Green ArchiTEXT

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).

Biomimicry Explained

SOURCE: Popular Mechanics

A nice but somewhat general introduction to the design ideas behind Biomimicry in this month's Popular Mechanics (October 2008):

"An airplane systems engineer, a shower designer and a biologist walk into a Costa Rican rain forest.

'This is the neatest thing I’ve found this week,' says the airplane engineer, from Boeing, pointing to a cluster of daddy-longleg spiders gently oscillating on the trunk of a banana tree. 'There must be some unique muscular elastic element in their legs sensing vibration and amplitude. There could be really important opportunities here for a low-energy sensor or mechanical actuator system.'

The group ambles on, stopping next at a 150-ft.-tall ajo tree with weeping vines and thick buttresses – the kind you might see in a natural history museum diorama. 'These roots are circumferentially distributed, so the tree’s strong in any direction,' notes the shower designer, from Kohler. 'These buttresses also have a nice gradient to the ground. When we want to reduce stresses in mechanical design, we try to gradually transform one shape into another – nature’s already done that here.'”

Read the rest of "Nature Inspiring Green Design for Planes, Trains, Autos & More"">here.

HOK, Biomimicry Guild Join Forces

HOK Network

On what promises to be an exciting collaboration of ideas, the architecture firm HOK and the Biomimicry Guild have embarked on a new partnership to further sustainable design strategies through nature. GreenBiz.com reports in "HOK, Biomimicry Guild Partner to Bring Nature to Cities and Buildings" the two organizations will work "to incorporate cutting-edge ideas from nature into HOK's designs for buildings, towns and cities. The two companies will bring their respective expertises – HOK in green buildings and sustainable design, the Guild in adapting natural technologies to human needs – to bear on projects around the world, with the goal of lowering the overall impact of the built environment on the planet."

                                        HOK Network

According to Mary Ann Lazarus, HOK's Sustainable Design Director: "We believe biomimicry will not only help us significantly reduce the environmental impact of our projects, but also has the potential to help define a whole new sustainable standard for our profession. Because biomimicry addresses critical environmental issues at the habitat scale, it gives us lessons on how to achieve significant results  even restorative outcomes  at all scales."

Lavasa Hill Station Development

HOK and the Biomimicry Guild have worked together since 2004 and are currently exploring ways to integrate biomimicry into the Lavasa Hill Station community under development near Pune, India in the Western Ghats. Based on the principles of New Urbanism, the HOK-developed Lavasa master plan is based on the transect model. The manmade environment here is designed to blend into the natural vegetation and existing topography while promoting sustainability in all aspects of town planning.

Room by Agreement: The Micro Park

SOURCE: Kansas City Star

Designer Kimberly Kolkovich has a revolutionary idea for downtown parking spaces: turn them into microparks, or ‘Spot Parks’. Everywhere. Her ingenious idea just might give new meaning to the term public spaces.

In “Proposed spot parks are right on target”, the Kansas City Star’s Steve Paul writes:

“When Kimberly Kolkovich searched for a project in her last months of architectural school, she stepped outside the Kansas City Design Center, looked around and wondered, what if …?

What if you could replace a single curbside parking spot with a micropark, a little bit of urban respite?”

In Kansas City, a place that’s undergoing a major urban makeover, this could be the perfect, humanizing element that’s needed in the midst of a new downtown arena, a new performing arts center, new headquarters buildings, and a new entertainment district – all in the span of a few years. With close attention to stormwater schemes and reliance on recycled materials, pervious paving, a micro-rain garden and sun-powered lighting, it could also go a long way to injecting sustainable landscape designs throughout the city as well.

National Park(ing) Day: San Francisco

The timing for this unveiling is perfect, as Friday was National Park(ing) Day, where volunteers in more than 80 cities across the U.S. created hundreds of temporary parks in public parking spaces. This was the 3rd annual event, created to celebrate parks and promote the need for parks in America's cities. National Park(ing) Day is sponsored by The Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national conservation nonprofit, based on an idea conceived by REBAR, a San Francisco art collective.

The Bad News About Green Architecture

"I hate green architecture. I can't stand the hype, the marketing claims, the smug lists of green features that supposedly transform a garden-variety new building into a structure fit for Eden. Grassy roofs? Swell! Recycled gray water to flush the toilets? Excellent! But if 500 employees have to drive 40 miles a day to work in the place – well, how green is that? Achieving real sustainability is much more complicated than the publicity suggests. And that media roar is only getting louder. The urge to build green is exploding: more than 16,000 projects are now registered with the U.S. Green Building Council as intending to go for a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) – or sustainable – certification, up from just 573 in 2000."

And so "The Bad News About Green Architecture" begins in the September 15 issue of Newsweek. But read on. Cathleen McGuigan's terrific piece, part of the magazine's ongoing "Project Green" series, isn't simply bashing this unstoppable green movement. It's actually a thought-provoking critique that sometimes green buildings are ugly, that perhaps bigger LEED buildings aren't always better (especially "Green McMansions"), and that the true lessons of sustainability may be found in historic homes, like many of those in New Orleans that survived Katrina relatively unscathed and ready to perform for another 150 years.

Mostly, McGuigan reminds us that "sustainability is about the practical systems of building, not the beauty of great design." Good words.