Brooklyn’s own Gowanus Canal is on the verge of becoming a Superfund site, pretty incredible since my friend was spotted paddling down the Canal in January, clearly at his own peril. The pending Superfund declaration has generated significant debate about how, exactly, the polluted waterway will be remediated. The industrial polluters that once lined the Gowanus are long-gone, but New York City’s own 19th century sewer system, which combines sewage from buildings with stormwater from streets, empties into the Canal and other waterways surrounding the city practically every time it rains. (It has been raining for almost a week straight here, so it’s on my mind.)
ARO Principal Stephen Cassell, and his friend Susannah Drake, Principal at dlandstudio, have a proposal for you – “Sponge Parks” along the Canal that will harness the incredible absorptive power of dirt and plant roots to capture water where it hits the ground, stemming the tide of stormwater that slicks our urban surfaces, building rooftops, sidewalks and roads. I have to admit, the term Sponge Park sounds pretty fun, a place that you might want to hang out in, enjoy the weather and such. It a significant improvement over the industry terminology of bioswales and rain gardens; the former sounding too technical and the latter sounding too age of Aquarius.
Filed under: Design, Green, Sustainability | Tags: Biden, First 100 Days, Obama, Pete Souza, Photography, President
I just discovered The Official White House Photostream, a beautiful chronicle of Obama’s first 100 days in office. The most endearing image to me of course is this photo of both the President and Vice President atop the solar panel bedecked roof of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Check out how much energy the system produces (and how it works) on the museum’s website.
Image: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
Filed under: Green, New York City, Sustainability, Urbanism | Tags: 21st century plowshare, bed stuy meadow, guerilla gardening
I braved the rain on Saturday in support of a beautiful and simple vision – to blanket the vacant lots of New York City’s Bed Stuy neighborhood with native wildflowers. The project’s creators, 21st Century Plowshare, supplied us volunteers with nifty bags filled with a seed/sand mixture and “seed bombs” for throwing over fences (shown here in Kate Glicksberg‘s great photo). I am hoping that April showers will work their magic and we will see some sprouts soon. More neighborhood plantings are in the works. And testament to the power of the idea – New York Times coverage here.
Image: Kate Glicksberg via 21st Century Plowshare
Filed under: Architecture, Design, Green, Sustainability | Tags: daylight monitoring, environment, fast company, Green, green building, humor, recession friendly
Environmentalism is serious, complicated business, so a bit of humor on the subject is quite refreshing, especially when the jokes call attention to simple green solutions. I had a good laugh over the “Tongue-in-Cheek Guide for Green Gadget Buyers” in Fast Company this month, especially the recession-friendly “efficiency toggle” that “can achieve a 100% reduction in power usage.” Building daylight monitors and occupancy sensors are cool, but lets not forget that the simple act of turning off the lights (like your parents told you to) doesn’t require a complicated calculation to determine the payback period.
Via: Fast Company
The pub-style taps at the new Green Depot store on the Bowery dispense dish soap, not beer, and consumers are sidling up to this “bar” in increasing numbers. According to IRI’s latest study, the growth in the popularity of sustainable products continues to trend upwards, ailing economy be damned. The report parses shoppers into eight different, curiously titled segments, based on their demographics, purchasing power and attitude towards premium pricing for green goods. While the habits of dedicated “Eco-centrics” haven’t changed much, the “Respectful Stewards” and “Proud Traditionalists” are stepping up their spending, even in these tough times. How to capitalize on this lone bright spot in the consumer-verse? “Understand core values across key consumer segments; align product assortment and merchandising programs accordingly,” in short – reduce, reuse, recycle and retail.
More info: Businesswire
Image via: Dave Pinter on Flickr
Update: More promising statistics from the Carbon Trust via UK’s Times Online
At their most relevant, design objects are a reflection of the moment that we live in. In leaner times, design downsizes accordingly, casting off the trappings of the baroque in favor of an austere, and even ascetic, sensibility.
The coveted objects of the past decade were born of excess and eschewed function in favor of frivolity. If I had to select one piece as a symbol of this heady time, I would single out the absurdly oversized chandelier.
The oversized chandelier is an entirely non-functional object. Unless you harbor a devious plan to incapacitate a ballroom’s worth of revelers in a very dramatic fashion, you probably don’t need one. A new asceticism, coupled with a renewed interest in ecology, is paring design back to its roots in function. The oversized chandelier has been usurped by the humble compact fluorescent bulb. The chandelier-lovers deride it, but it looks like progress to me, and its going to light the way toward a more purposeful future for design.
Must we repent, banish decoration and bathe in dumpsters? Probably no. (Although it does look roomy.) But as designers, we may want to take a hard look at the detritus around us and put our thinking caps on. I don’t want to see another bathtub carved from a single chunk of marble excised from the ground at the opposite end of the earth in a pricey apartment, pretty much ever again. There has to be a more intelligent way to make things.
Dumpster bathtub image via MAKE
In some ways, designing for a climate like Antarctica is like designing for another planet. That is exactly what I thought when I saw my friend Ken’s pictures of McMurdo Station, like the one above – this is what a future human settlement on Mars will look like. Not like the Jetsons house at all. Just bunkerlike, uninspiring, unsustainable, and thoroughly un-designed! And how unfortunate, because the idea of designing a building to house all those arctic researchers, ice pioneers and penguin aficionados that could be both beautiful and green is darn exciting.
That is exactly why I find this design competition for a “green” research station in Antarctica so intriguing. And not just a little bit green, but zero carbon emissions no less! I am imagining some sort of igloo, but with solar panels on it? I am really looking forward to seeing the results.
Competition via: Bustler
More Antarctica fabulousness: SpaceBit
The Galapagos Islands are renowned for their sheer number of endemic species, unique animals that inspired Darwin’s thinking about the interdependent relationship between form, place and time. Much like the islands from whence the Galapagos Art Space takes its name, their new performance and exhibition venue in the heart of Brooklyn provokes soul-searching questions about the transformational nature of culture in our city.
Artists that perform and show their work in New York City are survivors of the torrential rains of cash that have flooded the real estate markets in Manhattan and Brooklyn, washing away their cheap studios, workshops and performance spaces. Some artists and entrepreneurs have adapted, accepting assistance from developers no less, who provide low rent lifeboats in order to preserve the attractive cultural diversity of their investment. The artist Chuck Close has likened this new relationship to a “forcing a tulip bulb.” The evolutionary wheel turned, and a new interdependency formed. As a result, the latest iteration of the Galapagos space feels less experimental and spotaneous, and more programmed and curated, much the way a visit to the Galapagos Islands might feel today.
Galapagos Art Space has emerged stronger thematically and symbolically from a design standpoint, proudly wearing the title of the city’s greenest performance venue (their LEED certification is pending.) Material themes of the old space are carried over to the new, concrete, tread plate, and shallow reflecting pools, but with a greater degree of sophistication, and an eye towards sustainability. Plans for a green wall and/or a green roof are in the works. A little less rock and roll, and a little more country (in the city.)
Photo: Peter Paris
To continue with a theme (even though Olympic fervor has mostly dissipated), the new designs for the 2012 stadium deserve a quick critical take. If I thought that China’s groundbreaking Olympic architecture was going to up the ante for this building type, in the same way that Saarinen’s TWA Terminal did for airport design, I was certainly mistaken. New designs from HOK Sport and Peter Cook for the London games are as hum-ho as almost every Olympic stadium that has proceeded it.
The colorful pods clinging to the armature of the building are reminiscent of 1980′s era amusement parks. If someone told me this was the latest ride at Great Adventure I would be unsurprised. The whole form appears to house a giant teacup dolly or whirling centrifuge.
The materials palette warrants a mention, as the “walls” of the stadium are a polymer-based fabric “wrap,” reducing the building’s embodied energy profile significantly. Recycled ship containers are put to use as internal toilet “pods.” In the world of green construction however, temporary, tensile fabric structures and the re-purposing of shipping containers don’t represent a lot of new thinking material-wise. There is a sustainability argument to be made that the building should be “light,” using as little material as possible. There is also a psychological need for an Olympic stadium to feel monumental, or at the very least consequential. This appears to be a blast from the past rather than a vision of the future.
Images and info via: BD
To see the first round of designs: Architectural Record
“‘We could build another Phoenix inside the one we already
have, double the population of the city, and … still have
a population density that is less than it was in 1950,’
[architect Michael Hallmark] says.”
It was a real surprise to read this quote, or even to read thoughtful coverage of urban planning issues at all in the populist paper USA Today this week. High gas prices = densification planing in Phoenix. Everyone moves downtown. Suburbs become cities too. In a generation, our children long to move to the country the way that we longed to leave the suburbs for the cities.
