Architecture Addiction. Getting you where you need to be.
I just read this article by Daniel Barbarisi in the Providence Journal called, “City promotes green design for housing.”
PROVIDENCE — The two-story Victorian house on the design board looks spare and simple, and it is. It’s designed to be easily replicated and produced by developers all over Providence.
Yet, as Mayor David N. Cicilline explained, in some ways it’s among the most modern buildings around — because it is built “green,” using environmentally friendly, low-cost, sustainable building procedures and materials.
Things that give me the willies already only two paragraphs in:
1. The houses can be easily replicated and produced all over Providence. Like how suburban tract homes are mindlessly repeated all over?
2. The mayor thinks these are the most modern buildings around. What’s interesting here is the “greenest” technologies are the oldest, i.e., before people had the so-called luxury of depending on wasteful systems and foreign oil.
3. “Green” is in quotes. My boyfriend is always wondering how many supposedly “green” ideas are really just greenwashing.
But let’s keep reading…
“This is a personal goal of mine, to increase the mainstream usage of green architecture,” said West, who works with Kite Architects in Providence.
Her design uses cellulose insulation made from recycled newspapers, natural ventilation instead of air conditioning and low-flow water fixtures to reduce consumption, among other green touches. It features a two-story entry tower, intended to improve air circulation and to “allow individual expression and an opportunity for exploration and learning, whether it is connecting to nature with star-gazing or plantings or a platform for wind-catching turbines.”
Whoa whoa whoa! She said “natural ventilation!” And – oh my goodness – she said “platform for wind-catching turbines!”
NOW I’m interested!
An incentive system should encourage developers to use the designs. The numerous nonprofit community development corporations that rely partially on city funding could get extra “points” in their funding formulas for using these designs.
So I have this idea for a Very Short Film in which an architecture firm is fretting over “points.” Absurdity ensues. You know.
The “point” system cracks me up (and deeply worries me). You can collect points by making purchases with your credit card, or by flying often, or by owning a timeshare, or collecting bar codes. This point system we’re so in love with always strikes me as a little juvenile and ludicrous.
(Can I talk about LEED for two seconds?) There are many ways to make a building green or sustainable or whatever buzzword you want to use…and sometimes these ideas don’t really fit into a specific pre-determined pre-sanctioned LEED category. And then there are products and technologies that meet criteria for LEED points but are not very green at all.
One thing I did at my internship was categorize product information according to the respective LEED classifications. There was this rooftop insulating material. That’s what it does. It insulated your roof so you save on energy costs. Sounds good, right? One LEED point, coming right up.
BUT…
The cover of the product information package shows a couple of guys (?) applying the spray-on insulative coating… in full-body protective gear with goggles and respirators.
Okay…
So if a person has to dress like it’s nuclear meltdown time, can I hazard a guess that maybe…MAYBE the insulation is made of materials not conducive to health and well-being? And maybe…MAYBE over time, those same dangerous chemicals will work their way through the building to the part where the people live? You know, the people who do not, as a rule, wear full-body protective gear with goggles and respirators on a daily basis?
Do you see what I’m saying?
The point system is fine if you’re lazy. If you’re not too concerned with holistic solutions or overarching extracurricular long-term results.
I’m just saying.
Maybe some hard-core thinking would be better than another point system.
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Architect Michael Lehrer hosted a Harvard GSD alumni event at his office in Silverlake last night to welcome our new dean, Moshen Mostafavi.
I wrote “Future Alumna” on my name badge. I was the only new student there.
I ran into a current student pretty quickly. Get this – she received a travel grant and will be traveling to the Amazon this summer to study South American infrastructure. How jealous am I?
(We also have the same name, but she pronounces it differently.)
She also gave me some good advice about my housing conundrum: she suggested just taking a temporary summer sublet in Cambridge. I could then use that time to find some a place for the school year.
The idea of moving even sooner made up for the particularly unfulfilling and underwhelming day at my non-architecture-related job.
Michael introduced Moshen to us and I got a chance to meet him personally. You know what he said?
I told him I was thinking about getting all my sleep in now since I won’t have time for it once September comes.
He said he doesn’t believe in too many sleepness nights.
Which gives me hope. But I know me and my ambitious plans might render my nights sleepless anyway.
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So for Mother’s Day, we went to go see “Son of Rambow” at this new theatre where my sister works.
This new theatre is in this new outdoor mall in Glendale. It’s called (are you sitting down?) “The Americana.” Which is about the least imaginative name I think I have ever heard.
(Did they come up with a contest? Who can come up with a name, any name, the fastest?)
So it’s got these promenades that line high-end shops. There’s some high-end condos on top of the high-end shops. In the middle, there’s this large park-like are. And a fountain (of course).
The shops and condos are supposed to represent different eras of architecture throughout American history, my sister told us.
I didn’t see any plantations or teepees, no Okie shacks or adobe beauties. Aside from the Eiffel Tower-esque elevator mechanism and the large gold cupola plopped atop the Guess store, everything looked vaguely 1992 to me.
I was trapped in 1992.
But at least there were trolley tracks embedded in the promenade. The idea of LA people ridding in some form of mass transportation – even if it’s just make believe and does nothing to alleviate our choked freeways – did make me feel a little tingle of hope.
Sam Lubell of The Architect’s Paper writes about The Americana too.
Most of the architecture at the Americana is banal and unapologetically nostalgic, ranging from vaguely Italianate to art deco-light to faux colonial. Yet at least it is varied in style and size, a touch of city-ness from which many malls could benefit. The addition of real living spaces—although far from affordable ones—within the complex helps contribute to this sense of urbanity as well. And within the architectural array, there are a few gems that—while somewhat bizarre—draw the eye and keep the array from collapsing into a wasteland of boredom. A golden cupola adorns a large Guess Store. A 175-foot-tall rusted elevator tower is topped with a thin spire that looks like a cross between an oil tower and the Eiffel Tower. A few of the contemporary-style buildings, each with its own architectural expression, are pretty good: a gray limestone-and-steel-clad Barney’s; a blond wood-clad Martin and Osa; and a Lululemon Athletica whose fiberglass facade appears to be peeled away to reveal glazing.
After about an hour, the piped-in jazz, the strange security guards with their Mountie hats, and the supernatural syrupy sweetness of the place become seriously grating. It could be the set for The Prisoner. You start to doubt whether this concoction actually connects itself to the rest of Glendale, which peeks in at places but is mostly shut out. You start to wonder who would want to live over a place like this for years, not just linger for an hour. And you also start to wonder why there is no Farmer’s Market like at the Grove, just a collection of high-end stores for wealthy visitors.
Still, while the project may be a little creepy and architecturally unspectacular, for a mall it represents a stunningly good piece of urban design. Like the Grove, it’s one of the few malls I’ve been to where I’ve actually wanted to linger. These designers are getting so close to real urbanism that you wonder what they might think of next. Maybe a non-chain store that locals would want to use? Maybe an urban space that doesn’t prohibit pets and photography or have a curfew of 10 p.m.? Wait, I have an idea. Maybe these fake towns could someday even become… real towns! Well, a guy can dream, can’t he?
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Allison Milionis wrote this article “Don’t Supersize Me: Los Angeles limits McMansions, downsizes starter castles” in The Architect’s Newspaper.
The old adage “less is more” has been revived in Los Angeles. On May 6, the LA City Council unanimously approved its “Mansionization Ordinance,” also known as the Neighborhood Character Ordinance, which will restrict the size and bulk of new or remodeled single-family dwellings in many LA neighborhoods. First proposed by council member Tom LaBonge in 2006, it is one of many similar pieces of legislation in the region, all hoping to limit the spread of the much-reviled McMansion.
The LA ordinance will require that houses throughout many of the city’s flatland neighborhoods limit square footage to approximately half the size of their lot and keep garages at a modest 400 square feet. Fulfilling criteria such as having larger setbacks and including “eco-friendly” features would allow homeowners to add another 20 percent to their square footage.
LA residents have long been asking for more restrictions on house size, citing the loss of neighborhood character and, in some cases, privacy, as a glut of multi-level McMansions replaced 20th-century bungalows. According to The Los Angeles Times, LA houses have grown steadily over the years, reaching an average of 2,500 square feet, just over 1,000 square feet larger than the average residence in the western U.S.
LA City Council President Eric Garcetti argued that super-sized houses are the antithesis of sustainable development and a “green” city. “The days of considering land-use decisions separate from their environmental impact are a thing of the past,” Garcetti said.
But realtors and builders have a different take on McMansions. Holly Schroeder, CEO of the Building Industry Association’s Los Angeles/Ventura chapter, said that new homes and substantial remodels are already 30 percent more energy-efficient than in other states and that in the next year, new California standards will push that up another 20 percent. “Bigger homes are not necessarily less efficient,” she said. The Beverly Hills/Greater Los Angeles Association of Realtors said the ordinance will have a negative effect on the already beaten-down housing market and won’t allow families to grow into their current homes.
Their concerns are not entirely unfounded. In a March 2008 review by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LACEDC), it was determined that property values would decline in proportion to the floor area no longer allowed by such an ordinance. However, in the same report, LACEDC pointed to the potential for property values to decline in neighborhoods with prevalent McMansions because the demand for such houses was dropping.
Los Angeles is not the first city in Southern California to put the kibosh on super-sized development. The first anti-mansionization ordinance was introduced by LA City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel in 2005, and applied to the Sunland-Tujunga community the same year. Glendale, Burbank, and Beverly Hills have similar ordinances on the books, and Santa Monica has been curbing super-sized development for a number of years. Other Southland cities have started to undergo similar processes. In February, the Manhattan Beach City Council adopted an ordinance that revised residential building standards in an effort to minimize bulky, lot-consuming houses and additions.
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I just read this article by Edwin Heathcote in the Financial Times about I.M. Pei’s new museum in Qatar.
Standing on an artificial island off Doha’s harbour, Qatar’s new Museum of Islamic Art looks like a leftover from an epic Atlantean production. It has that stage-set flatness, and that odd cocktail aesthetic of ancient past, postmodern and off-key speculation that characterises science-fiction future-worlds. Blockbusters demand visions that suggest something hovering between utopia and dystopia, the wonders of imperial Rome tempered with the eerie megalomania of Mussolini’s version. In the searing sunshine of Qatari daytime, it has a cheesiness about it, a dated, sub-art-deco chunk seated self-satisfied between a pair of operatic obelisks.
But as you approach, it gets better. Suddenly the chunky stonework and sharp edges begin to make sense, it becomes more as you’d imagine a castle or a citadel must have looked when new, powerful but crafted. Then, once inside, everything resolves itself. This, you realise, is real architecture.
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Matt Tyrnauer wrote this article about my favorite living architect, William McDonough, called “Industrial Revolution, Take Two” in Vanity Fair.
On February 7, 1993, the architect William McDonough, a prophet of the sustainability and clean-technology movements, which set in motion many of the green design practices that are commonplace today, delivered a centennial sermon from the high altar of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York City. The sermon, which laid the foundation for a lifelong crusade to do nothing less than right the wrongs of the Industrial Revolution, was titled “Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things.”
“If we understand that design leads to the manifestation of human intention, and if what we make with our hands is to be sacred and honor the earth that gives us life,” McDonough said that day, “then the things we make must not only rise from the ground but return to it, soil to soil, water to water, so everything that is received from the earth can be freely given back without causing harm to any living system. This is ecology. This is good design. It is of this we must now speak.”
Over the past few decades, McDonough, who is 57 and who, with his uniformly black attire and rimless round glasses, has the look of a dapper monsignor, has done little but speak of this. The McDonough sermon nowadays, accompanied by slick PowerPoint slides, has become command-performance material for C.E.O.’s and world leaders. McDonough has given it twice at the White House as well as at such power confabs as the World Economic Forum, held annually in Davos, Switzerland, and the ted (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, held annually in Monterey, California. His evangelist’s flock comprises politicians, high-techies, and fat cats who lap up the fine points of his remarkable theory of ecological design—what he calls “Cradle to Cradle,” a repudiation of the Industrial Revolution’s linear, cradle-to-grave system of manufacture, consumption, and junk-heaping. Cradle to Cradle, in McDonough’s words, “does not just reduce waste, it eliminates the concept of waste,” stipulating that products be manufactured in new ways that will allow them to be reduced to their essential technical or biological elements in order to be re-used. Nature’s cycles provide the model. Organic substances go back to the soil, to feed the earth’s “biological metabolism.” Everything else is returned as “nutrients” for what is termed the “technical metabolism,” to be infinitely, effectively re-used. As McDonough sums it up, sounding a bit like a tree-hugging Clint Eastwood, “I’ve got three words for you: Waste equals food.”
In 2002, McDonough co-authored Cradle to Cradle, a book-length manifesto outlining the new paradigm for “remaking the way we make things.” His collaborator was the German chemist Michael Braungart. In 1995, McDonough had branched out from his architecture firm, William McDonough + Partners, with studios in Charlottesville, Virginia, and San Francisco, and with Braungart founded McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (M.B.D.C.), a consultancy based in Charlottesville, devoted to Cradle to Cradle–izing the planet, industry by industry, compound by compound, molecule by molecule. “Our goal is very simple,” McDonough tells me from the shotgun seat of a Toyota Prius as we speed down Highway 101, south of San Francisco, headed for a speaking date he has at the nasa Ames Research Center, in Silicon Valley. “It is to help create a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil, and power—economically, equitably, ecologically, and elegantly enjoyed, period.” He acknowledges, “Cradle to Cradle is daunting because this is an imperfect world, and we try to imagine the perfect to try to achieve the best possible.” Yet he and Braungart are pulling it off in measurable ways.
Over the last three decades, McDonough has worked with an all-star list of companies, whose aggregate revenues exceed $1 trillion. McDonough will not discuss details about his clients, but reportedly he has collaborated with, among others, Google, G.E., Wal-Mart, Ford, British Petroleum, Nike, the Gap, Whole Foods, Herman Miller, the city of San Francisco, the U.S. Postal Service, and a number of Chinese municipalities. Buildings—including a preliminary assignment from Google for its new corporate campus—are being designed; products are being made to Cradle to Cradle specifications; and conceptual master plans have been drawn up for cities, including six in China alone. “The whole nation of Holland is going crazy for Cradle to Cradle right now,” says McDonough. “They have huge conventions called ‘Let’s Cradle.’ I guess when you become a verb you know you are getting somewhere.”
According to Phillip Bernstein, a lecturer at the Yale School of Architecture and a vice president at Autodesk, Inc., a leading design-software producer for the architectural, entertainment, and engineering professions, “When it comes to new ways of shifting our sustainability paradigms, Bill is the granddaddy of this way of thinking. He’s the visionary inventor, there before anyone. And now he’s actually building the factories that make clean water, working on the concept cars that make clean air, doing the big thinking that is moving things forward.”
“I have been plowing this row for 30 years,” says McDonough. “The work all of a sudden is coming to fruition, and it’s a great moment in our culture, where these kinds of ideas are now being addressed by corporations, by agencies. I like to say there is a strong current interest in the leadership of our species in issues of sustainability, and I think we have about 20 years to fix this problem.”
“What are the consequences if we don’t make it?,” I ask.
“We would be in deep trouble,” he says. “So, as you might imagine, as our design philosophy becomes mainstream, our office is flooded with calls.”
It was not always like this, not even as recently as the antediluvian 1990s. “I used to get called loopy,” says McDonough, adding, “but I was used to it.”
As a Yale architecture student in the mid-1970s, McDonough liked to fit solar panels into his projects. “One of my teachers [Pritzker Prize–winner Richard Meier] kept coming to my desk to give me criticism, and he would say, ‘Bill, you’ve got to understand: solar energy has nothing to do with architecture,’ ” he recalls. Today, design-school professors no longer view solar-energy systems as part of the plumbing. In fairness to Meier, the modernist master had no way of knowing that the kid he was talking to would become the harbinger of a movement to redesign design itself.
Many of the radical players in the ecology and sustainability movements who have made their voices heard have done so through protest. Think of the vigilante-style work of Greenpeace in the 1970s. For most environmental activists, communal sacrifice and curbs on industry in order to create greater eco-efficiency—that is, the reduction of environmental impact and resource consumption on a global scale—are the prescriptions of choice. McDonough sees the matter through a very different lens. To him it’s a design problem. Shrill broadsides against industry are misdirected. Dire predictions of heatless winters and a car-less future are missing the point. Perhaps the most compelling part of McDonough’s plan is its repudiation of the Judeo-Christian guilt that has long defined the green movement. He and Braungart reject what they call the “dour face of eco-efficiency.”
“How many environmentalists do you know who say growth is good?,” McDonough asks. “We celebrate growth. Abundance is something we want. Our idea is to make production so clean there’s nothing left to regulate.” This, he notes, is extremely appealing to people of all political persuasions, from those who love the environment to those who want commerce free of regulation.
The metaphor he employs to make his point is the cherry tree. “Think of the abundance of a cherry tree’s blossoms in the spring,” he says. “We celebrate its abundance of blossoms. You don’t look at a cherry tree in the spring and go, ‘Oh, my goodness. How many blossoms does it take?’ It’s not very efficient. You know, thousands of blossoms, just so that a couple of them can turn into cherry trees, is not very efficient. But it’s highly effective. And effective, rather than efficient, is what we want. Think about efficiency versus effectiveness in another way. You don’t listen to Mozart and think, How many notes does it take? He could have hit the piano with a two-by-four and got them all at once. Very efficient, but would we love it?
“One of the points we make in Cradle to Cradle is that being less bad is not being good—it’s being bad, just less so. To be efficient is the same as being less bad. If I left here and went north to Canada and found myself going 120 miles an hour toward Mexico, it is not going to help me to slow down to 20. I’m going the wrong way. We need a change in direction.
“What we really need is an eco-effective strategy, to go along with our eco-efficient one, where we look at the idea of actually inventing new things that will take us all the way up to our desired goals.”
‘The industrial revolution of 150 years ago was not designed,” McDonough tells me. It evolved over decades as captains of industry and their technologists learned how to overpower nature and forge great machines to make standardized items of consumption. “If you look at the first industrial revolution as a retroactive design assignment, it would be to design a system that puts billions of pounds of toxic waste into the air and the water, depletes our soils and washes toxins into the ocean or into the air, produces endocrine disrupters to affect our hormonal systems, creates and distributes carcinogens, causes climate change, and dumps plastics in the oceans. If this was the design assignment, we’re doing great. If it’s not the design assignment, then what is? And so instead of seeing what goes on today as inevitable, what we have to recognize is that it’s not possible any longer to say that it’s not part of our plan, because it’s part of our de facto plan. It’s the thing that’s happening because we have no other design. We need a new industrial revolution.”
The three principles of Cradle to Cradle, McDonough says, are really very simple, even if they do require a radical change in the way the world operates. “(1) Waste equals food. So we eliminate the concept of waste. (2) Use current solar income. So rely on natural energy flows—also geothermal and wind—instead of unnatural energy flows. (3) Celebrate diversity. We want to see as many manifestations within the protocol as possible to celebrate human culture—natural culture. We want 400 kinds of French cheese, but we don’t want 400 kinds of French plastic. So within technology, we want coherency; within biology, we want diversity.”
One of the things that is holding back the environmental movement and its proponents, says McDonough, is the collective burden of guilt about the ills of our society. “They say they want durable products that last a long time. Like a 25-year car. I’ll tell you why that’s not good. That car will still be made with toxins in the adhesives, compound epoxies. O.K., it amortizes its damage over a longer period of time, but it’s still a car that is damaging. You also lose jobs, because people don’t buy enough cars. You are using outdated technology on the roads for a longer time.” The solution that he and Braungart suggest is a five-year car that allows for industry to “transform the technology at high speed toward the Cradle to Cradle concept. The five-year car is a car whose materials are all coherent and tagged. In fact, all materials in the car have ‘passports.’ So we know where they come from, and we know where they’re going”—back to the auto-makers—“after five years of utility, so the car could be recycled and updated with the latest in safety and efficiency. All done with the same materials that you—in effect—lease from the auto company. They keep making the cars out of the same stuff.”
In order to pull this off, McDonough says, “we need a huge amount of R&
—fast,” to produce gut remodeling of industry so that systems will become so well designed there is no need to restrain industry. “Regulation is a sign of design failure,” he insists. “A regulation is what we call a license to harm: a government-issued permit to industry so that it can dispense destruction, sickness, and death at an acceptable rate.
“I want things designed so well there is no need for regulations,” he continues. “How about cars that spew out good emissions? Factories that make clean water. Then growth is good. Then the question becomes: What do you want to grow? Right now industry is set up to grow cancer and Alzheimer’s. For every case of leukemia we create nine jobs. Are the government and industry willing to sign on to that as the right kind of job-creation program? If so, we clearly need an alternative plan.”
The first sweeping change McDonough calls for is to have solar energy brought to scale—which is generally accepted as a viable plan. “I want to see solar power cheaper than coal. Then the forces of the market will deliver us a solar-powered world We’re not just talking about solar collectors on our roofs,” he says. “Think of square miles of marginal land covered with them.”
He admits, “The order of magnitude that we’re going to have to scale up to is immense. Can we achieve it? Of course we can. We make over a trillion auto parts every year. We do very complicated things. When we think about how simple it could be to make solar collectors—flat sheets in the sunshine—this is not a complex thing, to capture solar energy.”
‘You picked a good day to come along with me,” says McDonough as we cross the nasa Ames Research Center campus after a series of meetings. “You can see the breadth of my work. We are really starting to get into some weird, unexpected areas.” One of today’s discussions with high-ranking nasa scientists veered into speculative talk of McDonough’s helping to design colonies on the moon and Mars.
Retired General S. Pete Worden, the director of the Center, announced to his colleagues, “If the first thing we do is make a rubbish heap on the moon, that is not a good start.” The nasa scientists see strong parallels between their requirements for extraterrestrial colonies and McDonough’s drive to eliminate terrestrial waste and exploit solar energy. “Our buildings on the moon and Mars would need to be a waste-minimum if not waste-free environment, so why not make them Cradle to Cradle?” asked Olga M. Dominguez, nasa’s assistant administrator for the Office of Infrastructure and Administration, who is McDonough’s champion among the organization’s officials in Washington. More immediately, McDonough has been exploring the idea of constructing a building at the Center that will function on Cradle to Cradle principles. Diana Hoyt, a nasa senior strategic analyst in the meeting, said that “as a prototype for new design strategies and technology, this could be the first lunar building on earth.”
McDonough was pleased to inform nasa that the prototype for such a building already exists. He completed it in 2001 in Oberlin, Ohio. The Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, at Oberlin College, is considered by McDonough to be the test case for his grandest schemes in sustainable design.
“It’s a building like a tree,” he says. “That was the design assignment, and when you think about a tree as a design assignment, it makes you think about design humility. Millions of years of R& went into a tree. Unfortunately, in my world of architecture, the word ‘humility’ and the word ‘architect’ have not appeared together in the same paragraph since The Fountainhead. Just remember, it took 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.”
With just a few years of R&, McDonough tried to simulate arboreal perfection. “Think about what a tree can do,” he says. “It can make oxygen, sequester carbon, fix nitrogen, distill water, provide a habitat for hundreds of species, accrue solar energy as fuel, make complex sugars into food, change colors with the seasons. We imagined ways we could do this in a 13,600-square-foot structure.”
He succeeded to a large extent. The Lewis Center, made of glass, steel, and brick, with a soaring arched roof supporting solar panels, produces 13 percent more energy than it consumes, all through solar intake and eco-effective design features. The building is covered with trellises of vines, and a grove of trees on the north side helps to block wind and provides a habitat for birds. A “living machine” inside and next to the building has a marsh system full of organisms such as snails and plants that clean the wastewater. Classrooms face west and south to absorb the sun. Special windowpanes control the intake of ultraviolet light. Careful landscaping eliminates the need for pesticides and irrigation. The interior is designed with raised floors and leased carpeting, which goes back to the manufacturer at the end of its useful life in order to be made into new carpet. The entire building can be disassembled, and its elements cycled back into the “technosphere” to be re-used. It is a waste-free unit that enhances its environment.
“We think of buildings like trees and cities like forests,” McDonough says later in the day to hundreds of nasa personnel in a lecture hall.
The slide projected on the screen behind him shows a rendering from the master plan his firm has done for the city of Liuzhou, in southern China. “Think about Paris with farms on the roofs,” says McDonough, eliciting oohs from the audience as he reveals a bird’s-eye view of a prospective, beautiful downtown Liuzhou. Scores of buildings are crowned with orchards, crop rows, and rice paddies, taking the place of hot, ugly roofs. It’s an alluring vision: the city as a dense “forest,” with each building supporting—literally—farmland made of native soil. McDonough has lifted up the earth and put it several stories above the streets. Green roofs help to prevent water-runoff and pollution problems—water feeds plants, instead of running into sewers—as well as heating and cooling problems, since the roofs absorb solar heat. Picture a habitat for hundreds of species of plants and animals, instead of an overheated platform for an air-conditioning unit.
“China is going to house 400 million people in the next 12 years, so imagine that,” McDonough says. “You know, it’s like rebuilding the entire United States in seven years—all the housing here. They’ve made brick illegal in 174 jurisdictions, because they’re afraid of losing all their soil and burning all their coal making brick. So we have to look at new materials; we have to look at new strategies.”
To facilitate his work in China, in 2000 McDonough accepted the co-chairmanship of the board of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development, an agency that seeks to create positive solutions to the massive environmental and ecological issues the nations have in common. With Madame Deng Nan, daughter of the late premier Deng Xiaoping, who is the chief executive secretary of the China Association of Science and Technology, he is coming up with suggestions for a more sustainable future for the most populous country on earth.
‘We were talking today about lunar architecture, and wouldn’t lunar architecture have to be sustainable,” McDonough says from the podium at nasa. “As our species begins to explore the potential of our design, and we start to imagine what it would be like to have a goal like this, I’m going to give you a bit of my background, to sort of set the stage for future work.
“I was born in Tokyo in 1951, after the Second World War [where his father served as a foreign-language officer],” he says. “And when I was a little kid lying on a futon, I remember listening to the oxcarts arriving from the farmlands, coming to collect our sewage—which my mother happily called the ‘honey wagons coming to collect our night soil.’ And being little children, you can imagine how excited we were about these stories about poop. We thought this was just the greatest thing, this idea that our waste could go out into the farmlands, become composted, become food, and come back on the carts in the morning—in the form of tofu and vegetables and things like that.
“Most of my childhood,” McDonough continues, “was in Hong Kong, where we had six million people, who were mostly refugees from Communist China, sharing the same small island and territory nearby. During the dry season we had water every fourth day. And the relationship of the Chinese to the land is fundamentally different than our own. This land has been continuously farmed for 5,000 years. And how do you farm the same piece of dirt for 5,000 years if you don’t understand nutrient flow? In ancient China, it was impolite to leave someone’s house after a meal without leaving a deposit, because you were taking their nutrients. It’s a very tight equation: waste equals food.”
A few weeks later in his office in Charlottesville, McDonough tells me in an interview about moving, as a teenager, with his family to Westport, Connecticut. His father had become president of Seagram’s overseas division. McDonough experienced profound culture shock. “All of a sudden I saw American kids leaving the water running in the showers after gym. And I remember being aghast. That was for me my late introduction to this world that we’ve come to have in the United States now—where it’s estimated that if everybody used as many resources as the average American we would require six planets.”
After graduating from Dartmouth, McDonough helped put himself through architecture school at Yale by working weekends and summers as chauffeur to the bandleader Benny Goodman. Before entering graduate school, he went to Jordan to work on King Hussein’s Jordan River valley redevelopment project. “That changed me for life,” he recalls, “because I had the chance to live in a Bedouin tent. When I first got there, I looked at this tent made of goat hair and said, ‘They’re going to make me live in a black tent in this 120-degree heat with no shade, no air movement?’ But once I was in the tent, I discovered I was in deep shade, protected from ultraviolet light. The surface of the tent would heat up, and you’d get convective currents, so all of a sudden there was a breeze. The coarse weave was so open that the light came streaming in, so it was full of beautiful light to read by inside. When it rains, the hairs swell up, and it gets tight as a drum. And you make it from [a goat] that follows you around and eats everything you can’t.”
McDonough says he remembers thinking, How exquisite are these tents? “At the same time, we were helping the local tribes make adobe houses, which work under entirely different principles of thermal mass and diurnal cycles. The heavy brick moderates the temperature in ways that are totally effective for this place as well. So, I learned about mass and membrane and transparency from the tent and the adobe, and I saw that when you finish with them they return to the earth. The mud adobe hut is the earth; the tent will become compostable material.”
“Then, when I got back to Yale to start graduate school,” McDonough continues, “there was the first oil shock, in 1973. And I don’t know if you remember Sheikh [Ahmed Zaki] Yamani [the former Saudi minister of oil]. He made two remarks in forming opec. When asked, ‘Do you think we’ll see the end of the age of oil?,’ he said, essentially, ‘I don’t know that we’ll ever see the end of the age of oil, but I can tell you this: the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones. The oil age won’t end because we run out of oil.’ This had a huge effect on me. I started working on a solar house as a project at Yale.”
Ford’s River Rouge plant, Dearborn, Michigan.
Ford’s River Rouge plant, Dearborn, Michigan. Courtesy of William McDonough & Partners.
At the time McDonough entered architectural practice, modernism was still the standard in New York City, where he set up shop. As much as he admired the Seagram Building, one of the very first sealed-window International Style towers, he had little interest in contributing another glass tombstone to the world. He looked at Seagram and the many cheap copies of it being thrown up by developers and wondered, What are we building along our highways but sealed-glass gas chambers—structures that cut their inhabitants off from nature and turn their backs to their environment?
An early commission, in 1984, for the executive headquarters of the Environmental Defense Fund, in Manhattan, was really an assignment to create a healthy workplace. McDonough’s team started looking hard at materials and systems for their effects on human and ecological health. “We found out that our profession didn’t know anything,” McDonough says. “We started asking manufacturers questions about their products: What was in the paint? Was there mercury in the light fixtures? Could the furniture be recycled? And the answers we typically got were things like: It’s proprietary. It’s legal. Go away.”
“We did the best we could at the time,” McDonough writes in Cradle to Cradle. “We used water-based paints. We tacked down carpet instead of gluing it. We provided thirty cubic feet per minute of fresh air per person instead of five. We had granite checked for radon. We used wood that was sustainably harvested. We tried to be less bad.”
Struggling for recognition as an architect in New York City with an ecologically minded practice but few clients who understood or cared about ecology, McDonough took on projects such as the Quilted Giraffe restaurant and the Paul Stuart store on Madison Avenue, neither one a landmark of sustainability. (In the case of the Paul Stuart job, he insisted on having 1,000 oak trees planted to replace the 2 used in the construction of the interior.)
“I was tired of being less bad,” says McDonough. “The way Frank Gehry must have felt when he made the decision: No more work for developers—I’m doing my own thing. As Louis Pasteur said, ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ This is how I felt when I met Michael Braungart.”
Braungart was a veteran of some German green-movement protests. As he writes in Cradle to Cradle, “I was caught up in the notion that industry was bad, and environmentalism was ethically superior to it.” His perspective changed after he and other demonstrators received a surprisingly warm reception from the director of a chemical company whose smokestacks they had chained themselves to. Braungart decided that his nascent environmental-chemistry-research group should work with industry rather than against it, and so, at the suggestion of the chemical-plant director, he changed his group’s name from the Environmental Protection Enforcement Agency to the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (E.P.E.A.).
McDonough met Braungart at an E.P.E.A. event on a Manhattan rooftop. The chance encounter lit a spark that would lead to the drive toward a second industrial revolution and the birth of Cradle to Cradle.
The next day they resumed their conversation in McDonough’s office. “He described the whole idea of materials that go back to soil and materials that go back to technology, and that’s when I said, ‘Oh, I see. Waste equals food,’ ” McDonough recalls. “Then we started talking about how this worked in the cosmos: that energy would come from the sun, that materials and chemistry would be seen as mass flows on the earth, and they had to be coherent. And we got so excited about it that we wanted to draw diagrams, and I didn’t have any flip charts or marker boards on the walls or anything. I was in my conference room. But when I draw and sketch architecture projects early, I have a big fat pencil, so I handed it to him and said, ‘Go ahead and draw.’ He started diagramming all of these scientific explanations of waste equals food on the wall, and I wish I had saved it, because it was really quite amazing. What he was talking about was mass-energy balance. If we combined the chemistry that he was doing with the design that we were doing, we could come up with something new. Effectively, that’s when we started the whole concept of design chemistry. It was a eureka moment.”
Their first collaboration on a product, in 1995, seems like a virtual industrial miracle. “We started the company to do textiles,” says McDonough. “A fabric company called Designtex, owned by Steelcase, was doing a portfolio series of fabrics, by Aldo Rossi, Richard Meier, Bob Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and me. And when I was asked to design what they looked like, I said, ‘Well, I’d have to design what it’s made out of. Not just what it looks like, but what it’s made from.’ So Susan Lyons, who was then the creative director for Designtex, got this immediately, and she selected a mill in Switzerland as the most advanced textile mill that she could think of that could take on this assignment.”
The McDonough-Braungart group tested all of the dye chemicals to determine if they caused cancer or other problems—birth defects, immune-system disruption, soil and water toxicity. They found that, of the 8,000 chemicals used in the dyeing and finishing process, only 38 met the protocol standards for human and ecological safety. But Braungart determined that was enough. With 38 chemicals, virtually any color could be produced, and costs associated with regulatory codes had been reduced, so the fabric’s price remained competitive. The human gains were even greater—health risks for mill workers and customers were greatly reduced.
The Herman Miller GreenHouse in Holland, Michigan
A sun-filled interior at the Herman Miller “GreenHouse” factory and offices in Holland, Michigan. Photograph by Todd Eberle.
“When they tested the water leaving the plant, the Swiss inspectors thought their instruments were broken. It was as clean as the water coming in—which is Swiss drinking water. On top of that, the trimmings from the fabric, which once were classified as hazardous waste and could not be buried or burned in Switzerland, were now contributed to the local gardening club and used as mulch for the compost heap.”
The miracle of the Swiss fabric has become the model for the Cradle to Cradle Certification system, which M.B.D.C. established in 2005. To date, more than 100 products, including a flushable diaper insert from gDiapers, chairs from Herman Miller, and even packaging from the U.S. Postal Service, have received the Cradle to Cradle seal of approval, a cross between the Good Housekeeping Seal and the leed (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System given by the U.S. Green Building Council.
In McDonough’s architecture studio in Charlottesville, where 49 associates work at ranks of desks, McDonough gestures to a scale model of the headquarters he designed for the Gap clothing company in San Bruno, California, south of San Francisco, completed in 1997. (Space in the building was recently leased from the Gap by Google to house its YouTube division.) “I think 10,000 architects have been through that building,” says McDonough. Many of McDonough’s buildings do not carry the U.S. Green Building Council’s leed certification, because they were built before leed came into being, in 2000. (Since then, some have been given “existing building” leed certification.) Part of the early design and planning for leed took place at a meeting hosted by McDonough at the University of Virginia, where he was dean of the architecture school from 1994 to 1999.
Later, McDonough and I stand on the green roof in San Bruno, and although we are only a few hundred feet from a freeway, the rolling vegetation up here gives the illusion of being in the Irish countryside. It was one of the first such roofs to be built in the U.S. “The design team had to get permission from the federal government to go on federal lands to collect the native seeds,” says McDonough. “It is effectively a nursery of native seeds for anyone who needs them.” We descend a ladder to the work floors as McDonough explains how the building has very significantly reduced energy consumption by means of an under-the-floor cooling system, which admits chilly air during the night and releases it during the day. As a result, there is reduced need for conventional air-conditioning.
“We were trying to show that it could exist—therefore, it is possible,” says McDonough. “So now when someone gets up and says, ‘We’re doing a giant green roof on a building—isn’t it wonderful?,’ it is wonderful. And it’s easier for them to say, ‘Let’s do it,’ because we did it once. We’ve only created the examples in the last 15 years that people can copy—the sort of things we did with Oberlin, the Gap, and the River Rouge.”
River Rouge, the massive Ford factory designed by Henry Ford in the 1920s, is the largest project thus far where McDonough has been able to show his ability to reverse the damage done by the Industrial Revolution. Almost a decade ago, at a Business for Social Responsibility conference in Boston, McDonough effectively stalked William Ford Jr., who had just been elected chairman of the company, to make a pitch concerning his ecological vision. He knew that the Ford heir had a very advanced green agenda for the automaker.
Ford representatives at the conference arranged a meeting for McDonough. “It was January 14, 1999,” he recalls. “We had a great conversation. It lasted most of the day. And then, after a while, he asked if I could take on the Rouge. I didn’t even know it was coming. Then he made an announcement at a Ford environmental conference, with cameras rolling, that we were going to be put in charge. So off we went.”
When McDonough arrived in Dearborn, Michigan, to see the factory, it approximated a toxic dump along a river. His brief was to make a new, green truck plant, and to solve the problem of runoff from the site, which had poisoned the river for almost a century. One of the most powerful slides McDonough uses in his sermon shows the completed Ford plant, with the largest green roof ever constructed at that time. “What you’re looking at in this picture is the roof of the River Rouge manufacturing plant that we designed,” he tells his nasa audience. “And those are killdeer eggs. Those birds arrived five days after the roof was put down.”
“Designers must become leaders, and leaders must become designers,” says McDonough, who is a great fan of Thomas Jefferson, the only architect-president. While McDonough was teaching at the University of Virginia, he lived in a house designed by Jefferson, and grew very fond, he says, of a passage in a letter the third president wrote to James Madison in 1789. “They were deciding the term of the federal bond,” says McDonough, “and Jefferson’s conclusion was that a federal bond should have a term of only one generation. And his logic was this: The earth belongs to the living. No man may, by natural right, oblige the lands he owns or occupies to debts greater than those that may be paid during his own lifetime. Because, if he could, then the world would belong to the dead, and not to the living.”
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Peter Eisenman set out his thoughts on architecture at RIAS 2008
Point one: Architecture in a media culture
Media has invaded every aspect of our lives. It is difficult to walk out on the street or stand in a crowded elevator without encountering people speaking into cellular phones at the top of their voices as if no one else was around. People leave their homes and workplaces and within seconds are checking their Blackberries. Their iPhones provide instant messaging email, news, telephone and music—it’s as if they were attached to a computer.
Less and less people are able to be in the real physical world without the support of the virtual world. This has brought about a situation in which people have lost the capacity to focus on something for any length of time. This is partly because media configures time in discrete segments.
Focus is conditioned by how long one can watch something before there is an advertisement. In newspapers stories keep getting shorter, the condensed version is available on the internet. This leads today to a corruption of what we think of as communication, with a lessening of the capacity to read or write correct sentences. While irrelevant information multiplies, communication diminishes. If architecture is a form of media it is a weak one. To combat the hegemony of the media, architecture has had to resort to more and more spectacular imaging. Shapes generated through digital processes become both built icons that have no meaning but also only refer to their own internal processes. Just think of any architectural magazine today devoted, supposedly, to the environment, and instead one finds media.
Point two: Students have become passive
The corollary to the prevalent media culture is that the viewing subject has become increasingly passive. In this state of passivity people demand more and more images, more visual and aural information and in a state of passivity people demand things that are easily consumed.
The more passive people become the more they are presented by the media with supposed opportunities to exercise choice. Vote for this, vote for whatever stories you want to hear, vote for what popular song you want to hear, vote for what commercial you want to see. This voting gives the appearance of active participation, but it is merely another form of sedation because the voting is irrelevant It is part of the attempt to make people believe they are participating when in fact they are becoming more and more passive.
Students also have become passive. More passive than students in the past. This is not a condemnation but a fact. To move students to act or to protest for or against anything today is impossible. Rather they have a sense of entitlement. The generations that remember 1968 feel that those kinds of student protests are almost impossible today. For the last seven years we have had in the US one of the most problematic governments in our history. Probably the most problematic since the mid-19th century and president Millard Fillmore. Our reputation in Europe, our dollar, our economy, the spirit of our people, has been weakened. In such a state of ennui people feel they can do little to bring about change. With the war in Iraq draining our economy there is still the possibility that the political party responsible for today’s conditions will be re-elected.
Will this have consequences for architecture?
Point three: Computers make design standards poorer
This passivity is related to architecture. Architecture today relies on one of passivity’s most insidious forms—the computer.
Architects used to draw volumes, using shading and selecting a perspective. In learning how to draw one began to understand not only what it was like to draw like Palladio or Le Corbusier but also the extent of the differences in their work. A wall section of Palladio felt different to the hand than one of Le Corbusier’s. It is important to understand such differences because they convey ideas. One learned to make a plan. Now, with a computer, one does not have to draw. By clicking a mouse from point to point, one can connect dots that make plans, one can change colours, materials and light. Photoshop is a fantastic tool for those who do not have to think.
The problem is as follows. “So what?” my students say, “Why draw Palladio? How will it help me get a job?” The implication is this: “If it’s not going to help me get a job, I don’t want to do it.” In this sense, architecture does not matter. In a liberal capital society, getting a job matters, and my students are in school precisely for this reason.
Yet education does not help you get a job. In fact, the better you are at Photoshop the more attractive you are to an office, the better you will work in that office.
If I ask a student to make a diagram or a plan that shows the ideas of a building, they cannot do it. They are so used to connecting dots on a computer that they cannot produce an idea of a building in a plan or a diagram. This is certain to affect not only their future, but the future of our profession.
Point four: Today’s buildings lack meaning or reference
The computer is able to produce the most incredible imagery which become the iconic images of magazines and competitions. To win a competition today one has to produce shapes and icons by computer.
But these are icons with little meaning or relationship to things in the real world. According to the American pragmatist philosopher C S Peirce there were three categories of signs: icons, symbols, and indices. The icon had a visual likeness to an object.
Robert Venturi’s famous dictum categorised buildings as either “a duck or a decorated shed”; the difference between an icon and symbol in architectural terms.
A “duck” is a building that looks like its object—a hotdog stand in the form of a giant hotdog or, in Venturi’s terms, a place that sells ducks taking the very same shape as a duck. This visual similitude produces what Peirce calls an icon which can be understood at first glance.
Venturi’s other term, the “decorated shed”, describes a public facade for what amounts to a generic box like building. The decorated shed is more a symbol, in Peirce’s terms, which has an agreed upon, or conventional meaning. A classical facade symbolises a public building, whether it is a bank a library or school.
Today the shape of buildings become icons which have none of these external references. They may not necessarily look like anything or they may only resemble the processes that made them. In this case they do not relate outwardly but refer inwardly. These are icons that have little cultural meaning or reference. There is no reason to ask our more famous architects: “Why does it look like this?”
There is no answer to this question because “Why?” is the wrong question.
Why? Because the computer can produce it. One could ask these architects: “Why is this one better than that one?” Or “Which one of the crumpled paper buildings is better?” Or “Which one is the best and why?”
There is no answer again to these questions. Why? Because there is no value system in place for judging, and there is no relationship to be able to judge between the image produced and its meaning as an icon.
These icons are made from algorithmic processes that have nothing to do with architectural thinking.
Point five: We are in a period of late style
Edward Said in his book On Late Style describes lateness as a moment in time when there are no new paradigms or ideological, cultural, political conditions that cause significant change. Lateness can be understood as a historical moment which may contain the possibilities of a new future paradigm.
For example there were reasons in the late 19th century for architecture to change. These included changes in psychology introduced by Freud; in physics by Einstein; in mathematics with Heisenberg; and in flight with the Wright brothers. These changes caused a reaction against the Victorian and imperial styles of the period and articulated a new paradigm: modernism.
With each new paradigm, whether it is the French revolution or the Renaissance, there is an early phase, which in modernism was from 1914-1939; a high phase, which in modernism occurred 1954-1968 when it was consumed by liberal capital after the war; and a period of opposition. The year 1968 saw an internal, implosive revolution, one that reacted against institutions representing the cultural past of many of the western societies. This was followed by post modernism’s eclectic return to a language that seemed to have meaning. The Deconstructivist exhibition at the MoMA in 1988 put an end to this cliché and kitsch style.
Today I say we are in a period of late style. A period in which there is no new paradigm. Computation and the visual may produce a shift from the notational but this in itself is not a new paradigm. It is merely a tool. The question remains: What happens when one reaches the end of a historical cycle? On Late Style by Edward Said describes such a moment in culture before a shift to a new paradigm. A moment not of fate or hopelessness but one that contains a possibility of looking at a great style for the possibility of the new and the transformative. He uses as an example Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, written at the end of Beethoven’s career. This was the composer’s response to the seeming impossibility of innovation. Instead Beethoven wrote a piece that was difficult, even anarchic, that could not be easily understood and was outside of his characteristic and known style. Beethoven’s later work is an example of the complexity ambivalence, and the “undecidability” that characterises a late style.
Point six: To be an architect is a social act
This last point deals with architecture and its unique autonomy. Since the Renaissance in Italy when Brunelleschi, Alberti and Bramanti established what can be called the persistencies of architecture—subject-object relationships—these persistencies have remained operative to this day. Alberti’s dictum that “a house is a small city and a city is a large house”, remains with us in all works that we see. In other words the relationship between the part and the whole: the figure and the ground, the house to its site, the site to the street, the street to its neighbourhood and the neighbourhood to the city.
These issues constitute the basis of what would be called the dialectical synthesis as an aspect of the ongoing metaphysical project. Thus one of the things that must be investigated is the problematic part-to-whole relationship—which is part of a Hegelian dialectical idea of thesis and anti-thesis forming a new whole or synthesis—and the relationship of building to ground.
Architecture has traditionally been concerned with these dialectical categories, whether it is inside/outside, figure/ground, subject/object. For me today, it is necessary to look within architecture to see if it is possible to break up this synthetic project from within. This attempt is what post-structuralism would consider the displacement of the metaphysics of presence.
If we continue to think that what is presented is necessarily truthful or what we see is truthful and also beautiful then we will continue to subscribe to the myth that architecture is the wonder of the metaphysics of presence. It may become possible with such an awareness to move away from what I call the hegemony of the image.
People always say formalism is the project of architecture’s autonomists. For me it is precisely this autonomy which is architecture’s delay of engaging with society. If it is architecture’s activity and its own discourse which in fact impacts society, then to be an architect is a social act.
This does not mean social in the form of making people feel better or happy. Or building houses for the poor or shopping malls for the rich or garages for Mercedes. I am talking about understanding those conditions of autonomy that are architectural, that make for an engagement with society in the sense of operating against the existing hegemonic social and political structures of our time. That is what architecture has always been.
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Here I go about gas prices again…
The Field Trip Team has saddened me with the news that rising fuel costs mean that they have no choice but to raise Field Trip prices.
I begged…I pleaded…I whined….
So okay, you have until May 16th to get your Reservation Form into my hands so that we can register you by the May 17th Absolute Cut Off Point.
After May 17th?
Higher prices.
Before May 17th?
Regular low prices.
Check out the Field Trips to the right, and let me know if you want to take advantage of these classic nostalgic good-old-timey prices.
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Los Angeles
Saturday, May 17: The Venice Art Walk & Auctions is an annual celebration of art, architecture, music, and food to benefit the Venice Family Clinic – the largest free clinic in the country. On May 17, meet the meet the architects and developers involved in Venice’s freshest new residences, including award-winning, prefab and sustainable designs by architects featured in Dwell. Through May 18. Various Locations, Venice; (310) 392-9255.
Miami
Friday, May 16: Les Standiford reads from Washington Burning, his book on 19th century architect and urban planner Pierre Charles L’Enfant, whose vision we see manifest in the U.S. capitol today. 8 p.m; Books & Books - Coral Gables, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables.
New York
Sunday, May 18: As part of the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, Dwell editor in chief, Sam Grawe, speaks with Copenhagen-based designer Louise Campbell, recently featured in dwell.com’s Emerging Designer video series. 11 a.m.-12 p.m.; Jacob K. Javits Center, 655 W 34 St.; (212) 216-2000.
San Francisco
Saturday, May 17: The Oakland Museum of Art opens Birth of the Cool, an exhibit on mid-century design, art, and culture in California. Expect to see Eames furniture, Julius Shulman’s architectural photography, and Chet Baker album art, among other works on display. Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., Oakland; (510) 238-2200.
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Rory Olcayto of Building Design wrote about yesterday’s devastating fire at Delft Univeristy.
A “catastrophic” fire has caused serious damage to the architecture faculty at Delft University in the Netherlands, endangering first edition books by Rem Koolhaas and MVRDV and Gerrit Rietveld furniture.
Although no-one was injured in the blaze, much of the 14-storey building has been completely destroyed, BD understands.
Tony Fretton, a visiting professor at the department, said the fire – which broke out on a mid-level floor around 9am local time and rapidly spread upwards - is believed to have been started by a short circuit in a coffee machine caused by a faulty water pipe.
“The faculty building caught alight, then spread to the library and the historic chair collection - which includes Rietveld’s Red and Blue chair,” Fretton said. “The fire brigade couldn’t get close to it and decided to stand back and let the fire burn itself out. The whole building is gutted. The effect will be enormous - there are 3,000 students. It’s a complete calamity.”
With exams being held in two months, Fretton, who is teaching next week, said he did not know where students would be taught.
“The building was actually undergoing a refurbishment at the time of the fire,” he said. “The damage is going to run into the millions.” He added that first editions of books by Koolhaas and MVRDV are now feared lost.
During the fire, a nearby student residence was evacuated and people in other buildings were warned to keep windows closed because of the heavy smoke.
A spokeswoman for Delft University said: “Although there were no personal accidents, we regret the loss of the work of staff and students and a number of collections. Delft’s executive board is currently investigating at which alternative locations staff and students of the architecture faculty can be housed.”
Share the grief – Read the comments
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High gas prices got you down?
Can’t stand your commute?
Can’t afford to just quit your job?
Here’s a solution:
Move to work. Live on the parking lot.
(But maybe not in a homeless kind of way.)
I just read an article in the NY Times by Elsa Brenner called “Parking Space as Living Space?”
Generating both praise and criticism in a county with plenty of expensive housing but not much of the budget-friendly kind, a Department of Planning report urges towns and villages here to use land in existing office parks as sites for new housing, some of it for moderate-income families.
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I’m glad I read this piece by Michael J. Crosbie, Ph.D., AIA, Contributing Editor of AIA.org.
I mean, it’s nice – no, it’s very very GOOD that people are waking up to sustainability – but…
Sustainability always seems exempt from the crime of banal building. Why is this? I think it has something to do with mom and apple pie. Second-rate (and worse) pieces of architecture that claim the mantle of sustainability always have a “Get out of Jail Free” card safely tucked away. “It’s an awful design,” goes the logic, “but it’s sustainable, so we’ll let it pass.” There’s reluctance to slam something that’s trying to do good. Mom, apple pie, and sustainability—who dares to complain?
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Randy Bright of the Tulsa Beacon wrote this article, “Engineering utopia with architecture.”
As I was about to file away one of the many newsletters I receive, my eye caught the headline, “First LEED and Now SEED..
LEED, of course, means Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or “green” design. SEED stands for “Social Economic Environmental Design Network.”
SEED is a relatively new organization formed in 2006 that is gaining in popularity and membership among architects, planners, developers and others. It is new enough that there is scant information that can be found on the Internet, but I found enough to begin to see what it is about.
One article I found on the AIA (American Institute of Architects) website was written by Laura Kreeger Neil, who was a member of SEED. It was unclear from the article if she was an architect or not, but her definition of SEED was that it was “a group of individuals and organizations committed to advancing the right of every person to live in a socially, economically, and environmentally healthy community.”
According to Neil, the mission of SEED is to “increase the relevancy of the building environment,” and their guiding principles are as follows:
1. Advocate with those that have a limited voice in public life.
2. Build structures for inclusion that engage stakeholders and allow communities to make decisions.
3. Promote social equality through discourse that reflects a range of values and social identities.
4. Generate ideas that grow from place and build local capacity.
5. Believe that a community’s design should help conserve resources and minimize waste.
A workshop was held in Dallas in January of 2008 by SEED, who produced a promotional flyer that stated that the group that founded SEED had originally met in 2005 to determine how to change “societal conceptions of the built environment.” The flyer also stated that “the way in which we build must be reevaluated to provide all individuals with healthy, sustainable living communities.”
One of the speakers at the workshop was Jeff Speck, who was a city planner who had previously worked as the Director of Town Planning for the firm of Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company. Andres Duany is a planner that I have written about in previous columns and who is the guru of New Urbanism.
As I read a blog posted by one of the attendees of the workshop, the purpose of SEED became a little clearer, that is, if you consider the thoughts of this very enthused “SEEDling” (his term, not mine) to be an indicator of what it is all about.
He wrote that he had felt the momentum “towards creating a tool for evaluating real estate development projects that would have real value in advancing social justice and community development” and that projects could be evaluated on a point system whereby affordable housing would be given a “very high national need score.”
He continued, “this would allow developers of affordable housing projects to argue against NIMBY (not in my back yard) opposition to affordable housing projects by citing the national necessity and citing SEED as a system that fairly shares this burden across communities.”
Later he suggested that “community approval does not strike me as a good benchmark for SEED to use.”
In other words, if a developer wants to build low-income housing in middle or upper income housing areas, those communities should not have the right to object on the grounds that low income housing would affect their home values.
He continued, “Challenging some forms of community opposition could be an opportunity for SEED developers to challenge NIMBYism.”
Though I could find nothing on the Internet that proved a direct link between SEED and the United Nations, it seems a bit coincidental that at the U.N.’s Johannesburg Summit in 2002 they broadened their view of sustainable development to include the concepts of society, environment and economy.
And on UNESCO’s website (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), you will find that there is a 10-year plan (2005-2014) for an education that will “encourage changes in behavior that will create a more sustainable future in terms of environmental integrity, economic viability, and a just society for present and future generations.”
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So it looks like there’s ONE smart state out there.
HONOLULU - All new homes in Hawaii will be required to have solar water heaters installed starting in 2010 under a law approved by the Legislature.
Hawaii becomes the first state requiring the energy-saving systems in homes.
Solar water heaters typically cost home buyers about $5,000 extra on their mortgage, but island residents will save thousands of dollars over the years on their electricity bills, supporters said.
Why did they do this? I LOVE Representative Hermina Morita’s answer:
“We owe to our children and grandchildren the promise of a clean and renewable energy future,” said Rep. Hermina Morita, chairwoman of the House Energy Committee. “A solar water heater mandate in new home construction … will result in greater public benefits to everyone at large.”
Oh yes, and it SAVES MONEY.
Solar water heaters reduce residents’ electricity costs between 30 percent and 35 percent — up to $150 per month for a family of four on Kauai, said Morita, D-Hanalei-Kapaa. With those kind of savings, their initial expense is usually paid off in three to four-and-a-half years.
AND it’s the responsible thing to do.
Lawmakers described a government requirement for solar water heaters as a way to protect the environment, reduce Hawaii’s heavy reliance on foreign energy sources and save money.
So let this be a message to the 49 feet draggers out there.
“There are significant and quantifiable environmental benefits, energy security benefits and economic development benefits,” said Sen. Gary Hooser, D-Kauai-Niihau. “This measure lowers the net cost of home ownership and will cost nothing in terms of the state budget to implement.”
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If you haven’t felt dismayed, outraged, shocked, or stupefied yet today, I urge you to peruse a long article about Orange County. It’s the usual rant about suburbian excess and SUV culture.
Oh, I forgot to mention.
It’s not that Orange County.
It’s Orange County, China.
Welcome to the O.C.
China’s rising elite is importing a new American lifestyle, complete with fake lakes, stucco ranch houses, and Hummers in the driveway. But as these gated communities grow, is China doomed to repeat all of America’s mistakes?
Oh…my…goodness…I…cannot….believe…this…
Do me a favor and read it so that you can be outraged too. Misery loves company.
(P.S. Word on the street is that people in China can’t even access this blog. Maybe that should be my new tagline: “BANNED IN CHINA” What do you think?)
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I just read this article by Carol Venolia in Natural Home Magazine. It’s called “Enlightening the Row House: Daylight, fresh air and outdoor living space turn a dark, cramped Washington, D.C., townhouse into a hospitable retreat.”
She had me at “Daylight, fresh air…”
I had to read on.
She tells us about a guy named Scott who started redoing his backyard and kitchen…and then…well, YOU know what happened next.
He couldn’t stop!
He called in Rick Harlan Schneider of Inscape Studio who worked with the site’s sunlight, breezes, walls and wildlife to create a light, open, outdoors-oriented home.
Sunlight? Breezes? Tell me more!
(Did I mention I work in a windowless office with forced air that smells like whatever the people upstairs are having for lunch?)
“Scott wanted a garden space,” Schneider says, “but there really wasn’t enough area to plant things horizontally. So we came up with what we call his ‘vertical gardens.’” A cedar fence brimming with potted plants and planter boxes surrounds Scott’s new stone patio, improving the view from the kitchen and capturing rainwater at the same time. A patio fireplace with a custom grill functions as a cookstove in summer and a heat source in cooler seasons. A strip of pea gravel carries water runoff back into the ground
.
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I found it. I’ve found The Best Article I’ve Read in the Past 48 Hours!
It’s called “No stars in our eyes,” and it’s written by Zoe Berman in the RIBA Journal.
Thanks, Zoe. I share your struggle. I salute you for your fine article. I can’t wait to see more of your work in the years to come.
Here it is!
No stars in our eyes
Starchitects and corporate icons make this student generation uneasy. They know the future is about multidisciplinary collaboration and ethically aware design.
The student: Zoe Berman
Today’s students of architecture are emerging into a fractured climate of varying design approaches and changeable fashions. They are keen to question the dominant commercial paradigm and the ‘architect as superstar’ typecast. Many want to produce work that goes beyond CAD-driven images in an exploration of a more thoughtful, ethically aware architecture.
Having recently completed my BA at Sheffield, and as a writer for the RIBA student newsletter, I’ve come across a series of recurring concerns among young architects. There is an overwhelming apprehension about the rise of, as friend of mine said, ‘the starchitect celebrity designer drafted in to produce a design icon’. Peter Morrison of RMJM’s recent comments on ‘architects as stylists’ shows this worry is not confined to students. Such a trend might raise public awareness of The Architect, but it is questionable whether this is constructive or beneficial. ‘Architecture lite’ TV shows and magazine articles presenting glossy projects risk creating a public perception of an industry defined by image and fad, while the grass-roots values of architects addressing issues of community, identity, site-specific, brief-specific and deeply sustainable (as opposed to token sustainable) projects are often ‘marginalised to the relative obscurity of architectural press and teaching within architectural schools’. (Dan Tassell, Part 1 student at Haworth Tompkins).
There appears to be a backlash against the commercial tide among some students and young practices, who are recoiling from projects that as a priority seek to satisfy corporate end-goals. Students have a growing preference to immerse ourselves in work that is local, small scale and brief specific, which allows us to pursue our personal ideals as to what architecture should be.
This was evident in the Sheffield BA final year, where students chose to undertake projects such as garden allotments, old people’s homes and boat-yards. Not exactly glamorous-sounding briefs, but should we be here for the glamour? Surely we’re here to produce ‘good’ schemes, and ‘good environment’. Young architects are seeking out what we mean by ‘good’. Tonkin Liu’s Singing Ringing Tree lookout in East Lancashire (right) is an inspiring example of a built project that challenged our sense of value. In its inventiveness and considered use of materials, costing only £60,000 to build, it is a reminder that kudos (and column inches in the architectural press) isn’t just about a price tag.
Beat the stereotype
I know I’m not the only junior who feels uneasy about the stereotypical architect figure, dressed head-to-toe in black, carrying an attitude that says ‘It’s an architectural thing. You wouldn’t understand’. I like to think that isn’t a fair representation of where we are, or who we are, in 2008. If we are to engage with a wider audience, the designer clique’s tendency to take a smug pride in itself will have to go.
“The smug pride the designer clique tends takes in itself will have to go if we are to engage with a wider audience”
Perhaps one of the ways to overcome the stereotype would be through greater acknowledgment of the collaborative relationships that are inherent in the industry. As Ellen van Loon highlighted in her talk at the 2007 RIBA international conference, a project is never one person’s creation but rather a series of copyrights that come together.
On my own year out, I have sought a greater understanding of the marriage between architecture and structure. During my placement with Buro Happold engineers I’ve been struck by how little I appreciated the importance of in-practice working relationships. The course at Sheffield University is rare in encouraging projects that forced us, often reluctantly, to work together in groups rather than allowing us to cruise through the course producing self-referential, self-satisfying projects. At its best the studio group work, with its clashes of ideas, personalities and viewpoints, was both hugely exasperating and amazingly gratifying. With hindsight, the importance of instilling a willingness to work collaboratively, at an early stage in our education, is becoming clear.
The era of the independent ‘lifestyle’ architect is all but extinct. We find ourselves blinking in the fierce light of corporate demands, stringent guidelines, bureaucratic wrangling and a widespread attitude of cheap-build large-profit. If the next generation of designers starting up in practice is to succeed, we’re going to have to become better at working with people from other design disciplines.
Hopefully there will be a greater acknowledgement of the synergy that results from multidisciplinary collaboration – the like of which is so evident when you visit studios at the Royal College of Art or the Bartlett, where projects are explored through film, theatre and product design.
The unveiling of Zaha Hadid’s Cultural Centre in Azerbaijan, dedicated to a former KGB chief, and the ensuing ethical debate is evidence of the concern felt within the industry and by many students about the wider challenges we must face up to: what will we accept, or rather how far are we prepared to compromise? Are we willing to participate in projects that threaten community or environment? Will we design centres for armaments, prisons, zoos, military bases, animal-testing laboratories?
Acknowledge consequences
The brief given to students at Kent University’s School of Architecture to ‘design, construct and draw a full-scale operable prototype torture device based on ergonomic principles’ (with a building for Amnesty International as the final aim of the project) was controversial, but it acted as a shocking demand for students to acknowledge the consequences of their work, and to consider their own ethical stance.
“We want to slow down and develop a deeper understanding of the built environment and its historical roots, as Ted Cullinan has done”
A rise in studies that provoke debate and demand we have an opinion on what we deem to be ‘right’ or ‘good’ architecture can’t be such a bad thing. I’ve come across a handful of students seeking radical new directions in the politics of design, but these explorations tend to be fringe. More often the focus is towards new movements in form-making and computer modelling – for a while, we seemed to forget that the computer can only ever be a tool that we direct, and is not a tool to direct us. CAD creates a veil of perception that can distance us from the realities of a project.
As a generation, we are lucky to have a handful of excellent young practices setting an example with projects that test boundaries and explore new approaches to design, with results that are colourful, playful, explorative but still have serious underlying ideals. Nor are they so avant-garde as to refuse to engage with the architectural community – work by the likes of young practices Public Works, 6a, de Rijke Marsh Morgan, AOC spring to mind, with the more established practices Haworth Tompkins, Fat and David Adjaye demonstrating we can maintain focus without sacrificing our ideals.
However, open up a design magazine showcasing ‘latest houses’ or ‘emerging architecture’ and it’s likely you’ll be looking at projects in Spain, Japan, South America. It is interesting that many of my classmates are taking two years out post-Part-1 to gain experience overseas, in practices in the Netherlands, Spain and Japan.
A wish to experience the design culture of another country perhaps indicates a desire to slow down and develop a deeper understanding of the built environment and its historical roots. Ted Cullinan is an excellent example of someone who has doggedly pursued a go-slow, grow-slow attitude to design: in his Royal Gold Medal lecture in February he spoke of the deep effect visits to Dudok’s Hilversum Town Hall, Corbusier’s Villa Savoie and Van Allen’s Chrysler Tower had had on him as a young architect.
My classmates and I are sheepish about how few renowned projects we’ve seen in the flesh, settling for photographs and reviews. CAD allows us to get away with this, but there is a danger in being seduced by the computer-generated image when we are dealing in a discipline defined by three dimensions. We cannot practise architecture without having seen, smelt and touched much of it hands-on. Not even the best 3D rendering can capture the intangible emotive qualities of a space. In the light of this, it is a shame that funding for events such as Open House and New London Architecture, which provided invaluable opportunities to see behind closed doors, has been dramatically cut.
From nursery to A-levels we are a generation squeezed through a spoon-fed education system that depends on box ticking and grade attainment. It took me the first three years of the BA course to begin to appreciate that in architecture, not only are we allowed to explore, but it is essential that we do so, and credit must go to those tutors who persist in showing us how to broaden our outlook.
No finishing line
Brought up in a fast-response media era where everything is immediately accessible, it took me a while to realise this is a lifetime’s career that doesn’t have one finish line – Oscar Niemeyer is testimony to this. We will not find The Solution but instead will spend forever turning over and reassessing a Rubik’s cube of options. If, after three years’ study, we emerge with the ability to question rather than accept, debate rather than meekly receive, then our universities will have done their job. After all, architectural progress surely relies on our eagerness to challenge and to question.
Zoe Berman is working at Buro Happold as a Part 1 architectural assistant
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Today’s LA Times featured two area homes by architect John Lautner. I hadn’t heard of him before.
From the pictures, Lautner’s experience as a Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice was clear. A couple of years ago, I drove from Moscow Idaho to Phoenix Arizona for some kind of organic-sustainability-something-something fest. I enjoyed it, but my tag-along sisters weren’t to keen on it. They drove back to Los Angeles. I bailed too…to Taliesin West for the official tour.
These photographs of Lautner’s work gave me a little flashback to that little 3,000-mile weekend road trip.
If homes were music, John Lautner’s designs would be Duke Ellington compositions.
The architect, a onetime Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice, compared the importance of the jazz composer’s use of rests to the significance of the voids in his architecture.
Lautner’s 1949 Schaffer Residence, set in a wooded area at the foot of the Verdugo Mountains in Glendale, represents the simple, uncluttered look the architect favored, fusing concrete, wood, glass and hardscapes into a singular vision.
Better known for his Flash Gordon style of architecture, Lautner’s early work here lacks the spaceship-shaped look of his 1960 Chemosphere residence on Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills. That one-story landmark octagon is perched on a single concrete column and reached by funicular.
“My house is a mix of complexity and simplicity at the same time,” said David Zander, a commercial film producer and owner of the Schaffer Residence. “It is not James Bond. It’s dynamic but has a very peaceful element to it.”
About this home: When Zander first saw the house nearly three years ago, he was struck by the “proportion and scale of every space, by the handmade feel” of the home.
The concrete floors, stained a muted red by the original owners and inset with wood panels, draw the eye – and warm the feet with their radiant heat, a popular amenity among Lautner and his contemporaries.
Zander spent months repainting the interior of the house and restoring the cabinets and built-ins to their earlier glory, based on photographs of the original work. Those photos also aided him in re-creating a desk and a side table – crafted from redwood – which may be purchased with the house. Asking price: $1,958,000 Size: The house has two bedrooms and two bathrooms in 1,698 square feet. The property is 11,230 square feet. Features: The house has an open floor plan that flows into an outdoor oak grove; a kitchen with refurbished cabinets, a stainless-steel refrigerator and the original stove, restored; a breakfast area; a den; a two-sided brick fireplace situated between the living room and den; and a covered patio. Where:Glendale Listing agent: Crosby Doe, Mossler & Doe Associates, (310) 275-2222.
A SECOND LAUTNER: John Lautner favored the use of earthy materials, such as brick, concrete and wood. The goal was to seamlessly connect a home’s indoors with its outdoor setting. His 1947 Gantvoort Residence atop La Cañada Flintridge represents that sensibility.
The home faces east, capturing the morning sun through a glass wall opening onto the patio and garden. The original ocher-colored floors extend outside.
The nearly 1-acre property – filled with mature fruit and oak trees – provides views of the local mountain ranges. A stream flows through the property year-round, and the olive-bronze steel roof amplifies the ting-tinging of the rain, bringing nature even closer. A gazebo, koi pond and a Lautner-designed swimming pool complete the outdoors.
About this home: Is this a park or a private residence? The winding driveway and woodsy pedestrian entrance to this property – and organic construction materials – make it hard to tell at first. Frequent wildlife visitors and mature landscaping add to the sylvan sensibility.
From inside the home, inclined glass walls face a kidney-shaped swimming pool and gardens. The dining area opens onto a covered patio. Wood trim softens the tapered steel trusses that run the length of the house and are a signature Lautner architectural element as are the sweeping, curved, poured-in-place concrete walls, duplicating the arc of the trusses.
Asking price: $2.2 million Size: The house has three bedrooms and two bathrooms in 1,801 square feet. The lot is 39,680 square feet. Features: The home has a curved wall of windows surrounding built-in seating in the living room; a floor-to-ceiling fireplace; stainless-steel countertops and original exotic-wood walls, cabinetry and trim in the kitchen; a den; remodeled bathrooms; radiant heat; central air conditioning; and a new irrigation system. Where:3778 Hampstead Road, La Cañada Flintridge Listing agent: Sam Buchanan, B&B Properties, (818) 790-4040. Open house today from noon to 6 p.m.
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A revolutionary eco-house in a Cotswold nature reserve has been sold for a world record £7.2 million for a country home.
The house, whose design is based on the bee orchid found on the reserve, was sold off-plan last week to an anonymous buyer.
The size of an average semi, the cost works out at £3,000 per square foot - double that of homes in Beverly Hills and Manhattan.
For their money, the mystery buyer - reputed to be in the entertainment industry - will get a lakeside home complete with a glass-sided badger set in the garden.
Orchid House is situated in the 550-acre Lower Mill nature reserve near Cirencester, which was created from abandoned gravel workings. The development is one-fifth housing and four-fifths reserve.
Brad Pitt, the actor, has looked at the plans for Orchid House, while Paul Sandberg, producer of the “Bourne” films, is buying a home nearby.
Kylie Minogue has stayed at the estate and ballerina Darcey Bussell has visited the area.
The home will take three years to build. It is hoped it will produce more energy than it uses, with an underground heat pump, geothermal heating and cooling, rainwater and solar and wind power.
The design is by Sarah Featherstone, whose practice in east London is designing part of the Olympic athletes’ village.
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ADC Young Guns exists to identify today’s vanguard of young professionals across all creative disciplines. Those of you who’ve set your minds to making a name for yourself, raising new standards from within cubicles, conference rooms, cramped apartments, and studios across the world —- this is your chance to put those battle cries in action…
Entrants must be 30 years of age or younger and must have been working professionally for at least 2 years (both full-time and freelance work qualify). Entrants can submit both professional and personal work.
Fifty new ADC Young Guns will be chosen!
Deadline: June 2, 2008.
ENTER at http://www.adcyoungguns.org
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As some of you know, I earned my undergraduate degree in microbiology. I tend to see all things as interrelated and had no problem switching my paradigm to architecture. Most of my family and friends did not see the connection between these two disciplines as clearly. When asked for an explanation, I replied, “They both deal with structure.”
I see structural similarities across phylum and scale.
A bare deciduous tree looks an awful lot like a dendrite…the tiny receptors of a nerve cell. An extreme close-up of a shark tooth looks like a million more shark teeth. The vein pattern of a leaf looks a lot like a river pattern across continents. The patterns of electrons are mimicked up through the scales: to atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, ecosystems, plants, solar systems…the universe.
I talk about these things, but I haven’t heard anybody else talk this phenomenon. Until I saw this article:
Constructal view of the scaling laws of street networks — the dynamics behind geometry
A. Heitor Reis
Physics Department and Evora Geophysics Center, University of Évora, R, Romão Ramalho, 59, 7000-671, Évora, Portugal
Abstract
The distributions of street lengths and nodes follow inverse-power distribution laws. That means that the smaller the network components, the more numerous they have to be. In addition, street networks show geometrical self-similarities over a range of scales. Based on these features many authors claim that street networks are fractal in nature. What we show here is that both the scaling laws and self-similarity emerge from the underlying dynamics, together with the purpose of optimizing flows of people and goods in time, as predicted by the Constructal Law. The results seem to corroborate the prediction that cities’ fractal dimension approaches 2 as they develop and become more complex.
If you want to read the whole thing, you’ve got to go here and pay up. (Sorry.)
But my friends over at Archinect (hi friends at Archinect!) reported on this too, and they were able to get more behind-the-scenes on the 411:
Scientist have begun to understand that urban transportation and infrastructure networks grow like biological systems.
Key aspects of the finding include:
They found that cities’ road patterns have a lot in common mathematically, as well as looking similar to the eye. ‘Not just planning’The researchers developed a simple mathematical model that can recreate the characteristic leaf-like patterns that develop, growing a road network from scratch as it would in reality.
The main influence on the simulated network as it grows is the need to efficiently connect new areas to the existing road network – a process they call “local optimisation". They say the road patterns in cities evolve thanks to similar local efforts, as people try to connect houses, businesses and other infrastructures to existing roads.
Evolution has ensured that local efficiency also drives the growth of transport networks in biology – for example, in plant leaf veins and circulatory systems.
“Cities are not just the result of rational planning – in the same way that living organisms are not simply what is in their genetic code,” Barthélemy told New Scientist.
Of course, next I had to learn more about Constructal Theory.
The constructal theory of global optimization under local constraints explains in a simple manner the shapes that arise in nature. It is the thought that flow architecture comes from a principle of maximization of flow access, in time, and in flow configuration that are free to morph.
The Constructal law proclaims a tendency in time about the generation of animate and inanimate flow systems: “the maximization of access for the currents that flows through a morphing flow system “. This theory replaces the belief that nature is fractal, and allow one to design and analyse systems under constraints in a quest for optimality.
This theory allows the design and understanding of natural systems, thermal dissipators, communication networks, etc.
I like to think that maybe I’m not really a nerd, but when I read stuff like that…and I feel the way I feel right now (kind of excited and intellectually…stimulated), I’ve confirmed it to myself (and you). But that’s okay. I’m cool too.
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This is the coolest thing.
I found a source for some news video footage about architecture.
Scroll down a little. It’s on your right.
There’s also a link to the new Archi-News Video Feed up at the top of this page, next to my picture.
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I recently wrote about how you can make a simple change to your car or truck to double your gas mileage.
You can read that post here.
It doesn’t have a lot to do with architecture. It’s more in the Sustainability category, or even the Taking Personal Responsibility category.
(Or how about the Quit Getting Ripped Off at the Pump category?)
Turns out, that post was one of the more popular of my postings, so I thought I’d tell you more about it.
In my post, I told you about a proprietary system for getting more miles or kilometers to the gallon.
You can do this with simple parts that you buy at Home Depot.
And you get the easy-to-follow instructions here.
Want to hear from someone who’s already done this?
I was looking for a way to decrease my gas expenses and I know it’s no easy task. Let me briefly share my story where I started in this process.
About 2 years ago I was tired of spending a ton of money on gas for the truck I was driving. So decided to buy a small gas economic car. Right away I almost doubled my MPG.
Finally, I was smiling while at the gas station as I watched the digital cash cow roll up on the gas pump.
But, after time went by I realized how much I missed driving my truck, especially during the winter and became a little tired of driving a small car around.
Thought this car could also be used as our 2nd family car, not the case we quickly found out.
So, the question became how do I drive the vehicle I want, while meeting my families needs and still reduce gas expenses?
My wife called me crazy at first, and to be honest I was slightly skeptical about using water for gas.
I made the decision to personally put together the system and tried it out on my older car… Amazingly enough within the first week I had a 82% increase in MPG.
Instantly we became believers and was so excited about this discovery that I decided to find a way to help other people Save on Gas expenses too.
To Your Gas Savings!
Andres Rodriquez
P.O. Box 50163, Billings, MT 59105, USA
You want to see a video of the vaporizer in action? Okay!
My car is an 1986 Subaru GL. I bought her originally in 1989.
Two weeks ago I agreed to have the gas saving device put on my car. Immediately I noticed that the engine was much, much quieter and smoother.
We did a test drive on the car with and without the device. The results were spectacular. The Subaru does 32.8 miles to the gallon. With the device - which is only the very basic fitting - the Subaru did 36.8 miles to the gallon, a saving of twelve and a half percent. With the rest of the equipment that Ozzie has now I estimate I would save circa 40%.
What was really noticeable on this test drive was the difference in the quietness of the engine and how the car picked up much more easy with the device installed.
Since then, I have noticed that the car continues to improve and I feel she is back to where she was in 1989. Feels like a new car!!
I am very pleased to have this device on my car which will not only save on the gas, but clean the engine, reduce emissions into the environment, and therefore give my car a longer life, as I love my Subi.. Also this will help because this year I have to have a complete smog test to go with my application for my registration renewal.
J.H. (California, USA)
It’s very simple. You don’t change your engine or computer. A quart-size (95O cc) container is placed somewhere under the hood. You fill it with DISTILLED WATER and a little bit of BAKING SODA. The device gets vacuum and electricity (12 Volts) from the engine, and produces HHO gas (Hydrogen+Oxygen) as shown in the MUCH QUIETER video below.
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I just read this article in The Architect’s Journal by Richard Vaughan called “Krier attacks ‘idiot’ architects.”
Léon Krier, the architect behind Prince Charles’ experimental Poundbury village in Dorset, has slammed contemporary architects, labelling them ‘idiots’ who build ‘absurd shapes’.
Speaking at the launch of his new book, The Architectural Tuning of Settlements, at the Prince’s Foundation in London on Monday (21 April), the fiery Krier lamented the loss of traditional building techniques, adding that architects and planners were unable to design towns on a par with ancient cities.
He said: ‘We have not been involved in [the traditional design process] for so many years. The result is always slightly less good. And this is not just because these cities are old, but because there was experience. There was a tradition of doing things right because there was no choice about it.
‘You cannot build a 30m-long cantilever that is going the wrong way with bricks, mortar and wood. Now we have idiots who can build the most absurd shapes and they stay up. We are in a culture of excess.’
Krier refused to be drawn on which architects he was referring to, adding: ‘You can name them. I don’t need to name them. They are all my friends and colleagues.’
The 62 year old also criticised the government’s eco-towns proposals, claiming it is making decisions without knowing the full story.
‘There is no such thing as an “eco-town",’ said Krier. ‘The government instructed many millions of new homes to be built, but under what conditions? Because the conditions are that the oil will be cheap for another 50 years. But it won’t, and that will cut down so much on our capacity to travel and to extend towns beyond their limits.
‘We’ll have to go back to traditional towns, not out of choice, as I thought, but it will be out of fate. There won’t be choice and it will be dramatic.’
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Can I make some assumptions about you?
Because you’re reading this blog, I think it’s safe to assume that you love architecture.
Now, you may be an architecture student. (Or you may want to be an architecture student.)
You might be an architect. Or an architecture professor.
Maybe you just love architecture. (Or all these brown boxes kinda turn you on?)
I think you’re creative. You’re intelligent. Cultured. You care about society, about making it better for people. You enjoy solving challenging problems. You come up with ideas that most people just…can’t. And you kinda like the way it feels to be able to do that.
I have a challenging problem for you to solve.
It’s not an optional problem. You really do have to solve it.
The AIA’s Architecture Billings Index—the profession’s rough measure of monthly architectural output—hit the lowest level in its 13-year history in March, according to numbers released yesterday by the institute. The index continued a slide that began in January, which bodes ill for the architectural economy and the construction sector as a whole, because the design phase is generally first in the building process. Inquiries for new design projects also hit a record low.
This is the challenge: How do you, personally, do your architecture…
and
…get paid for it?
I had a professor tell us once, “Architecture’s great if you don’t have to do it for money.”
Architecture continues to be my answer to the eternal question, “What would you do if money weren’t an issue.”
But, come on now, we all want to get paid. We are brilliant, talented, creative problem solvers. We should get paid for that.
My suggestion? Change your strategy. The old paradigm is suffering. It is up to you to create your new paradigm.
What’s the best way for YOU to do that?
You’re creative. You’ll figure it out. You have to.
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When I saw this building, I knew I not only had to blog about it.
I had to start a new blog category. A new category for all the buildings I come across that reach into my very soul and makes me gasp, “Whoa. I love this building.”
(So that’s what I named the category. “I love this building.")
This is Triptyque’s building on Columbia Street.
They even have a video of section cuts.
And a photo timeline of its construction.
What I love the most is the way the front steps line up and become the facade. The vertical surface and the horizontal surface ARE THE SAME SURFACE. And you can practically WALK UP THE WALL.
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I’ve been putting together the FOURTH Architecture Addiction Field Trip…
to Egypt!
I found this great video for you called “Visions of The Sphinx and Pyramids.”
Stay tuned for more information.
Remember, if you sign up for the Official Architecture Addiction mailing list, you’ll receive the details for this Field Trip (and all they other Field Trip I’m planning) before everybody else.
Look at the top right corner of this page for the mailing list sign up form.
And sign up now!
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Know of some others I can add here? Let me know. Have you already visited some of these places...or planning on it? Let me know and I will feature your story and your photos here!
It is my dream to start a new kind of architecture school. Unlike most architecture schools, you wouldn't have to submit GRE scores or good grades or letters of recommendation. You wouldn't have to put the rest of your life on hold for 3 to 5 years. You wouldn't have to accrue tens of thousands of dollars in debt. At my architecture school, anyone could come for a few weeks and learn how to build a house with their own two hands. My teachers would take skills and concepts from some of these other workshops I've listed above... except classes would be held year-round to make it easy to fit into your schedule. I would have a number of different campuses around the country that would teach building designs approriate to the local climate. And I need your help. Can you donate land for a campus? Can you teach a workshop? Can you provide start-up capital? Let me know.
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