Green ArchiTEXT

How Would Nature Solve This?

Another exciting focus for Benyus is city planning. The Biomimicry Guild—also co-founded by Benyus with Dayna Baumeister—and HOK Architects are now collaborating on urban design. In one masterplan for Lang Fang, China, under development, the idea is to model natural water self-reliance through a retrofitted landscape. Referring to related biomimetic urban plans in World Architecture News, Baumeister stressed that “the built environment is one of the most fertile grounds for biomimicry from a sustainability perspective…our greatest collective impact will come from applying biomimicry to the planning and design of buildings, communities and cities.” This collaboration allowed Benyus, Baumeister, and colleagues to ask a crucial design question: “Shouldn’t our cities do at least as well, in terms of ecosystem services, as the native systems that they replace?”

In that vein, the Biomimicry Guild and HOK partnership created a set of Ecological Performance Standards, metrics which measure “ecosystem services such as carbon fixation, water purification, air cooling, biodiversity maintenance, soil building, erosion control,” explained Baumeister. “The buildings and eco-structures will support themselves and then some, creating more fertile soils, cleaner air and water, and safe passage for native species.” With the use of these standards, we will be able to look back and say, “we have created a human settlement that is functionally indistinguishable from the local ecology.” Benyus told World Architecture News, “making a bio-inspired product is one thing; making a bio-inspired city begins to change the world.” 

via dirt.asla.org

Ellen Dunham-Jones: Retrofitting suburbia

New TED video: Dying malls reborn, empty "big box" stores re-inhabited, parking lots turned into wetlands.

Seven Recycled Architecture Public Places

Tearing down old structures to build new green designs in their place often consumes many more resources than simply working with existing architecture. The most sustainable construction comes from taking existing establishments and turning them into new useful assets for the community.

Here are seven awesome projects that have upcycled old and neglected architecture into new public places. READ MORE >>

via www.huffingtonpost.com

RMI Video: BNIM's Integrated Design Process

Case studies from RMI's (Rocky Mountain Institute) video High Performance Building: Performance by Integrated Design - featuring Bob Berkebile and Laura Lesniewski and their work on the LEED Platinum Lewis & Clark Building.

Theses on Sustainability | Orion Magazine

[1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment. “Sustainable” has been used variously to mean “politically feasible,” “economically feasible,” “not part of a pyramid or bubble,” “socially enlightened,” “consistent with neoconservative small-government dogma,” “consistent with liberal principles of justice and fairness,” “morally desirable,” and, at its most diffuse, “sensibly far-sighted.”

[2] NATURE WILL DECIDE what is sustainable; it always has and always will. The reflexive invocation of the term as cover for all manner of human acts and wants shows that sustainability has gained wide acceptance as a longed-for, if imperfectly understood, state of being.

via www.orionmagazine.org

Regenerative Design: Reframing Sustainability

Those now practicing regenerative design or more accurately, regenerative development, try to incorporate people and community into the process of development, and an understanding of how the end 'product' and its continuance or evolution hinges on the spirit and understanding of the individuals to make it so. Regenerative design is not a new idea per se. It has emerged from a long line of thinkers who have mulled over the proper relationship of Man and nature, and is found in the thoughts and writings of John and Nancy Todd and the New Alchemists, Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, writings by John Tillman Lyle such as in Design for Human Ecosystems, and works by the great permaculturalist Bill Mollison. Other names that come to mind are Ian McHarg, Sim Van Der Ryn, Anne Spirn, David Orr, James Corner, and as we heard from earlier, Bill McDonough.

Many of those above looked at how, as a society, we are overly prone to abstracting ourselves from natural systems, rather than asking how we can, through a better understanding of how they function, integrate with those systems to make places that are not just more efficient, but healthier, more pleasant and even more fun.

via www.c2cportal.net

Seattle buildings forming 2030 district

By Charles Redell

A new Seattle group operating incognito is fast becoming the most popular avenue for commercial building owners and managers in the city's downtown core to swap information and share resources to reach the goals of the 2030 Challenge.

The Seattle 2030 District, a public-private effort, could ease the work of companies trying to meet the 2030 Challenge. The ad-hoc group currently includes five major property owners and managers in the downtown core, two city utilities, including the city-owned electric utility, engineers and many organizations and design firms.

via www.sustainableindustries.com

Eco City Dreaming | Orion Magazine

...soon my eyes are drawn up to glass and steel. The John Ross turns its thirty-one-story oval elegantly sideways to the view, imperial, convincing. Its neighbor, Atwater Place, is all Bauhaus severity, but two other towers, Meriwethers West and East (where I’m staying), are faced in granite of a soft, almost buttery color. Is this really a “neighborhood,” as the real-estate brochures insist? Four condo towers in varying states of habitation and emptiness, two more half-built, and a medical high-rise linked by its glamorous new aerial tram to Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), up on the crowding hills just behind: South Waterfront we suddenly call it, this wide wedge between Portland’s Willamette River and Interstate 5. It was industrial low-rises and forgotten brownfields until planners and developers noticed the potential for better things so very close to the river, to OHSU, to downtown.

I’m a nature writer come home to the city, dazzled by comfort and the utopian promise of green buildings, sustainability, transit. It’s a vision of urban yet eco-friendly living—in this case a gleaming playground for the rich, yet (in theory) also an answer to calls for environmental justice and social equity. It is the odd beast of metro-centric environmentalism, a new way to live in the postsuburban age.

via www.orionmagazine.org

Notes on the design of participatory systems – for the city or for the planet

Usman Haque at IIT Design Research Conference 2010 from IIT Institute of Design on Vimeo.

Craig Venter: Turning Air into Fuel

Forget Jesus sandals. The recent surge of interest in biochemist Craig Venter has overwritten time-honoured notions of the earth-born god. Gone is the modest immaterialist: in his place stands a surfing dude with a sailing yacht named The Sorcerer and his eyes set on what he touts as the next multi-trillion-dollar industry. He even has a one-up on water into wine. Thin air into fuel.

Is Venter playing God… is God playing with Venter… The media debate, which peaked for me with the concern expressed by one atheist Guardian-reader "that a crazed evangelist may use the technology to create God", has been a lot of fun.

But it has also missed the point. Which is not whether Venter's synthetic addition to the earth's inventory of species is the eighth day of creation – or whether it is no more than a slightly obscure feat in computer-programming. The exciting part is that Venter wants to harness his creative powers to give the world a biologically engineered, renewable fuel – one he claims could scale up to rival the petrochemical industries.

via www.forumforthefuture.org