Considered by some to be a nuisance tree, Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), which grows across most of the US, may be an important resource in the near future; it could be the sustainable replacement to rainforest hardwoods.
Black Locust Tree, Source: Wikipedia
“The greenest building is… one that’s already built.” We have heard this before. It’s often spoken in response to the argument for shiny new buildings with LEED plaques in their lobbies.
For those who advocate the reuse of buildings, especially those of historic significance, there is soon to be a ‘how-to’ guide, sponsored by the Municipal Arts Society of New York (MAS) in collaboration with the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). “Greening New York City’s Landmarks: A Guide for Property Owners” is being developed by architecture firm Cook+Fox and environmental consultants Terrapin Bright Green.
Empire State Building, Photo by Ryan Cunningham
I’m of the first generation that grew up with computers. This doesn’t mean that I was born with an innate ability to use them, but being around something fosters a sense of acceptance and curiosity towards that thing. To see what I mean, give a two year old an iPhone and see how quickly she manages to unlock it and then delete all your apps. At first her actions are accidental, but eventually she recognizes a pattern of cause and effect. I grew up learning how to learn software. My father had a range of CAD software installed on our home computer and I constantly played around with these tools for no reason other than my own amusement. Ashlar Vellum (the 80s version) was my prepubescent gateway drug to digital design and the computer simply became part of how I experience the world.
During a final review in graduate school, a well-known ‘environmentally-responsible’ architect told me that my project would suffer from inadequate daylight levels due to the strategy I had employed. This came as a surprise to me because the ‘problematic’ spaces were rather small with large amounts of north facing glass, but I assumed that the critic must’ve been right, given his collection of completed projects and, after all, I was just a grad student whose projects were small enough to fit in a jump drive. I later studied the project in a lighting simulation course and found that the ‘problematic’ spaces received plenty of daylight and, if anything, they were better than the ‘unproblematic’ spaces because of the more evenly distributed northern light.
The point isn’t that the critic was wrong, though he likely was, but rather that the success of a design is based upon decisions made in response to collections of information. In some cases, we don’t have all the necessary information or we don’t fully understand the inherent relationships so we fill in the blanks by throwing darts with our intuition. As I start my career in architecture, I’m left wondering what influences the accuracy of my intuition: is it possible for me to develop it faster with better accuracy, and broader relevance?
Integral Sustainable Design, [amazon.com] reconciles divergent knowledge arenas and priorities while establishing integral sustainable design as a unique practice, ideal for this time of environmental and communitarian crisis. It’s author, Mark DeKay, prods the profession and asks, what design challenges lie beyond whole systems design? And how can we shift our focus from ‘doing’ design to ‘being’ design? DeKay, a professor of architecture and director of Graduate Studies, College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee, has crafted an accessible introduction to the fascinating emerging field of integral studies as applied to the practice of architecture.
What is Integral Theory and why might it be useful to designers? Integral Theory is a powerful critical approach, actually considered a meta-theory due to its breadth, its applicability to interdisciplinary studies, its integration of the truth claims of the arts, sciences, and humanities as well as its integration of the perennial philosophy across Eastern and Western, sacred and secular views. Ken Wilber, the American writer, scholar and framer of Integral Theory, first began writing in the early 1970’s in his area of specialization, developmental psychology, and its intersections with spirituality and the spectrum of consciousness described throughout history. Wilber has published over 25 books. His influential ideas have found application across a range of disciplines, spawning the young but expanding global interdisciplinary movement in scholarly and practical applications of his ideas now referred to as integral studies, inclusive of but not limited to the research and writings of Wilber himself.
What is sustainable? More to the point, what does the word mean when applied to a school? The MUSE school, founded by Suzy Cameron, offers some insight. The new campus in the Malibu hills opened with the help from Ecovations, a design firm that has re-envisioned the possibilities, indeed the very definition of sustainability. This is not an “expensive” or “faddish” place. At the Muse school, sustainable means healthy, integrative, and economically self-sufficient. The mission, according to Cameron, is to combine culture with sustainability and language and its name, Muse, which was her husband’s idea, epitomizes the philosophy of the school: inspiration.
Treehouse. Photo: Sherin Wing
While its primary goal is to educate children from Pre-K to 8, its edifying influence extends to everyone involved with the school: staff, teachers, parents, and even the community. All are involved in the school’s ongoing evolution. Indeed, many of the adults find that here they learn about the small and large interventions they can make in order to achieve a more healthy approach to living precisely because many of the MUSE strategies are inexpensive (composting and growing food), and can be practiced at home (drinking filtered water in glasses rather than buying bottles).
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, left, celebrates with the University of Maryland team after they placed first in the overall U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2011, alongside Richard King, right, Director of Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C., Saturday, Oct. 01, 2011. (Credit: Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon)
The Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon 2011 is now officially in the books. Despite the sub-par sunshine and weather throughout the week, the competition ended with success. Nineteen student teams from universities around the United States and elsewhere competed to the final day. They were challenged to design, build, and exhibit solar- powered homes during a weeklong competition. The homes had to do everything you would expect from a typical house while striving for net positive energy balance and remaining affordable. Hot water, temperature and humidity controls, home entertainment, and appliances were all measured for performance while architecture, engineering, communications, and market appeal were judged for excellence in design and promotion. Standings shuffled daily and sometimes hourly, but in the end it was The University of Maryland’s entry, WaterShed, that took home first place overall.
Among the many challenges for architects today has to do with technology: How do you apply new technology that can improve the quality of life cost-effectively, socially-conscientiously, without hogging resources (i.e. it is sustainable). The Changing Places research group at MIT Media Lab is working on the problem, developing several projects to address these issues. Their goal, as they state, is to “understand and respond to human activity, environmental conditions, and market dynamics.”
Design solutions as set of inter-changeable components
The Home Genome: Mass-Personalized Housing project exemplifies all these goals. Here researchers begin with the premise that the home is now a center of everything from “preventative health care, energy production, distributed work, and new forms of learning, [to] entertainment, and communication,” according to the brief. They identify and quantify those activities, needs, practices, and even values. From there, they provide solutions based on building blocks, or the “genes” in the title of the project. These can be reassembled in a myriad of different ways to accommodate specific needs and activities of the occupants. These ideas are combined with new approaches to more cost-effective, resource-conserving supply-chains and production.
By themselves, such ideas are not new; we’re familiar with architects’ proposals for reconfiguring storage containers, for example. Read more…
My background prepared me for the Solar Decathlon competition. But I wasn’t sure how to apply my interest in sustainability and architecture in a meaningful way until the Solar Decathlon challenged our class at RISD to build a house that produces all its energy needs. For us as students, this was an unparalleled opportunity to use architecture and design to address global energy issues, environmental concerns, and learn essential practical skills to address them. It also showed me that it takes leadership and collaboration to understand and engage the world around me. It changed my DNA as a designer.
Growing up in a South American country where petro-politics shaped the culture and the economy, I was acutely aware of energy issues. The country’s abundance of oil fueled its development for the past century. It has also, unfortunately, become a political weapon that’s led to regional instability, corruption, and many social ills. Our dependence on fossil fuels has restricted our ability to advance in many other areas. Tom Friedman refers to this condition as a “resource curse.” For me petro-politics generate social issues that translate to an architecture of dependence.
Started in 2000, and every other year subsequently, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon challenges collegiate teams from around the world to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that consume only the energy they produce. These net zero-energy homes need to have all the modern conveniences for our everyday lives while incorporating the latest technology. And, of course, we must make these homes beautiful, engaging, and relevant.
The Decathlon involves ten contests, each managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Through these contests, NREL monitors all aspects of energy production and consumption, as well as subjective grading for architectural design, marketability, and the teams’ communication skills. Though the competition occurs in the United States, it has spread to Europe and China. It is one of my favorite U.S. exports.
Photo: Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon
It was in the fall of my third year of architecture school at RISD that I learned about the Solar Decathlon. The project was presented to us as a studio to design and build solar powered, modular, sustainable homes that would be displayed on the National Mall in Washington D.C. and put us in competition with universities from around the U.S. and the world. It sounded amazing.
On September 23rd the Empowerhouse Collaborative’s building opens to the public on the National Mall in Washington DC. After a summer of non-stop construction on the Hudson River waterfront, our team, among the 19 competing in this year’s U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, is hard at work to make our design real. Ten days after the opening, when the competition concludes, most of the teams will pack up their houses and go home. Our house, however, will be moving to its newly poured foundation in the Deanwood neighborhood of Washington D.C, where it will be expanded into a two-family home for Habitat for Humanity families.
This is just one way that the Empowerhouse stands apart from the other Solar Decathlon entries. In addition to designing a high-efficiency, solar-powered home for the competition, our team of students from Parsons The New School for Design; Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at The New School; and Stevens Institute of Technology worked closely with the D.C.’s government and the local Habitat for Humanity, to create a new model for green, affordable housing for the city.
During this year’s NeoCon, the largest contract furniture trade show held in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) introduced Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Pilot Credit 43, which applies to all Building Design and Construction, Interior Design and Construction LEED rating systems.
The pilot credit supports LEED’s objective of encouraging building owners and facility managers to implement measurable green building goals as these relate to maintenance and furnishings, specifically. LEED Pilot Credit 43 promotes the use of non-structural products, with known life cycles in LEED buildings, in order to set the foundation for continuous improvement. Also, for the first time, the USGBC recognized several third-party certifiers, which validate the sustainable attributes proclaimed by manufacturers about their products. Many of the methods of earning LEED Pilot Credit 43 revolve around the use of third-party certification.
Project Haiti IV
Q&A: Core77
Call to Arms
Living with Guild
Architecture for the Other 99%
Behavior, Bicycles, and the Best Intentions
Celebrating the class of 2012 Game Changers
Black Locust: the Sustainable Hardwood of our Future?
Q&A: Guy Horton
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