an interesting blog post from dc.streetsblog.org compares how the states of california and new york are spending their federal stimulus money in terms of transit improvement versus highway improvement.
california does better than the national average with a 66 – 33 split, but new york is planning on diverting more than 50% of their stimulus package to improving transit… the most progressive of all the states to announce their plans so far.
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?
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.
if you look at the perception of sustainable architecture today as opposed to 10 years ago there is a pretty remarkable shift. more and more there is less emphasis on off-the-grid cabins in bucolic landscapes and much more mixed-use projects and transit orient developments. the pastoral solar cottage as sustainable icon isn’t going anywhere, but as there is a collective realization of the scale of the problems sustainability needs to address, there is more focus on how architects can make cities themselves more green as opposed to isolated homes. as alex steffen wrote in worldchanging, “if you want to be green, live in a city.” the efficiency of having large masses of people in the same area to bring resources to will trump any sort of gains met by a wind-powered rural cabin, especially as we look to greening our society as a whole.
one of the main issues with sustainability on a city level is how the residents move around within it. unfortunately for many american cities, this is more of a planning issue than anything else. mass transit in a city with a dense central core like new york, philadelphia or seattle is much more successful than a more diffuse city like los angeles or phoenix.
the term Personal Rapid Transit sounds a little bit like an oxymoron or a desperate re-branding of the automobile by GM. while it sounds like “personal” would be referring to either the size or scale of the vehicle, it is more a reference to how the system works. the only built PRT system in morgantown, west virginia uses vehicles that are sized for 20 riders- but what makes it “personal” is that the riders collectively decide where the vehicle goes and that the cars are dispatched as needed. if the there are more riders at one station as opposed to another, the system sends the cars there and if the riders on a car aren’t heading to a specific stop the car bypasses it.
while the WVU system is interesting, it still only runs along a single line. this is a fairly conventional model of how we understand transit it to work- one line takes us a set of destinations where we can either use a different form of transportation or transfer to another line. but what is interesting about a networked or intelligent system is that it has the potential of breaking this model and creating a more facile one. a route is simply a conceptual machine to help a rider understand where that vehicle will take them, but if the rider were to tell the vehicle where they needed to go, the idea of a route would no longer be as important.
the remarkable flexibility of the system is why PRT could have the potential of working incredibly well in more spread out urban and suburban areas. urban planners and transportation designers frequently describe the biggest issue with mass transit is the problem of the last mile- mass transit can frequently take people from one general area to another general area well, but moving people within those areas is a challenge. but with a “personal” mass transit system, the possibility of people quickly and conveniently moving from their houses to a larger transit hub seems likely.
so what makes a PRT system different from the currently form of flexible, personal transportation (the car)? parking. aside from the implied emissions and energy usage improvements of electric vehicles, parking is a clear advantage of a PRT.
in an article titled “we paved paradise”, salon.com reported the effects that municipal parking requirements have had land use policy, the classic example being that a typical code for a restaurant would require five times as much space for parking than the actual restaurant. at one point I had been told (though I can’t seem to source it), that in LA there are five parking spots for every car. while the environmental effects of that many impermeable surfaces and that many heat islands is massive, the real problem is how more and more parking spots continue to spread out our cities more and more- making the need for parking more and more necessary.
this is where the PRT is a really compelling idea. in theory, PRTs are never parked. they either constantly move or shuffle themselves to the station that has the highest probability of needing a vehicle the soonest. so the energy efficient, non-emitting communal machines were already compelling enough to most environmental advocates, but reducing the need for automotive parking could not just provide a cleaner alternative but could begin to significantly alter the way our cities are organized. a more efficient, closer urban fabric is easier to navigate by foot or by bike, which reduces the need for an artificially powered vehicle to begin with- which is ultimately the most sustainable goal of all. more than energy efficiency and resource use, a vehicle that can act as an agent against suburban sparsity will ultimately reduce the needs for vehicles to begin with.
PRTs as a commonly used urban vehicle is still a long way off- but at the moment they provide a clear example of how the vehicles in which we choose to move ourselves can directly effect the space we inhabit. it’s not just about the energy our vehicles use- it’s all of the resources they demand that will determine if they are sustainable or not.
every sustainable blog has to have a treehouse entry. you just have to, if no other reason than the shear volume of treehouse blog entries on the web. for every 5 sustainable buildings you read about, one or one and a half is a treehouse representing some sort of primeval nostalgia convinced that if we all lived like monkeys we’d be good to go. it’s a nice thought, but there aren’t 6.76 billion monkeys out there…
the belgian goverenment opened the world’s first zero emissions research station last sunday. the entire project is self-sufficient- wind turbines and solar panels provide electricity and solar thermal melts snow for water.
from ::treehugger. official website.
a typical crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells is expensive to produce- despite many advancements in the last few years, dealing with silicon is expensive and the payback time can be 14 – 20 years. so there’s been a lot of interest in recent years in creating better silicon systems, like thin film or solar tubes.
plextronics has created a complete alternative to silicon altogether- photovoltaic ink. instead of growing complex silicon crystals, pv cells are just printed on the mounting surface. not only is this process much cheaper, but pv ink is significantly lighter and more flexible than a conventional photovoltaic system. so while the range of printable surfaces are limited at this point, the possibilities of printable pv are pretty large- architectural glass, metal, even cloth seem like they could be incorporated in the future.
pv ink not just has the possibility to be a cheaper alternative to silicon pv, but it also has the potential of being incorporated into a vast array of architectural schemes and strategies- enhancing the architecture instead of shackling it to a bulky, rigid silicon panel.
not feeling CME? then perhaps CGS is more your speed. the colorado green shuttle is a recycled veggie oil powered shuttle that can take you from DIA to vail in 2 1/2 hours.
like many articles about biofuels, the gas 2.0 profile of CGS refers to the use of vegetable based fuel as “green”. while the production of recycled vegetable oil is clearly greener than petroleum based fuels, whether or not biofuel emissions are an improvement (particularly with NOx emissions) is in dispute.
biofuels, particularly recycled vegetable oils, are incredible methods of voting with your wallet- signals to our economy that green technology is an important facet of our lives and is worth developing. but the sustainable qualities of biofuels are at best questionable, and might be better thought of as transition technologies than green solutions to a global problem.
here’s an article from the chicago sun-times through city farmer news about the first certified organic roof garden. there’s some impressive numbers in here, like 2500 square feet of garden and $150,000 for structural modifications, but the most impressive has to be the six tons of soil carried up to the roof by volunteers… incredible…
a friend of mine from sciarc created an online thought contest to generate new ideas about our relationship to food. 24-7 sandwich shop identifies the radical disconnect between a quickly evolving mechanism for producing food, and a static concept of what food is. find the more interactive facebook page here.
