Green ArchiTEXT

Redefining Sustainability at the MUSE School | Metropolis POV

By Sherin Wing

What is sustainable?  More to the point, what does the word mean when applied to a school? The MUSE school, founded by Suzy Cameron, offers some insight. The new campus in the Malibu hills opened with the help from Ecovations, a design firm that has re-envisioned the possibilities, indeed the very definition of sustainability. This is not an “expensive” or “faddish” place. At the Muse school, sustainable means healthy, integrative, and economically self-sufficient. The mission, according to Cameron, is to combine culture with sustainability and language and its name, Muse, which was her husband’s idea, epitomizes the philosophy of the school: inspiration. READ MORE >>

Treehouse.  Photo: Sherin Wing

via www.metropolismag.com

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: The Something Out of Something Design Contest

You may have seen Jakub Szczęsny’s Keret House, which made headlines well ahead of its 2012 unveiling as the slimmest house in the world. Appropriate for Etgar Keret: most of his short stories could fit on a cocktail napkin. If these stories moved a Polish architect to create a four-foot-wide house, what else might they inspire?

The gauntlet has been thrown. FSG Originals and BOMB Magazine present the Etgar Keret Something Out of Something Design Contest. Twenty-five finalists will be selected in March by judges from Farrar, Straus and Giroux; BOMB Magazine staff; and Keret himself. Finalists’ work will then be sold in a silent auction on April 29, 2012, with proceeds to benefit the PEN American Center. The winner will receive $500 and a signed and personalized copy of Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, and the winning piece will be featured in a Keret story or film. READ MORE >>

via www.fsgworkinprogress.com

Amplifying Creative Communities 2011 Northwest Brooklyn: The Opposing Designs of Urban Activism

This is the first in a 3-part series from Cameron Tonkinwise, sharing learnings from a two-year project from the New School's Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab. Amplifying Creative Communities, works to research, promote and amplify community-based solutions for sustainability.

By Cameron Tonkinwise

Compared to the first year of the Amplifying Creative Communities project, which took place in the Lower East Side, this second year's exhibition pays more attention to the stories of individuals who are fighting to materialize their innovations in Northwest Brooklyn (neighborhoods that include Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bushwick). As Lara Penin, Assistant Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons the New School for Design and Co-curator of the exhibition and its workshops this November, notes, the narratives of heroically creative people, if you can find and capture them, are inspirational, and more appropriate to the United States' approach to social innovation.

What emerges from these stories is a rich picture of what it means to attempt change in dense urban contexts. They provide lessons for what a networked approach to social change demands, as opposed to Gillette's total designs and the competitive market's nondesigns:

There's not much room /
There's always space somewhere

There are lots of different kinds of cities, with different horizontal and vertical scales and densities, and within each of those cities are lots of different kinds of conditions. But in cities like New York, the number of people keen to be there means that nearly every square foot is programmed, usually with something expensive enough to deliver a growing return on investment to the owner. Further, what is there is invariably set in concrete, either literally, or, in the case of property rights, metaphorically. This means that urban change is difficult. Since there is no room to add onto the existing systems or structures, the task is one of 'unbuilding cities' (to use the nice title of a book), which is very difficult.

On the other hand, in a big city, there are often spaces that are neglected, either because the material is crumbling, or because they are between legal systems. These are often where motivated individuals site their experiments to change the city. This is the whole tradition of urban community gardens in New York City—that is where the Amplify Project began its research in the Lower East Side in 2010. In northwest Brooklyn, the waterways afford these kind of transition spaces: one story told in the Amplify exhibition is of an innovative photovoltaic system installer which operates from a series of boats set up as a co-working space by the marina owner interested in fostering the creative class.

via www.core77.com

Green Intelligence Forum: Creating the Sustainable City of the Future

The Atlantic is currently hosting the fourth-annual Green Intelligence Forum: Creating the Sustainable City of the Future, once again bringing together the world's leading authorities on energy and the environment for two days of dynamic conversation on the issues at the forefront of sustainable thought. On the first day, the Forum will explore macro trends in energy and the environment, including discussions on both national and global policy and sustainable business.  The following day, the event will examine green intelligence through the framework of sustainable cities. Expert panels will engage in key dialogue on topics including energy infrastructure, green building, and clean transportation

The Lexicon of Sustainability

The Lexicon of Sustainability is an amazing, creative website focused on multi-faceted issues of food and sustainability: food security, permaculture, urban gardening and more. Created by Douglas Gayeton and Laura Howard-Gayeton, the site reflects their ongoing work on the Lexicon project "by illuminating the vocabulary of sustainable agriculture, and with it, the conversation about America’s rapidly evolving food culture...to educate, engage and activate people to pay closer attention to how they eat, what they buy, and their responsibility for creating a healthier, safer food system in America."

Alice Waters on edible schoolyards.  Wes Jackson on reinventing wheat farming.  Joel Salatin on embracing the value of saner farming practices.  Vandana Shiva on the global imperative of protecting seeds.  Paul Stamets on how mushrooms can save the world.  Will Allen on Food Security.  Temple Grandin on the humane slaughter of animals.  Farmer John on the revolutionary idea of community-supported agriculture.

Well worth a look!

Inside The Ecological Engineer: Glumac - Profile of Mercy Corps Headquarters

Inside my latest book, The Ecological Engineer: Glumac. An in-depth look at the LEED Platinum Mercy Corps Headquarters (Portland, OR) that highlights use of daylighting, natural ventilation, an energy-efficient facade and alternative energy technologies - one of a dozen short project profiles throughout this new monograph.

Open publication - Free publishing

A College Town Imagines a New Way of Life

By Scott Carlson

This northern Ohio college town is barely a blip on a map, far away from national centers of power. And yet people here are working on a plan that could make it a model for fundamentally reshaping the American economy and its society.

The architect of the plan is David W. Orr, a professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin College. More than a decade ago, he helped inspire a "green building" trend when he dreamed up the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, which remains one of the greenest college buildings in the country.

Now he wants to expand that vision to Oberlin and its surrounding area. The Oberlin Project, as it's called, joins town and gown to create a resilient community for a post-fossil-fuel era. When asked to describe the project, Mr. Orr conjures a picture of life in Oberlin—a city of 8,000 residents and students, 40 miles outside of Cleveland—many years into the future: The town and the college would be powered by renewable energy, with a smattering of new and renovated green buildings at the town's core—the first among them paid for by the college. A "greenbelt" of farms would pump food, wood, and fiber into the city, while a steady stream of money from the college and small businesses, like restaurants and furniture manufacturers, would flow back out to the farms. The college, the local community college, the local vocational school, and the city's elementary and secondary schools would rejigger their programs to prepare students to live in the future: a world short on oil, wracked by unstable weather, relying increasingly on sustainable design, regional industries, and local know-how. The town itself would be a laboratory for a new way of life. READ MORE >>

via chronicle.com

Timelapse: Urban | Digital Urban

Cool video shot by cinematographer Chris Scarafile using a Bolex with intervalometer - via digitalurban.org.

Chris Scarafile Time Lapse - Urban from Chris Scarafile on Vimeo.

Detroit: rejuvenation through urban farms, sustainable living and innovation | Guardian Sustainable Business

By Leon Kaye

After visiting Detroit for the first time in 17 years, my first jarring impression of the city was the silence. Wide boulevards approaching downtown Detroit were bereft of cars. Once stately neighbourhoods laden with enormous houses emitted no sounds except for my footsteps. What was once the roaring Motor City, it seemed to me, had been reduced to a mumble.

But that initial snapshot belies what is occurring at the grassroots as Detroit's people work hard not only to survive, but to revive their city and even thrive. The hurdles are enormous. Automakers will always be part Detroit's fabric, but not as the reliable economic and jobs engine that they had been for a century. And for a city that has lost more than one million residents since 1950, the leadership has decided that demolition and deconstruction are behind the city's survival. To that end, 10,000 homes are to be torn down in the coming years.

Nevertheless, there is more than just demolition in Detroit. Families who have lived there for generations, as well as recent transplants, are taking back their city with their own hands. Old Detroit still offers a stunning collection of art deco architecture, a museum with a billion-dollar art collection, and a solid manufacturing infrastructure.

Now, all of it will be embedded in an environment that offers both the urban and the rural. And it is the rural, built with those determined hands, that could change our conceptions of what a city is. Detroit will be model for ageing cities and towns looking for a redefinition. READ MORE >>

via www.guardian.co.uk

CIRS opens as North America’s greenest building

Green roof on other side of wall made of glass and solid panels which create light and shade for optimum climate.
Photo: Martin Dee

The University of British Columbia has opened the most sustainable building in North America, a $37-million “living laboratory” that will help to regenerate the environment and advance research and innovation on global sustainability challenges.

The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) is one of only a handful of buildings worldwide that will provide “net positive” benefits to the environment. It reduces UBC’s carbon emissions, powers itself and a neighboring building with renewable and waste energy, creates drinking water from rain and treats wastewater onsite.

CIRS will be an international centre for research, partnership and action on sustainability issues, including green building design and operations, environmental policy and community engagement. Researchers will study users’ interactions with the facility to improve building performance, maximize the happiness, health and productivity of its inhabitants and advance best green building practices at UBC and beyond.

CIRS inside and out
Photo: Don Erhardt   

Quick facts about CIRS:

• Natural lighting: CIRS’ U-shape design maximizes natural daylight and fresh air for inhabitants, who control their environment (light levels, temperature) with their computers.  
• Flexible workspaces: With power, data and ventilation under modular floorboards (instead of through walls or ceilings) at each workspace, offices can be reconfigured overnight.
• Green IT: CIRS has no desktop computers or servers guzzling energy. Inhabitants “remote access” into desktops, drives and servers, which are stored “in the cloud” instead.
• Psychology: One of many research projects is a study of CIRS’ influence on thoughts and behaviors and science-based methods for encouraging people to act sustainably. 

CIRS’ “net positive” environmental impacts:

• Energy: By capturing energy from the sun, the ground and the nearby Earth and Ocean Sciences (EOS) building, CIRS heats itself and returns 600 megawatt hours of surplus energy back to campus.
• Operational carbon: CIRS’ operations require no fossil fuel and the surplus energy CIRS returns to EOS removes an additional 150 tonnes of GHG emissions annually through reduced natural gas use.
• Structural carbon: CIRS’ wood structure locks in more than 500 tonnes of carbon, offsetting GHG emissions from non-renewable materials used in the building’s construction, including cement, steel and aluminum.
• Water: CIRS will satisfy the water needs of 200 inhabitants, plus hundreds of auditorium and café users, by capturing rain and treating it onsite. Water that can’t be used for drinking will recharge the local aquifer.

READ MORE >>

CIRS at UBC
Photo: Don Erhardt