Green ArchiTEXT

Green Sprawl?

Yes, that does seem a contradiction in terms. But if “sprawl” is defined as the unbridled spread of urban and suburban areas into rural landscapes over the past 60 years, then perhaps the “greening of suburbs” might counter that trend somewhat – and begin to create healthier, more livable, eco-friendly communities from the inside out. It may also be that the country’s first suburb will lead the way.

In “The Greening of Levittown”, Jay Walljasper (Utne Reader, Ode) writes:

“America's original suburb is going green.

At least that's the hope for Levittown, New York, the town that defined post-World War II suburban living when it rose out of Long Island fields in 1948. Levittown stands, for some, as a symbol of the good life for middle-class families and, for others, as an object of derision for its ticky tacky subdivisions.

But if officials in Nassau County, New York, have their way it will soon be known beset as an innovative sustainable community. The New York Times reports that an ambitious project aims to cut carbon emissions 20 percent in Levittown over the next year.”

A suburb of New York City, Levittown was named for Levitt & Sons, Inc., which developed the area as a planned community between 1947 and 1951. It is considered the first truly mass-produced suburb and the archetype for postwar suburbs throughout the United States. Today, a ‘Green Levittown’ begins modestly enough with the push for home energy audits and widespread conversion to compact fluorescent light bulbs. Gaining real traction with CO2 emissions, however, will take aggressive utility and tax incentives “and, eventually, stricter building codes”, says The New York Times. It’s appropriate then that Levittown could someday join the ranks of BedZed near London and Kronsberg in Hannover, Germany as the world’s first green suburbs.

For more on green suburbia, The Green City: Sustainable Homes, Sustainable Suburbs by Nicholas Low (2005, Routledge) makes for an interesting read.

The Race for the First Carbon-Neutral, Zero-Emissions Community is On

The latest Wired Magazine (Issue 16.02) features a map, or “Atlas”, of extreme green communities emerging all over the planet in the drive to be carbon neutral. As Frank Bures writes in “Green Acres”, “Ecotopias aren't just for hippies anymore – and they're sprouting up worldwide”:

“In the 1970s, environmental idealists had a vision of Ecotopia: Everyone recycled, there was no pollution, and we all worshipped trees and co-ops. Today's eco-communities are less crunchy and a lot more high tech. In addition to using renewable energy sources, these projects aim to limit their impact on surrounding ecosystems by building with green materials, promoting earth-friendly transportation, and recycling water and waste. The race for the first carbon-neutral, zero-emissions community is on.”

It’s been a while since I’ve heard the word “ecotopia” used; equal parts sci-fi and Scientific American, it was originally coined to reflect the still-new environmental movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) and Ecotopia Emerging (1981) describe a region where eco-friendly energy, homebuilding and transportation technologies are central to society’s highest purpose. This fictional sovereign state comes about in the novels when British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and parts of Northern California secede from their countries to create “Cascadia”, a place Callenbach calls a “stable-state ecosystem: the perfect balance between human beings and the environment.”

IMAGE: Wired Magazine

The Wired piece then lists 11 places around the world where stable-state ecosystems are currently in development (without the secession part). Here’s a quick look at a few.

The Swedish city of Växjö is considered the greenest community in the EU and received the Sustainable Energy Europe Award 2007. Currently, the city gets more than half of its power from renewable sources and has one of the lowest per-capita carbon-output rates in Europe. With a population of 80,000, Växjö has vowed to become a 'zero oil' country by 2025 and the first fossil-fuel-free city by 2050. For more, read “A look at Växjö, Europe's greenest city” on Biopact.

Last February, the Costa Rican government announced plans to begin offsetting all of its carbon dioxide emissions and become the world's first carbon-neutral country by 2021. Much of the country’s power already comes from renewable sources. According to Worldwatch, Costa Rica will also rely on budgeting, laws, and incentives – including measures to promote biofuels, hybrid vehicles and clean energy – to reach this goal. Read on at “Costa Rica Aims to Become First ‘Carbon Neutral’ Country”.

Dongtan

On the other side of the world, development of an ‘eco-city' at China’s Chongming Island has begun. Located off the coast of Shanghai, Dongtan is planned as the “first truly environmentally and economically sustainable city”. The first phase is slated for completion by the Shanghai Expo 2010. Arup is heading up the project’s design and financing. What will this new city at the mouth of the Yangtze River look like when finished? According to CNN’s “Chinese eco-city heralds revolution in urban living”: electricity from wind turbines, cars that run on hydro-fuel or electricity, and activities concentrated around three "village entrees", encouraging people to walk, use bikes or public transport.

Closer to home is Dockside Green. Located in the heart of Victoria, British Columbia, this 15-acre development was formerly the site of a contaminated harborfront brownfield. Aiming for LEED Platinum, the new community plans to become one of the greenest, smart-growth developments in Canada. It will include 26 new buildings totaling 1.3 million square feet of mixed residential, office, retail and commercial space and be home to 2,500 residents. Each of the 1,000 condo units will feature Asian bamboo flooring, rainwater-storage tanks on balconies, motion-sensing light switches and a high percentage of recycled materials. In addition, the on-site sewage plant will utilize a membrane bioreactor system to treat water for ponds, toilets and irrigation, saving over 70 million gallons of potable water annually. The entire complex will be heated using a system that converts waste wood biomass into a clean-burning fuel. Dockside Green will be under construction for the next decade.

To LEED or to LEED Innovate...

Nadav Malin’s recent op-ed piece at BuildingGreen.com calls for USGBC to help project teams better identify, prioritize and clarify the process of achieving LEED innovation points. In “Will the New List of LEED Innovation Points Lead to Greener Buildings — or Just More Points?”, he writes:

“In the first few years of LEED, you could count the Platinum-rated buildings on one hand. Now it's hard to keep up with the announcements. There are several reasons for this evolution — more experienced project teams making better buildings, and more buildings going through LEED in general, for example. At risk of exposing my cynical side, however, I have to admit that I suspect that much of the change has to do more with teams having figured out how to work LEED for the most points, as opposed to really making better buildings.”

Read on here.

The Meaning of Place

Place matters: an idea perhaps more fundamental than ever in this era of globalization, sprawl, loss of green space, the homogenization of communities, the struggle to preserve and restore our historic places.

That’s the central premise in Native to Nowhere: Sustaining Home and Community in a Global Age, a book reviewed in AIA COTEnotes recently. In Native to Nowhere (Island Press, 2004), Timothy Beatley declares that real places are essential elements in the search for solutions to our current sustainability challenges. That their tangible benefits are economic, political, social and personal. In “The Value of Real Places”, he writes:

“At the heart of this book is the belief that reconnecting to people and landscapes at the local level and having a better understanding of the built and natural surroundings in which we live will result in better, more enjoyable, healthier, and more fulfilling lives. Meaningful lives require unique and particular places.”

Bentley also outlines the qualities of real places: walkable, bicycle-friendly neighborhoods; strong connection to local schools and common services; “inspirational architecture and interesting design”; parks and playgrounds of course; even a commitment to public art.

“Places that provide the spaces, reasons, and opportunities for people to come together, to share their passions, hopes, and troubles, will be healthier, stronger places and places where people trust and care about each other. And the more involved and engaged we are, the more likely we are to care about our communities and to be committed to working on their behalf in the future.”

Native to Nowhere has a number of fresh, compelling ideas and is a strong addition to the ‘Literature of Sprawl’ that includes Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere and Suburban Nation by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Beatley’s previous titles include Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities and The Ecology of Place: Planning for Environment, Economy, and Community. He serves as Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities, School of Architecture, at the University of Virginia.

Yet here, Native to Nowhere articulates a stronger philosophical, even poetic, approach to the concepts of place, identity, sprawl than these other titles. The book also makes a nice companion of sorts to the just released Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez. Ultimately, Bentley offers valuable insights about sustainability in communities and innovative ideas for strengthening place – for overcoming “lost connections”:

“An agenda of strong and vital places has a tremendous potential to build greater resilience into our communities and individual lives in many ways, from place-based energy systems that strengthen the economy, protect the local (and global) environment, and contribute to uniqueness of place, to green forms of infrastructure that provide essential services while celebrating and protecting important place qualities.”

Go to Island Press to learn more.

Make It Right: The Pink Tangram

Just a few days ago Brad Pitt’s Pink Project installation was disassembled – after five weeks on display in New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward and raising more than $10 million for his Make It Right Foundation. Make It Right (MIR), if you haven’t already heard, is the initiative he and philanthropist Steve Bing launched late last year – with partners William McDonough + Partners, Graft and the Cherokee Gives Back Foundation. The project's goals: to build 150 affordable, sustainably-designed single-family homes focused in an 11 block area adjacent to the floodwall that breached along the Industrial Canal after Hurricane Katrina. The force of the water, which then remained in place at a depth of 20 feet for nearly five weeks in August 2005, completely obliterated this neighborhood. Nothing left but the foundations.

Brad’s already gotten involved with the Holy Cross Neighborhood, at the other end of the Lower 9, with Global Green’s sustainable design competition and multi-family housing project. When completed, it’s likely to be one of the greenest on the face of the planet. But MIR is something quite different, and a project he undertook on his own – beginning with conceptual art and a party.

During his interview with CNN’s Larry King in early December, Brad Pitt explained his reasons for the overall concept, for choosing the layout, the fabric shapes, even the color pink to launch Make It Right (MIR) in the Lower Ninth Ward. He described his “Pink Project” as “part art installation, part active social disobedience...but it’s really meant to work as a fundraising component”:

“We were looking for something that was loud and would get a lot of attention that was also hopeful. So what you see here are these blocks scattered across this section of the Lower Ninth, to represent the houses that were destroyed. And what we’re hoping to do is as a home gets adopted...we will right that house and we’ll put it back on its foundation. This will be an art installation that will be constantly evolving and by the end of this five and a half weeks, we hope to have a symbolic neighborhood put back together.”

IMAGE: Make It Right

Together with the Berlin- and L.A.-based architecture firm Graft, Brad conceived of “Pink” as a hybrid of art, architecture and film into an installation that would focus attention quickly onto a local issue with global appeal: to create a symbol, according to Graft, that serves as a “call to action filled with hope and promise”. Graft is well known for their far-reaching, often experimental ideas about space and the built environment...such as a competition for the “House of the present” by creating the k-not house which is not a house; for the “Amphibious Living” competition, they conceived of a new resort in Europe designed to “synthesize” land and water.

On January 6, the 40,000 square yards of pink awning material and scaffolding were removed from the site. With all the media buzz, the interviews and events lately surrounding Brad’s amazing little project (which has raised enough for 66 of 150 sponsored homes), I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some of the ideas behind the concept: what they mean, why they were chosen, how it may transform at least this part of New Orleans.

For MIR, pink does not dwell on the past but empowers the future, symbolizing the promise of homes that will be constructed for Lower 9th Ward residents who “have not been forgotten”. Pink is the color of flamingos, of the Breast Cancer Awareness ribbon and a symbol of happiness, youthful, fun, lighthearted.

IMAGE: Wikipedia

So what about those game-board shapes? MIR focused on the idea of assemblying smaller, individual components into pink “Monopoly” houses during the course of the installation. This was intended to help residents, donors and other participants imagine the task of rebuilding homes on the site as something that’s manageable and allow “the individual to physically participate within the installation in real time.” The shapes are tangrams, pieces of a Chinese dissection puzzle and an idea that dates back to the Song Dynasty. MIR defines the tangram as a square cut into five triangles, a square, and a romboid; according to Wikipedia it consists of seven pieces, literally “seven boards of skill”. In either case, these pieces, or tans, fit together to create a variety of different figures.

For Pink, a total of 429 base “volumes” have been scattered throughout 14 square blocks since the first day of the installation/fundraiser. Over nearly a month and a half of reassembly, the original plan was to complete 150 house volumes standing on the site, each made up of three to four base volumes. Ultimately, these tangrams/shapes serve as a three-dimensional expression of reconstruction for the MIR project – representing a new version of traditional New Orleans housing such as the Shotgun House and Creole Cottage.

Anyone who’s crossed the Claiborne Avenue bridge into the Lower 9th Ward lately can’t miss the powerful imagery of the MIR installation seen to the north – at any time of day. But at night, the site becomes something quite different – lit throughout by 350 lights like soft, glowing lanterns. According to the designers, Pink at night mirrors “the star’s constellation the night Katrina hit...highlighting the installation and commemorating the lives lost to the storm.”

More on the concepts, designs and architects of Make It Right coming soon.

The End of Green Architecture As We Know It?

Maybe. If architect Travis Price has anything to say about it. Plenty – the green lifestyle magazine – ran an interesting piece on Price and his body of work late last year. In “Function Over Form?” November/December 2007), Lisa Selin Davis writes:

“Architect Travis Price thinks the green building movement he’s been part of for thirty years has veered off course. His new book makes a case for restoring the movement to its spiritual and aesthetic center. But will his ideas take hold?”

Price isn’t completely on board with LEED, feeling its methods emphasize engineering over architecture, what he calls “checklist architecture” rather than nature and inspiration. Architecture, he says, should be about “making a form, a shape, an experience – not just solving a bunch of technical problems. You’re inspiring people or it’s not architecture anymore, it’s just building.’” The real focus in sustainability should be on countering suburban sprawl (“as bad for our souls as it is for the environment”) and going beyond simply mandating green building techniques or smart-growth plants.

In the 1970s Price was a pioneer of passive solar design and a consultant for the Carter administration on alternative energy policy In the 1980s he supervised design of the world’s largest solar office building (at the time) for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in Chattanooga – a one-million-square-foot facility that combined natural sunlight, a ground water aquifer for cooling, computer waste heat for space heating, and chemical dehumidifiers and cut energy costs by 70 percent.

Travis Price is trying to re-focus the profession's dialogue about sustainable design in a big way with his new book, The Archaeology of Tomorrow: Architecture & the Spirit of Place (2006, Earth Aware: An imprint of the Palace Publishing Group). In it, he sets out to create a new vocabulary and philosophy of architecture: “the mythical modern and the ecology of the spirit.” Read a sample chapter here.

The Plenty article reflects his more down-the-earth views, perhaps, on what green architecture should be:

“Any great building, Price thinks, must be inherently green. You’d want to use the best windows, the thickest insulation, to maximize natural light and minimize indoor pollutants, to celebrate the local architecture and materials – but he stresses that these characteristics should be integral to the design, not regulated.”

For more on Travis Price and his work, go to “Modernist With A Poetic Message” and Travis Price Architects.

Bob Berkebile: The City as a Living System

IMAGE: USGBC & BNIM

Planner/architect Bob Berkebile of BNIM Architects in Kansas City was featured in a special video presented at the annual Greenbuild Conference and Expo held in Chicago this past November. A few excerpts on his thoughts about ‘design integrity’, creating the first ‘climate positive communities’ and approaching our cities as living systems:

“I think we’re in a moment of enormous change...and one of those changes has to do how we imagine the future.”

“Every human being, every blade of grass, every wildlife...are all connected to each of these building decisions. So the breakthrough for me, and I think for all of us has been, let’s look at the entire system. Let’s start thinking of community as a living system.”

He also refers to the ‘first climate refugees’ resulting from Hurricane Katrina more than two years ago.

“In ’05, when a group of people from New Orleans following Katrina came to Greenbuild in Atlanta, through that experience we learned that following these disasters, the first inclination is to rebuild exactly what we had, exactly where it was, at the earliest possible moment. So the tension is for all of us to come together as a community and find a way to build the first climate positive communities that offer affordable housing and more vitality for the social, economic and environmental systems than were ever realized in those communities before the disaster struck.”

"More recently, in Greensburg, Kansas in May of this year, a tornado removed a community of 2,500 people from the face of the planet. And we have seen this week the city administrator from the City of Greensburg and the governor of Kansas and a host of others – the Discovery Channel who’s working with them – to try to create a community again that sets a new standard for rural American communities. If we look at our American rural communities, we find they’re all declining in population, economic vitality, etc. So how do we re-think that system and how do we build a community that is built entirely on renewable, regenerative strategies with energy, with water, with all of our resources and especially, the human resources that reside in those communities."

"If we’re going to approach our cities as opportunities for regenerative community building, we have to look at the city as a living system.”

View Bob’s full video here.

A Question of LEED

Is USGBC's LEED Standard setting a high enough bar? Is it pushing the industry far enough – or even fast enough? Are there too many loopholes to achieving LEED? That's the premise put forth by Daniel Brook in "It's Way Too Easy Being Green: THE DECIDEDLY DUPABLE SYSTEM FOR RATING A BUILDING'S GREENNESS", which appeared on Slate.com recently.

"In a high-end Mumbai neighborhood, Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani's personal high-rise, named Antilia, is under construction. When completed, the 24-story Ambani family home will include its own health club, terraced sky-gardens, and 50-seat screening room (the reclusive Ambani is reputed to be a huge Bollywood fan). Antilia also boasts three helipads and a 168-car garage. This may sound like transportation overkill, if not outright eco-terrorism, for a family of six. But despite its 38-to-1 car-to-person ratio, Antilia has been billed by its American architects as a "green building." And under the leading standards for green architecture, the building will likely qualify."

and

"Critics of LEED—many of them architects who were green before green was cool—see a system that's easy to game and has more to do with generating good PR than saving the planet. Just a few years ago, such criticisms were limited to architectural and environmental circles, but the loopholes in LEED are no longer a trivial problem. Green building has gone mainstream. Early adopters of LEED certification included usual suspects like the Natural Resources Defense Council, whose Southern California office was among the first LEED-certified buildings in the country. Today, seeking LEED certification is becoming standard practice for Fortune 500 companies, including many that don't have particularly good records on environmental issues."

Read on...

A New Year, A New Shade of Green

Might as well start out the new year with a bang.

This is a blog about change. About green buildings – truly green buildings. The cutting edge. The next new thing in green architecture and sustainable design. I'll be looking for the best and the brightest: something completely different, the designs – built or not or not yet – that truly seek to explore how we think, act, re-act, motivate and evolve this still relatively new concept of what we call "green buildings" in North America and beyond. It'll be a year-long journey, a quest – to find, to reveal, to 'kick the tires' – of all kinds of structures, commercial, residential, all types that lay claim to be LEED, BRE, Green Globes or some other shade of green.

I hate blogs, or at least what I perceive as the point of most blogs: people blathering on and on about something they claim to know something about. Don't get me wrong: I completely support and celebrate people being able to express themselves, their points of view. Some of this is amazing stuff – ideas, perspectives you'd never find anywhere else, anywhere. True insights. Expertise. Insider points of view. Then again, sometimes it is just 'filler'. That said, I hope Green ArchiTEXT represents something different, something of value.

Here we go...