Green ArchiTEXT

49 Cities: A Call to Re-Engage Cities

What was the proposed population of Superstudio’s Continuous Monument? What would the density of Rem Koolhaas’ Exodus plan for London have been had it ever been realized? How would they compare in scale to Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Bay project, or to Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse? Which of the two would have contained more green areas? 49 Cities sets out to crunch the numbers of several centuries of unrealized urbanism, all the way from the Roman city to the great utopian projects of the 20th century. Through plans, sections, diagrams, charts and scale drawings, 49 cities are observed statistically and presented in an unprecedented comparative study, the result of a research project conducted over several years. Despite the fact that they never actually existed, this history of utopian urbanism provides a remarkable insight into our understanding of the contemporary metropolis.

"49 cities is a call to re-engage cities as the site of radical thinking and experimentation, moving beyond ‘green building’ towards an embrace of ideas, scale, vision and common sense combined with delirious imagination in the pursuit of empowering questioning and re-invention."

via www.storefrontnews.org

An exhibition curated by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of Work AC, 49 Cities explores several centuries of unrealized urbanism through plans, sections, diagrams, charts and scaled drawings. SPUR Urban Center, 654 Mission St., San Francisco.

Co-design, not ego-design! Some Thoughts on Contemporary Design

Designers should get away from ego-design and concentrate on eco-design, or even better, on co-design as Alastair Fuad-Luke believes. Designer Gui Bonsiepe commented in his speech at ESDi School of Design in Spain last week that we need to amplify design from environmentally sustainable to socially sustainable. Can that be the way to post-crisis design? And, How do we balance industrial skills with the ability to work with other people?, is that Fuad-Luke asked. Bonsiepe stated that designers do not only need a sensibility to solve problems, but also to detect them.

via www.treehugger.com

Headspace: On Scent as Design

On March 26, Parsons the New School for Design and MoMA, in collaboration with IFF, Seed, and Coty, will present Headspace: On Scent as Design. A one-day symposium on the conception, impact, and potential applications of scent, the event will gather leading thinkers, designers, scientists, artists, established perfumers as well as “accidental perfumers”—architects, designers, and chefs—to acknowledge scent as a new territory for design. Seed sat down with organizers Paola Antonelli, Véronique Ferval, Jamer Hunt, Jane Nisselson, and Laetitia Wolff to discuss why we tend to overlook the importance of scent, our increasingly antiseptic, smell-free lives, and how our lives could change when we begin to tap into the rich olfactory dimension of design.

via seedmagazine.com

Chuck Hoberman's Buildings Adapt to the Environment

You could reasonably argue that in Chuck Hoberman's book of virtues, flexibility would be number one. The latest mission for the transformable-design guru -- who has created everything from huge collapsible domes to a giant expandable video screen for U2 -- is the Adaptive Building Initiative (ABI), an effort to equip big buildings everywhere with skins that move. "If a building can change, it can respond to the environment and self-optimize," he says. His ABI cofounders at the engineering firm Buro Happold estimate that the facade of a building can account for more than half its energy use, depending on how it deals with heat and light. The ABI's new computer-controlled shading systems and glass sheaths with expandable frit patterns can boost a facade's energy efficiency by up to 20%.

via www.fastcompany.com

The David Report: Time to Rethink Design

APA Launches Sustaining Places Initiative

APA President Bruce Knight, FAICP, formally announced the association's Sustaining Places Initiative on Monday, March 22, 2010, during the first day of the United Nations Fifth World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Knight chaired the WUF session on "Planning Sustainable Urbanization and the Right to the City" that was put together by the Global Planners Network of 35 nation-based planning organizations. APA, a founding member of the GPN, also actively participated in previous World Urban Forums in Vancouver and Nanjing.

Planning is essential to creating sustainable communities

The Sustaining Places Initiative is a multi-year, multi-faceted program to define the role of planning in addressing all human settlement issues relating to sustainability.

In his announcement, Knight noted that, "The planning movement and its professional planners are uniquely qualified to provide leadership in defining, analyzing, and debating these issues and in integrating place-based strategies in the broader discussion of sustainability. Thus, Sustaining Places will examine both how places can be sustained and how places themselves sustain life and civilizations. Planning's comprehensive focus is not limited to a building or a site but encompasses all scales and all forms of organization of human settlements, from rural areas and small town to cities and metropolitan regions. The challenges of sustainability and possible solutions require planners' values, skills, and leadership.

via www.planning.org

Rewilding: A Model for Sustainable Conservation

While climate change gets most of the ink in environmental news sections, biodiversity is at a “point of no return” says Hilary Benn, the UK environment secretary. If ecosystems fail, their ability to sequester carbon or provide flood control diminishes. These ecosystems then also fail to provide the habitat necessary to preserve diverse species that rely on complex interactions with one another to survive. One possible solution is “rewilding,” a model that can be implemented piecemeal across landscapes to promote the reconnection of isolated habitats, form bridging corridors that help revive complex natural systems, and reintroduce predators. The approach is designed to restore biodiversity in places where it has been lost.

via dirt.asla.org

Arup: Towards Zero Carbon

Arup's take on achieving lower carbon targets in the built environment.

Turning River Current into Electricity

   PHOTO: Associated Press

 By Willie Drye

The steady roll of the Mississippi River, inspiration for so many great American songs and stories, also could light homes and power businesses, say developers who aim to turn that idea into reality.

The proposed project to convert the torrent beneath North America’s largest river into electricity is one of dozens of efforts across the United States to harness the energy produced by the constant surge of tides and rivers. These new proposals differ from traditional hydroelectric projects, which rely on dams to control the water’s flow.

via news.nationalgeographic.com

Can We Design Cities for Happiness?

Happiness itself is a commons to which everyone should have equal access.

That’s the view of Enrique Peñalosa, who is not a starry-eyed idealist given to abstract theorizing. He’s actually a politician, who served as mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, for three years, and now travels the world spreading a message about how to improve quality-of-life for everyone living in today’s cities.

Peñalosa’s ideas stand as a beacon of hope for cities of the developing world, which even with their poverty and immense problems will absorb much of the world’s population growth over the next half-century. Based on his experiences in Bogotá, Peñalosa believes it’s a mistake to give up on these cities as good places to live.

via shareable.net