The 70% of school buildings were built before 1975 in Italy. The ageing of the structures and the inadequacy in terms of seismic safety and energy performance represent an emergency to be managed but also a great opportunity for the renewal of teaching spaces.
Rethinking school complexes as new civic centres equipped with libraries, auditoriums and aggregation spaces is the new challenge and redevelopment can become a capillary engine of real urban regeneration.
This experiment has taken shape in the project “Torino fa scuola”, a public and private initiative together, promoted by Fondazione Agnelli and Compagnia di San Paolo, in collaboration with the City of Turin and Fondazione per la Scuola.
The project of Archisbang Architecture Firm and Area Progetti for the secondary school Giovanni Pascoli is a model for the redevelopment of a school in a period building.
READ "Innovative teaching in a renovated 19th century building in Turin" via Domus.
From rising sea levels to so-called heat islands, the challenges facing the world’s major cities as a result of climate change are daunting to say the least. But some municipal responses – especially those spearheaded by architects and designers – have been as creative as the problems are formidable. Think city parks turned reservoirs, urban forests on demand, even a redirected river. What follows are a few of the initiatives that five threatened yet ambitious metropolises have effected or are exploring to engender civic resilience, with designers leading the charge. READ MORE>>
Redevelopment plans for the station include making space along the Potomac River accessible to the public. (Hilco Redevelopment Partners)
By Lola Fadulu
A development company with a history of transforming obsolete facilities has purchased one of the largest industrial sites in Alexandria and plans to build housing, office space and retail, granting residents new access to a large swath of the Potomac River.
The Potomac River Generating Station, a shuttered, 71-year-old coal-fired power plant, was decommissioned in 2012. Hilco Redevelopment Partners bought the site last week for an undisclosed amount after a 3½ -year pursuit. Pepco will continue to own part of the site to operate an electrical substation.
“We’re excited about the chance to reintegrate it into the surrounding urban fabric, open up that access to the waterfront and create a really dynamic district with world-class architecture,” said Melissa Schrock, the senior vice president of mixed-use development at Hilco. “We think the city of Alexandria deserves nothing less.”
Hilco will be guided by Alexandria’s 2017 Old Town North Small Area Plan and must include some affordable housing in the project, officials said. The site will include dining and public open space along the river.
The group recently redeveloped Sparrows Point in Baltimore, once one of the largest steel mills in the country.
“Development and development policy is the lifeblood of controversy in local government, but this is actually a pretty good example of a development effort that very few people are opposed to,” said Alexandria Mayor Justin Wilson (D). “Everyone’s pretty excited to see [the coal plant] go away.”
Schrock said the project could take five to 10 years to complete, depending on how long the company needs to conduct an environmental cleanup of the site.
The group also plans to make what it builds environmentally friendly. Hilco strives to reuse and recycle as much material as possible, Schrock said, with a goal of recycling 98 percent of the materials. It plans to work with the city to meet the goals outlined in the 2019 Green Building Policy.
Those goals include reducing energy use, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and improving indoor environmental quality.
“I think we really envision that this is going to become part of an overall eco district, you know, trying to use some cutting-edge environmental sustainability components: district energy and geothermal and a lot of things that we haven’t seen much of in the city,” Wilson said. READ MORE>>
via Washington Post
IMAGE: Nautilus
By Diane Ackerman
It is winter in upstate New York, on a morning so cold the ground squeaks loudly underfoot as sharp-finned ice crystals rub together. The trees look like gloved hands, fingers frozen open. Something lurches from side to side up the trunk of an old sycamore—a nut-hatch climbing in zigzags, on the prowl for hibernating insects. A crow veers overhead, then lands. As snow flurries begin, it leaps into the air, wings aslant, catching the flakes to drink. Or maybe just for fun, since crows can be mighty playful.
Another life form curves into sight down the street: a girl laughing down at her gloveless fingers, which are busily texting on some handheld device. This sight is so common that it no longer surprises me, though strolling in a large park one day I was startled by how many people were walking without looking up, or walking in a myopic daze while talking on their “cells,” as we say in shorthand, as if spoken words were paddling through the body from one salt water lagoon to another.
We don’t find it strange that, in the Human Age, slimy, hairy, oozing, thorny, smelly, seed-crackling, pollen-strewn nature is digital. It’s finger-swiped across, shared with others over, and honeycombed in our devices. For the first time in human history, we’re mainly experiencing nature through intermediary technology that, paradoxically, provides more detail while also flattening the sensory experience. Because we have riotously visual, novelty-loving brains, we’re entranced by electronic media’s caged hallucinations. Over time, can that affect the hemispheric balance of the brain and dramatically change us? Are we able to influence our evolution through the objects we dream up and rely on? READ MORE
Kansas City, Missouri, is the home of Make It Right's latest community revitalization project. Though the neighborhood of Manheim Park hasn't been affected by a natural disaster, it's been afflicted with decades worth of decline. Bancroft Elementary, a formerly abandoned school dating from 1904, is the projects locus. Make It Right and local firm BNIM transformed the vacant building into low-income housing for families, veterans, senior citizens, and youths transitioning out of foster care. Architect Tim Duggan, director of Make It Right's Innovations department, spearheaded the effort. We chatted with him about the project, "urban acupuncture," and how this redevelopment plan serves as a model for other cities. "We see this as a model both locally and nationally to identify a catalytic project and revitalize it," Duggan says. "So often conventional development says, it won't pencil out or it won't work unless there are inferior quality materials, or it'll pencil out with less community space or less attention to quality. We didn't want to do that." READ MORE >>
via www.dwell.com
"The cloud” gives a lighter-than-air spin to all our connectivity and data sifting. In reality, they consume energy like there’s no tomorrow. Next-generation data centers aim to fix that.Data centers are changing. And that can’t happen too soon. “These buildings use an enormous amount of power,” says Gensler’s Bernie Woytek. “We’re talking millions of kilowatts per year—it really adds up.” After one data center client recently consolidated into a single new facility, its firstyear savings in electrical power was $14 million. The trends for future data centers are clear, says Woytek’s colleague Joe Lauro: “Smaller, more compact, and aggressively energy-efficient.”
So how do you get there? READ MORE >>
via Gensler Dialogue
The power of footfall. An English company harnessed energy from spectators arriving at the Olympic park during London 2012. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PAEndless amounts have been written about what is the right path to a low-carbon future – but not much of that commentary has focused on the role that literal paths could play. Yet in the future we may all be generating energy wherever we go, whether we're walking, driving or sitting on the train, using a technique known as energy-harvesting.
There are two main approaches. One is to use mechanical technology to capture the energy and convert it into electricity and the other is to use piezo-electric materials, which produce electricity when they are put under pressure – when someone steps on them or drives over them, for example.
One of the best-known uses of the technique was in a club in Rotterdam, which installed an energy-generating dance floor, where the dancers created their own light show. While in the UK, a company, Pavegen, has generated energy from schoolchildren running to their next lesson, from thousands of runners at this year's Paris Marathon, revellers at the Bestival music festival on the Isle of Wight and spectators travelling to watch the London 2012 Olympic Games via West Ham tube station.
The technology is ideal for anywhere that attracts crowds, so ticket barriers at train and tube stations are an obvious application, but the concept will also work at shopping centres, sports venues, even airport terminals. READ MORE >>
Image © San Diego History Center
Despite the sprawling nature of San Diego, our team chose to concentrate on the downtown core, not only because it is our own backyard, but because this region of the city has consistently lacked compelling public space. Combining historical research with a survey of the current urban landscape and its dynamics, we have started to unravel the “why” of our contemporary city, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. The historic and current drivers of the San Diego economy – the military, research and engineering, tourism, tuna fishing, and shipping – have over the years worked against the development of the downtown waterfront as a civic arena. READ MORE >>
Photo: DMagnus/Flickr
A tornado-resilient Russian nesting doll of a home, a sleek — and rising sea level-safe — spin on the iconic shotgun shack, and an energy effecient dwelling-on-stilts have been named the three winners in the American Institute of Architects’ Designing Recovery residential design competition.Launched this past summer by the AIA in partnership with the Make It Right Foundation, Architecture for Humanity, the St. Bernard Project, and Dow Building Solutions, Designing Recovery solicited architects to design affordable, buildable, and eco-friendly single-family dwellings that “aid in the rebuilding of sustainable and resilient communities.”Each home design was required to be site-specific and geared to help residents living in three specific cities/regions deeply impacted by natural disasters — of both the hurricane and tornado variety — over the last several years: New York City, New Orleans, and Joplin, Mo. As the competition, a “design competition with real world impact on the lives of families who have been struck by natural disaster,” brief reads: “This competition is not only about replacing what was lost, but building back better.” READ MORE >>
via www.mnn.com
The Looper repurposes an existing river barge into a greenhouse which collects, uses, filters, and returns water to the river in a remediated state – a loop. The “building” was designed in accordance with the Living Building Challenge Standards and addresses each principle – site, water, energy, health, materials, equity and beauty – to create a zero-impact design. At the heart of the vessel is a “living machine” that distributes filtered river water to an aquaponics system growing both plants and fish. As the greenhouse barge moves along the river, it is able to restore water and habitat, serve multiple communities with access to fresh produce and act as a floating classroom for an ecologically abundant future.
The Looper was an RTKL entry for the 2013 snoLEAF BIG! Green Greenhouse ideas competition. The competition asked participants to develop inspired new ideas about the future of locally grown fresh produce in the Snohomish region of the Pacific Northwest. The competition requirements for the greenhouse where that it needed to extend the growing season, around 3,000 square feet, mainly operated by volunteers and fulfill the requirements of the Living Building Challenge.
via the-looper.com
The green building movement doesn’t have one founder—it has several. One of them, without question, is Bob Berkebile, a founding principal at BNIM in Kansas City. In the 1990s Berkebile was part of the small circle of architects, designers and businesspeople who helped create the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program. He served as a delegate at the Earth Summit in Rio. Later, he took certification a step further and created (with Jason McLennan) the Living Building Challenge, a vigorous standard that exceeds LEED Platinum and serves as both aspiration and model.
My conversation with Berkebile is the second installment in The Next Building Environment Today series, a collaboration between Metropolis magazine and Architecture 2030. Each month I interview an internationally recognized leader in the green building movement. Here Berkebile talks about the recent Bank of America controversy, his new concept of Urban Acupuncture, early efforts in China, and the Architecture 2030 Palette:
Martin C. Pedersen: You followed the controversy surrounding the Bank of America building in New York. What was your take on the New Republic article accusing the building of being an energy hog?
Bob Berkebile: I don’t know all the facts, but the early responses suggest that it’s being compared unfavorably to the Empire State, but that’s still relatively empty and Bank of America is full. Again, I don’t know the facts. What I do know is, when a system is undergoing change—and I would argue that LEED has created more change in our industry than any other single thing in my professional career—when that amount of change occurs, there are always pushbacks. Several months ago US Today did two feature articles, saying that LEED is broken. When you look at the overall energy numbers, buildings have improved significantly. But the LEED system, as it has matured, is a like a natural system. Are you familiar with the S-curve that defines the vitality over time of a natural system?
MCP: No.
BB: It’s a very interesting. Let’s take, for example, an oak forest. You have an X- and Y-axis. The vertical is vitality; the horizontal is time. You plant an acorn, and initially that s-curve is below the line, because it’s taking nutrients, taking resources from the soil, water and sun, and not producing anything. As it becomes a tree, then it starts being productive. It’s sequestering carbon, managing water, sharing nutrients with other plant systems. As time goes forward that S turns up and becomes a steep incline as it increases its contribution and vitality. Then as the forest matures and gets to the climax phase, the line starts bending down again. So the graph looks like an S on its side. Then what happens in a natural system is something modifies it, like fire, and that regenerates the forest, and restarts the S-curve. That might be where we’re at in the green building movement. READ MORE >>
Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy is based on the thermodynamic premise that architecture should maximize its ecological and architectural power. No matter how paradoxical it might initially seem, architects should maximize energy intake, maximize energy use, and maximize energy feedback and reinforcement. This presumes that the necessary excess of architecture is in fact an architect’s greatest asset when it comes to an agenda for energy, not a liability.
By drawing on a range of architectural, thermodynamic, and ecological sources as well as illustrated and well-designed case studies, the author shows what architecture stands to gain by simultaneously maximizing the architectural and ecological power of buildings.
To the side of an amphitheater under construction on the new $44 million satellite campus of Chatham University, an air vent pokes through the ground. Easily overlooked unless a guide points it out, the vent protrudes from a root cellar, a concept that has existed since the Iron Age as a way of using the natural coolness of an underground chamber to preserve fruits, vegetables and other edibles. It may seem like a symbol of the past. On Chatham’s Eden Hall site in the North Hills, it speaks to the future.
...
Chatham’s root cellar is a symbol of how higher education has become deeper, greener and broader in western Pennsylvania, where colleges and universities have positioned themselves among the acknowledged leaders of a national and international movement. READ MORE >>
Firefly (Photinus pyralis) (image: wikimedia commons)
When I was a kid I had a “bug box” – a small, homemade container built from wire mesh and a couple pieces of wood. During the summer I’d try to fill this box with lightning bugs –fireflies or glow bugs, depending on where you’re from– in the attempt to transform the small translucent container into a natural lantern full of the insects whose biological incandescence was nothing less than a minor miracle. It never quite worked as I imagined. In, retrospect, the whole endeavor seems like a fantasy fueled by too many cartoons.
Or perhaps not.
Recently an international team of researchers looked to the firefly for inspiration in designing more efficient lighting. Building on previous research into the chemical reactions that powered the glow bugs’ glow, the team focused on the insect’s exoskeleton, which features unique shingle-like surfaces that reduce internal reflection, thereby allowing more light to escape. Using lasers to recreate the shingle shapes on the surface of an LED, the researchers were able to create a 55% more efficient LED. This is only one of the many, many ways that insect biomimicry is improving our products and our lives.
Biomimicry is a design principle that looks to reproduce systems, behaviors, or effects observed in the nature. After all, what we stupid humans have been working on for a couple hundred years –at best!– nature has been developing for eons. READ MORE >>
We have previously described four key characteristics of resilient structures in natural systems: diversity; web-network structure; distribution across a range of scales; and the capacity to self-adapt and “self-organize.” We showed how these features allow a structure to adapt to shocks and changes that might otherwise prove catastrophic.
We also argued that a more resilient future for humankind demands new technologies incorporating precisely these characteristics. As a result, environmental design, especially, is set to change dramatically.
But such desirable characteristics do not exist as abstract entities. Rather, they are embodied in the physical geometries of our world — the relationship between elements in space. As we will discuss here, these geometries typically arise from the processes that produce resilience, but in turn they go on to create — or to destroy — the capacity for resilience in their own right. So if we want a more resilient future, we first need to understand these geometries, and the technological and economic processes that produce them. READ MORE >>
CREDIT: Mecanoo Architects / TU Delft
By Esther Yi
Nobody likes living near wind turbines. They’re loud and obtrusive, and their slicing blades create a strobe-light shadow effect. nimbyism may be one of the reasons that wind energy, despite its many advantages, supplies just 4.8 percent of electric power in the U.S.
But what if turbines weren’t quite so awful to be around—what if, in fact, they were quiet and good-looking? Researchers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have led the development of a “windmill” that converts wind energy into electricity without using any moving parts. READ MORE >>
It’s not that uncommon to see architects designing furniture and product designers involved with small buildings like street carts or garden sheds. In sustainable design terms, a common suggestion for architecture is that we get serious about manufactured housing, that is, housing where the components are manufactured offsite, then delivered and assembled on location. This idea, of course, has a long history as “prefab” or “prefabricated housing.”
Architecture firm Keiran Timberlake is known for promoting high precision manufactured housing, such that component parts are so reliable and interchangeable that you could buy and sell them on ebay when it is time to make modifications to your structure. Their Loblolly house (short video or a blog post) exemplifies this approach where wall components basically become products assembled into buildings–and disassembled later. READ MORE >>
The built detail (left) and the reconstructed detail (right)
from Loblolly house by Kieran Timberlake
The new Green Dot Animo Leadership public school for 525 students is located in a tough South Los Angeles neighborhood almost directly under the flight path into LAX and adjacent to the very busy 105 Century freeway. The design was influenced by the New Orleans architects Curtis and Davis who designed and built many schools in the early 1950s in Louisiana. Their designs adapted to the harsh southern climate without using air conditioning, creating sustainable light filled and poetic spaces for kids to learn.
Similarly, this project is designed to enhance passive sustainable strategies. It allows for abundant natural light, ventilation and view, while shading itself and inducing airflow. The south facade is clad with 650 solar panels that shade the building and provides 75% of the energy needs for the school. Implementing these strategies will reduce carbon emissions by over 3 million pounds.
Certified by the Collaborative for High Performance Schools, aesthetics, sustainability, and cost-effectiveness were considered in every design decision. Taking full advantage of the region’s temperate climate, the designers eschewed the fully contained “big box” idiom of conventional schools on the primary use site. Instead, a landscaped courtyard with multifunctional “bleacher” terracing flows into the open-air covered lobby and the multilayered paseo, lending the school the appeal of a collegiate campus and offering significant environmental benefits—improving daylighting and access to fresh air both inside and out—while providing substantial cost savings by limiting artificial lighting and thermal conditioning to the smaller enclosed spaces.
Over 40 years ago, the Sokol Blosser winery began its journey to becoming a world-class vineyard and an industry leader in sustainability. They had a passion for growing Pinot Noir grapes and creating fine wine which helped shape Oregon's now-prominent wine industry. They also had a commitment “being good to the earth” and striving for sustainable design and operation of their winery. This standard has led to the recent launch of their new wine-tasting room that is pursuing the Living Building Challenge Petal Recognition, including net-zero energy efficiency.
...
Sokol Blosser, Allied Works Architecture and Glumac’s energy engineering consultants worked together to create this world-class, sustainable space. To target design for Petal Recognition, the first step was to look at Sokol Blosser’s energy consumption and ability to generate energy through existing on-site photovoltaic (PV) arrays. Based on analysis of the panels’ past production and the project building area, Glumac determined that the existing array could produce enough electricity to support a building energy use intensity (EUI) of just 20 kbtu/sqft. For the engineers and architects among us, this is a tight budget for any building. READ MORE >>
via www.glumac.com
Rejuvenative technologies are behaviours and technologies that support, borrow from, utilise, work alongside or benefit from the Earth’s natural productive capacity. They may include recognised sustainable stewardship and production techniques, nature mimicking design, sustainable and net positive biological production, or the as yet emerging “lifelike” natural manufacture.
Our economy, our engineering and our technology must become both explicitly and inherently rejuvenative, to make a manifest contribution to the abundance, vitality and productive capacity of natural capital upon which they rely. Such an approach has a number of obvious benefits: READ MORE>>
Over the last year, there’s been palpable buzz in San Francisco around eco-districts — essentially, sustainability plans that operate at the neighborhood scale. We’ve learned about different eco-district models and how eco-districts are working in Portland, Seattle, Brooklyn and Denver. The San Francisco Planning Department has been especially proactive in this learning process, putting together numerous presentations on district-scale infrastructure and sustainability throughout 2012. The largest of these meetings, held last August at SPUR, kicked off a planning process for an eco-district in the Central Corridor of San Francisco. This 24-square-block area south of Market Street, centered around 4th Street, is currently undergoing a neighborhood planning and rezoning process to better manage and support growth around the new Central Subway.
What’s the buzz about? In areas of transition like the Central Corridor — once an industrial area and increasingly the home of the city’s high-tech sector — neighborhood rezoning creates many opportunities for new development. Some of this will be private development on sites within the corridor, and some will be public investment in transportation assets, water, wastewater, energy and neighborhood parks. The Central Corridor Eco-District was conceived to help the transitioning neighborhood perform well on the city’s environmental goals for greenhouse gas reductions, zero waste, water conservation and efficiency, stormwater management, renewable energy, transportation and more. READ MORE >>
Socialize