Green ArchiTEXT

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

 

Cool Spots

The January/February 2008 issue of New Urban News examines a new planning technology to promote the environmental advantages of walkable land-use patterns. "Cool Spots, bright idea" explains:

"Eliot Allen of Criterion Planners in Portland, Oregon, calls the idea “Cool Spots,” a catchy name with a double meaning – it refers to compact, transit-oriented nodes that are both trendy and friendly to the climate.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is working with Allen to refine Cool Spots and is looking to complete a paper in 2008 that will bring the idea to policy analysts, environmental groups, and government officials...".

Read on, here.

Green Campuses: Carbon Neutral U

Metropolis Magazine

In "Carbon Neutral U", Andrew Blum writes of the commitment by Yale, Harvard, Cornell and other universities to cut greenhouse gas emissions dramatically – and agressively – over the next 5, 10 and 15 years. And this drive to green college campuses, according to Metropolis Magazine, is coming mostly from faculty, staff and the students themselves:

"In late 2005 Yale University president Richard Levin exercised the considerable prerogative of his office and announced that his institution—with its 5,500 residents, 21,000 commuters, and 1.7 million square feet of office space—would slash its greenhouse-gas emissions. His chosen target seemed attainable enough: a 43 percent reduction by 2020, which would bring the university ten percent below 1990 levels, thereby exceeding Kyoto Protocol goals. More than two years later Yale’s carbon graph is a beautiful site in an otherwise Sisyphean struggle. The university has already cut emissions 17 percent, with projects under way expected to cut another 17 percent by 2009—putting Yale a decade ahead of schedule in reaching its target. The even better news is that Yale is far from alone among universities: nearly 500 schools have signed the American College & University Presidents Cli mate Commitment, which sets them toward climate neutrality by a specified date (although it’s toothier than it sounds).

But Levin isn’t smug. An economist by training, if anything he’s frustrated by the wide view. “We’re showing it can be done, but our carbon savings are miniscule compared to what needs to happen,” he says on the telephone one morning. “And even if you put all the educational institutions in the world together, it still doesn’t add up to much. The answer has to come from governments, and I think the major reason for doing this is to enlighten the public so that ultimately governments will get serious about it.”

Yale and other schools are being spurred to action by a catch-22: the environmental moves they make on campus matter far less than what they teach their students—and what their students teach the world. But presidents and professors realize that the best way to teach students is through what they do on campus. Today’s campus sustainability movement is balanced be-tween nuts and bolts and big ideas. Local action has replaced global symbolism."

San Diego State University's Trolley Station

In a related story, GreenBiz.com writes about the launch of STARS (Sustainability, Tracking, Assessment and Rating System), a new pilot program on more than 90 college and university campuses. The STARS program is intended to make every aspect of campus life more sustainable, from buildings to food programs to education. Developed by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, STARS will remain a pilot throughout 2008 and launch as an official version 1.0 next spring.

According to “New Campus Sustainability Program Launches Comprehensive Push to Green Campuses”:

“The schools participating in the pilot launch cover a range of geographic locations, campus sizes and type of institution, including both public and private schools and everything from community colleges to research universities. Among the larger schools involved are New York University, Arizona State University and University of Arizona, and two schools in the University of California system, at San Diego and Santa Barbara.

There are five main goals of the pilot program, including:

• To help gauge the progress of colleges and universities toward sustainability in all sectors, from governance and operations to academics and community engagement;


• Develop meaningful ways to compare progress across institutions and benchmark within institutions;


• Develop and promote incentives for continuous improvement toward sustainability;


• Create ways to share best practices and resources on sustainability and performance across institutions; and


• Build more diverse participation in each campus's sustainability movement."

You can read more about the STARS here. Also, campus sustainability at San Diego State University is among the programs they highlight.

Europe's Largest Green Office Renovation

UK's Building Magazine reports that Deutsche Bank has begun work at its Frankfurt headquarters on what could be the largest green office tower (155-metre-tall) renovation in Europe – designed to reduce both CO2 emissions and energy consumption by at least 50 percent.

"The building, at Frankfurt’s Taunusanlage 12, will meet its strict energy strategy with elements including: a gas-powered buffered heating and cooling system; with the introduction of radiant heating and cooling to the building; by increasing the u values of glazing; and by including opening windows and the installation of solar water heating. These panels will sit on the glazed 90 degree base of the building. The project team hopes the generate sufficient hot water to provide for the kitchen and bathroom facilities. The scheme also includes grey water recycling."

Read more of "Deutsche Bank starts Europe's biggest green office refurb".

IMAGE: Mario Bellini, www.building.co.uk

The Greenest Synagogue in America

The Chicago Tribute's architecture critic, Blair Kamin, declares a new synagogue in Evanston, Illinois as successfully fusing "the structural, the sustainable and the spiritual into a powerful whole":

"Now we have a synagogue that adds fresh complexity to this multi-stylistic stew: the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation (JRC) synagogue at 303 Dodge Ave. in Evanston. The three-story building, which opened Feb. 10, is a simple cube sheathed in glass, stone imported from Jerusalem and recycled cypress. That last material reveals the building's true color: green.

It is believed to be the first synagogue designed to achieve the highest level – platinum – in the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system."

Read "Structure blends spirituality and sustainability".

EfficienCity: U.K.’s Climate-Friendly Town

Wave power, solar arrays, wind turbines, biogas and other local renewable energy sources. It's all there, all part of the virtual, energy-friendly town of “EfficienCity”.

UK Greenpeace has just launched this new Web site, showcasing how towns and cities can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy security and lower electricity and heating bills through reliance on their own local energy schemes. Instead of new coal or nuclear power stations, EfficienCity highlights efficiency, renewables and combined heat and power as alternatives. This new online city uses interactive case studies and animation to demonstrate how communities around the UK are using similar systems to fight climate change.

Users interact with virtual football stadiums, supermarkets, hospitals and breweries based on real world examples of a flexible, scalable energy system. Combined heat and power (CHP) is the heart of decentralized system like EfficienCity's. Greenpeace touts CHP as the most efficient way to burn fuel because so little energy is lost as waste heat; it’s also ideal in transitioning from fossil fuels to an approach based on cleaner, greener sources like biogas and biomass. At EfficienCity, you can see a tiny CHP plant in a supermarket or a single wind turbine in operation at the stadium.

Local, diverse solutions to energy are the most viable long-term solutions, says Greenpeace:

“There's an abundance of energy out there in our natural world, ready to be harnessed. We could be harvesting energy from the wind, the sun's rays, the ocean, underground springs and even the earth itself. According to the government, just the wind, wave and tidal resources of our windswept island could meet 40 per cent of our energy needs by 2020. In the longer term, the sky's the limit.”

See EfficienCity in action here.

Rise of the Carbon-Neutral City

BusinessWeek’s recent special report, “Rise of the Carbon-Neutral City”, offers a quick survey of several of the world’s greenest urban developments – or at least some of the most high profile – complete with a slideshow, audio clips and more: “Several ambitious plans around the world envision green cities, but such projects raise as many questions as they promise to answer.”

Masdar
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

IMAGE: Foster & Partners

Breaking ground this month, the $22 billion self-contained city will be approximately 20 miles outside of Abu Dhabi city.



Green Mountain
Libya

IMAGE: Foster & Partners

Unveiled last September, Green Mountain is a proposed ecotourism development in eastern Libya.




BedZED
Wallington, England

IMAGE: Bill Dunster Architects

Built between 2000 and 2002, BedZED was one of the world's first small-scale carbon-neutral communities.

Big Solar on Campus

Solar energy and solar shading across six Contra Costa Community College District (CCCCD) parking lots completes the first phase of the largest solar power installation ever constructed for a college or university in North America. According to Solarbuzz:

“The Chevron Energy project is part of a program expected to save CCCCD more than $70 million over 25 years. The cost is being offset in rebates and other incentives administered by PG&E.

The solar installation part of that program involves a 3.2-megawatt solar power generation system comprised of photovoltaic panels mounted on 34 parking canopies in six parking lots at three colleges. The installation is expected to generate four million kilowatt-hours of power each year.”

U.K.: All Commercial Buildings Can Be Carbon Neutral

The majority of new non-domestic buildings can be zero-carbon if on-site, near-site and offsite renewable energy sources are used. That’s the conclusion of “Carbon Reductions in New Non-Domestic Buildings”, compiled by the U.K. Green Building Council (UK-GBC). Researchers also found that although there was a cost associated with zero-carbon buildings, it could be as low as 5 to 10 percent of developers' current baseline costs.

The new report, commissioned by the U.K.’s Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG), investigates the costs and benefits of raising the energy performance standards in new non-domestic buildings above those currently set out in the Building Regulations all the way to zero carbon. The report’s findings also focus on the targets set out in the “Code for Sustainable Homes” to achieve radical emissions reductions in new homes.

Published December 17, 2007, the full report (PDF) is available here to download.