Green ArchiTEXT

Convergence: Maximizing the Architectural & Ecological Power of Buildings | Harvard GSD

Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy is based on the thermodynamic premise that architecture should maximize its ecological and architectural power. No matter how paradoxical it might initially seem, architects should maximize energy intake, maximize energy use, and maximize energy feedback and reinforcement. This presumes that the necessary excess of architecture is in fact an architect’s greatest asset when it comes to an agenda for energy, not a liability.

By drawing on a range of architectural, thermodynamic, and ecological sources as well as illustrated and well-designed case studies, the author shows what architecture stands to gain by simultaneously maximizing the architectural and ecological power of buildings.

via www.gsd.harvard.edu

Thinking Green: Chatham's Eden Hall Campus Brings the Past into the Future

 

 

To the side of an amphitheater under construction on the new $44 million satellite campus of Chatham University, an air vent pokes through the ground. Easily overlooked unless a guide points it out, the vent protrudes from a root cellar, a concept that has existed since the Iron Age as a way of using the natural coolness of an underground chamber to preserve fruits, vegetables and other edibles. It may seem like a symbol of the past. On Chatham’s Eden Hall site in the North Hills, it speaks to the future.

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Chatham’s root cellar is a symbol of how higher education has become deeper, greener and broader in western Pennsylvania, where colleges and universities have positioned themselves among the acknowledged leaders of a national and international movement. READ MORE >>

 

via www.pittsburghmagazine.com

Biomimetic Design Means We'll All Be Living A Bug's Life

By Jimmy Stamp

Firefly (Photinus pyralis) (image: wikimedia commons)

When I was a kid I had a “bug box” – a small, homemade container built from wire mesh and a couple pieces of wood. During the summer I’d try to fill this box with lightning bugs –fireflies or glow bugs, depending on where you’re from– in the attempt to transform the small translucent container into a natural lantern full of the insects whose biological incandescence was nothing less than a minor miracle. It never quite worked as I imagined. In, retrospect, the whole endeavor seems like a fantasy fueled by too many cartoons.

Or perhaps not.

Recently an international team of researchers looked to the firefly for inspiration in designing more efficient lighting. Building on previous research into the chemical reactions that powered the glow bugs’ glow, the team focused on the insect’s exoskeleton, which features unique shingle-like surfaces that reduce internal reflection, thereby allowing more light to escape. Using lasers to recreate the shingle shapes on the surface of an LED, the researchers were able to create a 55% more efficient LED. This is only one of the many, many ways that insect biomimicry is improving our products and our lives.

Biomimicry is a design principle that looks to reproduce systems, behaviors, or effects observed in the nature. After all, what we stupid humans have been working on for a couple hundred years –at best!– nature has been developing for eons. READ MORE >>

via blogs.smithsonianmag.com

High Risk: Art, Environment, Crisis | Artforum

By Michelle Kuo

RISING SEAS AND BURSTING BUBBLES: Today, events both wildly unpredictable and apparently inexorable confront us at every turn. We live in a world defined by risk—environmental, economic, technological, geopolitical.

From the “risk society” (Ulrich Beck) to “disaster capitalism” (Naomi Klein), Fukushima to Sandy, market crash to global instability, we are surrounded by new and unprecedented risks. Yet these risks have arisen precisely during a period in which risk management— the science of prediction, probabilistic calculation, and control—has likewise become all encompassing. We both can and cannot predict the weather. This special section of Artforum aims to address the paradoxes, critiques, and symbolic and material effects of these tumultuous conditions.

Environmental risk and climate change, in particular, are at the crux of the pages that follow. READ MORE >>

via artforum.com

Landscapes of Resilience — Joplin, MO and Queens, NY: Exploring How Nature Can Influence, Strengthen Restoration in Times of Crisis

The television footage of the devastation of Joplin, Missouri — struck by an EF5 multiple-vortex tornado in May 2011 — reminded him of old black and white photos of World War I battlefields scarred deep with trenches. Not just the devastation to the people, but the way the high winds had actually stripped away much of the bark from the trees, laying them bare.

“Those trees were first an indicator of the injury to the ecosystem…and later would become a springboard image as to how the community would respond,” said Keith Tidball, PhD, an Extension Associate and Associate Director of the Cornell University Civic Ecology Lab in upstate New York.

In time that imagery would also help springboard Tidball to the Landscapes of Resilience project in Joplin and Queens, N.Y., which suffered greatly from Hurricane Sandy. READ MORE >>

via naturesacred.org