The small heart of oyster-tecture is already beating along the coast of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Though embryonic, it could become a full-fledged infrastructure in a matter of years. For that to happen, practical aspects of current oyster restoration methods need to integrate a larger view for its future.

The majority of oyster projects are quite tiny, measuring in the single digits of acres – and even that’s a stretch. Most reefs are no more than a few feet wide by a few feet long. That doesn’t reduce their positive impact. Little is the new big when it comes to oyster-tecture. Larger projects do exist in places like the Chesapeake Bay and off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas. However, they are still a fraction of the size of historic oyster range in the same locations. In fact, if you combine all the projects throughout the eastern coastal states, you don’t have the biological framework necessary for natural restoration. That means that without people actively restoring wild populations, only farmed oysters would endure.

For nature to take over, we have to rebuild the metapopulation of the Crassostrea Virginica – something the current culture of oyster-tecture does not structurally support. Metapopulations (essentially, a population of populations) are a critical mechanism for the evolutionary and genetic survival of any species. Such a population of populations allows both individuals and groups of an organism to be healthy and thrive. Before oysters were overharvested, over-polluted, and their habitats over-developed there was a universe of separate areas that contained millions of individual oysters that interacted along a marine highway of oysteranic (not sure if that’s a word) reproductive interdependence.

Oysters in the warm waters of Winyah and Long Bay (in South Carolina) interacted with those in the expansive marshlands of eastern North Carolina, and in turn, they mingled with those in the rushing tidal rivers of the Chesapeake Bay and Maryland estuaries, and so on into the bays of the south shore of Long Island and the tidal basin forming Long Island Sound, through the coastal plains of Connecticut, and then those Yankee sliders frolicked (in an oyster kind of way) with the populations in Cape Cod and so on and so further into Maine, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia until their habitat dissolved into the icy ocean of northern Canada. This web of invertebrates celebrated each spring with a continental-scale orgy making the Atlantic a soup of oyster-ganismic juice full of the spat formulating the next generation of shellfish.

Read more…

Edward Mazria and the 2030 Challenge respond to the American Gas Association’s attack on Section 433.

Last week a House Appropriations Committee approved a spending bill for energy and water agencies and, tucked into it, was an amendment (sponsored by Representative Rodney Alexander, a Republican from Louisiana) that would essentially gut Section 433 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. That provision mandates the eventual elimination of fossil fuels by most federal buildings by 2030. An odd assortment of the usual suspects (think: evil oil companies), and some real head scratchers (companies at the forefront of energy efficiency) have banded together to kill Section 433. According the E&E Daily, the American Gas Association has been circulating a position paper entitled, “Fossil Fuel Elimination Rule: Issue Brief.” On Friday, Edward Mazria and the folks at the 2030 Challenge responded to the brief. It’s essential reading: http://www.architecture2030.org/enews/news_050412.html

Last week I received a press release from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) headlined, “Architects Oppose Effort to Repeal Energy Reduction Law for Federal Buildings.” This was in response to an action last week by the House Appropriations Committee, which approved the 2013 Energy and Water appropriations bill that included an amendment (sponsored by Congressman Rodney Alexander, a Republican from Louisiana) prohibiting the use of appropriated funds to implement Section 433 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

What is Section 433 and why should architects care? The provision is in many ways—all of them good, in my view—a radical one. It mandates a fossil fuel-free future for federal buildings. According to the law, all new federal buildings and older buildings undergoing renovations of more than $2.5 million are required to substantially cut their use of fossil fuels. The provision sets rigorous, targeted goals that culminate in a 100% reduction by 2030. For all practical purposes, this represents nothing less than the federal adoption of Edward Mazria’s 2030 Challenge.

Read more…

Photo: Matthew Hinton/The Times-Picayune.

Not even a month after we wrote about the impending demolition of the Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School, the battle over one of New Orleans’s last standing mid-century modernist schools has come to an abrupt but decisive conclusion. On Friday, bulldozers began their work on the dilapidated structure, two months before anyone had any reason to expect them. Read more…

Image courtesy World Monuments Fund.

The Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School in New Orleans looks like no other school anywhere else. Designed and built in 1955 by the architect Charles Colbert specifically for the historic African-American neighborhood of Tremé/Lafitte, the now-decrepit modernist glass box appears to float above the ground. Colbert managed to set back the columns needed to hold the building above flooding levels, creating dramatically cantilevered class rooms and an empty common area for the kids underneath. Huge windows let in plenty of sunlight, and kept the building surprisingly cool in hot and humid New Orleans. The building was celebrated for these features at the time, but fifty years of neglect and a hurricane have taken their toll. In July last year, the Recovery School District (RSD)—which works to rehabilitate underperforming schools in Louisiana—finally decided to tear the dysfunctional building down, and build a new school in its place by 2013. Read more…