Green ArchiTEXT

’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

Classrooms of the Future: Opening symposium on green school design

Classrooms of the Future: Opening symposium on green school design - Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Join SPUR for opening night of Classrooms of the Future, an exhibit produced by Architecture for Humanity, on view at the SPUR Urban Center through Feb. 26. The exhibit features winners of the 2009 Open Architecture Challenge, an international design competition for sustainable classrooms. Moderated by Kate Stohr, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, a panel discussion will explore the potential of good design to enhance the learning process in schools around the world.

via www.spur.org

Hope in the Built Environment

The title for this upcoming conference in the U.K. is as intriguing as any I’ve seen: Hope in the Built Environment? To be held November 18-20 at the Cumberland Lodge, a 17th century house/conference center near London, the conference has been designed for an interdisciplinary audience of architects, planners, developers and builders to explore themes such as “Buildings and Society”, “Sustainability and Wellbeing”, and “Shaping Space for Life”.

Ultimately, delegates will address the conference’s core question, “In a time of climate change, financial uncertainty and social anxiety, how can architecture and the built environment make a difference?”

Among the plenary sessions and presenters:

• “Shaping better cities” – Charles Landry, Director, Comedia (author of The Art of City Making and The Creative City: A Toolkit for urban innovators)
• “The built environment and climate change: precepts and policies” – Rt Hon Lord Smith of Finsbury, Chairman, The Environment Agency
• “Buildings for health and wellness” – Simon Henley, Buschow Henley Architects (whose practice includes adaptive reuse, regeneration and urban design disciplines)
• “Homes and towns” – Camilla Sheldon, Eco-towns Programme, DCLG
• “Spaces across the life course” – Spencer de Grey, Foster + Partners (whose work includes the Commerzbank Headquarters in Frankfurt)

For a complete list of presenters and more information about Hope in the Built Environment?, check out the conference site.

The Age of Stupid: Playing Everywhere

Eco-Opolis @ Sustainable Living Roadshow

The Sustainable Living Roadshow is a caravan of educators and entertainers who tour the country in a fleet of renewable fuel vehicles setting up off-the-grid eco-carnivals with experiential learning villages, empowering communities to utilize sustainable living strategies for a healthier planet. On display – not far from the Solar Stage, the Clean Energy Showcase, the Conscious Carnival Midway and the Awakened Art Garden – is Eco-Opolis (pictured), "A Model Green City" made from recyclables like plastic bottles and containers, juice cartons, cups, and yogurt containers.

Next week, the Roadshow stops in New Orleans (Oct. 4/5) at the University of New Orleans; then on to Austin (Oct. 11/12).

Moving Beyond Zero Impact

The Oregon Environmental Council is sponsoring what looks like a very interesting panel discussion: "Forum for Business and the Environment:The Next Green Building Revolution: Moving Beyond Zero Impact". The focus is on how the green building market can move above and beyond LEED:

"Our panel will address critical questions: Will the next target be zero-impact buildings or an even more aggressive goal? What does a “living building” look like and how can development actually help restore watersheds and slow global warming? How will the new LEED Neighborhood Development standard shape sustainable communities in the short term? Where is the green building industry headed?"

Speakers: Gina Franzosa, Director, Oregon Chapter, Cascadia Region Green Building Council and Scott Lewis, Founder and Principal, Brightworks.

To be held June 3, 2008 from 07:30 to 09:30 a.m. at the Doubletree Hotel and Executive Meeting Center, Lloyd Center, Portland, OR. For more information, visit http://www.oeconline.org.

Charlie Rose: "Design and the Elastic Mind"

Charlie Rose, without question the best interviewer on TV, spoke last night with Paola Antonelli, senior curator of New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) about the incredible "Design and the Elastic Mind". Running through May 12, this major exhibition at MoMA explores the relationship between design, science and innovation and was featured here in an earlier post.

Living Future 08

Billed as the leading conference for green design, focusing on “deep solutions to the most daunting global issues of our time”, Living Future 08 is coming soon: Wednesday April 16 to Friday April 18 in Vancouver, BC.

This annual event has attracted some of the biggest names in sustainability. The keynote speaker will be Paul Hawken (on Wednesday, April 16), author of The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism, who will address “How the largest social movement in history is restoring grace, justice and beauty to the world.” Sim Van der Ryn of Berkeley, an internationally-distinguished pioneer in ecological design, presents at Friday’s Opening Plenary.

Living Future focuses on solutions to the built environment requiring new tools, new perspectives and better collaboration. In addition to attracting some of the region’s top green architects, engineers and other experts in design and construction as speakers, the format for this “UnConference” is something quite different. After each panelist spends 15 to 20 minutes sharing his/her ideas and experiences, participants form small groups with each facilitated by one of the panelists for a 45-minute, interactive session.

Sessions include “Living Building: Energy and Carbon Neutrality”, presented by Vancouver’s Peter Busby, Busby Perkins + Will, and Jennifer Sanguinetti of Stantec. Also scheduled for the program: “Wholistic Engineering: Applied to a Living Building Water System”; “Green Land Development of Year” (about the highest rated LEED home in Canada to date); “Charting a Course Towards Water Independence: Achieving Net-Zero Water in Living Buildings”; and “Living Cities – Remaking our cities one neighborhood at a time”.

For more information or to register, go here.

Design and the Elastic Mind

MoMA

“Design and the Elastic Mind” opened
February 24 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and runs through May 12. This new exhibition focuses on how architecture – and the design world in general – are responding and adapting to momentous changes in technology, science and social mores.

In its incredible, wide-ranging display of ideas, the show explores ‘computational origami’, ‘tagging’, ‘extreme visualization’, ‘biomimicry’, ‘sensory design’ and many more advanced and emerging concepts. The premise behind all of this is that in recent decades people are experiencing fundamental changes in all aspects of human life.

According to the show’s curators:

”..people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change.”

Writing “The Soul in the New Machines” in The New York Times, reporter Nicolai Ouroussoff describes “the exhibition’s overarching theme, the ability to switch fluidly from the scale of the atom to the scale of entire cities, may sound a death knell for the tired ideological divides of the last century, between modernity and history, technology and man, individual and collective. It should be required viewing for anyone who believes that our civilization is heading back toward the Dark Ages.”

One of the exhibits, “Rules of Six, 2007” (below), uses algorithms to fashion an organically-based architecture. In this, a collaboration between Aranda/Lasch, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the artists declare that:

“New design approaches in science, design, and architecture have replaced a top-down description of form by bottom-up rules of formation: materials carry information within them about how to behave, grow, combine, assemble, and proliferate. Rules of Six is an open exploration of self-assembly and modularity across scales.”

IMAGE: MoMA