Green ArchiTEXT

MIT Collaborates with AIA to Research Solutions for Healthy Urban Futures

By Irina Vinnitskaya

American Institute of Architects (AIA) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU) have announced a research collaboration to support AIA efforts through the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), Decade of Design, a measure focused on improving the health of urban communities.  As the global population continues to shift toward urban environments, urban conditions of the past century have become too outdated to address the increase in population and pollution.  In order to advance the state of city livability, professionals in the design and planning fields must reconsider how urban environments need to be designed to work optimally in regards to social, economic and health challenges.  MIT’s collaboration with the profession-based organization of the AIA allows the school’s research to reach the professional world for application and development. READ MORE >>

via www.archdaily.com

Green for Growth: The UK steps back from zero-carbon homes?

By Thomas Lane

In 2006, the Labour government gave the housebuilding industry 10 years’ notice to make its products zero-carbon. This ambitious requirement was launched as part of the Code for Sustainable Homes, and included interim carbon reduction targets along the way: 25% reduction in emissions in 2010 and 44% in 2013. Zero-carbon was going to be expensive - adding up to £40,000 per home - but the argument was that the industry would find ways of reducing these costs as the 2016 deadline approached.

About the only aspect of the zero-carbon requirement welcomed by the industry were the clear carbon reduction milestones along the way. This gave manufacturers confidence to invest in zero-carbon-friendly products and galvanised housebuilders into action. A collection of odd-looking homes sprung up at BRE’s innovation park at Garston, near Watford. Zero-carbon made the industry innovate.

That confidence has taken a battering since the last election. The chancellor George Osborne changed the definition of zero-carbon in the March 2011 Budget so housebuilders would no longer have to provide zero-carbon energy for domestic appliances, just heating, fixed lighting and hot water. Confidence has been further undermined by cuts in feed-in tariff rates for renewable technologies.

The biggest wobble, however, came from the 2013 Part L consultation. Instead of the 25% cut in carbon emissions over 2010 as proposed in the Code for Sustainable Homes, the government favoured an 8% cut, citing the election pledge not to place additional burdens on housebuilders during this parliament. This means that housebuilders face a much bigger jump in 2016 to keep the zero-carbon deadline on track. Additionally, the details of allowable solutions, the mechanism for handling how carbon emissions are mitigated off site, has yet to be finalised. The Zero Carbon Hub put forward proposals for managing this process in July 2011 but the government has yet to respond.

The carbon reduction jump needed in 2016 to keep the zero-carbon policy on track may be too big for the housebuilding industry to cope with. This means the date could be shifted to 2019, which would align with the date for all other buildings to be zero-carbon. READ MORE >>

via www.building.co.uk

Mardi Gras as a Citywide Revolt Against the Car

Excellent essay in Next City by James Reeves:

A scene from Mardi Gras. Credit: James A. Reeves

I bought my first car two weeks ago from an old Cajun mechanic named Dub. For $2500 I got a gigantic white 1997 Lincoln Towncar with a plush burgundy interior, a cassette player, and the phrase ‘Executive Series’ written in cursive on the side. This thing turns heads, particularly when I attempt to parallel park. On Mardi Gras day, I foolishly attempted to drive across town. As drums and horns boomed from all directions, I ran into closed road after closed road. Some were officially barricaded or blocked by a patrol car with flashing lights, others were filled with people, lawn chairs, and barbecue grills. Soon I was trapped in my ridiculous piece of Detroit metal on a side street in the Treme, swal-lowed up by feathers, umbrellas, and cheers as the Zulu parade began to roll.

At its heart, Mardi Gras is a citywide pedestrian revolt against the car. READ MORE >>

via nextcity.org

Green versus Gray: Nature’s Solutions to Infrastructure Demands | Solutions

By John Talberth, Erin Gray, Logan Yonavjak, Todd Gartner

Cities around the country are starting to realize the economic—to say nothing of environmental—benefits of this shifting reality. A recent analysis by New York City found that green roofs and bioswales could help meet water-quality goals with savings of more than $1 billion compared to conventional infrastructure; the Chesapeake Bay could reduce nitrogen loading at less than half the price by using cover crops instead of upgraded wastewater plants. The City of Philadelphia found that the net present value of green infrastructure for storm-water control ranged from $1.94 to $4.45 billion, while gray infrastructure benefits ranged from only $0.06 to $0.14 billion over a 40-year period. And using a system of wetlands, North Carolina could minimize storm-water runoff for 47 cents per thousand gallons treated. Using conventional storm-water controls, this figure jumps to $3.24 per thousand gallons.^3-5

An emerging hypothesis in environmental management settings is that investment in ecosystem-based green infrastructure solutions provides economically superior environmental quality outcomes when compared to investments in technology-based or “gray” infrastructure. READ MORE >>

via www.thesolutionsjournal.com

Lake | Flato's Bob Harris on Beauty, Place and the Environmental Imperative (VIDEO)

Robert Harris, FAIA LEED Fellow and partner at Lake/Flato Architects, on how to recognize and create beauty and place from an architectural perspective. Aesthetic places bring emotionally connect to human nature. People can enlarge their living experience by becoming aware of the environment – inside and out.

Jeanne Gang: Building A Wilder City

By Caroline Winter

Studio Gang Architects—run by Jeanne Gang, 48, and her husband, Mark Schendel—moved into the gritty Chicago neighborhood of Wicker Park in 2002. Initially, they shared their floor, above an Aldo shoe store, with a personal injury lawyer, a communist bookstore, and a poetry group. As these neighbors moved on and Gang’s reputation grew—she won a MacArthur Fellow “genius” grant in 2011—Studio Gang took over. Inside, research specimens line several of the orderly studio’s walls and windowsills: mushrooms, rocks, bent baseball cards, and various samples of wood. “A lot of the stuff we do involves testing materials or making big, giant mock-ups,” says Gang, who is slim with light gray eyes, a wavy chestnut bob, and an uninhibited laugh. “There’s a lot of craftsmen out here, people who fabricate things for us. It’s almost like a whole ecology.”

Among Gang’s intentions is to invite a “more wild version” of nature into cities, using what she refers to as “green infrastructure” to support and enhance urban landscapes. “Nature as we see it in cities is created, it’s man-made, it’s redesigned in a certain sense,” says Gang. “I think it’s important not for romantic reasons, but for practical and experiential reasons, to extend biodiversity within the ecosystem.”

This fall, Chicago broke ground on Gang’s biggest designed wilderness to date: Northerly Island. The plan, devised by Gang in collaboration with the landscape architecture firm SmithGroupJJR, fashions a public park out of Meigs Field, a former airport on a 91-acre man-made peninsula just off the southern tip of downtown Chicago. READ MORE >>

via www.businessweek.com