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I just read this article in The China Daily by Erik Nilsson called “For a 5,000-star hotel stay, head to treehouse resort.”

There probably isn’t any place in China that resembles an Ewok settlement more than Sanya Nanshan Treehouse Resort and Beach Club.

But rather than being home to the pint-sized, bear-like buddies of the Star Wars heroes, these rustic structures in Hainan province’s Nanshan Cultural Tourist Zone are meant for habitation by tourists.

Nestled in a tropical thicket just a skipping stone’s throw from a virgin beach, some of these dwellings offer vistas of the 108-m-tall bronze Guanyin Buddha. Built in the tourism zone’s Buddhism Culture Park in 2005, the bronze likeness, which is 15 m taller than the Statue of Liberty, has the extraordinarily particular distinction of being the world’s largest Buddha statue standing in the sea.

Staying in one of the resort’s four elevated edifices provides a Robinson Crusoe-like experience for those who love “roughin’ it” that’s difficult to find in a country so enchanted with the luxuries of five-star hotels. As Nanshan Treehouse Resort’s American mastermind, self-described “anti-architect” David Greenberg, says: “Laying out there and looking up at the sky makes for a 5,000-star hotel experience.”

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I just read this article on the AIA site by Michael J. Crosbie called “Sustainability by ‘Amateurs.’”

It’s like I’ve been saying for years. Design like people designed before people became HVAC whores and high-embedded-energy sluts. Use materials that are already at the site. Design according to solar orientation. Channel the wind through the house. Use the earth. Use what you’ve got, again and again and again.

We are struck by how efficient, sustainable, environmentally tuned, recycled, and recyclable these creations are. They put our so-called sophisticated, LEED®-plated buildings to shame.

Here are some design guidelines for you to incoporate into your arsenal of understanding. Enjoy.

1. Design and build with local stuff. I don’t think there is a building in Rudolfsky’s book made of materials that were carted more than a few miles to the construction site. What are the options of doing the same thing on your next project? Our material palettes are much richer, yet there are still lots of choices that can be acquired locally. Building with local materials also helps the local economy, which strengthens the economic sustainability of the region.

2. Use thermal mass. Many of the buildings in Architecture Without Architects are in warm climates and made of substantial materials (stone, brick, mud, tile, or carved into the earth itself) that naturally help to slow the temperature swings within the building. This is a viable lesson and it can help architects in shaping and massing the building for sculptural effect: art from environmental science.

3. Catch the wind. If you are designing in a temperate climate, you may be able to rely less on mechanical cooling and ventilation and shape your building to catch prevailing breezes that will cool and ventilate without expending energy to do so. Again, architectural expression dovetails with this approach. Rudofsky shows us the roofscapes of the lower Sind district in Western Pakistan, animated with windscoops (one for each room) that channel the breeze and bring it deep into the building.

4. Follow the sun. Look at the native architecture that Rudofsky collected and you can always tell where the sun is—its track in the sky, and how the building bends and opens to gather it, but also how it huddles and turns to provide shelter from it. Courtyards, porches, balconies, and arcades open and close, like the aperture of a camera, in response to how the sun moves around the building. These buildings never forget their place on the earth, and respond accordingly.

5. Reuse, recycle, renew. Nonarchitects never seem to have a problem with pulling materials together from different resources (often, old buildings!) to make a new environment. The amount of wasted building materials in our own culture is staggering. Look into the possibilities of recycling part of a client’s existing building into a new one, turn old materials over to recycling centers, and work with manufacturers who have a recycling program for their products.

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I just read this article called “The eco-town has not landed” by Jonathan Glancey in Building Desing: The Architects’ Website.

In its earliest years, Letchworth was a magnet for sensation seekers. Cheap day excursions by Great Northern from London would bring gaggles of Cockneys up for a laugh to the leafy ways of this idealistic garden town.

How they gawped and gesticulated as they watched the new model Letchworth citizenry go about its business of growing beards, wearing sandals and knitting yoghurt while reading progressive journals and attending lectures on eurhythmics, theosophy and beekeeping. What larks.

Will the new generation of government-imposed eco-towns be treated in much the same way? Farce, it seems, is never far away. Build some spec houses with wind turbines on the roof, add some quango-style jargon about “sustainability” and, hey presto, the New Jerusalem will magically appear in what used to be Dullsworth Palaver, Much Barking and the former RAF Boxkite-on-the-Floodplain. Uncritical, clap-happy reports in the national press of how these instant “communities” have already been matched by the school of “I say this/Make no mistake” commentators. They smelled a rat as soon as “eco-town” slipped from the politicians’ mouths.

The potty thing about “eco-towns” is the unnecessary pother surrounding them. All towns used to be “eco-towns” in one way or another before the arrival of the car. We could house many people by gently extending and infilling existing towns and, if we had the confidence, by building even just one intelligently thought-through and beautifully realised new town.

Meanwhile, the prescriptions issued for central government-enforced “eco-towns” make them sound as risible as Letchworth was to jeering daytrippers. No one, knowing England, will ever expect to find instant, environmentally friendly new towns lived in by saintly Jonathon Porritt types. Nor decent public transport. Nor good schools. Nor, especially, post offices. Tesco, maybe.

The decline and fall of the post office should remind us all of the implausibility of the “eco-town” project. On the one hand, government barks away about “sustainability”, while on the other, it does nothing as we lose a public service that is so much a part of the very “community” spirit ministers are so keen on, even if the only “community” they know is tax-eating, expense-claiming Westminster. Every time a local post office closes, something of true community spirit dies with it, and people reach for the keys of their cars to drive to a non “eco-town” some miles away.

Architects will do their best, I’m sure, to make these “eco-towns” work in terms of individual buildings, but surely we should be able to plan and build new homes wisely without wrapping them in the wallpaper of fashionable jargon while despoiling land best left to kingfishers and water voles.

Nor should any of us celebrate such things while the very same people forcing us to accept “eco-towns” are binning public services, common sense, plain speaking and all the things that help to make a truly sustainable world.

Source

The South African government has announced plans to abolish the South African Council for the Architectural Professions and usurp all its assets and powers.

According to the recently released policy document on the proposed amendments of the statutory regulatory framework of the Built Environment Professions, South African architects will be stripped of their autonomy and self regulating powers before the end of 2008, according to the timetable published by the Department of Public Works.

That’s a direct quote from architect John Lautner. He was talking about Los Angeles.

(I like him already.)

He stayed here only because the technologies of the aerospace and military industries had established a culture of innovation. Wealthy residents were willing to take risks and experiment, even when it came to something as elemental as their homes.

The architect wasn’t – and still isn’t – held in high regard among certain critics, who see his homes as symbols of L.A. excess. “If you’re going to run the risks he did and build what Frank Lloyd Wright called exuberance and others called vulgarities, you’re going to build some mistakes,” Olsberg said by phone from his home in Patagonia, Ariz. But even those mistakes are part of Lautner’s biggest legacy in Southern California, a spirit of invention. “That’s what is amazing,” Olsberg said. “There are clients and architects willing to run risks like nowhere else. That’s why Lautner stayed.”

In the forthcoming book, Olsberg details the architect’s childhood influences, his cantankerous and sometimes self-destructive personality, and the genius of his work: a sense of freedom that one feels upon entering Lautner’s best houses – “a form and spatial experience so ravishing,” Olsberg said, “it brings you to tears – to walk in and have the world open up.”

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Okay, so this isn’t strictly about architecture or green design or urban planning (or another rant about the LA traffic).

It’s about a chair.

A Chair Affair Chair.

It’s so cool. I just had to show it to you. (Even if you’ve seen it before? Have you seen it before?)

You are cordially invited to attend this year’s Alt-Build.

When I heard about it, that was all I needed to know. The “Alt” part followed by the “Build” part.

Luckily, it’s only a few miles away.

Which should only take 45 minutes.

Anyway, it’s April 25 & 26th at the Santa Monica Civic Center.

Look, I’ll even give you a map to make it easy.

It’s from 10 am to 5 pm.

Oh, and did I mention it’s FREE?

Read all about it