Green ArchiTEXT

Can We Design Cities for Happiness?

Happiness itself is a commons to which everyone should have equal access.

That’s the view of Enrique Peñalosa, who is not a starry-eyed idealist given to abstract theorizing. He’s actually a politician, who served as mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, for three years, and now travels the world spreading a message about how to improve quality-of-life for everyone living in today’s cities.

Peñalosa’s ideas stand as a beacon of hope for cities of the developing world, which even with their poverty and immense problems will absorb much of the world’s population growth over the next half-century. Based on his experiences in Bogotá, Peñalosa believes it’s a mistake to give up on these cities as good places to live.

via shareable.net

Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World

The latest work from Alastair Fuad-Luke is Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (2009), an overview of the origins and continuing influence of design activism. Fuad-Luke also recently published The Eco-Design Handbook and The Eco-travel Handbook. In her review, Ann Thorpe writes:

Fuad-Luke comments that conventional notions of beauty are those that align with financial profitability, a profitability that is ultimately destructive in social and environmental terms. He argues that instead, “we need new visions of beauty—we could call this beauty, ‘beautiful strangeness’, a beauty that is not quite familiar, tinged with newness, ambiguity and intrigue, which appeals to our innate sense of curiosity,” a beauty that, rather than stemming from profits, stems from resilience. Positioning of the goal of activism—its destination—in aesthetic terms is important for a design audience, but selection of the word “strangeness” strikes me as unfortunate given the weight of negative connotations that terms such as “activism” and “sustainability” already confront. We are in need of more resonant rallying cries, and the book does offer these within its pages.

via designactivism.net

Can Skyscrapers Be Green? Yes, Says Ken Yeang

But first, he says, architects, designers and governments must realize that there is more to green design than "stuffing buildings with ecogadgetry or getting a certification."

The industry must revolutionize the entire building cycle, says Mr. Yeang, "from the extraction of materials to make the building material...to [their] transportation, storage and delivery, to the design, construction and assembly of the building, to the...transportation and movement of people to and from the building." The goal is to build structures that not only have a minimal impact on the natural environment but also benefit the ecology of the site and the world's climate.

via online.wsj.com

U.S. Directs $36 Million Toward Net-Zero Building Research

By Tim McKeough

Reflecting the rapidly growing interest in sustainable design and construction technologies, the U.S. Department of Energy has announced new funding to support research on net-zero energy buildings.

Berkeley Lab plans to use the funds to construct a new facility to research net-zero energy buildings. While the lab currently tests building products, “with this new facility, we’re scaling up to full building systems,” explains Stephen Selkowitz, head of the Building Technologies Department in the lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division. Plans are still being finalized, but the project is expected to consist of a series of structures, either standalone or within existing buildings on campus, for researching HVAC systems, facade systems, lighting and interiors, skylights, and building sensors and controls. The centerpiece will be a set of three 5,000-square-foot structures where these different systems can be tested together.

via archrecord.construction.com

It Takes A Village? Checking In On Slate's Collective-Intelligence Home Efficiency Experiment

As you might expect, much of the interest and conflict in the piece comes from the confrontation between what David Owen calls LEED Brain – that is, the urge to solve every efficiency problem in the most ostentatiously futuristic and expensive newfangled fashion – and the fact that such comparatively dull efficiency measures as improved insulation are far more effective than, say, solar showers or suburban-scale geothermal. There's something gratifying about Slate taking a break from tweaking expectations to get as service-y as Gross does here, in his recent celebration of insulation. "Insulation is more expensive and more intrusive than things like smart meters, programmable thermostats, or compact fluorescents," Gross writes. "Improving your insulation could involve cutting holes in walls and ceilings, ripping some stuff out, and blowing or rolling other stuff in.

via www.greenbuildingsnyc.com

David Orr | The Hour Glass

Editorial by David Orr of Oberlin College, one of our best thinkers and writers on sustainable design and education, for Solutions Journal:

A Copernican shift is underway in fields as diverse as agriculture, materials science, architecture, engineering, business, economics, urban planning, waste management, national security, and many others. In every case, it is driven by the need to discover patterns and larger systems essential to reaching higher levels of efficiency and lower environmental impacts—and by the requirements of fairness and human decency. The second driver is the need to extend horizons for planning, accounting, and decision-making to a longer-term view, in order to improve resilience and stability. This revolution in design goes by a variety of names: natural-systems agriculture, biomimicry, green business, the fifth discipline, green building, ecological economics, ecological engineering. By whatever name, it reflects common purposes and similar dynamics across fields, and it arises from a common set of principles. But the various conversations arising from the design revolution are still confined to separate disciplinary arenas, each with its own jargon, methods, and focus.

via www.thesolutionsjournal.com

On Seeing Air

By Jennifer Yoos

The growing crisis of pollution and global climate change has made the chemistry of the earth’s atmosphere the most pressing problem of the 21st Century. It has also made the performative aspects of architecture much more a part of architectural discourse. If we learn to see air as the essential medium of architectural space, we will also begin to see it as a fundamental material shaping habitation and form. If we avoid building metaphors of fluidity in favor of acting directly upon the temporal field, we may gain a new understanding more appropriate to contemporary conditions of architecture as a mediator of the environment. Architects could even move beyond ceding the design of air movement to mechanical engineers and HVAC systems and engage it as an essential issue in defining the shape of buildings.

via www.arcadejournal.com

Martin Melaver on Sustainable Development

Eric Corey Freed interviews green developer Martin Melaver, CEO of Melaver, Inc.: on the place of sustainable design in real estate, a new approach to business, and recreating the urban fabric. Based in Savannah, Georgia, Melaver is known for its green shopping centers throughout the southeast, including Abercorn Common, the First LEED Retail Center in the U.S.

MartinMalaver from Urban ReVision on Vimeo.

How's the environment doing? Ask the buildings

PHOTO: CNN

By Niicolai Hartvig

Imagine that you could double the size of your apartment as a reward for saving electricity, water and gas. It's an idea proposed by the Seoul-based design collective Randomwalks and architect Lee Min-soo for the green redevelopment of Incheon, outside the South Korean capital.

Called Data Formation, apartments would start at 90 square meters, with a system of sliding modules stretching the space according to how much energy each dweller uses and saves. Bespoke furniture would be designed to fit the size-shifting rooms.

via edition.cnn.com

Old is the New Green

Great new issue of Preservation from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with facts and figures, case studies and resources – exploring the conflicts and growing partnerships between sustainable design, new urbanism and heritage conservation.

• “The Height of Sustainability”: Turning the Empire State Building into a model of energy efficiency
• “Brick by Brick”: Greening a Rhode Island fire station
• “Preservation Green Guide”
• “Historic Preservation and Green Architecture: Friends or Foes?” Blair Kamin explores the natural alliance between these two discplines:

"Whenever I hear people talking about tension between historic preservation and green architecture, I am taken aback. What tension? Choosing between preservation and conservation, it would seem, is like choosing between a Volvo and a Saab. They have more similarities than differences.” >> MORE

Read the entire issue here.

The Plan to Decarbonize Chicago's Central Loop

Renowned architecture firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill (AS+GG) recently completed the investigation phase of a massive plan to “decarbonize” Chicago’s Loop. The firm’s goal was to assess variables such as the age, use, condition, and energy consumption of the 500 buildings in this central core area of the city. Carried out in cooperation with the Chicago Climate Action Plan, the monumental project calls for a retrofit of half the city’s commercial and residential buildings to result in a 30% reduction in energy use by 2020. AS+GG took on this tall order with very well thought-out, research based, holistic ideas that beg to be implemented.

via www.inhabitat.com

Wetlands as Urban Connectors

IMAGE: SWA Group

Framework For many years people have become increasingly interested in the way water is conveyed not only off a site but within a site as well. It has been through several trial-and-error attempts that humans have been able to find a system that works effectively for the particular site. We have found it to be that when dealing with stormwater issues near a site it is best to design or redevelop the area to allow for water overflow as an amenity to the urban setting. This is commonly done through the use of water retentions/detentions or other on-site methods. In a fairly recent example SWA group completed a project in Houston, Texas along Brays Bayou that called for the development of stormwater management areas along some of the more urbanized areas and infrastructure in the city.

Experience In a fairly recent example SWA group completed a project in Houston, Texas along Brays Bayou that called for the development of stormwater management areas along some of the more urbanized areas and infrastructure in the city. Three ways they looked at solving this problem was to develop their ecological system 1.) alongside Brays Bayou, 2.) at the mouth of an already developed, but rarely used park, and 3.) on both sides of the bayou in an attempt to use this bayou as an amenity passing through a larger system that was on both sides of it.

via lab.visual-logic.com

Food and the Shape of Cities

Food issues make headlines. Note Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity, the White House vegetable garden, chef Jamie Oliver’s 2010 Ted Prize for his work to counteract the culture of junk food, and Michael Pollan’s appearances on Oprah and The Daily Show to discuss his motto “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” But how often do we talk about food systems and the staggering, complex infrastructure that supplies, processes, distributes, stores, and removes the waste of what we eat? Or the way that food, food culture, and food systems shape the urban environment around us?

via UrbanOmnibus

Driving Green: New Freeway Cap Parks for L.A.?

  IMAGE: AECOM

Plans to develop four so-called freeway cap parks have recently been announced in Los Angeles. The cap concept, which essentially covers a portion of a freeway with a planted concrete lid, has gained popularity in the last decade as an urban “greening” solution. The multibillion-dollar projects are meant to knit together previously disparate neighborhoods, theoretically creating cohesion and larger-scale community gathering places without having to destroy or displace existing infrastructures.

The four projects are spread across Hollywood, downtown LA, and Santa Monica. Hollywood Central Park would be built atop the 101 Freeway on a proposed 44-acre site between Santa Monica Boulevard and Bronson Avenue.

via www.archpaper.com

City Under the City in Amsterdam

IMAGES: Zwarts & Jansma Architects

Amsterdam is bursting at the seams: the space is limited and the narrow streets are often congested. The architectural office Zwarts & Jansma further developed a concept by Dutch engineering company Strukton, which foresees a city under the city.

AMFORA (Alternative MultiFunctionele Ondergrondse Ruimte Amsterdam – Alternative Multifunctional Underground Space Amsterdam) solves the space and traffic problems of Amsterdam: almost 50 km of tunnels will be built underneath the canals in the town centre. They will accommodate extended parking space, sport and leisure facilities like cinemas and others.

AMFORA is CO2-neutral. Heat pumps provide the energy for heating and cooling. Excess energy could be used for temperature control in the buildings aboveground. Moreover, the Amsterdam air will improve: exhaust fumes will be filtered using state-of-the-art technology, particulate matter and other harmful substances will therefore no longer reach the atmosphere.

via www.zwarts.jansma.nl

EcoFLATS, Net-Zero Apartment Living

There is no lack of imagination in the sustainable development community in Portland, Oregon, but when Doug Shapiro and Jean-Pierre Veillet teamed up, a new type of ‘everyman housing’ was the result. In about a year the partners expect to have built a commercial mixed use development that includes a net-zero apartment building they can market to those who desire to reduce their personal carbon footprint.

Net-zero is used to describe the result in which a building’s energy use is equal to the amount that is produced on site from renewable resources like solar or wind. Because the technology exists to create this perfect balance, many governments are aggressively making plans to impose net zero requirements within a generation. Investors are following this trend and, based on projects like this one, many will decide to invest in buildings with net-zero energy technology. And that is exactly the point. The ecoFLATS partners insist a driving force behind their motivation to build this development has always been the concept that it would provide both educational benefits and a prototype that would support similar projects.

via greenlandlady.com

IMAGE: ecoflatspdx.com

Defining a ‘Carbon Neutral’ City

What does carbon neutral even mean? A critical first step in pursuing ‘carbon neutrality’ is defining it. Of the many considerations that go into defining carbon neutrality for a city the size of Seattle, a few stand out for their significance.

1. How does carbon neutrality relate to the global limits that scientists warn us we must not exceed – 350 ppm CO2 (or 2 degrees C over pre-industrial levels)?

2. Would a city have to actually quit emitting greenhouse gases, or could it use offsets (purchase carbon credits) to reach its goal?

3. Are we trying to account for only emissions that occur within city limits, or all emissions for which Seattleites are responsible?

This is wonky stuff; catnip for the carbon emissions accounting crowd (yes, they exist, and yes, there are technically enough of them to constitute a crowd…).

via www.worldchanging.com

The Living Building Challenge Roadshow Hits the Road

Living Building Challenge is sweeping North America, with more than sixty registered projects from coast to coast now pursuing certification under this rigorous performance standard as interest continues to rise. In response to frequent requests for introductory presentations, the International Living Building Institute (ILBI) is hitting the road to create an opportunity to share the tenets of the program with advanced practitioners in the United States and Canada.

Thirty cities throughout the United States and Canada will host Living Building Challenge Roadshow events this spring:

U.S

Kansas City, KS - 03/10/10
Atlanta, GA - 03/23/10
Los Angeles, CA - 03/23/10
Minneapolis, MN - 03/24/10
Albuquerque, NM - 03/25/10
San Diego, CA - 03/25/10
Portland, OR - 03/31/10
Anchorage, AK - 04/07/10
New York, NY - 04/21/10
St. Louis, MO - 04/21/10
Washington DC - 04/21/10
Seattle, WA - 05/05/10
Austin, TX - 05/24/10
Sacramento, CA - 05/25/10
San Francisco, CA - 05/26/10
Pittsburgh, PA - 05/26/10
Cleveland, OH - 05/27/10
Clermont, KY - 05/28/10
Detroit, MI - 06/01/10
Chicago, IL - 06/08/10
Phoenix, AZ - 06/08/10
Denver, CO - 06/09/10
Miami, FL - 06/09/10
Boston, MA - 06/10/10
Houston, TX - 06/16/10

CANADA

Toronto, ON - 03/02/10
Winnipeg, MB - 03/04/10
Vancouver, BC - 04/08/10
Ottawa, ON - 04/14/10
Montreal, QC - 04/15/10
Calgary, AB - 04/20/10

via ilbi.org

Shigeru Ban: Places for People

Short, but sweet: video interview with Japan's Shigeru Ban on designing contemporary houses and public buildings using innovative materials such as recycled paper rolls for trusses – from Wall Street Journal (via Talkitect.com).

Envisioning Sustainable Communities

Parts 1 and 2 of a diagloue on building community.

By Pamela Courtenay-Hall and Gary Clausheide

The question of how to build sustainable communities is essential to surviving the predicaments of climate change, peak oil, environmental degradation, global imperialism and economic collapse that are upon us. So it is good that questions about community have entered Energy Bulletin discussions.

But so far, recent EB discussions of community have focused on the question of how to “create”, “build” or “organize” community in general terms, without examining what we mean by “community”, and without examining the fundamental features of the vision of community that we want to move toward. Instead, the focus has been on the understandably pressing concern, how do we motivate existing communities to make the transition toward sustainability, or at least to move to more sustainable practices?

We want to take the discussion further by arguing that the best way to motivate people to adopt the profound changes that real social change would require is to show them a successful model in action. This is likely a goal of Transition Towns and many other sustainability movements, but most of these are framed within the existing economic and social structures of mainstream U.S. society. Unasked is the question of how such reform initiatives can resist the centralizing and hierarchy-inducing influences of corporate America.

via www.energybulletin.net

Nature imposes the real bottom line

From the David Suzuki Foundation:

We often describe the triple bottom line - society, economy, and environment - as three intersecting circles of equal size. This is nonsense. The reality is that the largest circle should represent the biosphere. Within that, we have 30 million species, including us, that depend on it. Within the biosphere circle should be a much smaller circle, which is human society, and within that should be an even smaller circle, the economy. Neither of the inner circles should grow large enough to intersect with the bigger ones, but that's what's happening now as human societies and the economy hit their limits.

We also draw lines around property, cities, provinces, and countries. We take these so seriously that we are willing to fight and die to protect those borders. But nature pays no attention to human boundaries. Air, water, soil that blows across continents and oceans, migrating fish, birds and mammals, and windblown seeds cannot be managed within human strictures, yet all the discussions in Copenhagen were centred on countries that, in turn, were divided into rich and poor. In science-fiction movies where an alien from outer space attacks and kills humans, national differences disappear as we join forces to fight a common enemy. That is what we have to tap into to meet the climate crisis.

Nature is our home. Nature provides our most fundamental needs. Nature dictates limits. If we are striving for a truly sustainable future, we have to subordinate our activities to the limits that come from nature. We know how much carbon dioxide can be reabsorbed by all the green things in the oceans and on land, and we know we are exceeding those limits. That's why carbon is building up in the atmosphere. So our goal is clear. All of humanity must find a way to keep emissions below the limits imposed by the biosphere.

via beta.davidsuzuki.org

The City is a Brain

Thought-provoking ideas on city design from a10, an architectural studio in Mexico City:

“the new city should generate situations rather than things.”

FUNCTIONAL AUTONOMY:
In the course of pursuing any sufficiently ‘complicated problem’ (the city), the subgoals that engage our attentions (the topics of study) can become increasingly detached from the original problem (the city).

Virtually any problem (city) will be easier to solve the more one learns about the context world in which that problem (city) occurs. No matter what one’s problem is, provided that it’s hard enough, one always gains from learning better ways to learn.

INTELIGEN.CITY
Intelligence emphasizes swiftness and efficiency. Taking as accounted, that a city should work as a brain, which means that it can learn and solve problems by itself and be functionally autonomous...

via a10studio.tumblr.com

Virtualizing Succession and Sustainability

How do we as a society imagine our future? With social and natural environments changing, often quickly, it's difficult to imagine how our society might look a generation or more into the future. How can we then develop robust solutions for the sustainability challenges we face? Courses in sustainability offer insights; still sustainability science remains a developing field of study.

The solutions are to be found with practitioners, who live, interact and decide in society, says Arnim Wiek. Wiek collaborates with stakeholders from government, business and civil society to create solutions to sustainability challenges, such as climate change or detrimental urban development. At the same time, he is committed to build problem-solving capacity in the next generation of sustainability researchers and professionals.

One of Wiek's key research strengths is looking forward. For example, in scenario building, a method of complex systems analysis that incorporates the panoply of social, economic and environmental variables within sustainability science to examine potential long-term outcomes, Wiek turns to explore science-based visualizations of future pathways. Such virtualizations draw from an "interdisciplinary suite of methods from sustainability, environmental, decision and computer sciences to gaming, virtualization, education and policy analysis" aimed to enhance the connection between the science and the public.

via www.physorg.com

In Minneapolis: Rezoning for More Density Around Trails, Parks

There is a symbiotic relationship between parks and population density. For those living in compact housing around a park’s borders, there is respite, a place to recreate, a back yard where little private outdoor space exists and an amenity that increases property values. For the park, there’s the “eyes” that make it safer, more property taxes to keep it maintained, nearby users to keep it vibrant and able to maximize its value as a public amenity.

While many parks are historically located in dense urban surroundings, the relationship of compactness and green space has not been an area of much attention in urban planning circles.

That may be changing to some extent. In Minneapolis, the city appears to be close to rezoning land along the Midtown Greenway, a 5-mile crosstown trail and linear park that links the city’s lakes to the Mississippi River.

via cityparksblog.org

Putting a Value on Bees, Trees and the Rest of Nature

By Tom McKeag

"Money doesn't grow on trees," our parents told us, and they were right. Trees, however, are essential for making money, and not just because of the paper they provide. More and more, companies are recognizing that the forest, as well as the tree, is essential to everyone's prosperity. After all, we live in a society with a nature-based economy, and the resources that nature provides could not exist without healthy ecosystems.

Resource economists typically depict nature as doing four general favors for us: providing things like food and water; regulating things like floods and droughts; supporting life through basic processes like photosynthesis, soil formation and material cycling; and enhancing cultural things like spiritual refreshment and scientific discovery. Valuing these services is complicated and is done by several methods, like calculating replacement value, or willingness to pay. As resources get scarcer, valuation of these services will become more and more a part of every business.

via www.greenbiz.com

Urban Resilience: Breaking New Ground on Understanding – and Preserving – Natural Ecosystems

By Maywa Montenegro

...to some scientists, what happened in New Orleans, while devastating, wasn’t very surprising or unexpected. They see a system that was insufficiently robust to handle the blow it was dealt. They see a highly ordered, complex state – commercial districts and neighborhoods, social networks and infrastructure networks, cycles of water, energy, and food consumption – reduced to a state of chaos and disorder. From this perspective, the problem wasn’t merely an incompetent leadership and not enough FEMA trailers. It was a fundamental question of resilience.

Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and co-evolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held assumption that systems respond to change in a linear, predictable fashion is simply wrong. According to resilience thinking, systems are in constant flux; they are highly unpredictable and self-organizing, with feedbacks across time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmarks of complexity.

via seedmagazine.com

Your Brain Needs the Nature

More and more research is leading scientists to believe (and engage in further research) that we humans function much better when there is some piece of nature around us. Even if it is just a small patch of grass or a glimpse of a tree, we seem to be able to concentrate better, heal quicker from injury, make better decisions, even live longer, when we have some exposure to natural elements, in our urban world. 

via blog.cunysustainablecities.org

Beyond Green Buildings: Creating Sustainable Communities

By Barbara Kessler

Defining a sustainable master plan for St. Charles, Maryland

If you had the money and connections, you could build a snappy green house these days. Sink a geothermal heat pump to tap Mother Earth’s energy, slap up some solar panels, finish it out with non-toxic drywall, cork floors, denim insulation, recycled glass countertops and floors made from sunken ship decking.

But does a green house a green home make? The answer to that is….of course not. Green builders, and those who live in green houses, soon bump up against what some land planners have known all along: It takes a village to bring green to its fullest expression.

via www.greenrightnow.com

’Ecology.Design.Synergy’: Sustainability for Architecture and Life

Ecology.Design.Synergy redefines the term “sustainability” by examining how people inhabit their built environments. This exhibition showcases the innovative design approach of Behnisch Architekten and Transsolar ClimateEngineering as illustrated by a roster of international projects and ongoing collaborations.

via www.archinnovations.com

Rachel Armstrong on Living Materials, Architecture That Repairs Itself

Podcast featuring the UK's Rachel Armstrong and her ongoing research to develop "living architecture" using "materials that couple built and natural environments so that energy and information flow freely between architecture and the biosphere as an integrated process." Click here to listen.

Rachel Armstrong is a synthetic biologist working at the Bartlett School of Architecture. She talks to the Wellcome Trust's Daniel Glaser about connecting the natural world with the built environment to create 'living materials' that can grow themselves and may even offer a solution to climate change.

via www.wellcomecollection.org

And Rachel's TED talk on "Architecture That Repairs Itself" is definitely worth another look. See it here.

Olafur Eliasson: Space is Process

"When I make something, I want it to be sincerely and honestly and responsibly in the world. I want it to have an impact somehow."

Olafur Eliasson: Space is Process from Mads Jørgensen on Vimeo.

Interesting short video on Olafur Eliasson’s latest design ideas, Space is Process. Eliasson, a Danish-Icelandic artist, is known for his art installations in public spaces around the world, including intervention Green river and the weather project at London's Tate Modern. Your chance encounter is still on display at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

UBC develops North America’s greenest building

By Glenn Drexhage

“Sustainability is about what kind of world we want to live in,” says UBC’s John Robinson. If so, then the ambitious project he’s leading – the development of the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) – should provide some valuable inspiration. The $37-million building will be greenhouse gas-positive and a net energy producer, meaning that it will help UBC reduce the energy it uses and carbon it emits. All water will be sourced from rainwater, with wastewater treatment occurring on site. There is also more carbon sequestered in the building’s wooden structure than will be emitted during its construction and eventual dismantling.

Not only does the UBC-based centre aim to be among the greenest buildings in North America, it will also serve as a living laboratory for sustainability research, development and practice. For example, building processes will be continuously monitored, including heating, cooling, lighting, equipment use, water harvesting and treatment, building occupancy, inhabitant behaviour and more.

via www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca

ALL IMAGES: Busby Perkins and Will

Work in Progress: Mithun's Pier 56 Office, "a living laboratory for sustainable strategies"

My current article for Eco-Structure Magazine:

In any weather, the views from Seattle’s Pier 56 to the Olympic Mountains are nothing short of spectacular: cruise ships and ferries plying the waters of Elliott Bay, misty islands in the distance, occasionally an orca surfacing, seabirds circling. Home to architectural firm Mithun for the past 10 years, the pier marks the intersection of old and new, of history and a bright green tomorrow.

via www.eco-structure.com

ALL PHOTOS: Dave Macaulay

De-Industrializing the City

By Alex Steffen

One of my favorite quotes by Bjarke Ingels:

"Engineering without engines. We should use contemporary technology and computation capacity to make our buildings independent of machinery. Building services today are essentially mechanical compensations for the fact that buildings are bad for what they are designed for—human life. Therefore we pump air around, illuminate dark spaces with electric lights, and heat and cool the spaces in order to make them livable. The result is boring boxes with big energy bills. If we moved the qualities out of the machine room and back into architecture’s inherent attributes, we’d make more interesting buildings and more sustainable cities."

These are all ideas very much at the core of green building, but there's a focus here that I think is important: that sustainable cities involve removing machines designed to do ecologically stupid things, and that new technology should reorient the city around the human body.

Fewer machines. Smart surroundings for people.

via www.worldchanging.com

Tour of Chicago's New Aqua Tower

A tour of the Aqua Tower, the new Chicago residential high-rise, designed by Jeanne Gang, FAIA, Studio Gang Architects.

Seattle Bends Rules for "Living Buildings"

A new ordinance in Seattle will pilot-test exemptions for projects attempting to use innovative onsite water and energy strategies that currently run afoul of codes.

The ordinance will allow code exemptions for up to 12 buildings seeking certification through the Living Building Challenge (LBC). The exemptions will allow the buildings to meet LBC prerequisites that require techniques, such as onsite water treatment, that conflict with current land-use and building codes in Seattle (as well as in many other areas of the U.S.). City officials will use the review process to inform future code changes that could make the regulatory landscape friendlier to onsite water and energy strategies.

via www.buildinggreen.com

The Architecture of Healthiness

It was only his first hour as the city’s new health commissioner, but Dr. Thomas Farley had already singled out a new target in the fight for New Yorkers’ well-being: elevators. “Over the past 60 years, we engineered physical activity out of our lives,” the rail-thin infectious disease specialist told a conference called Fit City, held at the Center for Architecture in July. Elevators and escalators seemed “like a good idea at the time,” but now New Yorkers needs more stairs, the doctor ordered. Moving up and down by foot isn’t just cheaper and more energy efficient than using an elevator: Just two minutes of stair climbing a day burns enough calories to eliminate the one pound an average adult gains each year. If we engineered physicality out of our lives, Farley added, “we can engineer it right back in just as easily.”

via americancity.org

Yale Building Uses 81% Less Water, 58% Less Energy

PHOTO: Hopkins Architects

A new building at Yale is a working laboratory for the students that frequent it. Kroon Hall, home of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, uses 81 percent less water and 58 percent less energy than comparable buildings.

The building, which achieved LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, also generates about 25 percent of its electricity needs onsite from solar.

via www.environmentalleader.com

In Portland, Going Green and Growing Vertical in a Bid for Energy Savings

Urban gardening used to seem subversive. People planted tomatoes in public parks, strung their hops to rooftops to make homebrew and reclaimed empty lots as community farms, never mind the property owner.

Yet here in one of the more thoroughly tilled cities in America, subversive has come full circle: the federal government plans to plant its own bold garden directly above a downtown plaza. As part of a $133 million renovation, the General Services Administration is planning to cultivate “vegetated fins” that will grow more than 200 feet high on the western facade of the main federal building here, a vertical garden that changes with the seasons and nurtures plants that yield energy savings.

via www.nytimes.com

Imagining Austin

Austinites begin a new comprehensive plan for the city's future

By Katherine Gregor

"If we do our jobs right, we'll create a plan that has a profound influence on our generation and the next."

Do those words make your heart leap? John Fernsler, a principal with consultants Wallace Roberts & Todd, offered them up to inspire a dozen tables of engaged Austinites who attended a comprehensive planning kickoff community workshop at Scholz Garten last August. If you're like the folks in that room, planning and community activism already quicken your pulse. You're likely a planning or policy wonk or involved with a nonprofit or neighborhood association or task force – and probably a habitué of City Hall. But for many, talk of a comprehensive plan can be a real eye-glazer: What is it, and why should I care if the city of Austin is doing one?

The short answer: Cities create comprehensive plans to holistically address all community needs. Citizens come together to express common values, visions, and aspirations for the future; those will get translated into a comprehensive plan, according to the city of Austin, that "will drive the way the city grows, spends, and conserves its resources."

via AustinChronicle.com