” 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

“Now Coveted: A Walkable, Convenient Place

By CHRISTOPHER B. LEINBERGER. May 25, 2012

WALKING isn’t just good for you. It has become an indicator of your socioeconomic status. 

Until the 1990s, exclusive suburban homes that were accessible only by car cost more, per square foot, than other kinds of American housing. Now, however, these suburbs have become overbuilt, and housing values have fallen. Today, the most valuable real estate lies in walkable urban locations. Many of these now pricey places were slums just 30 years ago. 

Mariela Alfonzo and I just released a Brookings Institution study that measures values of commercial and residential real estate in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, which includes the surrounding suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. Our research shows that real estate values increase as neighborhoods became more walkable, where everyday needs, including working, can be met by walking, transit or biking. There is a five-step “ladder” of walkability, from least to most walkable. On average, each step up the walkability ladder adds $9 per square foot to annual office rents, $7 per square foot to retail rents, more than $300 per month to apartment rents and nearly $82 per square foot to home values. 

As a neighborhood moves up each step of the five-step walkability ladder, the average household income of those who live there increases some $10,000. People who live in more walkable places tend to earn more, but they also tend to pay a higher percentage of their income for housing.

Although we have not studied all urban areas to the same degree, these findings appear to apply to much of the rest of the country. In metropolitan Seattle in 1996, the suburban Redmond area, home to Microsoft, had the same price per square foot as Capitol Hill, a walkable area adjacent to downtown, based on data from Zillow. Today, Capitol Hill is valued nearly 50 percent above Redmond. 

In Columbus, Ohio, the highest housing values recorded by Zillow in 1996 were in the suburb of Worthington, where prices were 135 percent higher than in the struggling neighborhood of Short North, adjacent to the city’s center.  Today, Short North housing values are 30 percent higher than those of Worthington, and downtown Columbus has the highest housing values in that metropolitan area. 

In the Denver area, Highlands Ranch, an upscale, master-planned community 20 miles south of downtown, had housing in 1996 that cost on average 21 percent more than housing in Highlands, a troubled neighborhood adjacent to downtown Denver. Today, Highlands has a 67 percent price premium over Highlands Ranch. 

People are clearly willing to pay more for homes that allow them to walk rather than drive. Biking is part of the picture, too. Biking and walking are part of a “complete streets” strategy that public rights of way should be for all of society — not just cars.”

Via: The NY Times

Image: Josh Cochran

“The Greenest Building May Actually Be a Neighborhood

Nate Berg. April 10, 2012

Green building might be little more than a fringe hippie idea if not for certification. The medals and honors now available through rating systems have enabled a good and altruistic effort to become a highly marketable quality. LEED – Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – is now the most well-known and well-used certification system, claiming nearly 9 billion square feet of space participating in its various certification programs globally. But it’s not alone, and it’s not necessarily the greenest of the green. The relatively new Living Building Challenge has been steadily gathering fans in the green building community for tougher-than-LEED standards such as net-zero energy and net-zero water.

“The Living Building Challenge has emerged as the high bar in sustainable design,” says Walker Wells, director of the Green Urbanism program at the advocacy organization Global Green USA. He’s had firsthand experience with both LEED and the Living Building Challenge and likes the fact that the Living Building Challenge requires many of the highest possible standards.

One house at a time, though, is a slow go. So Wells and his colleague Ted Bardacke have decided to see how well the Living Building Challenge could be applied to an entire neighborhood. They’re teaching a design studio for urban planning grad students this spring at UCLA to test it out.

This is a concept that’s been emerging in recent years. Since 2007, the U.S. Green Building Council has operated the LEED for Neighborhood Design rating system. Global Green USA has been involved in two projects certified under the system, and while Wells says LEED-ND is a good program, he notes that some of its requirements don’t go far enough.

The Living Building Challenge requires that every project meet each of its 20 strict requirements to achieve the certification. All sites, for example, have to be either greyfields or brownfields, meaning that they’ve already been developed and that they often have some environmental degradation as a result. This idea of renovating existing development to reduce its impact has huge potential in a highly developed world. And at the neighborhood scale, even more so.

“The idea is, how do we take place that’s already there, that has some development opportunities and plug in new stuff and modify what’s there so that it can achieve some standard of sustainability?” says Wells. “How aggressive or radical do we need to be thinking in this effort to redesign and retrofit cities?”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo:  Shutterstock

“Brainstorming Ways to Turn Tappan Zee Into Park

Peter Applebome. April 4, 2012

One drawing envisions a sprawling Seurat-like park scene with the towers of Manhattan beckoning in the distance. Others call for two ghost piers beginning at opposite sides over the river but not meeting, elegantly terraced gardens and plantings, a simple walkway surrounded by wind generators, photovoltaic cells and other examples of green energy.

The idea of turning the existing Tappan Zee Bridge into a walkwayand park when a new bridge is built remains more alluring dream than likely reality, though when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared it in February to be an “exciting option,” that seemed to guarantee it would at least get serious scrutiny.

But since the proposal was floated last fall by Paul Feiner, supervisor of the Town of Greenburgh in Westchester County, enough people have become entranced by the idea that some have been imagining what it might look like, and have put those imaginings on paper.

Milagros Lecuona, an urban planning professor at Columbia University who with Mr. Feiner leads the Tappan Bridge Park Alliance, which is advocating the project, has worked with her class all semester on what it would take to make the park a reality. The New York Times also put the challenge to architecture students in Laila Seewang’s advanced urban theory class at Cooper Union. Ms. Lecuona is hoping to put together an international design competition to attract ideas for the Tappan Zee as park.

Still, the ideas already generated reflect the way the proposal is consistent with trends in preservation and urban design. After all, to the north is Walkway Over the Hudson, reclaimed from a 1.2-mile abandoned railway bridge linking Poughkeepsie and Highland. To the south, along the West Side of Manhattan, is the High Line, built on what was once a 1.45-mile-long elevated rail structure.

Lisa Tziona Switkin, an associate partner with James Corner Field Operations, was one of the designers of the High Line, and she cited it as evidence that the Tappan Zee project, no matter how outlandish it might sound, has potential.

“When the High Line was first proposed it was an impossible dream, and it became an exercise in making the impossible possible,” she said. “As a designer I’m incredibly excited about this kind of opportunity; something that crosses boundaries about what it is and what it is not. Is it a building? A bridge? A park?”

Still, many bridge experts and planning professionals urge caution, doubting it will be possible to turn the existing bridge into a three-mile, 30-acre park when a new $5 billion bridge is built. (And a more pressing issue for now is what kind of bridge that will be and whether it should be built without provisions for new mass transit.)”

Via: The New York Times

Photo: The Tappan Zee Bridge, which is likely to be replaced soon, is being reimagined for alternative uses. Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Time

“Low Tech Magazine on How To Heat And Cool Cities Without Fossil Fuels

Lloyd Alter. March 26, 2012

One of the fundamental problems about covering sustainable design is that really, the single family house doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things. We spend so much time covering passive houses, for example, when they and all of the other green houses shown on every design website don’t add up to a rounding error when it comes to where people live in most of the world, which is in cities.

That’s why Kris De Decker’s post at Low Tech Magazine is so important and groundbreaking. He has written The solar envelope: how to heat and cool cities without fossil fuels. He writes:

Passive solar design does not involve any new technology. In fact, it has been around for thousands of years, and even predates the use of glass windows. For most of human history, buildings were adapted to the local climate through a consideration of their location, orientation and shape, as well as the appropriate building materials. This resulted in many vernacular building styles in different parts of the world. In contrast, most modern buildings look the same wherever they stand. They are made from the same materials, they follow forms that are driven by fashion rather than by climate, and are most often randomly located and oriented, indifferent to the path of the sun and the prevailing wind conditions.

He then goes on to describe how zoning and building rules might be changed to create solar envelopes and the ensure the principle of solar access. It used to be common practice; De Decker notes that ” The Ancient Greeks built entire cities which were optimal for solar exposure.”

Via: Treehugger

Image: © The density atlas

“The Case for Skyscrapers Made of Wood

Samuel Medina. March 21, 2012. 

Since the invention and development of steel and concrete, the combination of which would spawn the birth of the skyscraper, wood as a building material has been marginalized as simple construction ephemera, used to form concrete or to structure building frames advanced with the expressed purpose of producing single family homes or large estates and to furnishing their plush interiors.

Wood fell out of vogue in a large part because of its vulnerability to fire, probably the single greatest factor in restricting use of the material to smaller structures. But change is coming, writes CNN, as wood has become transformed by a handful of dedicated engineers and architects – Shigeru Ban most notable among them - and put to use in the service of large-scale structures like Michael Green‘s proposed “Tallwood” skyscraper in Vancouver.

The plans for the 30-story tower are among a small group of “woodscrapers” being proposed throughout the world, which all had to overcome stringent building codes. Explaining the motivation behind his design, Green says that wood construction at such scales is decidedly cheaper than standard-industry methods and, more importantly, much more energy efficient, given the large amounts of CO2 expended in the manufacturing of steel and concrete and the extent of their large carbon footprints. Conversely, wood traps carbon dioxide throughout a building’s life cycle, and, if sustainably harvested from controlled and well-managed forests, can prove to be a renewable resource.

For Tallwood, Green has created a system of laminated strand lumber beams which are load-bearing and fire-resistant. Where the structural capacity of steel rapidly degrades when exposed to flames, the large beams, which are comprised of strips of wood fibers glued together, develop an exterior layer of char that insulates the wood’s structural core. Innovative designs such as Tallwood, when coupled with  may propel wood at the forefront of future construction advancements.

As Green says, “Really we’re at the stage where we’re able to start to show what’s possible, a bit like that Eiffel Tower moment. That was built when no one was used or understood tall structures, but it showed what could be done and just as importantly stretched the imagination.”

Via: The Atlantic

Image: Courtesy of Michael Green

” Via: Mammoth, March 6, 2012

Photo: [“Reclamation and slope stabilization on a volcanic ash hillside” in Japan; photograph by flickr user GeoJuice.]

If I weren’t going to be in California March 23rd and 24th, I’m pretty sure I’d be in Boston at theGSD’s “Landscape Infrastructure” symposium, which promises a fascinating range of discussion on “the future of infrastructure and urbanization beyond the dogma of civil engineering and transportation planning”, organized and curated (obviously) by Pierre Bélanger:

“Urban life is sustained by technological infrastructure. Highways, harbours, airports, power lines, landfills and mines largely figure as the dominant effigies of contemporary urbanization. The sheer size of these elements renders their understanding as a single system practically impossible, yet their operations depend precisely on their continuity to support the flow of capital and cultural mobility. Often found underground, or beyond the periphery of cities, the presence of urban infrastructure remains largely invisible until the precise moment at which it fails or breaks down. Floods, blackouts and shortages serve as a few reminders of the limited capacity and fragility of this large operating structure that unilaterally depends on constant control and micro-management for its sustenance.

As the invisible background of contemporary society, the smooth functioning of infrastructure has literally naturalized the processes of urbanization whereas less than a century ago, a basic level of collective, essential services barely existed. Rarely, do we stop to interrogate the functioning, let alone the effects – geospatially, metabolically, or semiotically – of this Taylorist, technological superstructure. Yet recent events – from the sudden collapse of highway bridges, the rise and fall of water levels, the growing hazards of coastal storms and coastal eutrophication, the accumulating effects of carbon emissions, the surge in foreign oil prices and spike in food prices, the drop in credit markets, to the increase in population mobility and dispersal – are instigating a critical review of the basic foundation upon which urban economies depend on.

Emerging from current economic exigencies and environmental imperatives, this symposium engages these challenges by re-examining the precepts of infrastructure - the basic system of essential services that support a city, a region, a nation, a continent- as well as the patterns of urbanization from which they originated. Responding to the overexertion of civil engineering and the inertia of urban planning vis-à-vis the pace and complexity of urbanization at the turn of the 21st century, the symposium challenges the technocratic role of engineers, transportation planners and policy makers who have profoundly shaped the urban environment that we move through and live in today. Drawing from the growing agency of contemporary urbanists – ecologists, geographers, historians, designers, conservationists and social groups – who are rethinking the predominance of centralized infrastructures, guest speakers employ a telescopic vantage to bring forth alternative models, methods and measures across a range of scales, that seek to decouple the Fordist economies of scale from the paradigm of economic growth.”

“ULX: The Art of Affordable Housing

By Ron Nyren. March 15, 2012

Ten affordable housing developments take creative design approaches to providing appealing environments while controlling costs.

Affordable housing does not have to look like plain boxes. Though tight budgets may restrict options for materials, architects have found ways to add variety, mixing exterior textures and colors, breaking up massing, and integrating art into the architecture. Careful siting leaves room for generous outdoor open spaces—whether landscaped courtyards or public plazas—that provide places for residents to get to know each other or enjoy a respite from life in the city.

All completed in the past five years, the following ten projects (listed alphabetically) exemplify levels of design more typically found in market-rate housing. A number incorporate sustainable design strategies that reduce energy and water use—crucial whether the tenant or the owner/operator pays the utility bills.

1. Armstrong Place Senior and Family Housing 

When people move out of traditional housing into seniors’ residential complexes, they risk becoming isolated from the larger community. To encourage continued cross-generational interactions, local nonprofit developer Bridge Housing and local firm David Baker + Partners Architects teamed up to transform a former industrial site in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, building affordable apartments for seniors as well as a complex of for-sale townhouses next door available to families. The 124 townhouses are stacked around a large public courtyard that includes vegetable gardens; bioswales help manage stormwater runoff.

The four stories of seniors’ apartments above ground-level retail are connected to the family townhouses by a landscaped mews. They also have their own central courtyard. To reference the historically African American neighborhood, the architects patterned the exterior paint scheme and window placement after traditional African textiles. A wall inset of Ashanti tribal symbols rings the courtyard. The 116 apartments are earmarked for seniors earning less than 50 percent of the area median income (AMI), while the townhouses are intended for households earning 60 to 100 percent of AMI. Both portions were completed in 2010.”

Via: Urban Land

“SimCity 5 Confirmed: Maxis to Make a More Socially and Environmentally Conscious Computer Game

Ramon Gonzalez. March 7, 2012

Earlier this week concept images for what were purported to be SimCity 5 hit the Internet and raised the hopes of many of us of a certain age. For those two young to know, SimCity is a city-building simulation computer game. The last version, SimCity 4, was released in 2003. The game allows you to build terrains, layout a city, and micro-manage it as the city’s mayor. Think Minecraft, minus the creepers, and add a team of advisors that constantly complain about things like air pollution, education funding, traffic congestion and power consumption.

Forbes reports SimCity 5, scheduled to be released in 2013, will take on an environmental slant:

‘Online and social elements where if you put a lot of polluting power plants near your borders, your friends might start to get some smoke rolling into their suburbs. You might even start to contribute to global CO2 levels.’

News of SimCity 5 was announced as part of the Game Developer’s Conference“Games for Change” track. According to Kotau, this new feature that takes the environmental impact of your city is called “Social Flow.” The term describes how the choices and advancements you make in your city will affect neighboring cities.

While the ability to customize buildings looks interesting, I hope the game takes organic farming into consideration. Trying to build a bucolic farming community in SimCity 4 was nearly impossible because farms polluted surrounding lakes and rivers. I hope MAXIS realizes it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.

Challenge Everything.”

Via: Treehugger

Image: © MAXIS/EA GAMES

“Los Angeles Seeks Pedestrians

The automobile is undoubtedly the dominant mode of travel in Los Angeles. But to write off the city as made up entirely of car-driving, bumper-to-bumper rush hour commuters is clearly an over-generalization. A growing group of Angelenos is finding ways to make transit, cycling, and walking (and, often, a combination thereof) relevant and viable in their daily lives.

A physical example of this transition opened this weekend in the city’s Silver Lake neighborhood. On a short strip of street bordering a small triangular park within a vibrant commercial area, officials from the city’s departments of planning, transportation, and public works partnered with the county’s public health department to close the street off to car traffic and convert it into an outdoor plaza. On 11,000 square-feet, the roadway has been effectively removed form the automobile grid with the simple application of paint (in glowing neon green polka-dots), bike racks and planters around the edges and seating in the middle. The project was inspired by similar street plazas created in New York City and San Francisco.

“In L.A., 60 percent of our land area is devoted to streets and parking lots. So the real hope here is that we can take that and transform it into something really different than just spaces for cars,” says Bill Roschen, president of the city’s planning commission.

Roschen helped spearhead the street-to-plaza project, part of an effort called Streets for People. His intention is to spread projects like this one throughout the city.

“It’s about culture change,” Roschen says. “It’s looking at streets as not always for cars, but a real shared effort around mobility.”

At least a hundred people were milling around the plaza for its opening day ceremony this past Sunday – an especially warm and sunny day. A line trailed out of the door of a café right on the plaza’s edge, and people moved chairs to find some shade underneath the umbrellas sprinkled throughout the area. Kids ran around, while adults and community members crowded around local officials to talk about – and congratulate each other on – the project.”

Via: The Atlantic

Photo: Nate Berg