I recently learned about Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s concept, “soft fascination.” According to the Kaplans, environmental psychologists, “Experiencing environments that encourage soft fascination provides opportunities to think through situations and make decisions; to reflect on prior experiences and make sense of them; and to develop ideas that can be implemented in the workplace or in personal life.” The environments they mention can usually be found in nature. This is precisely what artist and designer Michele Oka Doner does. She immerses herself in the natural world and comes back with questions and answers that fuel her creations. Case in point is her new design for a landmark pavilion in the recently incorporated City of Doral, in Miami-Dade County.

Pavillion Elevation. Rendering by Local Office Landscape Architecture

A Miami Beach native whose inspiration is heavily influenced by her city’s abundance of nature, be it from the ocean or the flora, Oka Doner has left her mark on her home town, in projects like “Walk on the Beach,” the mile long floor installation that greets passengers at Miami International Airport.

When Armando Codina who, with his daughter Ana, is developing the Downtown Doral project, went looking for something that would make a statement about the new independent municipality, he was searching something that “would give it a heart.” Having chosen Oka Doner, he says, “She was the natural artist to do something special in our new city, so the selection was easy,” Codina explains. “Michele is a world-renowned artist whose roots are very much a part of the history of Miami–Dade, having grown up in Miami Beach,” he adds. Read more…

As a longtime subscriber to NASA News Services and a frequent user of Google Maps I get to see some thrilling and, often sobering, views of the Earth from space. For some time now, I’ve been watching the polar ice cap recede at an alarming rate while hoping that millions of others, too, are looking at the same images. It’s hard to deny that climate change is real when the evidence is right in front of you.

Image Credit: NASA/Aqua

Now we have another image to ponder: Snow Covered Desert. This phenomena, notes NASA, is “rare but that’s exactly what the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite observed as it passed over the Taklimakan Desert in western China on Jan. 2, 2013. Snow has covered much of the desert since a storm blew through the area on Dec. 26. Read more…

Small is beautiful. But for oyster-tecture, small isn’t the goal.  It needs to be built at the continental-scale. Yet the beauty of small oyster-tecture projects is that they are inexpensive, easy to set up and manageable on a community level.  Funding opportunities are available to sustain small community-scale efforts. And since lots of people love bivalves, volunteers abound.  The drawback is that those qualities that make oyster-tecture inexpensive and easy to execute are not easily scaled up for bigger installations. That said, it is not impossible to enlarge an oyster-tecture project while keeping the cost down, growing the support around it, and maintaining its ecological and design integrity for local needs, urban design, scientific discovery, and the goal of reestablishing a metapopulation.

Image by Chambers Design

Since 2007, I’ve headed an oyster-tecture project in Myrtle Beach (located in northeastern South Carolina).  It abuts Long Bay, which connects the city to the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The project started as a community collaborative focused on a single estuary known as Withers Swash, and is now growing to include additional estuaries with a vision of serving the entire northern coast of the state, which is comprised of Horry and Georgetown Counties. These two counties form the inner rim of Long Bay, measuring approximately 60 miles in length. It is known as the Grand Strand and is a major tourist destination for more than 10 million visitors each year.

In the last five years, our oyster-tecture venture has conducted water testing, annual oyster reef installations, visual assessments of four estuaries in the area, and initiated a shell-recycling program. We participated in the master planning for Myrtle Beach’s Withers Swash District Plan, partnered with local non-profits for bi-yearly cleanup days and pursued grants to continue to grow the program. Like many other oyster programs, ours depends on volunteers, donations, and partnerships that bring expertise in topics such as ecology, storm water, policy, urban design, and strategic long-term planning.  The core of the team consists of Coastal Carolina University, the City of Myrtle Beach and my company, Chambers Design. Other team members include the Grand Strand USGBC branch, the local Surfrider Chapter, NOAA, local businesses such as Shield Waterproofing and KOA Campgrounds, and community members.

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In keeping with President Obama’s “Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance” executive order, we’ve seen a decisive push for greener federal buildings over the past year. It even appears that different agencies are actually vying with each other for the most sustainable buildings—NASA seems absolutely thrilled that the new Propellants North Administrative and Maintenance Facility, at the Kennedy Space Center, will be its greenest facility ever.

The building will be “a future hub for spacecraft fueling support and a storage facility for cryogenic fuel transfer equipment,” so I was expecting suitably fancy, futuristic technology. Instead, the design and construction team is gunning for a LEED Platinum rating with some good old-fashioned methods—recycling and Dumpster diving. Read more…

Yesterday was the ground-breaking ceremony for William McDonough + Partners’ new Collaborative Support Facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in Silicon Valley. The 50,000-square-foot facility is expected to be the highest-performing building in the federal government, and thus will incorporate a dizzying array of green-building strategies (natural ventilation, a geothermal system, radiant cooling, on-site photovoltaic energy generation, and on and on) as well as some of the latest NASA technologies. “I like to think of it as the first lunar outpost on Earth,” the center’s director said. Learn more about the mission and features of the “Sustainability Base” with this five-minute video.