Green ArchiTEXT

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

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

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.

If I Were God of the Climate

Standing over a tabletop computer screen depicting a dark and stormy sky, I become the Climate God, tasked with reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and saving humanity from dangerous climate changes. At my will I wield my climate-crushing powers by choosing a “solution card” and throwing it on the screen, thereby enacting policies and making the world a brighter place.

Choosing the Wind Energy card, I place it in the stormy sky, and a ray of blue light shoots from the card into the small bright spot in the corner labeled “Energy Supply.” The ray of light passes through three barriers that diminish its strength: Electric grids still can’t handle lots of wind power; energy policy still favors more carbon-intensive electricity; and the public still isn’t sold on the idea. With the mere click of a button, I resolve these barriers and watch as global greenhouse gas emissions drop from 36,284 to 34,686 Gigatons of CO2 equivalent (Gt CO2e).

via blogs.worldwatch.org

Price fixing: Why it is important to put a price on nature

The insight that nature provides services to mankind is not a new one. In 360BC Plato remarked on the helpful role that forests play in preserving fertile soil; in their absence, he noted, the land was turned into desert, like the bones of a wasted body. The idea that the value provided by such “ecosystem services” can be represented by ecologists in a way that economists can get to grips with, though, is rather newer. A number of the thinkers who have made it a hot topic in the past decade gathered at a meeting on biodiversity and ecosystem services held by the Royal Society, in London, on January 13th and 14th. They looked at the progress and prospects of their attempts to argue for the preservation of nature by better capturing the value of the things – such as pollination, air quality and carbon storage – that it seemingly does for free.

via www.economist.com