Green ArchiTEXT

AIA, Mithun Lead Birmingham's Pratt City Rebuild

Nearly 100 days after a tornado destroyed much of Birmingham’s Pratt Community, an effort to create a new master plan is underway. The AIA Regional and Urban Design Assistance Team (RUDAT) visited Birmingham, toured the Pratt City community and met with neighborhood leaders and ministers. RUDAT will return in the fall for a four-day workshop to engage residents in shaping a master plan that reflects their vision and priorities for the community. During the first public meeting, Bert Gregory, who is leading the RUDAT design team, noted:

“This is really all about your community, and we need you folks to really define your community. You should think of us as the pencil for your vision.”

via mithun.com

Return to the Clinton Presidential Center

En route to New Orleans via Little Rock, I stopped for a renewed look at the William J. Clinton Presidential Center & Park - opened in 2004 as a LEED Silver, then elevated to LEED Platinum status (for Existing Buildings) three years later. It's a spectacular setting, overlooking the Arkansas River and literally right off I-30 and the entrance to the city.

In "Bridge of Possibilities" for the Nov./Dec. issue of Eco-Structure Magazine, I wrote:

"Around Little Rock, Ark., they call it “Bill’s Bridge.” In a lush setting that was once a brownfield and reaches out towards the Arkansas River, the William J. Clinton Presidential Center & Park is reminiscent of Little Rock’s six bridges that cross the river nearby, its modern design emblematic of a 'bridge to the 21st century.'"
The LEED Platinum headquarters for Heifer International (left) sits to the southeast of the Clinton Center, while a wetlands restoration (right) in progress stretches towards the river as part of a 27-acre park space. To the Center's immediate south is the Clinton School of Public Service, housed in a reburbished 1899 train depot (below) for the old Choctaw Route. In all, a beautiful place, throughful, restoring the past, declaring a hopeful future.

The Zero-Carbon House: It’s Just Around the Corner >> Wired

By Nate Berg

Green building and carbon-neutral living might seem like recent ideas, but engineer Jerry Yudelson has been in the environmentally friendly building business for 14 years. Today he directs a consulting firm in Tucson, Arizona, and his name is on a dozen books about green design. Before LEED certification (that’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, to us non-pros) was a glimmer in any architect’s eye, Yudelson was pushing for solar houses. And he still is. He offers his thoughts on where the field is headed, what new tricks are cutting energy use, and which technological leaps may yet take green homes mainstream.

Wired: You can hardly think of a green house without imagining solar panels. How has solar changed in recent years?

Jerry Yudelson: You’re getting solar a lot cheaper now. And it’s being incorporated into roof shingles, so you can actually have solar-powered roofs without putting on separate panels. You’ve got to put a roof on anyway, so if you can effectively make the roof itself a solar collector, you get two for one.

Wired: Bill Gates recently called rooftop solar “cute.” He seemed to think it was a rich person’s toy.

Yudelson: Production housing is where it’s getting interesting. The big home builders are starting to put on 2- or 3-kilowatt systems as a standard feature, and it’s just part of the price of the house. There’s no add-on cost. That’s a real breakthrough.

Wired: What about the systems that really run a house, like heating and cooling?

Yudelson: The real key is the windows. There’s some revolutionary nanotechnology that’s about to go into the glass—different kinds of coatings that make them five to 10 times more energy-efficient than double-paned windows. These windows are as energy-efficient as walls. READ MORE >>

via www.wired.com

Tuscaloosa Forward: BNIM Creates New Site to Help the City's Tornado Recovery Efforts

BNIM launched Tuscaloosa Forward in June 2011 to create and manage the dialogue between community residents and the planning team - critical to sustainable recovery and rebuilding efforts...and the results have been stunning so far. Read more in "Tuscaloosa Forward Takes Off".

The Other New Orleans | Metropolis POV

By Martin C. Pedersen

Photo: Francesca Pedersen.

The conventional wisdom about New Orleans these days is for the most part positive: an engaged mayor (with the obligatory “60 Minutes” profile under his belt), rebounding neighborhoods, improving schools, young people flocking in.  All of this is true, as far as it goes, but it’s an incomplete accounting. What has gone largely unreported in the mainstream press is the condition of the neighborhood hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina.  Much of the Lower Ninth Ward—despite the heroic efforts of Brad Pitt and Make It Right—remains desolate.

This past weekend I went on a bus tour of the Lower Ninth, sponsored by the local chapter of the AIA and hosted by John Williams, who in addition to his work as executive architect for Make It Right has taken on the role of unofficial master planner for the embattled neighborhood. While there are pockets of hope in the Lower Ninth—the Holy Cross section has seen about half of its residents return—the overall picture is troubling.

Photo: Alex Pedersen.

“Before Katrina, seventy-two percent of the residents owned their homes,” Williams says. “It was the highest rate of home ownership in the state of Louisiana. It was a dense neighborhood. There were blighted properties, but virtually no empty lots. Eighteen thousand people lived here. Today I’d put that number at thirty-two hundred.” Prior to Katrina, there were eighty businesses on St. Claude Avenue, a main drag running through the neighborhood; there are now five. There were once 72 churches; about 20 survived.  There is one school, but it largely serves students from outside the neighborhood. The children of the Lower Ninth live mostly elsewhere: Dallas, Houston, Baton Rouge.

For the past couple of years Williams has been fighting to get a school in the Lower Ninth. But it’s been a kind of chicken and egg game: the neighborhood asks for a school; the city says they don’t have the kids to support it (which is true); and the community responds, we would if they had a school to go to. According to Williams, Mayor Mitch Landrieu and his sister, Senator Mary Landrieu, have expressed support for a high school in the Lower Ninth. To her credit, the senator appears to be showing an interest in the neighborhood, conducting regular meetings with community activists there. READ MORE >>

via www.metropolismag.com

Design Futures Council Leadership Summit on Sustainable Design in Boston, Oct. 9-11

Nine years ago on Nantucket Island, the Design Futures Council initiated the first Leadership Summit on Sustainable Design. At that three-day session, the Nantucket Principles were developed, providing a philosophical, strategic, and tactical path toward sustainable design. Today, thousands of professionals and industry leaders are using the tools and the networks of the Leadership Summit to make a profound difference. But we must do more.

There are unprecedented opportunities ahead. We are not waiting for an economic upturn or new regulations. We are not waiting for someone else to lead. We will act. We will make sustainability and economic health real.

Join this transformation at the 10th Annual Leadership Summit on Sustainable Design. This important gathering will inspire you to reorder your leadership priorities and establish a new game plan. It will rekindle a world-class network of friendships and alliances, providing a new platform for leadership. We invite you to engage and challenge today’s limiting beliefs.

Speakers & Agenda

• NATALIA ALLEN, Founder, Design Futurist
• BOB BERKEBILE, Principal, BNIM
• TIM FERGUSON, Founder, Chair, & Managing Partner, Next Street
• MICHAEL GRAVES, Founder and Principal, Michael Graves & Associates
• WILLIAM KAMKWAMBA, New York Times Best-Selling Author of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
• TED LANDSMARK, President, Boston Architectural College
• TOM LOLLINI, Associate Vice Chancellor & Campus Architect, University of California, Merced
• JOHN OCHSENDORF, MacArthur Fellow & Associate Professor, Building Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

FOR MORE INFORMATION >>

via www.di.net

Scientific American Special Issue on Cities: Better, Greener, Smarter

As Ecosystems, Cities Yield Some Surprises >> NY Times

By Hillary Rosner

In Boston, scientists measuring the city’s greenhouse gas emissions have found what they call a “weekend effect,” a clear drop-off in the amount of carbon dioxide entering the city’s atmosphere on Saturdays and Sundays. In Fresno, researchers have discovered that backyard water use increases with wealth, as does backyard biodiversity. And in Los Angeles, ecologists studying the city’s “ecohydrology” have calculated that planting a million new trees, an idea with fairly universal appeal, would have the drawback of increasing water consumption by 5 percent.

The researchers, who presented their findings this week at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting in Austin, Tex., are all involved in a nascent program to understand the nation’s cities, home to 80 percent of the population, as functioning ecosystems. The goal is to educate urbanites about their environment and how they can act to make it more sustainable.

The program, called Ultra, for Urban Long-Term Research Area, is a joint effort of the National Science Foundation and the Forest Service. A total of 21 projects are under way, including two in New York City. In establishing financing (known as Ultra-Ex grants) for exploratory sites in 2009, the science foundation called urban sustainability one of “the greatest challenges to the long-term environmental quality of the nation.” READ MORE >>

via green.blogs.nytimes.com

Four Greenhouses that Point to the Future of Urban Building

By Tom McKeag

This summer I was lucky enough to teach courses in bio-inspired design at Schumacher College in Devon, England, and the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. At both institutions I saw what I think is the future of urban building, although it will not, I am quite sure, look anything like what I observed and discussed at these quiet, idyllic places.

This future will have, I believe, a large element of the past within it. Green ideas that were the stuff of hippie dreams 40 years ago have been given two gifts from Father Time: new relevance in the centers of capital, thanks to the urgency of climate change, and new feasibility in the centers of design, thanks to our advances in technology and industry.

The humble greenhouse appears to represent some of these trends, and why not? It is a building meant to support life in a context broader than a single, human species.

1. The Omega Center's Eco-Machine

Take, for example, the Omega Center for Sustainable Living (OCSL). This is the first building in the United States to meet both the Living Building Challenge criteria and U.S. Green Building Council LEED Platinum standards. The 6,250 square foot building is a zero-net energy building, and actually feeds energy back into the grid over the course of a year. Solar panel arrays and a geothermal heat exchange system make this possible for a building that is used as a classroom during the milder times of the year.

The building and its constructed wetlands and dispersal fields process all the wastewater from the 195 acre Omega campus and return it to the local aquifer. No chemicals are used to treat the waste; plants and a special recipe of fungi, algae and bacteria in the soil and in tanks do the work.

The aerated lagoons are the heart of the OCSL's Eco Machine. They play an essential role in purifying Omega's wastewater. Photo courtesy Omega Center.

This so-called Eco-Machine, designed by John Todd Ecological Design, brings blackwater to potable levels in seven sequential steps over the course of 36 hours. These stations include a beautiful 4500 square foot greenhouse full of flowering tropical plants growing in tanks. Most of the water flow is gravity powered. Any energy used is supplied by solar power. The plant processes as much as 38,000 gallons per day and has a design capacity of 52,000 gallons per day. READ MORE >>

via www.greenbiz.com

How do we put a value on green infrastructure?

By Tony Mulhall

The benefits of green space have been understood for some time. However, recent evidence suggests that the specific arguments in favour of green infrastructure, in the form of parkland, gardens, trees, and planting vegetation on walls, appears to be gaining momentum in the UK and internationally. A growing body of evidence suggests that increasing high quality green space can generate wide-ranging benefits to the three pillars of sustainable development: the environment, the economy and wider society.

The publication of my organisation, RICS', recent information paper, Green Infrastructure in Urban Areas, coincides with two other important documents in this area of policy, the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (UK NEA) and the government's white paper, The Natural Choice: securing the value of nature. The research identifies how green infrastructure can be both understood and delivered, and aims to estimate the value of the natural world by taking account of the economic, health and social benefits we get from nature. In order to improve the environment, economic growth and personal wellbeing, the nation must consider the value that nature can bring.

In urban areas, green infrastructure is one way of achieving these aims. It can best be understood as a network of high quality green spaces woven into the fabric of the city. It includes playing fields, rivers, railway embankments, gardens, parks, green roofs and countless small and large scale environmental features. READ MORE >>

via www.guardian.co.uk