Green ArchiTEXT

In the Air

Description

In the Air is a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city.

The visualization tool is a web-based dynamic model which builds up the space the components generate, where through data crossing behavior patterns emerge. The results of these data feed a physical prototype of what we have called a “diffuse façade”, a massive indicator of the air´s components through a changing cloud, blurring architecture with the atmosphere it has invaded and mediating the activity of the participants it envelops.

Project Goals

The project proposes a platform for individual and collective awareness and decision making, where the interpretation of results can be used for real time navigation through the city, opportunistic selection of locations according to their air conditions and a base for political action.

Exhibition

In the Air is on display at Medialab-Prado in Madrid through January 11th.

via www.intheair.es

Sign of the Times: A Bank HQ Built for Total Transparency

The ANZ Centre in Melbourne puts a small town's worth of financial professionals in a architectural fishbowl.

By John Pavlus

TARP, credit default swaps, collateralized debt: Since the economy tanked, these opaque acronyms and impenetrable instruments are all too symbolic of the financial industry's mysteriousness. But in Australia, one of the world's largest bank headquarters has taken an architectural stand for radical openness. At the Hassell-designed ANZ Centre in Melbourne, 6,500 financial workers do business in a gigantic vertical "urban campus."

[Wide, cantilevered balconies mean that the hum of the banks activities are always in plain sight]

The ANZ Centre is built around the idea of a "common" that opens the bank to its surroundings with wide balconies and natural light, as well as publicly accessible walkways to cafes, art galleries, and the waterfront. Instead of locking its operations inside a forbidding fortress, ANZ wants its borders to feel permeable and inviting to the local community. You'll notice that anyone, from above and below, can see what every one else is doing -- the perfect symbol of a bank seeking a responsible, 21st century image. READ MORE >>

via www.fastcodesign.com

Book Reviews: Two Positive Paths to Sustainable Design & Development

Two new books offer a non-apocalyptic approach to sustainability.

Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order
Thomas Princen
MIT Press, $22.95

Rematerial: From Waste to Architecture
Alejandro Bahamón and Camila Sanjinés
Wiley, $49.95

Thomas Princen, who teaches social and ecological sustainability at the University of Michigan, has authored several sustainability-oriented books, and his latest goes to the heart of the matter. Treading Softly acknowledges the dichotomy of environmental preservation and human development in urbanism as well as economics, but doesn’t browbeat readers. Princen argues that while we as a society must inevitably face dire ecological circumstances, our fate depends on how people view their place in the world and how they choose to live.

Princen declares his book is for “those who know the problem is in the grounding.” While this may sound like preaching to the choir, his arguments and examples provide inspiration for those who know but haven’t acted. However, more facts and figures, rather than citations, would have provided more grounding. Instead, he fills the book with stories, metaphoric examples, and academic prose.

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Rematerial: From Waste to Architecture presents several projects that repurpose waste materials. The authors, architect Alejandro Bahamón and artist Maria Camila Sanjinés, both based in Barcelona, introduce each building or installation with overview information, the material strategy, and detail images, all in succinct and easy-to-survey spreads. Each project concludes with a diagram of its rematerial process, which, while easy to grasp, glosses over the technical aspects of a resourceful guide.

Divided into six sections, each tackles a different theme, from overarching initiatives to landscaping to interiors, in addition to institutional and housing building types. Various authors introduce each section with an essay that grounds the strategies of the projects that follow. Anneke Bokern tells the story of how Freddy Heineken, the magnate of the ubiquitous Dutch libation, upon seeing his green bottles strewn about Caribbean beaches in the early 1960s initiated a campaign to redesign his beer bottles into a form that could be used to build homes. John Habraken, the then-young architect in charge of the design, relays the process that yielded the WOBO, or World Bottle, a glass block–like bottle successfully used in a housing prototype, as well as the marketing politics that ultimately killed their mass production. READ MORE >>

via archpaper.com

Adaptive Lighting Could Slash Electricity Bills

By David Teeghman

A new development from MIT could slash a home's energy budget in half. Researchers Matthew Aldrich and Nan Zhao built a system that's able to monitor available light and adjust it automatically. The setup was made using LEDs, the most efficient form of lights that are commercially available. Unlike compact fluorescent bulbs, LEDs can be adjusted to any level of lighting intensity.

An important component of the light-adjusting system is a control device about the size of a business card that's placed on a work surface. The card contains sensors that measure the intensity of light coming from different fixtures or windows.

The control device then adjusts the lighting accordingly. If plenty of natural light is coming in through the windows, for example, the controller lowers the amount of artificial light. READ MORE >>

via news.discovery.com

North America’s Greenest building?

IMAGE: Busby Perkins+Will

By John Robinson

Will CIRS be North America’s greenest building? The question makes me cringe a little, for two reasons. First, “green” is too narrow a word, in my view, to describe the CIRS building. And second, whatever is the right word, it’s a moving target. Every week a new green building is announced and the performance standards keep improving.

What we can say is that when it opens, and if it performs according to its design, CIRS will be the most sustainable building that we know of anywhere. That really means four things.

1. CIRS is designed to be a regenerative building.

CIRS goes beyond what I think of as the old environmental agenda (doing less bad). For example, CIRS will be net positive on energy, carbon emissions, water quality and structural carbon. Adding a 60,000 square foot building to the campus will reduce campus energy use, reduce campus carbon emissions, improve the quality of the water flowing through our site and sequester more carbon in the building structure than all the carbon emitted in building and eventually decommissioning CIRS. READ MORE >>

via blogs.ubc.ca

Omega Center for Sustainable Living by BNIM

american-architects.com "Building of the Week":

The International Living Building Institute’s Living Building Challenge could be described as extreme green; it “defines the most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment possible today.” BNIM’s Omega Center for Living is one of the first buildings to achieve “Living” Status from the Living Building Challenge and the first in the world to receive that status and LEED Platinum certification. The Kansas City-based architects answered some questions about their groundbreaking design.

Can you describe your design process for the building?

Though the most obvious function of this facility is to house an ecological wastewater treatment system, OCSL has also become a powerful demonstration of transforming Omega Institute’s vision and values into the form of an integrated landscape and building that serves the campus both functionally and pedagogically.

One way that we approached the design process was to acknowledge the many layers that make-up any building — structure, mechanical, integrated sustainable strategies, etc. — so that we could explore how best to integrate those layers into the most appropriate and high-performing building possible. By understanding the opportunities inherent within each layer or system, we can create a design that integrates each layer into a coherent whole, with each layer mutually beneficial to the others. The goal is to create a building (or campus or community) that is in balance— for optimal performance, interconnectivity and support of its owner’s mission.

How does the completed building compare to the project as designed? Were there any dramatic changes between the two and/or lessons learned during construction?

The OCSL is comprised of two primary spaces, the Eco Machine™ room and classroom. The classroom supports many programs on the campus, including yoga. The Eco Machine™ room has an important function: it harnesses sunlight; fosters the water plants that are critical to cleaning and reclaiming the water; and houses the cellular lagoons that process and purify water.

Early in the process of discovery leading to the design of the OCSL, we confronted questions regarding the warmth and coolness of the water passing through the building while it is being cleaned — was temperature friend or foe? We asked questions, such as “What impact would the embodied energy and humidity have on comfort during the very cold winters or hot humid summers?” It was answering that, and other questions, that led us to simple, elegant solutions in the architecture, landscape, structure, lighting and other layers of the facility.

Integrated design is an iterative process. READ MORE >>

via www.american-architects.com

Azure: Greenbuild starts today

The annual Greenbuild conference and expo is back in Chicago this year, and since its last time in the Windy City three years ago, it’s doubled in size.

This year’s theme “Generation Green – Redefining our future” addresses the economic instability of the past couple years, and explores the growing role of green design in the recovery strategy. In addition to a keynote address from former secretary of state Colin Powell on leadership, the show features speakers like eco design group Terreform 1 founder Mitchell Joachim and Green Science Policy Institute director Arlene Blum.

On the show floor – the world’s largest expo dedicated to green building – exhibitors showcase their latest innovations for energy-efficient buildings and healthy living spaces, from insulation and cladding to lighting and carpets. DuPont is debuting its new exterior cladding material (shown above), for example, and countertop manufacturer Cosentino will highlight its Eco line. Other exhibitors will present concepts for the future. Greenguard’s booth is transformed into a healthy low-emitting classroom environment, showcasing furniture by KI, paint by Sherwin-Williams, flooring by Mondo and many more companies – all of which aim to decrease the amount of airborne chemicals and other air pollutants in indoor environments. 

via azuremagazine.com

Trees grow in Brooklyn | The Economist

A natural form of relief for overworked city sewers.

LIKE other post-industrial areas in the city, New York’s Gowanus neighbourhood is getting stylish. But those who venture there after a heavy rainstorm might rethink their plans to buy that loft. When the city’s ageing sewerage system is overwhelmed, untreated storm-water and sewage flood into local waterways, including the Gowanus Canal. The resulting whiff is sure to keep property prices at a level starving Brooklyn artists can afford.

New York has a serious sewer problem. The city spills more than 27 billion gallons (102 billion litres) of untreated overflow into its harbour each year, according to Riverkeeper, a local advocacy group. And New York is not alone. Nearly 800 American cities rely on decrepit systems that collect storm-water run-off, industrial waste and human sewage in the same pipes. Usually these pipes take waste water to treatment plants. But any overflow is released into rivers and streams.

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New York recently unveiled a grand plan to clean up its waterways. Instead of spending billions on new tanks and pipes (ie, “grey infrastructure”), which take years to build and never quite address the problem, the city intends to invest in “green infrastructure”, such as roofs covered with vegetation, porous pavements and kerbside gardens. The scheme involves a fundamental shift in approach: instead of treating rainfall as waste to be whisked away as quickly as possible, New York will let it sink usefully into the ground: thereby helping to make the city greener, improve air quality, raise property values, increase jobs and lower water and energy costs, according to studies by the EPA and others. READ MORE >>

via www.economist.com

How to achieve energy neutrality in cities

By Andy van den Dobbelsteen and Nico Tillie

...planners have yet to fully grasp the fundamental question at the heart of the global warming challenge in urban areas: how can cities and towns become far more autonomous and possibly even free from fossil fuels?

In Europe, until now, architects and urban planners have often followed three steps when designing a sustainable built environment. Reducing energy consumption, utilising sustainable energy, and using fossil fuels as efficiently and cleanly as possible. However, to date at least, this approach has not led to substantially more sustainable towns and cities.

As part of a new approach, we have therefore added in another step: re-using waste flows such as waste-water, household and agricultural waste, and residual heat, whilst using renewable energy to satisfy remaining demand. All buildings and urban areas generate "waste streams" that could be harnessed, but rarely are. We believe that adoption of this approach will eventually render the use of fossil fuels completely unnecessary. READ MORE >>

via environment.weblog.tudelft.nl

Higher Density Living: Deal with our fear of heights

By Elizabeth Farrelly

Up or out. We often talk as though cities must do one or the other, but what typically happens is they do both, giving us a clutch of skyscrapers stranded in a puddle of sprawl. It's like the smoking thing. People take up smoking to quit eating, then they take up eating to quit smoking, and they end up fat and dead.

Backtrack to a stage I'm sharing with the wonderful David Malouf, on the gritty question of whether buildings mould behaviour. We make them, then they make us, and all that. Malouf avers that childhood in a Queenslander made him (I dare to paraphrase) a more open, more casual, more communally minded human. Nicer, basically.

And I suddenly wonder if he's right. I, too, have often suspected Queenslanders (and for that matter people from Perth, Adelaide and Hobart) are nicer than us Sydney types. I wonder briefly whether our crooked narrow streets leave us with crooked narrow minds, but decide it's just as likely vice versa. Or maybe our streets and mindsets both flag some more sinister malaise.

Even if our spaces don't shape us, though, cultures do develop spatial habits – which is why Fifth Avenue feels different from the Gulargambone high street – and we do read meaning into space, if not in any consistent or scientific way. READ MORE >>

via www.theage.com.au