Green ArchiTEXT

How Five Major Cities Are Boldly Tackling Climate Change

From rising sea levels to so-called heat islands, the challenges facing the world’s major cities as a result of climate change are daunting to say the least. But some municipal responses – especially those spearheaded by architects and designers – have been as creative as the problems are formidable. Think city parks turned reservoirs, urban forests on demand, even a redirected river. What follows are a few of the initiatives that five threatened yet ambitious metropolises have effected or are exploring to engender civic resilience, with designers leading the charge. READ MORE>>

via Azure Magazine

Alexandria power plant along the Potomac to become mixed-use project

Redevelopment plans for the station include making space along the Potomac River accessible to the public. (Hilco Redevelopment Partners)

By Lola Fadulu

A development company with a history of transforming obsolete facilities has purchased one of the largest industrial sites in Alexandria and plans to build housing, office space and retail, granting residents new access to a large swath of the Potomac River.

The Potomac River Generating Station, a shuttered, 71-year-old coal-fired power plant, was decommissioned in 2012. Hilco Redevelopment Partners bought the site last week for an undisclosed amount after a 3½ -year pursuit. Pepco will continue to own part of the site to operate an electrical substation.

“We’re excited about the chance to reintegrate it into the surrounding urban fabric, open up that access to the waterfront and create a really dynamic district with world-class architecture,” said Melissa Schrock, the senior vice president of mixed-use development at Hilco. “We think the city of Alexandria deserves nothing less.”

Hilco will be guided by Alexandria’s 2017 Old Town North Small Area Plan and must include some affordable housing in the project, officials said. The site will include dining and public open space along the river.

The group recently redeveloped Sparrows Point in Baltimore, once one of the largest steel mills in the country.

“Development and development policy is the lifeblood of controversy in local government, but this is actually a pretty good example of a development effort that very few people are opposed to,” said Alexandria Mayor Justin Wilson (D). “Everyone’s pretty excited to see [the coal plant] go away.”

Schrock said the project could take five to 10 years to complete, depending on how long the company needs to conduct an environmental cleanup of the site.

The group also plans to make what it builds environmentally friendly. Hilco strives to reuse and recycle as much material as possible, Schrock said, with a goal of recycling 98 percent of the materials. It plans to work with the city to meet the goals outlined in the 2019 Green Building Policy.

Those goals include reducing energy use, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and improving indoor environmental quality.

“I think we really envision that this is going to become part of an overall eco district, you know, trying to use some cutting-edge environmental sustainability components: district energy and geothermal and a lot of things that we haven’t seen much of in the city,” Wilson said. READ MORE>>

via Washington Post

Bringing Buildings to Life

Could buildings imitate living organisms? Negin Imani has created a tool translating natural thermoregulation strategies into architectural solutions.

Building on the theory of biomimicry, an approach using natural-world strategies to solve human design challenges, Imani’s thermo-bio-architectural framework (ThBA) takes the many ways animals and plants regulate body temperature as a starting point for a roadmap to design energy-efficient, sustainable buildings.

“Evolution has solved many of these challenges, so where better to find innovative design solutions,” says Imani.

“Studying the structure of polar bear fur, feathers, and skin can motivate designing artificial surfaces capable of collecting solar radiation efficiently. Or consider our own blood vessels and the way they expand or contract to manage heat transfer with our skin.”

In a building, this could mean flexible pipes moving a heated fluid to where it is needed: in a roof-mounted solar collector for heating water, geothermal floor heating, or in the walls to retain heat. This use of capillaries is common to both animals and plants, but Imani sees plants as a better model for buildings because neither can uproot and move freely about.

“Plants can move some degree to increase the amount of light they absorb, and this same approach could be used in a house that shifts according to the sun or seasons,” says Imani.

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The Life Cycles Of Cities