Architecture Addiction, The Official Blog of

This is the best idea I’ve heard of in all of 2009…which it will be in one hour, 21 minutes:

Using metallic balloons as solar power collectors.

(OMG!)

SOLAR cells are expensive, so it makes sense to use them efficiently. One way of doing so is to concentrate sunlight onto them. That means a smaller area of cell can be used to convert a given amount of light into electricity. This, though, brings another cost—that of the mirrors needed to do the concentrating. Traditionally, these have been large pieces of polished metal, steered by electric motors to keep the sun’s rays focused on the cell. However, Cool Earth Solar of Livermore, California, has come up with what it hopes will be a better, cheaper alternative: balloons.

Anyone who has children will be familiar with aluminised party balloons. Such balloons are made from metal-coated plastic. Cool Earth’s insight was that if you coat only one half of a balloon, leaving the other transparent, the inner surface of the coated half will act as a concave mirror. Put a solar cell at the focus of that mirror and you have an inexpensive solar-energy collector.

Cool Earth’s balloons are rather larger than traditional party balloons, having a diameter of about two-and-a-half metres (eight feet), but otherwise they look quite similar. The solar cell apart, they are ridiculously cheap: the kilogram of plastic from which each balloon is made costs about $2. The cell, whose cost is a more closely guarded secret, is 15-20cm across and is water-cooled. That is necessary because the balloon concentrates sunlight up to 400 times, and without this cooling it would quickly burn out.Like a more conventional mirror, a solar balloon of this sort will have to be turned to face the sun as it moves through the sky, and Cool Earth is now testing various ways of doing this. However, the focus of the light on the solar cell can also be fine-tuned by changing the air-pressure within the balloon, and thus the curvature of the mirror.

The result, according to Rob Lamkin, Cool Earth’s boss, is a device whose installation costs only $1 per watt of generating capacity. That is about the same as a large coal-fired power station. Of course, balloons do not last as long as conventional power stations (each is estimated to have a working life of about a year). On the other hand, the fuel is free. When all the sums are done, Mr Lamkin reckons the firm will be able to sell electricity to California’s grid for 11 cents a kilowatt-hour, the state’s target price for renewable energy, and still turn a tidy profit.That belief will soon be put to the test. Cool Earth plans to open a 1-megawatt plant this summer. If it works, more will follow and, in the deserts of California and elsewhere, it will be party time for solar-energy enthusiasts.

So these two USC architecture students bought a 100-year-old Victorian house a block away from campus and built an addition to its backside.

I think this is fantastic. I want to buy something and built on it asap.

“This project is a modern 1200 square foot addition onto the rear of a hundred year old Victorian home a block away from the University of Southern California. Over the years, the interior of the existing house had slowly been partitioned off to become a duplex with dormitory type accommodations for students. Programmatically, the new addition sought to add a large common social space as well as two extra bedrooms to each unit. In order to respect the proportions and architectural character of the Victorian, old and new were kept at bay by a five-foot wide clear polycarbonate annex which served to resolve all sectional circulation connections between old and new.

As the area surrounding the University becomes denser given the increase in demand for housing, many older homes are being demolished to make way for larger apartment blocks. In this scenario, this addition prevented the waste and demolition of the older house and reappropriated its use to accommodate the areas demand for higher occupancy. Ultimately, it is greener to find creative ways to upgrade and reuse existing structures than to demolish and build new.

This project is owned and was developed by two students at the University of Southern California. Christopher Megowan, one of the two students/owners, designed the project while still studying at the School of Architecture. Purchased as a student housing investment, the addition was constructed on a tight budget at less than 130 dollars a square foot.

The addition was designed as efficiently as possible in order to not complicate construction and reduce material waste. Designed on materials grid, the main volume of the addition was detailed from the exterior 4′x8′ fiber cement panels and polycarbonate in. Given the “urban” nature of the property and context in the rear (the addition is adjacent to parking and an alley), light and air were prioritized over a view. The design provides more evenly filtered natural light at a fraction of the price of glass. Further, in a neighborhood with bars over the windows of most homes, the polycarbonate provides much more security than glass. Light and air are separated into two functions as ventilation flaps seamlessly clad in the fiber cement panel and two operable skylights allow for air to pass through and promote passive ventilation.

The polycarbonate walls are wired in between studs to accommodate lighting that would allow for the walls to glow (the initial intent was that color changing LEDs would be placed between the studs to allow the walls to change color, however this solution proved too costly). In using the fiber cement panel rainscreen, thermally stabilizing concrete floors on the lower unit, and the polycarbonate, this addition was able to be constructed at a price per square foot competitive with stucco and other less desirable finishes.

The interior volumes benefit from tall ceilings and open spatial flow between the existing house, the annex and the common rooms of the addition. The bedrooms each have a wall of sliding doors providing privacy between spaces and enclosing the closets that serve as a sound barrier to the common spaces.”
– USC-School of Architecture [Official Site]

Sounds great, right?

But…

Look…

Ughhhh

I have been hungering for a book like this.

In our reviews at Harvard (your school too?), the critics often fall into ideological discussions. These are interesting because they make me wonder:

What about the person who will live in our buildings?
What about the people who will live and work in our buildings? Who will have to deal with our design decisions every day?

The user never makes an appearance in their discussions. Ideological theory is king.

Why is ideologocial anything more imporant than the people who will actually use the building?

I have asked this question. I have not received an answer. I like to think that as I move through the rest of my 3.5 year program, I’ll get an answer, and maybe a better appreciation for the purpose of the ideological discussion.

But, in the meantime, I need to satisfy myself that architecture cares about the people.

I just read about this book by Jonathan Hill called “Occupying Architecture: Between the Architect and the User”

Jonathan Hill “Occupying Architecture: Between the Architect and the User”
Routledge | 1998-06-05 | ISBN: 0415168163 | 253 pages | PDF | 3,3 MB

Occupying Architecture explores the relationship between the architect, the user and architecture, revealing that architecture is not just a building, but that it is the relation between an object and its occupant.
This collection discusses how and why architectural production and discourse ignores the user, and focuses on what is absent from present debates and practice. This book proposes a complete reworking of the relations between design and experience to transform practices of the architect, and ways of seeing and using architecture.

I found this book in a small bookshop in Cambridge, England, and was immediately intrigued as an architecture student whose design philosophy is based in a user-needs-come-first approach. Hill’s selection of authors, including one of his own writings, is just as varied as the authors’ individual response to the challenge of “write about architecture and the user.”

Each article varies in its dissection of the profession as practice and application. Katerina Ruedi, for example, presents her resume, then dissects it in terms of cultural, educational, and social context. Lesley Naa Norle Lokko discusses architecture and a sense of place from a cultural and racial point of view, the cultural aspects of imagery, territory, and “response-ability” as a creative source and outlet. Hill’s own article indirectly jabs at the heart of New Urbanism, as this book came out in 1998, by making the distinction between “community” and “society”; one is physical, while the other is truly a product of commonalities or/of conflict. Muf Art and Architecture records the comments of the locals in one British neighborhood and uses these to compare and contrast the spatial and civic aspects of the surroundings.

Overall, Hill’s book encourages the reader to consider the client as a different faction than the user, and to own up to the differences between those of us getting the degrees and those having to tolerate our actions upon the built environment. It was not, as I’d expected, an environmental-behavior text, but rather an analysis of social forces at-large that are at work in our surroundings. I also recommend Andrew Ross’ book on “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Values in Celebration FL” for anecdotal relation to Hill’s article.

I’m going to check this out as soon as I return to Cambridge next week!

While I’m down here in the basement laser cutting my projective geometry assignment, I figured I do a little reading on some of the people who have passed through these hallowed halls…

…people like Walter Gropius…

Walter Gropius wanted the Hagerty House, his first commission in the United States, to be as close to the sea as possible. He sited the structure a precarious 20 feet from the shore and let the setting dictate the design.

When the Hagerty House was built in 1938 along the rocky coastline of Cohasset, Massachusetts, the stodgy Yankee neighbors were appalled. The minimalist International Style structure may have sat in sharp contrast to the area’s traditional shingle, Federalist, and Greek Revival architecture, but it helped blaze a trail for the modern century to come.

The story of the home begins in 1937, when Walter Gropius, the pioneering founder of Germany’s Bauhaus and a recent émigré to the United States, accepted a teaching position at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. After coming under increasing attack from the Nazi regime for his non-conformist, left-leaning ideas and spending almost three years in England with the modernist Isokon group, Gropius, with his wife, Ise, relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Harvard, Gropius would exert a profound influence over the minds of a generation of architects whose work would shape America’s built environment for decades to come.

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