Posts Tagged ‘Urban Design and Built Form’
Floating Home
Posted in Research, Visions by Kate Archdeacon on August 27th, 2010
Source: Metropolis Magazine
A competition proposal to develop a floating city has developed into ‘the world’s first off-the-grid floating building’ in Rotterdam.
Towed into place in the Rijnhaven harbor late this spring, the 10,764-square-foot pavilion is made of three geodesic domes designed by Bart Roeffen, a local architect. It grew out of a competition proposal for a floating city developed by Roeffen and fellow students at the Delft University of Technology. “We thought it was a brilliant idea to promote Rotterdam as a city on the water to anticipate the effects of climate change,” says Arnoud Molenaar, program director of the Rotterdam Climate Proof Program.
The city is expanding its current harbour by 20% and this expansion has created the space for up to 5000 similar floating structures that could potentially use the harbours and docks that are being superseded.
Original article by Cathryn Drake on Metropolis Magazine
Building Niches for Biodiversity
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on August 26th, 2010
Source: Treehugger
From “Biodiversity for Low and Zero Carbon Buildings: A Technical Guide for New Build (Book Review)” by Kimberley Mok:
With major declines observed in bee, bat, bird and other critical species, it makes sense that newer built environments now being designed with zero- or low-carbon status in mind should also integrate ways to boost wildlife diversity as well. That’s the premise of Biodiversity for Low and Zero Carbon Buildings: A Technical Guide for New Build by Dr. Carol Williams.
Dr. Williams, who is associated with the UK-based Bat Conservation Trust (BCT), points out that imperfections in the craftsmanship of traditional buildings allowed certain species to find ecological niches and roosting opportunities right alongside humans. Not so with newer, ‘air-tight’ construction, hence the need to accommodate and integrate built-in habitats for now-threatened species ranging from certain bats, owls and peregrine falcons. Thus, the book is apparently the first of its kind to consciously target biodiversity enhancement in new developments, rather than retrofitting existing structures.
Unless biodiversity is considered early on in the design process, these ever more stringent demands for increased energy efficiency of buildings will lead to losses in the biodiversity that have shared our built environment for centuries. This book addresses this issue because if we do not, there will be very few, if any, future roosting opportunities for bats or nesting opportunities for birds in our buildings. Without these measures, key species will be adversely affected by new developments; not only meaning a failure to achieve truly sustainable building, but also an erosion of the quality of life we all hope to experience in our working and home environments.
With a focus on the sustainable building process and wildlife in the United Kingdom, the book is practical in its scope, providing plenty of tables and technical information on how to size and orient suitable building elements that each particular species could call home. There’s also valuable information on prefabricated wildlife-friendly components from various manufacturers, plus a chapter on living walls, roof gardens and artificial lighting. Full of clearly annotated architectural drawings, colour photos and well-organised information, this book will be an excellent reference for architects and developers in the sustainable building industry.
Original article by Kimberley Mok on Treehugger.
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Build it back green: A global movement
Posted in Movements by Kate Archdeacon on August 4th, 2010
Source: Green Cross Australia
From “Build It Back Green: A Global Movement“:
“Build it back green” (BIBG) is a new global movement which recognises that scientific predictions of more intense severe weather are becoming a reality. Each major event offers the opportunity to break the greenhouse emissions cycle if we rebuild with a reduced carbon footprint.
Katrina provides the wake-up call
The BIBG movement started in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina which the world watched in horror. Green Cross’s US affiliate Global Green catalysed a major green rebuilding effort in New Orleans supported by Brad Pitt, Habitat for Humanity and dozens of business and community groups who share the vision. This effort is now delivering thousands of green homes and neighborhoods are being transformed.
Greensburg Kansas follows the example
Greensburg Kansas is a conservative midwest US town which was devastated by a 2007 tornado. The entire town is rebuilding with sustainability and community development in mind, and has captured the imagination of the American public. Watch their progress on YouTube.
Flowerdale follows suit after the horror of Black Saturday
Right now Australia is joining the BIBG movement, finding hope in the aftermath of the horrors of Black Saturday Victorian bushfires which destroyed more than 2,000 homes and 3,500 structures in total. Flowerdale is an inspiring example of a Victorian community pulling together to rebuild their lives, homes, community centres and schools in a more sustainable way. Green Cross Australia and its partners – Australian Conservation Foundation, Alternative Technology Association, Habitat for Humanity Australia, and Green Building Council of Australia – are determined to support Black Saturday affected communities with green rebuilding tools from a base in Flowerdale, a town determined to create a sustainable future out of a tragic episode.
Queensland prepares to rebuild green after its next major weather event
The Queensland government recognises its growing exposure to severe weather as the planet warms. Green Cross Australia has been selected as the Q2 Environment Foundation Partner of the Bligh Government, and BIBG will underpin our efforts to support reduced household emissions right across the State. Together with our BIBG partners and Queensland government agencies, Green Cross is preparing to BIBG after Queensland’s next cyclone or major flood or fire.
Visit the Green Cross Australia website for more information.
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Retro-Fitting Suburbia: TED Talk
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on July 16th, 2010
Source: TED
Images above: Suburban retrofits contribute to sustainability in a variety of ways, most of which are manifest at Belmar in Lakewood, CO. It replaces an auto-dependent, private mall with an urban, walkable, and bus-served mix of uses and public spaces. It provides a range of housing types, diverse architectural styles, and variety of cultural activities, including but not limited to shopping, with the intention that it function as a downtown. It also uses green bonds to finance rooftop photovoltaics and a small wind farm.
Ellen Dunham-Jones fires the starting shot for the next 50 years’ big sustainable design project: Retrofitting Suburbia – dying malls rehabilitated, dead “big box” stores re-inhabited, parking lots transformed into thriving wetlands. Ellen Dunham-Jones teaches architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is an award-winning architect and a board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism. She shows how design of where we live impacts some of the most pressing issues of our times — reducing our ecological footprint and energy consumption while improving our health and communities and providing living options for all ages.
Dunham-Jones is widely recognized as a leader in finding solutions for aging suburbs. She is the co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs. She and co-author June Williamson share more than 50 case studies across North America of “underperforming asphalt properties” that have been redesigned and redeveloped into walkable, sustainable vital centers of community—libraries, city halls, town centers, schools and more.
Watch the TED talk.
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Low2No: Suburban ReDesign
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on July 2nd, 2010
Via Worldchanging
Low2No: A Sustainable Development Design Competition:
The built environment is now the largest negative factor in the stability of ecosystems and the climate. As populations become increasingly urbanized, the evolution of cities will largely shape the outcome of our long dependence on natural resources. Two pathways of evolution are evident: an urban society that is in balance with the environment, or one that has depleted available natural capital. The decisions that will direct this evolution are being made now. It is clear that no single organization, profession or nation can achieve the goals of sustainable global development. It will require an architecture of solutions including low/no carbon buildings; sustainable economic systems; enhanced mobility; sustainable planning and energy policies; resilient social systems (access, equity and capacity), among countless others.
Recognizing the need and opportunity to improve sustainable building practices, Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, in collaboration with the City of Helsinki, launched a sustainable development design competition. The goal was to attract and identify the best team to design a large building complex on a reclaimed harbour (Jätkäsaari) at the western edge of Helsinki’s central business district. The competition sought approaches for four central objectives applied at the scale of a city block:
1. low- and one day no- carbon emissions
2. energy efficiency
3. high architectural, spatial and social value
4. sustainable materials and methods
With the selection of a team comprised of Arup, Sauerbruch Hutton, Experientia and Galley Eco Capital, the competition is moving from ideas to implementation. This next phase includes not only design development of the architectural and strategic solution, but also many activities targeted at raising the level of awareness and sophistication of Finland’s national sustainability discussion. Work on the development has begun, with completion scheduled for the end of 2012.
Read more about Low2No.
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Energy Efficient Facelifts for Buildings
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 9th, 2010
Source: Worldchanging
© Aidlin Darling Architects: 355 Eleventh
From “ZEROPrize Winners Showcase Re-Skinning as Energy Efficient Facelifts for Buildings” by Carissa Bluestone:
Re-skinning, essentially putting an entirely new facade on a building, can save an older structure when standard retrofits like installing insulation fail to make it more energy-efficient. There’s no one approach to re-skinning. The winners of the ZEROPrize, a re-skinning award from ZeroFootprint (in conjunction with UNHabitat and others), worked on a variety of structures from a typical single-family house in Toronto to a large bank headquarters in Ludwigshafen, Germany. The former, a 60-year-old bungalow called the Now House, achieved an energy savings of 70% after it was given a new envelope with high-quality insulation and a new roof with integrated solar panels, among other improvements.
The most beautiful project in the winners circle was 355 Eleventh, a small industrial building in San Francisco. Aidlin Darling Architects replaced the original steel cladding with a new skin of perforated, corrugated metal laid over new walls that included operable windows (something the original building lacked). The result is a striking, modern building full of light and natural ventilation that still retains its historic character. The retrofit reduced energy consumption enough to earn the building a LEED Gold designation.
Read the full article by Carissa Bluestone.
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Urban Planning in Developing Countries: Innovative Design
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on May 19th, 2010
“…a flexible building design that would allow residents to expand their homes upwards by up to three floors – as and when their families grow – and create socially and economically successful communities that are as dense as, or even denser, than buildings that are up to six floors high.”
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From “Innovative design could transform urban planning in developing countries“:
A new vision of urban planning that will positively transform the way cities grow across the developing world in the 21st Century was presented in a study issued today {18/03/2010}. The vision involves a flexible building design that would allow residents to expand their homes upwards by up to three floors – as and when their families grow – and create socially and economically successful communities that are as dense as, or even denser, than buildings that are up to six floors high. The new design, which promises a brighter future for millions of the world’s poorest urban citizens, is detailed in a study and multimedia collection funded by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. Its launch today coincides with the opening of the United Nations Fifth World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro, where thousands of delegates from governments, academia and nongovernmental organisations will discuss solutions to the challenges of urbanization.
Among those challenges is the question of how best to increase urban population densities as populations grow and land prices rise, especially when large informal settlements of the urban poor occupy prime centrally located land. In many cities in Asia and elsewhere, governments are keen to force these poor communities into high-rise apartments so that the land they currently occupy can be developed into condominiums and iconic buildings to attract foreign investment. “In promoting such a vision of a modern world-class city, international financial institutions and city planners are failing the poorest communities and ensuring that those who are meant to gain the most are instead the biggest losers,” says architect Arif Hasan, a visiting fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development and lead author of the new study.
Citygarden, St Louis.
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on May 10th, 2010
Source: World Architects
Photo: Steve Hall / ©Hedrich Blessing
Citygarden employs sustainable technologies which include raingardens that collect stormwater from approximately 70% of the site, green roofs on both buildings, pervious paving, a largely native plant palette, regionally quarried stone, and suspended slab construction to give tree roots in terrace areas room to grow.
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Citygarden is a new “urban oasis” in downtown St. Louis, on axis with that city’s popular Gateway Arch. A hybrid between a sculpture garden, botanic garden and city park, the design was spearheaded by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, with two buildings designed by local architects Studio / Durham Architects.
The design of Citygarden derives from the cultural and natural histories of St. Louis and its environs. Acknowledging its position in the heart of the Gateway Mall, a few blocks west of the Arch and the Mississippi River, Citygarden is structured as three precincts delineated by two walls. The northern precinct (or band) represents the high upland ground, the river bluffs. The middle band represents the low ground or floodplain. The southern band represents the cultivated river terraces. A series of outdoor rooms in the northern band provide shaded platforms for specific sculptures, while also providing for sitting, dining and prospects over the upper-level water basin to the rest of the sculpture garden. A 550 foot long arcing wall of Missouri limestone defines the edge between the urban groves of the “uplands” and the low ground of the grassy “floodplain” that occupies the middle band of the site. The third band of Citygarden runs along the southern tier, framed by Market Street on one side and the central “floodplain” on the other. The inner edge of the Market Street gardens is prescribed by 1100 linear feet of granite-topped meander wall, the second major site wall. This nearly continuous seat wall sinuously loops through the garden in evocation of the striking patterns of regional river systems.
Urban Form & Behavior Energy Modeling
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on May 3rd, 2010
Source: PostCarbon Institute
Shanghai superblocks via afrechillo
“The result was perhaps the closest-yet attempt at modeling and thus being able to forecast the complete energy needs of a segment of urban population. This allows an integrated assessment of required energy supply and expected impacts far beyond a single structure, energy type or industry.”
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From Urban Form, Behavior Energy Modeling in China: Sim City for Real? by Warren Karlenzig
One of the great challenges in urban planning and green building has been material life cycle energy use–how steel, concrete and wood products are produced and transported. Add to that the decisions people make once construction is finished, and you can rightly conclude that development standards have only scratched the veneer of total energy and sustainability impacts. In addition to material climate and resource burdens, there are myriad consequences on life-cycle energy use that arise from commuting and transit choices, food and product consumption, and building heating or cooling.
Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have devised a tool that may soon provide governments and urban planners ways with which to model complete material, building and residents’ anticipated energy use. After a proof of concept was applied to a Jinan, China, housing development, LBNL has integrated building life-cycle assessment (LCA) and urban form agent-based modeling tools to capture embodied, operational and behavioral aspects of urban form energy use and emissions.
With hundreds of new cities being planned or built in China, Indonesia and India, new tools such as LBNL’s will be critical in managing and reducing the energy, climate and environmental impacts of this unprecedented urban growth era. Adding 1.1 billion people to new or growing Asian cities will produce more than half of the world’s increase in global climate change-causing greenhouse gases by 2027, according to the Asian Development Bank.
Complete Streets: Urban Design for all Users
Posted in Movements by Kate Archdeacon on April 9th, 2010
Source: Grist
Image: digiart2001 via flickr CC
From “Towns invest in smarter streets … in Mississippi” by Jonathan Hiskes
Two Mississippi towns want better options than auto-only streets, and now they’ve made it official. The towns of Tupelo (pop. 36,223) and Hernando (pop. 6,812) each passed Complete Streets legislation that ensures roads will be built and maintained for walkers, cyclists, and other forms of transportation—along with drivers. This week St. Louis citizens voted to fund better mass transit. Now this in Mississippi—this stuff is getting around. Towns of these sizes don’t build a lot of transit infrastructure, so sidewalks, bike paths, and road safety features are all the better.
The National Complete Streets Coalition works to promote what its name suggests—streets designed for more than one use, and ones that work for children, seniors, wheelchair users, and sidewalk retailers. It’s fiscally responsible, says walkability guru Dan Burden. “The big win for city government is that anything built to a walkable scale leases out for three to five times more money, with more tax revenue on less infrastructure,” he said in a news release.
Note that this is all about happier, healthier, and safer living. It just so happens to be sustainable, but you don’t even have to use environmental selling points if they’re too distracting.
From “Towns invest in smarter streets … in Mississippi” by Jonathan Hiskes for Grist.
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