we heart Frank Gehry
Well, actually, not so much. Buy one (or one of our Corbusier shirts) here.
architecture
The CDM and building sustainable cities
Now even George W. acknowledges that the world needs to “confront the serious challenge of global climate change”. The scientific consensus is that if present trends continue, the world is due for a 1.4 to 5.8ºC warming by 2100. The current international policy response is embodied in the Kyoto Protocol, which sets binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. One part of the Protocol, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), allows for emissions trading between developed and developing countries. I’ve been thinking recently about how the CDM may serve as an unexpected new source of funds to finance more sustainable urban development, of which all urbanists should be aware.
In the context of global warming, it is important to realize how massive the coming global urbanization will be. By 2030 there will be 1.7 billion new urban residents in cities, the equivalent of building a city the size of Vancouver every week. The two largest sectors of global energy use, transport and power generation, serve primarily urban residents and industries, and account for almost 60% of total energy use. Therefore the form that this urban growth takes, and particularly its density, will clearly affect energy use and carbon emissions, as has been argued so frequently by compact city theorists.
Consider a city in the developing world with a high population density but little public transit. What public transit exists is mostly motorbike and minivan taxis, with inefficient old engines burning gasoline. Suppose this city, with the help of some significant investment from an Annex 1 (rich) country or investment firm, build a new electric mass transit system, out of light-rail or bus rapid transit. Suppose they finance the switch to a cleaner burning fleet of taxis. Suppose they make sure new settlements in the growing city are designed to be easily accessible to mass transit, reducing private automobile use. A clear reduction in CO2 emissions would have occurred, generating a Certified Emission Reduction. Sale of the CER would cover most or all of the initial foreign investment. Moreover, the city would be left with a more livable, sustainable place. There are two significant hurdles to be overcome if these kinds of scenarios are to occur. The first is the calculation of the baseline (the “additionality”): what would have happened to emissions without the project? A strict interpretation of the Kyoto Protocol says the project should not have happened without the external funding to qualify for the CDM. The second hurdle is financial viability. Several studies have suggested the minimum viable size for a CDM project is one that stores about 100,000 tons of CO2 per year (or other greenhouse gases with an equivalent global warming potential). Only very big projects within cities are likely to reach this threshold.
As a small-scale example of this, Dhakal (2003) shows that a modest promotion of electric vehicle use in Kathmandu, converting all three-wheeled passenger travel to electric motors and 20% of the bus-travel to trolley buses run on overhead electricity, would save 20,400 tons of CO2 annually. As a CDM project to perform this upgrade could claim credit for several years worth of decreases in emissions, the value of the project on the global carbon market might be in excess of US$500,000, which would cover a significant portion of the project.
I believe the CDM may prove to be a grand opportunity for sustainable urban development. Estimates of the potential global market of the CDM have varied widely depending on assumptions, from $3-21 billion per year. Urbanists need to press for a broadening of the interpretation of CDM under the Kyoto Protocol. If even a small part of the global market for CDM could be used to leverage projects in cities in the developing world, it would make a huge difference. In the process, we would also build more sustainable, livable cities. In essence, I believe the world has the technical know-how to build more sustainable cities, but poorer cities simply lack the capital to enact this change. The CDM could be one of the important tools to close this funding gap.
Vertical Garden: The art of organic architecture
Via PingMag:
"Patrick Blanc overgrows the vertical surfaces of buildings in the most beautiful way. What he creates is far away from any fancy horticultural show, his Vertical Garden could rather be called eco-art, or greener architecture consisting of a variety of plants trailing gently up any interior or outside wall. Imagine the Hanging Gardens of ancient Babylon but this time on modern concrete buildings. But Patrick is not just simpy putting green on the walls which last for a day or two: set up with a highly scientific background he studies the many ways plants adapt to extreme situations at the CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris since 1982."
Where is My Flying Car?
I already got 5 emails regarding last week's note on the Barbican Future Cities exhibit. Apparently there are a lot of people out there wondering just where the heck our flying cars and jet-belts and antigrav undergarments are. Thus, to sate your hunger, to slake your thirst, I give you: the future!
- Future by Design is a huge trove of future city maquettes, animations and cg images, like these awesome sea cities, where everyone has rocketboats and personal submarines; the site is a companion to the documentary of the same name focusing on the work of the great industrial designer and modelmaker Jacque Fresco, and you can spend hours in teenage-boy-like-bliss checking out all the awesome models
- The Australian Sustainable Living Foundation's Future Cities Project
- McMaster University Art Gallery: Future & Virtual Cities Project - interacticity, stillcity, synchronicity
- futuristic cities in art, compiled by David Szondy; includes World's Fair exhibits, work by H. G. Wells, and many others
- Victory City: The City of the Future, the dream of Orville Simpson II
- pictures of the city of the future - please note that you cannot have a future city without a monorail
- of course, people in these future cities will have futurismic haircuts, right?
- Eugene Henard (1849-1923) and his futuristic city drawings (pictured: the Paris of the future) at the Cornell Library
- this interactive game takes place in a future city - aw yeah, flying cars
- at Global Graphica, a model of future Manhattan including the "freedom tower," but without flying cars or a monorail I'm still not very impressed
- some kids built these awesome models
- an exhibit of city models of/in Tokyo, which is as close to a Future City as we're going to get anytime soon
- BBC News article by Jo Twist on Hollywood's ongoing attempts to imagine & visualize futuristic cities and how they never quite measure up to the real thing - squatters, leveled neighborhoods ala Beijing, etc.
- the great Mike Davis is interviewed by Mark Dery regarding Davis' essay Beyond Blade Runner at Escape Velocity; related is Stephen Rowley's Cinephobia essay, The Least Scary Option: Blade Rubber & The Future City; to round out this meme, the BBC asks how much of Blade Runner has come true
- an exhibit at USC's library investigates possible futures for Los Angeles
Form follows human function
MIT’s new Stata Center lurches impressively over Vassar Street, a mélange of surfaces and cylinders intersecting at odd angles. Designed by Frank Gehry, it’s seen as the pinnacle of hip, postmodern architecture in Boston (which ain’t saying much), and supposedly is surprisingly functional inside despite its odd form. I therefore feel decidedly square saying it but I must: I think it’s rather ugly. More than anything, its ornamentation seems ostentatious to me, arbitrary, like a sculpture pretending to be a building. Part of me still believes in that mantra of modernist architecture, form follows function. Politically and spiritually, this at least seems like an honest goal, far more than mere irony and whimsy.
Yet as I’ve been reviewing the works of Mumford and Kunstler, I’ve been realizing how much of modern architecture and modern town planning has been a disaster. Often the scale of the projects has been all wrong, and the projects have not really been focused on human needs at all. There’s typically no respect for public space, no creation of places for human interactions. And they are often just plain ugly, all gray concrete and blacktop, which on our New England winters gets pockmarked with salt stains.
And so I’ve been struggling between these two parts of myself. I want architecture and urban planning to reflect some of the honesty of modernism, and yet I want beauty and even a bit of whimsy and ornamentation. It strikes me that both post-modernism and modernism have same fault, at least as they are often practiced: An utter lack of interest in what the users of the space want, and what will seem beautiful in the context of its surroundings. Form does not follow the true, human function of the building but instead a perverted function set by someone other than the users. For modern architecture, it became cheapness of construction; for post-modern architecture, it has become hip irony; for urban planners, it became moving cars efficiently. The solution, in my humble opinion (as an ecologist who is admittedly not trained in architecture), is not to abandon “form follows function” but to make sure society gets the function it wants.
As a counter-example to the Stata Center, I would offer the Levine Science Research Center at Duke University. It too is in a generally postmodern style, but all the whimsy is directed toward parodying and playing with the lines of the nearby gothic architecture, so it fits right in on campus. It has all the functional traits the Stata Center aims to have- good lighting, large conference rooms, flexible lab space- while also managing to form a large courtyard and quadrangle with other buildings, which are filled with students and staff just enjoying a beautiful public space. It may not make the cover of any magazine, but I'll take it over the Stata Center any day.
Berlin's Brain: The Philology Library
Norman Foster's new library for the Free University of Berlin is nothing shy of breathtaking. Perhaps even more exciting is that this pretty shell has a green heart. According to the article, "the building combines a concrete structural mass with a curved translucent double-layered skin that dramatically diffuses daylight and naturally ventilates the space."
Check out the full article (plus diagrams and pictures) over at Metropolis Magazine.
New York Changing
Photographs show old and new skylines, buildings and city artwork from New York City, through the photographs and rephotographs of Douglas Levere. This link comes from an ancient metafilter post, but since the exhibition is about to end at Museum of the City of New York in less than two weeks, I thought it a great time to put in one last plug. An excerpt from the New York Changing website:
New York Changing, The current body of work by New York City photographer Douglas Levere, is a photographic record of the ever-changing landscape of New York City. Guided by Berenice Abbott’s 1930’s project, Changing New York, Levere revisited neighborhoods and former storefronts, documenting the evolution of the metropolis known for constantly reinventing itself.
Instant City
In ten years, and with a $25 billion dollar investment, South Korea will have created an instant city for 100K people. Metropolis Magazine has the story. Almost makes me want to scrap some small cities and just start over from scratch. Watch out Elk Grove, CA! Watch out Waco, TX! Cambridge, MA! Berkeley, CA! Ah... I'm only teasing. Well, okay, not about Elk Grove.
Big Box Reuse
Hi all, I'm new. I remember once chatting with an architect who tried to convince me that big box development is actually a great opportunity because, in ten years when the company goes bankrupt, communities all over the country will have these huge boxes/land to play with. Although that logic seems pretty misguided to me (and, in my mind, the cons outweigh the pros), our reality and future includes lots of planning for big boxes...
A bunch of ideas in this New York Times article disturbed me, but this one's at the top of the list:
These projects succeed, many new owners say, simply because people feel comfortable with mall-style architecture. At Calvary Chapel, a nondenominational church in Pinellas Park, Fla., which started out in a Winn-Dixie and has now expanded to an adjacent Wal-Mart, the low-slung architecture is a draw for the 3,000 congregants.
Studio 804
Studio 804 is a program at the University of Kansas School of Architecture that presents students with design projects which combine challenging design issues and affordable housing goals. For months, the students toil and toil, eventually designing and building an end product -- a functional, efficient, and affordable modular home. The University terms these Pre-fab homes "precision homes." I just call them pretty fabulous.
Not for Sale
In his two part series, Not for Sale: City's Uniqueness, Mitchell Gordon presses heavily on how the unique attributes of a location are what draw people and businesses in, and maintain a sense of place.
We, at least in part, are defined by our surroundings. If we are to be a unique and interesting people, this will be reflected in the built environment, celebrations, and community activity that we allow to happen.
Read parts one and two from two April issues of Philadelphia's The Weekly Press.
The Untitled Project
From Matt Siber's project statement for The Untitled Project:
The Untitled Project is rooted in a base interest in the nature of power. With the removal of all traces of text from the photographs, the project explores the manifestation of power between large groups of people in the form of public and semi-public language. The absence of the printed word not only draws attention to the role text plays in the modern landscape but also simultaneously emphasizes alternative forms of communication such as symbols, colors, architecture and corporate branding. In doing this, it serves to point out the growing number of ways in which public voices communicate without using traditional forms of written language.
The reintroduction of the text takes written language out of the context of its intended viewing environment. The composition of the layouts remain true to the composition of their corresponding photographs in order to draw attention to relative size, location and orientation. The isolation of the text from its original graphic design and accompanying logos, photographs and icons helps to further explore the nature of communication in the urban landscape as a combination of visual and literal signifiers.
[via room 116]
skateboard obstacles, billboard homes
Toronto's downtown has built-in barriers to skateboarders and prevent the homeless from sleeping outdoors.
Across the city, seating areas, standing areas, sculptures — any place where people might be inclined to loiter or play — have sprouted an array of armrests, ribs, "fins," stone knobs and even klieg lights in an effort to keep us from getting too comfortable.
This is the essence of the exclusionary and separation trends that have been overtaking rich urban environments throughout North America. It is sometimes called the "suburbanization of the city." At its core is the vast amount of publicly accessible private land.
On the other side of the spectrum: the Cradle to Cradle (C2C) home design competition is over and Metropolis Magazine has the story. 'pMod', the first prize winner, recycles billboards and train cars into a modular home with some great features.
Your Own Private Heat Island
Heat Island Effect is a calamity where urban areas experience temperatures up to ten degrees hotter than their neighboring rural areas. According to research being conducted by the EPA, this phenomenon poses serious health risks to urban dwellers. Not only is excessive heat bad for a person, but the ground-level ozone that forms as a result of this heat can be particularly damaging. Riffle through the EPA's Heat Island Effect website to find out what can be done about this heinous happening.
Also check out the pilot project that Sacramento, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Baton Rouge and Houston are taking part in to reduce Heat Island Effects in their cities.
Getting Motion Sick at Home
It's like living in the space needle, but not as high up, and in Brazil instead of Seattle. My question is, would it mess up your biorhythms?
Recent Comments