Green ArchiTEXT

Tipping towards sustainability: Science calls for ecologically literate innovation

Interesting website and research from the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University:

It is a fascinating paradox that the same innovative capacity that has put us in the current environmental predicament is actually what can be used to push us out of it.

"It is time to use this capacity and introduce innovations that are sensitive to the fundamental bonds between social and ecological system."

This is the gist of the third and final scientific paper produced for the recently held Stockholm Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability.

The paper, which follows from two related ones on reconnecting to the Biosphere and how humans must go from hunter-gatherers to planetary stewards, was recently published in the scientific journal AMBIO. READ MORE >>

via www.stockholmresilience.org

Preview of CEBRA Architect's Monograph: CEBRA_files_01 (VIDEO)

Very cool video from CEBRAarchitects (Copenhagen, Denmark), showcasing the firm'sfirst book CEBRA_files_01.

DE Magazine: Commerce. Community. Skills and Credit. Where Does Collaboration Come into Design?

Nice piece from London's Design Exchange Magazine:

Open publication - Free publishing - More architect

Health + Wellness 2.0: From Home to Therapeutic Cities | Gensler

By Chris Jerde

In a TEDx presentation this year, Dr. Anthony Atala demonstrated a laser printer that “printed” a kidney transplant using a patient’s own cells. Meanwhile, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that humans will soon be injected with robots the size of blood cells to fight off diseases before they spread inside the body. This is just a glimpse into a not-so-distant future when bio-scientific and technological innovation transform how ailments are diagnosed, treated and cured. Coupled with the rising demands of an aging global population, the developments will result in a health and wellness industry that hardly resembles what it is today.

I think that the environments of health and wellness will reflect these developments dramatically. The home will soon become a focal point for health services delivery, while mega-facilities will bridge hospitals to research labs to expedite care innovation in urban settings. And everything will be informed by greater knowledge of how the human body and brain react to those environments. There’s an amazing opportunity right now to recreate the experience of health and wellness in ways that the well, the sick and every person in-between can appreciate. READ MORE >>

via www.gensleron.com

Rutgers professor uses lichen to help cities go green

Elizabeth Demaray, an associate professor of fine arts, is cultivating lichen on the sides of New York City skyscrapers to counteract the lack of native vegetation found in the city. Her "Lichen for Skyscrapers Project" was featured as part of New York's Art in Odd Places Festival from Oct. 1-10 and is currently on view as a site-specific installation on 14th Street between Union Square Park and the Hudson River.

"Metropolitan centers figure into local temperatures in an interesting way," Demaray says. "They are sometimes referred to as 'urban heat islands' because they create heat and they trap heat. A large part of this process is due to the materials that we build with and the actual architecture of the buildings that we create."

Demaray says one of the ways to reduce heat in these cities is to cultivate lichen, which forms a protective barrier, insulating its supporting building from harmful elements. It can lower cumulative temperatures by absorbing sunlight and reflecting heat due to its light color palate while making oxygen and creating green space on the sides of buildings. READ MORE >>

via www.physorg.com

Beyond Green: A Net-Zero College Community

By Jim Witkin

Designing buildings that leave a lighter imprint on the environment has become the de facto standard these days. The target for many is zero net energy use, meaning that a building makes as much energy as it uses over the course of a year.

Noteworthy net-zero-energy homes, commercial buildings and government structures are regularly built. But none have matched the scale of West Village, a net-zero community at the University of California, Davis, that its developers describe as the largest project of its kind in the country.

Stretching over 130 acres on the campus, which is just west of Sacramento, the initial phase of this $280 million project officially opened last weekend with the completion of 315 apartments, 42,500 square feet of commercial space and a recreation center. Once it is completed in 2013, the development will be home to about 3,000 students, faculty and staff in apartments and single-family houses. READ MORE >>

via green.blogs.nytimes.com

ScienceDaily: Technologies for the city of tomorrow

A city that obtains its power from renewable resources, where electric cars move quietly along the streets and which emits almost no carbon dioxide -- German federal minister Mrs. Schavan and the president of Fraunhofer, Hans-Jörg Bullinger, shone a spotlight on the scenario of a sustainable city of the future in the vision of "Morgenstadt.

At the UrbanTec Trade Fair in Cologne from October 24 -26, 2011, Fraunhofer researchers are demonstrating which of the technologies shown can already be implemented today.

It has become quieter on the streets of Morgenstadt: electric cars are now the masters of the road. And quite a bit has changed where housing is concerned: ecological rent guidelines provide landlords with an incentive to restore their houses with energy efficiency in mind. Local heating supply with combined heating and power, as well as solar energy, are systematically expanding into large areas of the city, and Morgenstadt managed to occupy first place in the category of major cities in the federal solar league. Old houses have been completely renovated where energy is concerned -- even in the deepest winter they only need little heating to be comfortably warm. Last, but not least, new safety and security concepts ensure a resilient infrastructure such as railway stations. Plazas and city centers afford a high quality of life and comfort. And washing machines and dish washers run predominantly when electricity is most affordable. In their publication "Morgenstadt -- An answer to climate change," German federal minister Annette Schavan and the president of Fraunhofer, Hans-Jörg Bullinger, supported by nineteen researchers from business, science and politics, describe this vision for the high-tech strategy of the German federal government.

"Morgenstadt" is one of the lighthouse projects adopted by Fraunhofer in the course of the high-tech strategy of the German federal government: READ MORE >>

via www.sciencedaily.com

Designing Cities for a Sustainable Future | Harvard Business School

By Garry Emmons

On a June day in Manhattan with temperatures heading into the 90s, a straphanger named Mike is taking his customary subway ride to work. People are grumbling about the heat, but hey, it's summer, it's supposed to be hot, and besides, "Whaddya gonna do?" New Yorkers have their opinions: mention the heat index, or the greenhouse effect, or global warming, and you'll likely get an earful. But Mike is a little different. From his vantage point in what's been called the second-toughest job in America, he really knows about those issues, and he knows there are things that can be done about them.

For not only is he the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg (HBS MBA '66) is also the chairman of the C40, a group of fellow mayors from the world's 40 largest cities who have banded together to fight climate change. Bloomberg has recently returned from a C40 meeting in São Paulo, Brazil, only to hear the International Energy Agency's chief economist announce that 2010 saw the largest annual rise in carbon emissions in history. So just how hot is it? Climate change, Bloomberg says, is "the greatest challenge that humanity has ever created for itself."

...

One useful way to think about cities is to divide them into three fluid (and sometime overlapping) categories: global hubs of wealth and talent (e.g., New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong); megacities and population magnets (e.g., São Paulo, Lagos, Mumbai, Jakarta); and "up-and-comers," cities of 150,000 to 10 million people, aspiring to international stature (e.g., Cape Town, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur). Much of the world's population growth in the coming decades will be in this last group.

Amid the challenges of protecting the environment and halting its decline in urban areas and elsewhere, there is a consensus that sustainability will drive business during the coming years and that the transition to a low-carbon economy will bring significant investment opportunities. Cities, the C40 says, offer three principal areas for such investment activity: increasing infrastructure energy efficiency, namely in buildings, lighting, and transportation systems; using resources more effectively, for example, through advanced waste management; and producing clean energy at the district level as well as sourcing clean energy from large-scale suppliers. For cities and businesses, millions of dollars saved is equal to millions of dollars earned, and that can readily be achieved through greater efficiencies. While clean tech and green tech—glamorous alternative energy sources and state-of-the-art systems, machinery, and products—often come to mind, the most dramatic inroads may be made in much more prosaic ways, especially in the urban setting. READ MORE >>

via hbswk.hbs.edu

Six Critical Levers to Transform our Energy Future

By Kelly Vaughn

To reinvent fire, we need to master six critical challenges.

1. Build efficient buildings and retrofit existing ones on a tremendous scale

Just one energy efficient building makes a difference. Multiply that by 120 million buildings, and, there will be a revolution. Ultimately, there’s a $1.4 trillion opportunity on the table for smart building owners and entrepreneurs to aggressively adopt straightforward efficiency techniques.

“There are several emerging trends that point to ‘cracking the code,’” said Mathias Bell, RMI consultant. “The challenge is to dramatically accelerate these nascent trends—like straightforward efficiency techniques and technologies—and leverage integrative design to achieve greater energy savings and financial returns.”

To jumpstart widespread investments in building efficiency, building owners, energy service firms and utilities need to spearhead change. The good news is that the time is ripe: the technologies are available, smart regional policies are proliferating, and the opportunity to deliver innovative hassle-free energy products at scale is increasing. READ MORE >>

via blog.rmi.org

‘Greenscaping’ for Health: On the Nature Principle and Greening our Cities and Communities

Neal Peirce of the Washington Post Writers Group is one of my favorite writers - and has long covered the dynamics of cities, the changing face of urbanism and sustainability trends.

By Neal Peirce

What if we got really serious about “greenscaping” our neighborhoods, towns and cities — bringing them closer, by plantings, building design, nurturing parks both great and small, to the natural world that preceded them?

It may be much more important than we think. Journalist-visionary Richard Louv argues that in an age of overwhelming technology, as we dive ever deeper “into a sea of circuitry,” we need more than ever to relate to the natural world. And that we embrace “The Nature Principle,” title of his latest book (subtitled “Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder,” published by Algonquin Books).

Louv’s earlier book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” sparked the creation of an international movement to reconnect children with the natural world.

Now he’s taking the case a step further — to suggest that all of us need deeper, daily contact with nature to “feel fully alive” — to shake free of our own “nature-deficit disorder,” to expand our senses, to reignite our sense of awe. In the process, he argues, we’ll not just be freer of the modern tangle of technology’s constant drumbeat. We’ll also tap nature’s power to calm and focus our minds, improve our physical and spiritual health, boost our mental acuity and do better both in interpersonal relationships and careers.

Cities themselves, Louv argues, need to pay more attention to the Nature Principle — “Vitamin N” — if they’re to be livable, sustaining, successful homes for growing majorities of mankind. READ MORE >>

via www.nlc.org