a fascinating article on a prospective aquaponic farm as a vehicle for urban renewal in denver. Urban Organics, the potential facility profiled, not only would provide locally grown food and produce, but also cooking, nutrition and sustainability workshops.
what’s interesting about this project, is that it is engaging the local community in sustainability and health on a very basic level. by providing both a model of how people could grow their own food and lessons in how they could create their own food production systems, Urban Organics is providing the opportunity to create a behavioral shift. I’ve written about this a lot on TOSD, but I feel strongly that we can create as many technological advances as we want, but until we actually start effecting our collective culture we won’t make any significant change. sustainability isn’t about having the most fuel efficient car, it’s about changing your behavior so you don’t use one at all. Urban Organics wouldn’t just providelocally grown produce and fish, it would give an entire community the vision and means to do it themselves.
I came across some very interesting maps that show population density effecting geography… they are definitely very revealing to exactly where populations reside and where countries are more sparse.
it’s easy to get mired in a view of design that focuses data exchange between ecotect and grasshopper, performative skin systems in generative components, and scripting architectural solutions, but once in a while you find a completely different take on what design is and what you really should be doing to be creating a design solution. james rojas of g727 and metro has one of these takes on design on an urban scale: let the community members design it themselves. if you haven’t seen one of james’ installations for yourself, you can’t imagine the vast amount of trinkets, toys, and other items that people can use to construct their own vision of their environment. by using either items we recognize as toys or elements taken out of context, the users have a remarkably high amount of creativity and exploration.
read more about one of james’ installations on ::industrianism.
gizmag reports that adding green roofs to an urban area the size of detroit would be the equivalent of talking 10,000 SUVs and mid-sized trucks off of the road. that would be incredible in itself, but I find myself wondering if 1/5 of the USA’s vehicular emissions are from the transportation of food, then what would the be impact if these roofs weren’t just green but agricultural? what would be the impact if the vegetation wasn’t just counteracting vehicles emissions, but actually replacing the need to have emissions in the first place?
lately TOSD has been a little dormant… I was lucky enough to convince my amazing girlfriend to marry me, so blogging hasn’t exactly been at the center of my focus… but there’s a large, large backlog of topics so stay tuned over the next weeks, I should be posting a lot.
one subject that’s fairly timely- the chain of ecohomes competition just started their online voting process and two good friends of TOSD have a very compelling entry. maybe I’m biased, but my take is that their ability to merge sustainable design into a modern and contextual architecture is significantly higher than the other leaders at this point. they’re also one of two vote leading entries to incorporate agriculture into their design.
I feel very passionately about the benefits of urban and home based agriculture, so much so that you can look for an upcoming second blog devoted to the subject. but I think more importantly than simply suggesting that architecture can be used to grow food is the idea that sustainable design can provide for more than just itself. the majority of entries in the competition and the majority of contemporary sustainable work seems to be focused on sustainably providing for itself in terms of energy, resource and material use. but to begin to see architecture as having the ability to provide a sustainable platform for all facets of our lives is both visionary and inspired.
these shots are from an interesting architectural exploration from the university of stuttgart, where willows and trees grow to become load bearing members of a 26′ tower. as the trees develop, so does the structure and the program.
what ’s unique about this project as compared to projects like plantware and patrick dougherty’s work is the demand placed upon the trees. in other projects that either reappropriate plants to perform an alternative function or reorganize trees to provide enclosure, this example of building botany asks the trees to support more than their own weight. in the spiegel online article there’s a description of how the architects need to manipulate the trees to become load bearing, which is an interesting process of placing lateral forces on the trees in order for them to develop a support for the steel platform.
which calls into question, how green is this? forgetting for a moment that this is a nascent technology and that with time it will certainly become more efficient, it would be interesting to see how much energy is used in weighting the trees versus creating the lumber necessary to frame the same structure. I think this project is brilliant, but too frequently we define what is sustainable very simplistically. for example, it takes five years for the average driver to counter the embodied energy of just the battery of a prius, much less the rest of the vehicle. in the case of building botany, does removing the fabrication process of lumber out of construction create a more sustainable building method or is there an economy involved in creating massive amounts of lumber at once and then shipping it very efficiently? it’s a little unclear, which is why I wish there was more published on this process. regardless, its an incredibly fascinating and thought-provoking development.
shawn gehle sent me Wallpaper*’s profile on alex de rijke’s sliding house. the clip is exceptionally well shot and edited, and profiles a home who’s cladding mechanically slides away from the structure.
mechanized building elements that can respond to different climate conditions have typically operated on the very small scale (nouvel’s institut du monde arabe) to the very large scale (montreal’s olympic dome), but rarely on the scale of a house facade. it would be interesting to see how the energy savings matched up with the emboddied energy and operational energy of the motor system, but regardless it’s a very interesting piece of architecture and certainly worth the four minutes it takes to watch the clip.
philipp schaerer’s photography is a unique examination of how build for relates to its context. his bildbauten series looks at buildings as negative space and his meereshorst series investigates a variable relationship of building form to its surroundings. schaerer’s work is a collection of fascinating minimalist images that seem to build off of the work of andreas gursky and carlo van de roer, but manages to manipulate the relationship of subject and surroundings in a very potent way.
my name is alex webb and I am an architectural designer who is primarily interested in performative algorythmic design, environmental sustainability, sustainable transit and building information modeling (BIM).
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