I Tower “A research and professional project for mixed use sustainable tower in Sofia: Architecture for a Climate Solution”

When in 2008 I was commissioned to design a 130m tower in the centre of Sofia, intended for shops, offices, hotels and apartments, I immediately built a multidisciplinary project team capable of discussing all the issues that my research had been pursuing for some time and that saw 360° sustainability as the only way forward for an architecture capable of being sustainable, and that was not just for a simple technological problem, but that was in its DNA, as are the wind towers of Yazd in Iran for example. The municipality had asked us to address the issue of its sustainability so that the project would be representative of an important step towards change in the management of resources and the territory. I-TOWER in this sense had to represent the possibility of doing research in the field, to be tested through construction. The economic crisis led to a change of leadership in the 1997 political elections and marked the end of a long period of economic and political instability.