The Guardian:

‘Architecture has become too mundane’ says Charles Correa’

‘India’s greatest living architect’ on environmental design, cosmic principles and why architecture is not like music.

Oliver Wainwright. 15 May 2013

“When the hippies first came to India in the 1960s, people got very upset,” says the 82-year-old architect Charles Correa. He is standing in the art deco surrounds of the RIBA in Portland Place – an institution that has declared him “India’s greatest architect” – where a retrospective of his life’s work opens this week.

“The rich Indian, driving his new Mercedes, just couldn’t understand why a white person would be sitting in the road with lice in his hair. A friend of mine used to say that the hippy is sending us a signal: ‘I am coming from where you are going,’ he is saying. ‘And it’s not worth going there.’”

It is a fable that neatly sums up Correa’s own journey. Trained in the US in the early 1950s, on a monotonous diet of Mies van der Rohe, he glimpsed the future and decided it wasn’t for him. Instead, he returned home and has since built a body of work grown out of a deep understanding of his country’s vernacular. As the simple product of climate, landscape and local techniques, his buildings have always stood out against many of his contemporaries’ pursuit of exotic western forms – which continue to erupt across India’s booming cities.

“We have all come too far away from the fundamentals,” says Correa. “We have surrendered more and more to engineers, who manage to prop up any design and manage to heat and cool any kind of shape. Ultimately we are the losers: everything has left architecture, except whimsy and fashion.”

Photo: ‘Architecture is a diagram of the cosmos’ … Jawahar Kala Kendra, an arts centre in Jaipur, Rajasthan. Photograph: Charles Correa Associates

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Greening America’s capital cities

Kaid Benfield. Jan 30, 2013

“The federal Environmental Protection Agency sponsors an innovative planning program designed to help bring more green infrastructure and green building practices to our country’s state capitals, making them simultaneously more environmentally resilient and more beautiful.  Implemented with EPA’s cohorts in the federal Partnership for Sustainable Communities - the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development - Greening America’s Capitals launched in 2010 and thus far has been selecting five capitals each year for design assistance.  The program is not very well known but deserves to be. 

The idea is that these particularly prominent communities are inevitably ambassadors of a sort for their respective states and for other cities.  Indeed, elected representatives and their staffs – leaders, by definition – from all across their states work at least part-time every year in the capital cities.  What they experience there, good or bad, imparts observations and lessons that can be taken back to the representatives’ home districts or even incorporated into statewide policy.  There are also many visitors to state capitals for business or pleasure, each forming and taking away impressions.”

Photo: Jimmy Emerson, Creative Commons license

“NYTimes: 

South African Settlement Welcomes the iShack 

By Emma Bryce. Nov 5, 2012

One of the first sights greeting every tourist riding from the airport into Cape Town is a wall of corrugated iron and wood on either side of the highway. Before Table Mountain rises on the horizon in all its majesty, it’s the clusters of shacks that make an initial impression.

South Africa has several thousand informal settlements, many of them technically illegal, comprising well over a million dwellings. While these are a legacy of the country’s system of racial apartheid, the problem has only worsened since apartheid was dismantled, partly because of weak political will, many say. The government, led by the African National Congress, acknowledges that the demand for state-sponsored housing has outstripped supply. So efforts have shifted toward providing services in the settlements and upgrading existing shelters.

Enter the wryly named iShack, or improved shack, a prototype built by a group of South African researchers to help address the problem. The main goal of the design, which is malleable, is to equip informal homes with solar panels and energy-saving features that make them more livable. With a rooftop photovoltaic panel, shelters can generate enough electricity to power three lights, a cellphone charger and a motion-sensitive alarm. (Security is a pressing concern in the settlements.)

Of course, the premise behind these upgrades is that the settlements are here to stay.

“South Africa is experiencing some of the highest rates of urbanization in the world,” said Berry Wessels, the project’s field coordinator. “Housing backlog is growing. The government cannot provide houses for everybody.” He describes his team’s invention as the first effort at in-situ upgrades in the settlements.”

Photo: The iShack prototype at the Enkanini settlement outside Cape Town has cross-ventilation, a sloping roof and solar power. Ishack

Fast Company:

World-Class Buildings For The Underserved, At Under $10k

THE EUROPEAN PRIZE FOR ARCHITECTURE HONORS NORWAY’S TYIN TEGNESTUE, WHO SPECIALIZE IN LOCALLY SOURCED, LOCALLY BUILT PROJECTS IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD.

by: Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan. 

“Is London Serious About Building a Network of Elevated Bike Lanes?

• HENRY GRABAR
• SEP 06, 2012

The bicycle infrastructure arms race has moved forward once again with the news that London is toying with the idea of elevated bike highways.

The project is the work of Sam Martin, of Exterior Architecture, who’s spent the last two years developing a concept for bike lanes truly separated from traffic. Martin doesn’t bike anymore for safety reasons. But he would get back on two wheels to ride the SkyCycle, his proposal for elevated bike lanes that’s already piqued the interest of London Mayor Boris Johnson.

“It came as all good ideas do,” Martin says, “walking to the pub.” London’s outer districts are threaded with overhead railways, erected during the Victorian era and still used daily by commuter trains. Passing under one such viaduct, a young colleague of Martin’s, Ollie Clark, mentioned to his boss an idea he had to use that infrastructure for something else — why not bike lanes, they reasoned. Two years after hammering out a concept, Martin and co. got the chance to pitch it to Johnson and affiliates of Network Rail, which owns the city’s overground rail infrastructure.

The meeting, he says, went well. “There’s a huge appetite and desire to make this happen, but it needs to be thoroughly tested and we need to identify potential sites.” Exterior Architecture is working now on assembling a more concrete proposal. Contrary to reports in the Daily Mail, Martin says, no location has been chosen. It would probably be somewhere in North London.

Made of steel and glass, the SkyCycle pathways would provide an above-ground path for long-distance bicycle commuters. Entrances and exits would be placed at regular intervals, perhaps at stations, and users would pay a swipe-in toll of one pound with their Oystercards. Because overhead rail links suburbs to the city and runs between London’s biggest stations, such a network could serve all types of commuters. With a corporate sponsor, SkyCycle could avoid dependence on public funding. Londoners are wary of the latter option, particularly with a project as fantastic as this one.

Johnson has said he’s interested, and has a record for realizing biking infrastructure. “The Mayor is committed to leading a cycling revolution in London,” a spokesman for the mayortold the Times of London. “The use of railway land or elevated cycleways to provide fast and direct cycling routes around the capital is an exciting idea that his team are looking into.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Image: Sam Martin/Exterior Architecture

“Seattle, Washington’s Rain Wise Program: Making Managing On-Site Stormwater Easy

Akua Nyame-Mensah. June 25, 2012

Cities across the United States are turning to property owners to help reduce the amount of stormwater runoff making its way into sewers and stormwater drains. In Seattle, Washington, the Residential RainWise Program aims to reduce the impact of stormwater running off of private impervious surfaces in the city by providing homeowners with resources and incentives to implement low-cost green infrastructure techniques to mitigate stormwater.

By appealing to property owners, the city hopes RainWise property interventions will “reduce flooding, protect property and restore … waters for people and wildlife.” The program aims to encourage property owners to capture rainwater, reduce impervious surface, and “help the rain soak into the soil, just like it does in … native forests.”  The RainWise Program website makes it easy for residents to find the footprint of their property and select the appropriate RainWise intervention for their property from a list of recommendations.  The city has also developed a database of licensed contractors, engineers, and landscape architects to help residents with installing interventions, such as rain gardens and cisterns that require a permit.

Currently there is a rebate program for residents based on the amount of square feet of roof runoff that is controlled by cisterns and rain gardens in select areas of the city that have combined sewer overflow issues. The city hopes to increase the area of the city that is eligible for these rebates.

As the cost of installing and maintaining traditional stormwater infrastructure, such as storm drains, continues to increase, cities like Seattle, Washington will continue to look for ways to encourage property owners to sustainably manage rainwater onsite.” 

Via: Global Site Plans

Image: 

“The Future of Measuring Community Sustainability

KAID BENFIELD JUNE 21, 2012

Some very interesting things are happening in the world of sustainability measurement, or our ability to gauge how well we are doing in moving neighborhoods, cities and regions toward a healthier future. It’s a new and rapidly evolving field, and in some ways an elusive one: as I’ve written before, there are some concepts critical to our well-being that don’t lend themselves to objectivity, and frankly I think that’s a good thing. As a lover of art, music, romance and matters of the spirit, I don’t particularly want to live in a world that can be entirely reduced to numbers.

But there are some things that are important to our well-being and to our environmental health that we can measure, and it is fascinating to follow the systems some leaders are coming up with, such as the “happiness index” pioneered by the government of Bhutan. Closer to home, I have been impressed by efforts I have recently gotten to know in Illinois and New Jersey. I’ll get to them in a minute; but, first, a little background.

LEED-ND and neighborhood measurement

As longtime readers know, NRDC was deeply involved for the better part of a decade in the construction of a sustainability tool called LEED for Neighborhood Development. (Our partners in the endeavor were the US Green Building Council and the Congress for the New Urbanism.) The idea was to come up with a set of measurements that can be used to identity and certify smart, green land development, in order to encourage more of it and help us separate the praiseworthy from the pretenders.  Our hope was to do for multi-building, neighborhood-scale projects and for smart growth what the LEED systems had already done for individual green buildings. 

LEED-ND measures things like proximity to transit and existing infrastructure, walkability, mix of buildings and neighborhood amenities, and the likely performance of environmental management systems. Applicants that pass certain prerequisites may then earn credit points toward a certification by the US Green Building Council; as with other LEED systems, the more points, the higher the rating.

Although our system had the misfortune to hit the street at the same time that the Great Recession slowed real estate development to a crawl, I think there is little doubt that we created something useful and influential, if inevitably a bit imperfect. 

Over a hundred projects have been certified under the pilot program and the fully launched system, with at least that many more in the pipeline for eventual approval. Some are truly outstanding examples of just the sort of development that brings environmental, social and economic benefits. LEED-ND is better at measuring some things (for instance, transit richness) than others (inclusiveness), but it’s been a good start and will be improved over time.”

Via: The Atlantic

Photo: Dockside Green in Victoria, British Columbia, courtesy Perkins and Will

“The Right Way to Engage Residents in a Neighborhood Redesign

Kaid Benfield. June 7, 2012

Denver’s rejuvenated South Lincoln neighborhood, being redeveloped in phases, will be walkable, transit-oriented, equitable, green, and perfectly located in close proximity to downtown jobs and services. It’s a terrific new model-in-the-making of how to revitalize older, distressed public housing sites in an ambitious yet sensitive way. But what really sets the South Lincoln project apart from others is the outstanding predevelopment public engagement and analysis undertaken by the Denver Housing Authority to ensure that the new community will deliver maximum benefits to existing and new residents and neighbors.

Last month I wrote about the Denver Regional Equity Atlas, a compendium of maps and research showing how the city’s expanding transit system can be leveraged to bring opportunity to traditionally underserved populations. A couple of weeks later, my collaborator Lee Epstein wrote an article about how we can use emerging technology to facilitate citizen participation in the design of sustainable communities. Neither of us had the South Lincoln redevelopment in mind when we wrote those posts, but we certainly could have.  Now that I have had an opportunity to research the project, it’s hard to imagine a better exemplar for both subjects.

Anticipating full redevelopment of the 17.5-acre site by 2018, DHA will replace 182 outmoded apartments in an area of “concentrated poverty and physical distress,” to use the phrase of the Housing Authority’s Kimball Crangle in a presentation to the Urban Land Institute last year. The new community will include 457 homes, including over 300 public housing residences, workforce homes and other affordable housing. There will be 147 units available at market rates, creating a mixed-income neighborhood.

Public and affordable housing will be available to households earning less than 80 percent of the area median income; workforce housing will be available to those earning 50 to 60 percent of the area median income. All homes will be within convenient walking distance of the neighborhood’s light rail station and expected nearby mixed uses. By coordinating demolition and construction in phases, all residents will maintain the ability to remain in the neighborhood during the redevelopment process.

The first new project to be completed in the neighborhood is a 100-unit, eight-story apartment building for seniors and the disabled, constructed on a remediated brownfield site. Expected to earn a LEED-platinum rating, the building features rooftop solar panels, an advanced green heating and cooling system, and graywater recycling; the landscaping in the adjacent right-of-way includes green infrastructure for stormwater management.

Apart from the green features, among the building’s tenants is a youth culinary academy providing job training. Denver artist Jolt and his company GuerillaGarden created a 5,000-square-foot mural symbolizing community pride that stretches the full 90-foot height of one wall of the building.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Image: Courtesy of Mithun

” Uninhabitable High-Rises

Steve Mouzon. May 14, 2012

 My tweet-cast of Léon Krier’s address to the Congress for the New Urbanism Saturday morning created a small firestorm for a while on Twitter characterized by @nlamontagne’s “Low-rise fetishism is bad for cities” and @BLAH_CITY’s iconic “…my coffin will be “human scale”! All else is architecture…” Never mind that the real fetish here is the Skyscraper Fetish. In any case, here are several thoughts for the skyscraper apologists:

Sustainability may be defined as “keeping things going in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future.” That uncertain future is very unlikely to include cheap energy at levels we know today. At unaffordable energy price levels, what fails to work in high rises?

   1. Wind speed increases with distance from the ground. A gentle breeze on the ground translates to something closer to a gale higher up. Open two windows for cross-ventilation on the forty-second floor, and all your papers may get blown out into the street. That increased wind speed, when combined with rain, plays havoc with weatherstripping in operable windows. Operable windows in high-rise offices therefore have serious issues. But on a hot day without cheap fossil fuel, inoperable curtain walls have an even bigger problem: without the ability to cross-ventilate, the building may literally be uninhabitable because without a way to dump excess heat, interior temperatures would soon become even hotter than outdoors.

  2. Our great-grandchildren will ask “what were they thinking?” about many of our building techniques. Chief amongst them will be glass curtain walls. The best possible curtain wall today is not as good an insulator as a 2x4 wood stud wall, R-11 fiberglass batts, and the cheapest possible finishes. Yet we wrap all four sides of buildings (including east and west sides, facing the hot, low sun) with the stuff, acting as if the laws of thermodynamics don’t exist. But as energy costs climb towards the unaffordable, glass-clad high-rises will move closer towards being uninhabitable.”

Via: Original Green