Green ArchiTEXT

Nature, Pixelated. With our brains plugged into virtual worlds all day, what is real?

IMAGE: Nautilus

By Diane Ackerman

It is winter in upstate New York, on a morning so cold the ground squeaks loudly underfoot as sharp-finned ice crystals rub together. The trees look like gloved hands, fingers frozen open. Something lurches from side to side up the trunk of an old sycamore—a nut-hatch climbing in zigzags, on the prowl for hibernating insects. A crow veers overhead, then lands. As snow flurries begin, it leaps into the air, wings aslant, catching the flakes to drink. Or maybe just for fun, since crows can be mighty playful.

Another life form curves into sight down the street: a girl laughing down at her gloveless fingers, which are busily texting on some handheld device. This sight is so common that it no longer surprises me, though strolling in a large park one day I was startled by how many people were walking without looking up, or walking in a myopic daze while talking on their “cells,” as we say in shorthand, as if spoken words were paddling through the body from one salt water lagoon to another.

We don’t find it strange that, in the Human Age, slimy, hairy, oozing, thorny, smelly, seed-crackling, pollen-strewn nature is digital. It’s finger-swiped across, shared with others over, and honeycombed in our devices. For the first time in human history, we’re mainly experiencing nature through intermediary technology that, paradoxically, provides more detail while also flattening the sensory experience. Because we have riotously visual, novelty-loving brains, we’re entranced by electronic media’s caged hallucinations. Over time, can that affect the hemispheric balance of the brain and dramatically change us? Are we able to influence our evolution through the objects we dream up and rely on? READ MORE

Ed Mazria @ Greenbuild: How Do We Mitigate Climate Risk & Why Do We Need a Shared Vision? [VIDEO]

Greenbuild 2013 Master Speaker: Ed Mazria from U.S. Green Building Council on Vimeo.

Bob Berkebile: On a Changing Climate & the Next Big Thing(s) in Green Architecture

By Martin C. Pedersen

The green building movement doesn’t have one founder—it has several. One of them, without question, is Bob Berkebile, a founding principal at BNIM in Kansas City. In the 1990s Berkebile was part of the small circle of architects, designers and businesspeople who helped create the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program. He served as a delegate at the Earth Summit in Rio. Later, he took certification a step further and created (with Jason McLennan) the Living Building Challenge, a vigorous standard that exceeds LEED Platinum and serves as both aspiration and model. 

My conversation with Berkebile is the second installment in The Next Building Environment Today series, a collaboration between Metropolis magazine and Architecture 2030. Each month I interview an internationally recognized leader in the green building movement. Here Berkebile talks about the recent Bank of America controversy, his new concept of Urban Acupuncture, early efforts in China, and the Architecture 2030 Palette:

Martin C. Pedersen: You followed the controversy surrounding the Bank of America building in New York. What was your take on the New Republic article accusing the building of being an energy hog?

Bob Berkebile: I don’t know all the facts, but the early responses suggest that it’s being compared unfavorably to the Empire State, but that’s still relatively empty and Bank of America is full. Again, I don’t know the facts. What I do know is, when a system is undergoing change—and I would argue that LEED has created more change in our industry than any other single thing in my professional career—when that amount of change occurs, there are always pushbacks. Several months ago US Today did two feature articles, saying that LEED is broken. When you look at the overall energy numbers, buildings have improved significantly. But the LEED system, as it has matured, is a like a natural system. Are you familiar with the S-curve that defines the vitality over time of a natural system?

MCP: No.

BB: It’s a very interesting. Let’s take, for example, an oak forest. You have an X- and Y-axis. The vertical is vitality; the horizontal is time. You plant an acorn, and initially that s-curve is below the line, because it’s taking nutrients, taking resources from the soil, water and sun, and not producing anything. As it becomes a tree, then it starts being productive. It’s sequestering carbon, managing water, sharing nutrients with other plant systems.  As time goes forward that S turns up and becomes a steep incline as it increases its contribution and vitality. Then as the forest matures and gets to the climax phase, the line starts bending down again. So the graph looks like an S on its side. Then what happens in a natural system is something modifies it, like fire, and that regenerates the forest, and restarts the S-curve. That might be where we’re at in the green building movement. READ MORE >>

via www.metropolismag.com

Zygote Quarterly: Why Don't Solar Panels Look Like Trees?

Andrew Oswald on the Economics of Happiness

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.

Spatial Agency: Moving Beyond Architecture

Spatial Agency is a project that presents a new way of looking at how buildings and space can be produced. Moving away from architecture's traditional focus on the look and making of buildings, Spatial Agency proposes a much more expansive field of opportunities in which architects and non-architects can operate. It suggests other ways of doing architecture.

In the spirit of Cedric Price the project started with the belief that a building is not necessarily the best solution to a spatial problem. The project attempts to uncover a second history of architecture, one that moves sharply away from the figure of the architect as individual hero, and replaces it with a much more collaborative approach in which agents act with, and on behalf of, others.

In all the examples on this website, there is a transformative intent to make the status quo better, but the means are very varied, from activism to pedagogy, publications to networking, making stuff to making policy - all done in the name of empowering others. In Bruno Latour's terms, critical attention is shifted from architecture as a matter of fact to architecture as a matter of concern. As matters of fact, buildings can be subjected to rules and methods, and they can be treated as objects on their own terms. As matters of concern, they enter into socially embedded networks, in which the consequences of architecture are of much more significance than the objects of architecture.

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This website is an extendable repository of examples of Spatial Agency. The database is sortable into broad thematic areas that group the motivations (why?), locations (where?) and means (how?) of Spatial Agency. READ MORE >>

via www.spatialagency.net

Interview with Bob Berkebile: Moving Beyond "Green"

Nice interview with BNIM's Bob Berkebile in The Huffington Post:

Bob Berkebile encourages us to look to nature as our model for how to live sustainably.

Omega: For more than 30 years, you have been a pioneer in the sustainable design movement, and helped introduce the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard that has become the benchmark for green buildings in America. How can new standards in sustainable design help to restore the environmental, economic, and social vitality of communities?

Bob: LEED was created as a voluntary educational tool for those who wanted to reach for higher levels of performance in the built environment, but, as it turned out, the industry was ripe for a new standard. When the United States Navy and the General Services Administration made it their standard for design and construction, others followed and it became a standard. I would argue that, by far, it has been the most transformative tool in the design and construction industry in my professional life.

Omega: You've been widely recognized for your leadership in the industry, including being listed as on of the top five role models for green and sustainable design by DesignIntelligence. Were you always passionate about the environment or was it something that evolved over time?

Bob: I always loved nature. My mom taught me about observing the subtle but powerful forces of nature, and I try to bring that to my work. I always look to nature to see how we can evolve and change the way we build. Once, one of our buildings partially collapsed. I spent an anxious night on the rescue team, wondering if somehow I had caused this catastrophe. It was an epiphany. I became aware of unintended consequences and the need to change the design and construction industry to support life. This still continues to fuel my desire for change. READ MORE >>

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Perkins+Will Research Journal looks at evidence-based design, information content of BIM & more

The latest issue of the excellent Perkins+Will Research Journal (Vol. 03.02) explores five diverse, thought-provoking topics: evidence-based design in healthcare; design of a modular student housing unit; analysis of information content in BIM; relationships between digital design and fabrication; and network challenges associated with BIM data sharing. Articles include:

“A Design-Based Approach to Collecting Evidence” – Diana Davis, Bowman Davis

Evidence Based Design (EBD) research analyzes the built environment through a very rigorous lens, one that takes its methodology from scientific protocol. Most environmental designers are not well versed in the utility of scientific methodology for demonstrating design efficacy, even though they employ a similar method of questioning.

“Performance-Driven Design and Prototyping” – Ming Tang, Ajla Aksamija, Michael Hodge, Jonathon Anderson

Discusses performance-driven design and fabrication as one of the emerging approaches in architectural design, where computational tools are used for integrated design exploration, analysis and fabrication.

“The Information Content of BIM” – Mario Guttman

The application of general information theory to pragmatic problems within the architecture, engineering, construction, owner and operator (AECOO) industry is explored in this article. Some basic principles about the nature of information and how it provides value are defined and applied to current issues in the use of building information modeling (BIM) and integrated project delivery (IPD) in design and construction.

To download the full issue, or individual articles, go here.

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