagnant, overheated air and trapped exhaust.
In the dense concrete jungles of Hong Kong and Seoul, a single misplaced skyscraper can act like a cork in a bottle, trapping heat and pollution in the streets below. To combat this, architects are now designing buildings with massive holes in their midsections or lifting them onto stilts called pilotis to let the wind pass through. These perforations allow natural breezes to flush out urban heat, which can otherwise make a city block several degrees hotter than a nearby park. By treating air like a public utility, planners ensure that sea breezes aren't just hitting a wall of glass but are instead flowing through the city's veins.