Green ArchiTEXT

Return to IslandWood

I was pleasantly surprised to come across a “Virtual Tour of IslandWood” posted recently on Mithun Inc.’s blog. This may be one of the greenest, restorative, 255 acres on the planet. IslandWood is more than just an environmental education center; it’s an experience in design: integrated, biophilic, educational, transformational. The slideshow recaps the visit made by a group of ‘Mithunees’ in July, from IslandWood’s ‘entrance sequence’ out front and throughout the heavily-wooded site.

Even after seven years, IslandWood stands out as one of our best examples of green design, a place I was privileged to visit for nearly a full day while writing Integrated Design: Mithun. As described in "IslandWood, A Light in the Forest", the center’s very concept was experimental, with Mithun’s design process a mix equally of exploration and collaboration. Overarching goals for the project included:

• Protection of the entire property through environmentally-intelligent design
• Best practices in environmental education for a state-of-the-art facility
• Buildings that function as interactive learning tools
• Connections to nature

Located only a few miles from downtown Seattle on Bainbridge Island, IslandWood is both a return to another time and a glimpse of a possible future. In addition to the six-acre campus of buildings (3 of them LEED Gold), the site features a solar meadow, living machine, tree house, PV arrays, and healthy use of sustainable design strategies for daylighting, rainwater collection, natural ventilation, recycled materials, and more.

For more on IslandWood, see Mithun’s IslandWood and “A Light in the Forest”.

It Pops, It Grows, It Recycles: Next-Gen Design @ the Solar Decathlon

  Team Germany

Blogger Matt Hickman obviously enjoyed his tour of the DOE's 2009 Solar Decathlon at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. – and had a lot of fun writing about it for the Mother Nature Network (MNN). In “Battle of the greenest”, he presents a few of his own distinctive honors for several entrants. Despite the wet conditions for this year’s competition, it’s apparent he and many others were right where they wanted to be:

“Mud, rain, cold, wind, more mud, and a Canadian Mountie marked my afternoon on the Mall. Even my trusty rubber Tretorn boots didn't hold up that well. I figured that the horrid weather would keep lines down, but that wasn’t the case at all ... umbrella-wielding folks of all stripes came out in droves to view the 20 competing homes.”

Read the full piece here.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (left), Team California (right)

ALL PHOTOS: Dept of Energy Solar Decathlon

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.

Is San Francisco One of America's Greenest Cities? You Decide.

“San Francisco starts mandatory composting this week” – all part of a city-wide ordinance requiring every residence and business to reduce waste, sending nothing to landfills or incinerators by 2020.

Tour of South Korea's New Eco City: Songdo City

Living Buildings & the Future of Architecture: Jason McLennan @ Bioneers

Cascadia CEO Jason McLennan addresses the Bioneers 2009 Conference this morning on the Living Building Challenge: making significant leaps and new standards by which metrics for architecture and the built environment should be measured – the “living building”.

“We have all the technology that we need now to build living buildings.”

The Living Building Metaphor:

A living building…

• Harvests all its own energy and water
• Adaptedd to climate and site
• Operates pollution free
• Promotes health and well-being
• Comprised of integrated systems
• Is beautiful

For more on the Living Building Challenge go here.

Thom Mayne’s Floating House for New Orleans

Okay, so maybe it isn’t such a crazy idea: a house that could literally float in the event of floodwaters. Created by Thom Mayne, this buoyant design was his answer to the challenge of sustainability and passive survivability for the Make It Right Project. After all, the house was built for a part of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward that was as much as 20 feet under water after Katrina following the breach of nearby floodwalls. Despite its unusual properties, the house’s architecture also fits right in with the rest of the neighborhood.

Doug MacCash, The Times-Picayune’s art critic, comments on the house and took this video tour:

Visit architect Thom Mayne's Floating House at the Make It Right Development

MacCash writes:

“The architects who designed houses for Brad Pitt’s Make It Right development in the Lower Ninth Ward had to juggle two challenges. The first was how to build the houses high enough so that they would escape floodwaters -- even if they might not withstand the inundation that occurred following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The other was how to preserve the intimate New Orleans-style streetscape where people could sit on their porches and visit with passersby.

Architect Thom Mayne, whose firm Morphosis is based in Santa Monica, Calif., has come up with the most radical reconciliation of the need for height and the need for neighborliness so far.”

Read the rest of “Brad Pitt's architect Thom Mayne designs floating house in New Orleans”.

Toward the Sentient City: An Exhibition

Currently on exhibit at NYC’s The Urban Center (Sept. 17-Nov. 7, 2009),"Toward the Sentient City" explores the evolving relationship between ubiquitous computing, architecture and urban space. Organized by The Architectural League of New York, the exhibit looks at how various forms of ambient, mobile, and ubiquitous computer technologies inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it.

Included are five commissions by teams of architects, artists and technologists:

• Too Smart City
• Amphibious Architecture
• Natural Fuse (harnessing the carbon-sinking capabilities of plants to create a city-wide network…)
• Trash Track
• Breakout! (what if the entire city was your office?)

 As exhibition curator Mark Shepard beautifully states:

 “’When it is raining in Oxford Street the architecture is no more important than the rain, in fact the weather has probably more to do with the pulsation of the Living City at that given moment.’ – Peter Cook

One could argue that this provocation by Peter Cook, published in 1963 in the catalogue for the Living City exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London, remains remarkably relevant for anyone interested in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary city. In place of natural weather systems, however, today we find the dataclouds of 21st century urban space increasingly shaping our experience of this city and the choices we make there. To what degree are these informatic weather systems becoming as important, if not more so, than the formal organization of space and material?

Since the late 1980s, computer scientists and engineers have been researching ways of embedding computational ‘intelligence’ into the built environment….”

Witold Rybczynski's Green Case for Cities

Rybczynski, author of The Look of Architecture (2001) and A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and North America in the Nineteenth Century (1999), offers this short essay on ‘greening the metropolis’ for The Atlantic Monthly. There’s really nothing completely new here, nothing radical in terms of writing about green design or new urbanism. Still, he addresses, compactly and eloquently as always, some of the big – and obvious – issues of the day: the pros and cons of LEED rating system; green (grass) roofs versus white (painted) roofs; and, most importantly, the everpresent problem of suburban sprawl.

The most sustainable approach to green cities, he writes, lies in urban density…and the ultimate low carbon footprint is the high-rise tower versus the low-rise office campus:

“The problem in the sustainability campaign is that a basic truth has been lost, or at least concealed. Rather than trying to change behavior to actually reduce carbon emissions, politicians and entrepreneurs have sold greening to the public as a kind of accessorizing. Keep doing what you’re doing, goes the message. Just add a solar panel, a wind turbine, a hybrid engine, whatever. But a solar-heated house in the burbs is still a house in the burbs, and if you have to drive to it, even in a Prius, it’s hardly green.”

Read the rest of “The Green Case for Cities”.