The project provides easy access to the Gautrain station, malls, embassies, hotels and offices. The prominent new green building forms part of Abland’s larger R1.7-billion mixed-use development on Alice Lane road, which will comprise three phases.

Green building certification company Solid Green Consulting owner and consultant Marloes Reinink says that Abland and the future tenants of the sustainable building started the Green Star SA certification process early in the green design process, making it simpler.

CERTIFIED South Africa now has 30 buildings with Green Star certification from the Green Building Council of South Africa

The development of the Alice Lane building involves constructing three office towers that are linked by a central landscaped piazza, which will be pedestrian friendly and a naturally greened environment. The sustainable building will incorporate convenience and service retail by including a bank, restaurants, hairdressers, dry cleaners and convenience-food outlets.

The green building will be equipped with energy efficient lighting and air-conditioning sys- tems. It is designed to allow maximum natural light into the building, affording as many occupants as possible external views from their desks.

The first 18 000 m2 green building, on Fredman Drive, is under construction and will be completed and occupied in August. The second 16 000 m2 sustainable building, situated on the Alice Lane side of the property, will be ready for occupation in September next year. The third building will be on the corner of Alice Lane and Fifth streets.

The Alice Lane project will be one of the first in South Africa to negotiate a ‘Green Lease’, which is vital to ensuring that green building in South Africa live up to their promise and operate at optimum levels.

Reinink notes that developing a Green Lease is a significant achievement, particularly since there are numerous and diverse parties involved, including the developers, tenants, facilities managers and lawyers. Therefore, all involved in the development are aware of their role and the benefits they will derive from the green building.

The green building in South Africa site is a brownfield site and did not require the disturbance of previously unused land for construction. During the green building construction, processes, such as waste management and recycling, are closely monitored. The final touches to the offices will include paints, adhesives and carpets that are low in volatile organic compounds, making it a healthier space in which to work.

This article was edited by Alive2green

Article Source

http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/30-green-star-buildings-in-sa-2013-05-03

Responsible care for the environment

Right from the beginning of the renovation work, it was clear that the whole area surrounding BASF’s office building should be protected. The responsible planners therefore preferred to plant local plants. Water consumption and the use of chemical fertilisers have been minimised.

Good indoor air quality

To make sure indoor air quality in BASF’s newly renovated office building is good, CO2 measurement devices continuously monitor the air in meeting rooms. During the renovation, BASF products containing minimum volatile organic compound rates have been preferred such as MASTERTILE®, a ceramic tile adhesive and joint filler, as well as MASTERTOP® and CONIPUR® as floor coating systems.

Energy efficient façade and roof

For the insulation of the building’s facades, BASF’s polyurethane spray foam Elastopor® H was used. The roof was insulated with Styrodur® C. By using these materials, the U.S. energy-efficiency standard (ASHRAE 90.1) performance values were met. As a result of the renovation work, annual savings of 21 % in energy consumption and 25 % in energy costs have been achieved.

The first article broadens the debate around quantifying the performance enhancements and return on investment of green buildings. The findings are enlightening both in terms of identifying new impediments and confirming certain performance gains. Of particular interest to me is the confirmation of the old allegation that predicted performance is not matched in operation. This does not bode well for the efficacy of compulsory building energy and water efficiency regulations and will require further investigation if the objectives of these regulations are to be achieved.

The second article relates the experience (and conviction) of a builder as he commercially explores the world of net-zero.

The third article highlights two things that are not generally recognised: one, The Living Building Challenge may well be the very best rating methodology available right now and two, that green buildings should also focus on the “art” as well as the science of building.

The fourth article is, in a way, supplementary to the first inasmuch as it exposes some notable trends in household energy consumption including:

• The average U.S. household consumed 11,320 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity in 2009, of which the largest portion (7,526 kWh) was for appliances, electronics, lighting and miscellaneous uses.

• On average, residents living in homes constructed in the 1980s consumed 77 million Btu of total energy at home. By comparison, those living in newer homes, built from 2000 to 2009, consumed 92 million Btu per household, which is 19 percent more.

This is followed by three articles addressing differing components of the people/planet nexus: of particular interest is the restitution of natural resources and landscape features lost due to city planning acts in the past.

The last article articulates a notion that I have spent some considerable reflecting on: will future courts pursue surviving decision-makers (including architects) for damage caused to the environment through their actions? Read the piece published on a Yale University website!

Until next time,

Yours truly,

Llewellyn van Wyk

Editor-at-Large

Nestled between downtown Seattle and the Capitol Hill district, the Bullitt Center will open on Earth Day, April 22. Builders of the six-story, 50,000 square-foot building claim it will be the “greenest” office building on the planet. Ground broke in August 2011, and since then few green building details have been left unturned, from water efficiency, renewable energy and choice of construction materials. If anything close to a zero-impact office building exists, the Bullitt Center is it.

Inside, tenants will benefit from abundant natural light, plenty of fresh air and overall a healthier environment than can be found in most commercial buildings. The builders bypassed the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED certification in favor of the strenuous Living Building Challenge standards.

The Bullitt Center’s approach towards environmental sustainability starts with the design of the site. Cisterns will store rainwater, and “grey water” from sinks and showers will funnel through the building’s green roof. Perched on Madison Street, the Bullitt Center will be flanked by a planting strip that will make the approaching sidewalk more pleasant for local workers and residents. Solar arrays will provide as much electricity as the building requires. Medium-height sidewalk plantings will also create a physical separation between pedestrians and vehicle traffic. The building’s planners chose the transitional Madison-Miller neighborhood for the opportunity to add more commercial space to a mostly residential area; Madison Street’s role as a link to several neighborhoods in Seattle also factored in the building’s location.

In tune with the ideals behind the Living Building Challenge, the Bullitt Center takes inspiration from nature and creates a work environment that is practical, yet also healthy for its inhabitants. Architectural details that are aesthetically pleasing yet practical include higher ceilings (eliminating an additional floor possible under local building codes) and a central glass-enclosed staircase that encourages tenants to use the stairs instead of the elevator. Exposed wood, Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified, is a reflection of the local Pacific Northwest natural environment.

Tenants include the University of Washington’s Integrated Design Lab, the Cascadia Green Building Council and, of course, the Bullitt Foundation. In a phone conversation with spokesperson Brad Kahn, he explained that currently the building has leased out 40 percent of its space and negotiations are underway with prospective tenants and the Bullitt Center feels very optimistic about leasing the entire space. Suites ranging from 2,000 to 8,000 square feet are available: larger offices include a kitchen and a shower for those who will commute by bicycle. Should a cleaner and healthier built environment indeed evolve after the Bullitt Center’s opening, watch for architects and developers around the world to take notice.

Retrieved Thursday, January 17, 2013

http://www.triplepundit.com/2013/01/worlds-greenest-building-bullitt-center-opens-earth-day/

If we are successful, this will not just be the greenest commercial building in the world. It will be a crucial milestone in ushering in a new era of intelligent, sustainable urban design.

The Living Building Challenge is a bold, new certification program that tests green buildings against the most rigorous performance standards in the world. A building cannot receive full certification until it has operated at demanding levels for at least one year. Much attention has been directed to the energy, water and materials criteria of the Challenge; these are objective characteristics that can be measured and counted. However, I want to focus on an equally critical part of the LBC test – “beauty” – and the central role it plays in green building design.

Form Follows Function

In 1896, Louis Sullivan, the architectural titan, was the first to write the words: “form…follows function.” Rather than follow precedent, or generate random graceful swoops, the form of a building, according to Sullivan, should flow organically from its purpose.

While that might seem self-evident – one would not want a cathedral that looked like a prison – this basic dictum was received as a bombshell at the time. And it started modern architecture down a curious path.

In 1908, the Austrian architect Adolf Loos took a further step, denouncing architectural ornamentation as “criminal.” The Bauhaus school, led by such giants as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, embraced this vision and sought to eliminate all superfluous grace notes from the built environment.

One branch of this modernist school ultimately produced housing developments so “soviet” in their utilitarianism that they evoke gulags. Today’s “big box” retail outlets – essentially featureless – are also part of this tradition.

A different modernist derivative led to exposed plumbing, heating ducts and structural elements (whose beauty had not previously been widely appreciated). Brightly painted plumbing is considered ornamental-but-not-superfluous. This approach reached its presumed zenith at the Pompidou Centre, a collaboration of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano.

Trophy Buildings

Movements invariably produce counter-movements. Today’s most celebrated architectural prizes are frequently awarded to buildings that are nearly pure ornament. In these concoctions, form often bears no significant relationship to function. Like sculptors, star architects produce objects that bear their own unmistakable signatures. Shown photos of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, Marqués de Riscal and Disney Hall, the man on the street could easily guess that they are all by the same architect, but he would have no clue as to which is the museum, the hotel or the concert hall.

There is no denying that today’s prize-winning buildings have panache. The sculptural elements of the Disney Center, the National Assembly of Wales, CCTV headquarters, the Burj Khalifa and virtually everything by the astonishingly versatile Zaha Hadid inspire emotional reactions of the same sort as Rodin, Henry Moore or Brancusi. Developments in materials science, computer topography and CAD-CAM have now made imaginable buildings that could not have been built 10 years ago. It is hard to find anyone who isn’t affected – whether delighted or shocked – by these trophy structures.

What many of these visual icons don’t do very well, however, is serve the actual needs of their tenants without unduly burdening the planet. Comfort, convenience, productivity, acoustics, views from inside-out and even healthy indoor air are reduced to second-order concerns. The sculptural elegance of the structure, when viewed from outside, trumps all other considerations.

Sculptor Richard Serra famously dismisses architecture as mere “plumbing.” Although intended as arch sarcasm by the artist of the artisan, his comment operates effectively at another level.

Learning from Nature

In dramatic contrast, the Living Building Challenge insists that a building be designed from the ground up to be useful and healthy. A living building must be designed to radically minimize its impacts on the earth. And a living building’s design must be beautiful.

Beauty was no mere afterthought to the Challenge’s authors. Jason F. McLennan and Eden Bruckman had seen plenty of ugly structures that met very high environmental performance standards, and they knew that unsightly design would not inspire a successful movement.

The LBC authors also knew that “beauty” could not simply be mandated. Beyond a series of generalized principles, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

In conjunction with the other elements of the Living Building Challenge, the authors appear to be affirming that architects should never have to choose among aesthetics, functionality and performance. If faced with such a trade-off, architects need to probe more deeply into their designs to solve for all three ends simultaneously. In particular, stumped architects should explore how nature has solved analogous problems during the last couple billion years of beta testing.

Most of what we know about our perceptions of beauty is based upon the human response to natural patterns. Fibonacci numbers, the golden ratio, Fermat’s spiral and scores of other algebraic mainstays that define beauty are commonplace in nature and were discovered there by humans.

And nature, over time, always favors designs that are functional and make the most efficient use of scarce resources. That is the essence of natural selection. Buildings that seamlessly blend beauty, efficiency and functionality are almost always inspired by something Mother Nature invented millions of years ago. (While natural selection produces superb blends of functionality and efficiency, humans don’t always appreciate their beauty. That is particularly true of some that can cause us harm. Snakes, crocodiles and sharks, for example, are superbly tailored to succeed in their environments.)

Location + Efficiency

The Challenge also emphasizes the role of place. It acknowledges the beauty (as well as the efficacy) of thick adobe walls of the American Southwest and breezy verandas in the Southeast; of A-frames above the snow line and stilt houses on most of the world’s bayous. Living building architecture is, of necessity, regional architecture. It takes advantage of sun, rain and wind instead of fighting to overcome them.

In important ways, the LBC’s beauty is a celebration of the same elegant simplicity found in Apple’s iPad and Air. Aesthetics were not compromised in these devices in pursuit of superb functionality. Rather, a sleek, elegant beauty emerged as the consequence of an uncompromising search for the best possible user experience achieved as efficiently as possible. Like living buildings, these devices minimize the use of materials and energy.

The Bullitt Center, the Greenest Commercial Building in the World

Anyone asked to describe the Bullitt Center is likely to begin with its large, visually arresting roof. To capture enough solar energy to power a six-story building in cloudy Seattle, an expansive roof is essential. The roof is also a collecting basin to capture rainwater to store seasonally in a huge cistern. This functional design provides a striking architectural signature for the building—it is as regionally appropriate in its own way as adobe or stilts.

The Bullitt Center has unusually high ceilings: The developers (Point32) included one fewer floor than would have been possible under Seattle’s regulations in order to ensure that every tenant has direct access to daylight and fresh air. The architects (Miller | Hull) specified ample use of gorgeous FSC-certified wood from nearby forests for the walls and ceilings. The owner (Bullitt Foundation) demanded an external, glass-enclosed staircase with great views to lure tenants away from the elevator, saving electricity while promoting health through exercise.

The end result is an elegant, simple, modern structure. Its features are the product of creative efforts to fulfill its purpose as an office building in ways that serve the tenants’ needs as efficiently as possible in a Seattle environment.

The Living Building Challenge is premised on a belief that the 21st century will require a rapid, worldwide movement to ultra-high performance buildings. But for this movement to realize its full potential, these buildings must also be a source of beauty, joy, well-being and inspiration. They will marry Sullivan’s “form follows function” precept with the highest levels of efficiency currently achievable. Learning from nature’s preoccupation with maximizing return from scarce resources, they will also be beautifully functional.

———
Reprinted by permission from ARCADE: March 20, 2012
Arcade 30.1
 | Winter 2012

After a century of looking outward, cities large and small are experiencing a renewed interest in downtown, taking stock of what was lost and building on what resources remain. Some cities like Lexington, Kentucky, are literally peeling back layers of history and returning to their roots. An invited competition comprising five internationally recognized firms is reimagining a lost waterway now running beneath city streets as a vital asset to downtown and an organizing armature of public space to guide future development around a new sports, arts, and entertainment district.

Lexington was founded along Town Branch Creek in 1775, a meandering waterway that sustained initial settlement and helped launch a thriving Bourbon distilling industry along its banks. As the city grew and industrialized, the creek fell victim to pollution and neglect and was eventually rerouted, buried, and forgotten for over a century.

SPACE GROUP’S RENDERING SHOWING A RENOVATED RUPP ARENA WITH TOWN BRANCH CREEK REINTRODUCED INTO THE URBAN FABRIC (LEFT). BATES’ MASTER PLAN FOR LEXINGTON’S PLANNED ARTS, SPORTS, AND ENTERTAINMENT DISTRICT (RIGHT).

COURTESY SPACE GROUP

In April, 2011, Lexington Mayor Jim Gray created a task force to evaluate 62 acres of parking lots and underutilized parcels surrounding the University of Kentucky’s Rupp Arena, bringing on Norway-based architecture firm Space Group to create a master plan. Space Group principal Gary Bates proposed rethinking downtown’s geography, centering on the arena to weave together the city’s historic center with the adjacent Distillery District, rebuilding the city’s outdated convention center, and renovating the arena in the process.

Michael Speaks, Dean of the University of Kentucky College of Design, said Bates pushed the city to look at the larger picture of downtown development. “Although Bates’ brief was to look at Rupp Arena, the convention center, and the surrounding parking lots, he knew the idea needed to expand into downtown. But to get people to focus, you need to center on Rupp,” he said. “The proposal gathered a lot of visual interest and got a lot of people excited.” Several high profile projects in the area continue to generate interest in downtown, including boutique hotel by Deborah Berke Partners and a large-scale mixed-use project called Centrepointe, previously master planned by Studio Gang and now moving forward under EOP Architects.

SPACE GROUP’S MASTER PLAN CALLS FOR RENOVATING RUPP ARENA (LEFT). THE MIXED-USE CENTREPOINTE DEVELOPMENT BY EOP ARCHITECTS FILLS AN ENTIRE CITY BLOCK (CENTER). DRAWING OF THE DISTILLERY DISTRICT ALONG TOWN BRANCH CREEK (RIGHT).
COURTESY SPACE GROUP; COURTESY EOP ARCHITECTS; COURTESY LEXINGTON DISTILLERY DISTRICT

Building on Bates’ master plan, the Lexington Downtown Development Authority (DDA) issued a RFQ to daylight, or uncover, the downtown segment of Town Branch Creek with new pocket parks along its route. After an overwhelming response from firms across the country, the DDA invited five firms to study the feasibility of the project and create detailed proposals of how Town Branch Commons might look. The five teams are led by Denver-based Civitas, Minneapolis-based Coen+Partners, Inside Outside from the Netherlands, Danish firm Julien De Smedt Architects, and New York-based SCAPE / Landscape Architecture.

RENDERING SHOWS A RESURFACED TOWN BRANCH CREEK FLOWING THROUGH A PROPOSED CONVENTION CENTER.
COURTESY SPACE GROUP

Each teams’ proposal will be presented on February 1 following a symposium organized by the University of Kentucky. Speaks said each firm will present previous work showing the benefits of large-scale urban interventions like the High Line in New York. “Part of the competition is to show the city five speculations that are realistic,” Speaks explained. “But this is not purely speculative. The competition is an attempt to bring a new level of talent to Lexington.” The symposium will be moderated by Michael Speaks, Aaron Betsky, Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum, and Landscape Architecture magazine Editor-in-Chief Brad McKee.

Following the symposium, a jury will select a winning proposal and the DDA will award $200,000 to further develop their concept and establish financial feasibility. The winning design will eventually be used to bolster public support and help with private fundraising.

Branden Klayko

APPROXIMATE PATH OF TOWN BRANCH CREEK THROUGH DOWNTOWN LEXINGTON (TOP). CURRENT CONDITIONS AROUND RUPP ARENA (RIGHT) AND A VIEW OF NEW PARK SPACE FORMING TOWN BRANCH COMMONS FROM SPACE GROUP’S MASTER PLAN (LEFT).
COURTESY SPACE GROUP

Retrieved Wednesday, 16 January 2013

http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=6450

An international agreement to study how to redress developing nations for damages from climate change illustrates how ineffective climate diplomacy has been over the last two decades. But this move may pave the way for future court suits against polluting countries and companies.

The UN climate talks in Qatar, which ended last month, were as inconsequential as you might imagine when the host nation chairing the event has the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world.

In other words, not a lot happened — except for one thing. For the first time, nations agreed that “developing nations that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change” might have a right to redress from major polluting nations for any resulting “loss and damage.” The conference then directed its staff to begin research on how to ensure that redress.

The U.S. delegation in particular worked hard to make certain there was no mention of compensation or litigation. Nonetheless, the action taken in Qatar suggests nations now concede that damaging impacts of climate change are inescapable. Given that those nations are already under an obligation in international law to prevent dangerous climate change, it brings closer the day when nations may seek redress in the courts for damages caused by climate change. And it may make more likely the prospect of citizens successfully bringing major polluters to court and making them responsible for their contributions to climate change.

The fact that negotiators are even discussing how to respond to “loss and damage” from climate change shows how badly climate diplomacy has

If countries can sue each other, why not private actions against corporate polluters failed since nations, including the U.S. under George H.W. Bush, signed up to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the original Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Under that convention, nations promised to ensure the “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

But greenhouse gas concentrations have continued to rise since, because the promised mitigation of emissions has not happened. After 17 years — with the pitifully weak Kyoto Protocol of 1997 the only sign of progress — negotiators at the much-anticipated climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009 admitted that mitigation was failing. So the Copenhagen Accord added another element. Besides mitigation, governments pledged to set aside money for an “adaptation fund” to help poorer nations adjust to what now looked like inevitable climate change.

Today, three years later, the prospect of a new global treaty to mitigate emissions seems as far away as ever, and the adaptation fund is largely empty. So, in Qatar, they added a third leg by launching studies into how to respond to the growing threat of “loss and damage.” What they are, in effect, telling the world is that neither mitigation nor adaptation will work.

The steps taken in Qatar are just words for now. But they could matter a great deal as droughts intensify, floods spread, heat waves kill, seas rise, and islands disappear. Since the big nations are palpably failing to meet their legal obligation to prevent dangerous climate change, it cannot be long before some small nation decides to invoke the disputes procedure laid out in article 14 of the UNFCCC. This procedure allows countries to take those nations failing in their duties under the convention to the UN’s International Court of Justice.

At that point, the legal floodgates may open. For if countries can sue each other, why not private actions against fossil fuel companies and other corporate polluters?

The few attempts so far by citizens to take climate change to court, mostly in the U.S., have been unsuccessful. Courts have dismissed their actions on the grounds that climate change is a political rather than a legal issue. But

One court case brought echoes of the class actions against tobacco and asbestos companies.

the longer the politicians delay, the less viable the courts’ position becomes. Judges may feel forced to fill the void.

The first such legal excursion was in 2005, when victims of Hurricane Katrina filed a suit against a group of oil companies, claiming that by emitting gases that contributed to the warmer Gulf of Mexico that helped intensify Katrina before it made landfall. The case was dismissed in 2007, partly because judges said the harm could not be traced to individual defendants.

Then in 2008, an Inupiat Eskimo community living on a barrier reef off the west coast of Alaska brought an action against Exxon Mobil and 23 other large oil, coal and electricity utility companies. The community said its village of Kivalina was being eroded by the sea. It blamed rising sea levels and melting coastal sea ice that left it exposed to storms and tidal surges, and it sought $400 million to pay for the relocation of the village further inland in Alaska.

Attorney Matt Pawa of the Pawa Law Group in Boston, which brought the case, argued that the energy companies were liable not just because they emitted millions of tons of greenhouse gases, but also because some have engaged in a conspiracy to misinform the public about the dangers of those emissions. This latter point brought echoes of the famous class actions against tobacco and asbestos companies that hung, in part, on their denial of the science proving the risks from their products.

In September this year, the Kivalina case suffered a setback when federal appeal judges ruled that the issue was for politicians in Congress and not the courts. Pawa says his clients have not given up and may try to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court for review.

Meanwhile, on the international stage, a group of small island nations, headed by Palau in the western Pacific, has asked the UN General Assembly to seek an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the legal responsibilities of nations whose corporations cause international harm through contributing to climate change. The action is not being taken under UNFCCC, but it opens up the door to that possibility in future.

Yale law professor Douglas Kysar, who is helping bring the case, says the island nations, all of which could disappear as sea levels rise, want “to show that the issue is a matter of law and justice, rather than merely politics.” That probably explains why, at the last meeting of the General Assembly this fall, the U.S. government exerted what Kysar calls “significant

Courts cannot stay away from climate change much longer if politicians continue to fail in their responsibilities.

diplomatic pressure to stop the resolution reaching the floor for a vote.” Those efforts ultimately proved successful.

But Palau and its fellow small island nations intend to push the resolution again at future General Assemblies, according to Kysar. “We are seeking nothing more than that the rule of law be introduced into the climate issue,” he says. Kysar believes the courts can no longer shy away from climate change. “Part of the reason why climate change treaty negotiations have cycled through the same set of arguments for the last 20 years,” he says, “is that we don’t have a clear baseline understanding of state responsibility.”

The new diplomatic language about “loss and damage” adopted in Qatar signifies that there has been a potential breach of the UNFCCC agreement. And that breach can only intensify the demand for the responsibilities of nations to be defined in law.

Not everyone is convinced that the new agenda of “loss and damage” will help civil litigators. Pawa believes that if there ever were intergovernmental action on compensation for climate victims, it might reduce the chance of success for private actions against fossil fuel companies. “If they set up a mechanism for compensation internationally, that would make private litigation more difficult, at least in the U.S., because our courts might defer to that process,” he told me.

But that still looks like a long way off. One way or another, lawyers spoken to for this article agree, the courts cannot stay away from climate change much longer if politicians continue to fail in their responsibilities. And it may take court rulings to force politicians to act.

Once the law gets involved, however, there has to be proof linking polluters to damaging weather. That requires good attribution science. In many cases, in order for actions to succeed, it will not be enough to show that polluters cause climate change. Scientists will have to show that individual extreme weather events are attributable to anthropogenic climate change.

The scientist most active in this area has been British climate modeler Myles Allen. He and colleagues at the University of Oxford have shown that both the European heat wave of 2003, which killed an estimated 35,000 people, and devastating floods that hit England in 2000 were made at least twice as likely by climate change. Allen says there is also convincing evidence from others that background global warming turned a heat wave in western Russia in 2010 into an extreme event, in which record temperatures triggered massive forest and peat-bog fires that blanketed Moscow in smog. In past cases involving environmental and health disasters, says Allen, a doubling of risk has been enough to trigger civil liability.

British barrister Richard Lord of Brick Court Chambers in London, editor of Climate Change Liability, believes that attribution research such as that undertaken by Allen and his colleagues makes litigation against climate polluters more likely to succeed in the future, especially if political negotiations continue to falter and climate impacts worsen.

Allen makes another point about knowledge, culpability and liability. Before 1990, he notes, no corporation or government could be held accountable for the impacts of their emissions of greenhouse gases. We simply did not know enough about their impacts on climate. But that year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first assessment of climate change, providing clear evidence. It was enough to persuade diplomats at the UN to begin drawing up the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and for governments to sign it two years later in Rio de Janeiro. From that moment on, claims of ignorance have been harder to justify.

That means culpability is growing with time. Within a decade, approaching two-thirds of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will have been emitted since 1990. And courts may say that culpability means liability. The argument that emitters should take some legal responsibility for the consequences of their emissions will harden. This will be especially true for those companies still in denial about the climate. They will look ever more like the tobacco corporations denying, against all the evidence, that their products are cancer sticks.
Retrieved Wednesday, 16 January 2013

http://e360.yale.edu/content/print.msp?id=2609

The home office is an example of natural daylighting emphasized frequently throughout the house. Images courtesy of Marc Rutenberg Homes

The 4,552-square-foot home, known as Zero Energy America 1, was recently completed and is the first of four houses comprising Rutenberg’s ambitious Zero Energy America project in the Tampa Bay area, which draws on the company’s luxury building expertise to create high-end homes classified as net-zero energy.

In order to achieve sustainability goals for Zero Energy America 1, Rutenberg incorporated many materials not previously used by the longtime builder. “We knew from the beginning we wanted to reach a LEED Platinum certification, so that choice really governed many of our product decisions throughout the life of the project,” Rutenberg says. He and daughter Ashley Rutenberg, LEED AP Homes, project LEED AP, conducted assiduous research which led them to products ranging from the Boral Roofing clay tiles containing recycled content chosen for the roof to the high-performance, low-carbon Blue World Crete concrete selected for the floor system

“Zero Energy America’s first-generation home really started off with the concrete material itself,” Marc Rutenberg recounts. Blue World Crete concrete is a low carbon footprint alternative to Portland cement, as this product contains a proprietary catalyst/binding agent in place of quarried limestone. The concrete requires significantly less energy to produce than Portland cement and also causes much lower levels of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere. “This is the first application of Blue World Crete concrete in the United States,” the builder says. “In order to use this product, we actually went through nine test labs to work through different formulations.”

The game room includes a television and couches (not seen in the picture) to create a comfortably cool entertainment area. Images courtesy of Marc Rutenberg Homes

The product selection process provided plenty of teachable moments for the Rutenberg team, including one lesson learned while choosing tiles for the roof. “The green building technical challenge on the roof was matching together the SRI values and the recycled content values,” Marc Rutenberg notes.

Though there are no hard-and-fast LEED requirements concerning residential roofs, Ashley Rutenberg looked to the commercial guidelines for guidance. “LEED New Construction (commercial buildings) requires an SRI of 29 for sloped roofs…so we decided to follow these same guidelines on the home, meeting an SRI of 29 or higher, and also meeting the LEED requirement of 50 percent pre-consumer recycled content,” she explains.

Boral tiles fit the project from both the sustainability and design aspects. “Made from the earth, Boral clay roofing products are all natural, 100 percent recyclable, with a recycled material content of up to 59 percent, minimizing the environmental footprint,” says John Renowden, vice president of technology at Boral Roofing. “Boral clay roofing products are unsurpassed in aesthetics and durability, and are covered by a transferable lifetime limited warranty that includes fade and labor coverage,” Renowden adds.

The color retention of clay tiles was a major selling point for Marc Rutenberg. However, the real lesson came when making his color selections. “We were looking at some of the Boral products, and we found out very quickly that the visual expectation of reflectives is very different from the technical values,” he recounts. As such, a decision was made to mix two Boral Clay 1-Piece “S” Tile roof color selections with 80 percent El Camino Blend and 20 percent Old World 1 in order to meet both the SRI of 29 or higher and the LEED recycled content requirement.

The chalkboard paint used in this bedroom is the only paint in the home that is not low- or no-VOC. Images courtesy of Marc Rutenberg Homes

Color pairing also proved extremely effective for the home’s hardscape, as the Rutenberg team selected a combination of Boral pavers that allowed them to meet the LEED SRI requirement for lowering the local heat island effect and also made for an attractive design. A falling leaf design was achieved with the Heartland Flashed pavers, while the broader field area was laid with the Peachtree Avenue pavers. The combination of the Heartland Flashed SRI of 20–25 and the Peachtree Avenue SRI of 40–45 resulted in a point from LEED, which rewards the use of high-albedo surfaces on a home’s hardscape with an SRI of at least 29.

The ethanol-burning fireplace in the meeting area brings warmth and original design to the home beyond the standard fireplace. Images courtesy of Marc Rutenberg Homes

“Here again, we had to find color blending that allowed us to stay within the SRI limitations,” Marc Rutenberg notes. “The positive side was that there was someone at Boral who we could work with on creating the blend and verifying the technical components.”

Many of the companies that Rutenberg sought out proved to have extensive technical prowess, which was an invaluable asset on a project where the seasoned crew required specialized training at times, given that some of the materials incorporated into Zero Energy America 1 are rarely used in residential construction. The home’s exterior walls, for example, are comprised of Xella’s Hebel Aerated Autoclaved Concrete—a product that is primarily found in industrial and commercial buildings. “In order to complete the installation, Xella brought over trainers from their manufacturing facility and spent three days in the field with our masonry crew to train them on how to work with this product,” Marc Rutenberg says. The builder notes the product’s fire resistance, durability and energy efficiency as its virtues, though he does acknowledge that a significantly deeper trained labor pool is necessary for increasing its viability as a market replacement for conventional concrete block.

Xella’s Hebel Aerated Autoclaved Concrete has a higher thermal resistance than conventional concrete block, making it an integral component of this net-zero energy home. “What we used had an R-value of 12.5 and conventional rock has an R-value of about 1,” explains Ashley Rutenberg. “When you add conventional installation, you go to 5.4.”

Using the product meant interior finishes could be applied directly to the wall system, though this made electrical work a bit tricky. “We had to work out very creative ways to run the electrical work in many locations,” Marc Rutenberg recounts. “We had to find ways to run wiring at the base of the wall pipes, so we actually ran chasers through the wall…we drilled right into the material itself to create this passageway for all the wiring.”

In addition to Xella’s Hebel Aerated Autoclaved Concrete and Boral’s clay product, the builder also integrated PGT ENERGY STAR windows and French doors into the home to ramp up energy efficiency even further. Marc Rutenberg refers to the Solarban 60 window and door glazing in the house as “ENERGY STAR on steroids.”

The master bathroom includes a bathtub and shower on the opposite wall. Images courtesy of Marc Rutenberg Homes

The front door of Zero Energy America 1 is a prime example of the builder’s determination to achieve sustainability without sacrificing design integrity, as it features stunning heart cypress finishes from the Goodwin Company, a small manufacturer that specializes in river-recovered wood. The company recovers heart cypress and heart pine logs that were initially lost during transport on Florida’s rivers more than a century ago. “This is literally the wood that built America,” notes Carol Goodwin, president of the Goodwin Company. “All the old homes up and down the Mississippi in the 1700s and 1800s would have been made out of this prehistoric heart cypress, so our practices for conserving it and really just making sure that we are producing the best and highest yield intrigued Marc.” The builder also utilized the Goodwin Company’s wood for the home’s lanai and loggia ceilings.

A bevy of high-end green products also characterizes the interior of Zero Energy America 1, including Teragren stranded bamboo flooring, Columbia Forest Products’ Purebond cabinetry plywood and veneer with no added urea-formaldehyde, Mohawk carpet manufactured from 100 percent recycled plastic bottles, Oceanside Glasstile handcrafted bath tiles, ECO by Cosentino countertops created from 75 percent recycled content, and custom concrete countertops by Florida craftsman Jake Brady—whose facility is located just one hour from the home. “He was able to create extremely custom finishes, color and character—and all of the inlaid materials were 100 percent recycled glass,” says Marc Rutenberg of Brady. “Here, we were able to take a locally made product and build countertops that were aesthetically gorgeous and met the sustainability requirements,” he explains.

The completion of Zero Energy America 1 marks a major green accomplishment for Marc Rutenberg Homes, as it represents a significant shift in building practices for the company and its contractors. “Across the board, almost none of our contractors had experience in green building or the technical compliance demands that we were giving them,” Rutenberg notes. “Most all of them went from being interested students to being proud students in the end.

“The other major change that occurred was we went from a company that hadn’t recycled the first stick at an ordinary job site and we learned to dumpster dive very early in the project,” he adds. “To go from a group that had never recycled a lick to a project that recycled 95 percent of its construction debris was pretty amazing.”

“I think Marc is way ahead of the curve,” observes Goodwin about Rutenberg’s new focus on net-zero energy homes. “And not only is the sustainability and the durability of the home important to Marc, but so is its beauty. He understands that if you love your home, you are going to take care of it.”

Retrieved Wednesday, 27 March 2013

http://www.edcmag.com/articles/94886-net-zero-energy-home-marries-style-with-sustainability

While energy used for space conditioning has declined, energy consumption for appliances and electronics continues to rise. Although some appliances that are subject to federal efficiency standards, such as refrigerators and clothes washers, have become more efficient, the increased number of devices that consume energy in homes has offset these efficiency gains. Non-weather related energy use for appliances, electronics, water heating and lighting now accounts for 52 percent of total consumption, up from 42 percent in 1993. The majority of devices in the fastest growing category of residential end-uses are powered by electricity, increasing the total amount of primary energy needed to meet residential electricity demand. As described in Today in Energy from March 6, 2013, increased electricity use has a disproportionate effect on the amount of total primary energy required to support site-level energy use.

Other notable trends in household energy consumption include:

• The average U.S. household consumed 11,320 kilowatthours (kWh) of electricity in 2009, of which the largest portion (7,526 kWh) was for appliances, electronics, lighting and miscellaneous uses.

• On average, residents living in homes constructed in the 1980s consumed 77 million Btu of total energy at home. By comparison, those living in newer homes, built from 2000 to 2009, consumed 92 million Btu per household, which is 19 percent more.

• Space heating accounted for 63 percent of natural gas consumed in U.S. homes in 2009; the remaining 37 percent was for water heating, cooking and miscellaneous uses.

In the past, EIA reported household energy data for the United States, for census regions and divisions, and for the four most populous states: California, Texas, New York and Florida. In the 2009 RECS, EIA expanded the household data series to include 12 more states: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Retrieved Wednesday, 27 March 2013

http://www.edcmag.com/articles/94954-heating-cooling-no-longer-majority-of-us-home-energy-use

Ecology, by definition, is about interactions; it’s the study of the relationships among organisms, and between organisms and their environment. When we consider the work of ecologists in urban contexts, we often think of protecting natural systems against the harm wrought by development. Alexander Felson, an assistant professor at Yale in both the School of Foresty & Environmental Studies and the School of Architecture, is a different kind of urban ecologist. In his research and his design work, he calls for an ecological practice that moves from analyzing nature to shaping it, embedding scientific experiments into the design process. The framework he’s established for this synthesis, Designed Experiments, offers to yield scientific data as well as influence the physical form of built projects. But it also offers a platform for a new model of collaboration between designers, scientists, developers, and community members, engaging multiple stakeholders in a shared exercise of creating new knowledge. New data, new design strategies, and new forms of collaboration will all be necessary to make our landscapes more productive, our coastlines more resilient, and our understanding of our relationship to both natural and constructed environments more informed.

New York City Afforestation Project (Million Trees NYC) | Spring Creek, Queens

How do you describe what you do?
I describe myself as an urban ecologist. I combine science with urban design and landscape architecture.

I’m a registered landscape architect with 12 years of experience working in New York City and on projects around the country. And I have a PhD in ecology and evolution from Rutgers. For my doctoral work, I focused on amphibians and suburbanization, adapting experimental research into the masterplanning process in order to improve science-based land use practices.

So, what comes first for you? The design or the ecology?
I have a lifelong interest in plants. I lived on a kibbutz in Israel for a year when I was 15, working on and managing the landscape. As an undergraduate, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I studied the uses of plants in contemporary Native American societies, and became fascinated with the interface of plants and people. That interest evolved into deeper study of urbanization and biological systems. So I’m not sure what came first, but I have always been interested in the middle ground between the two.

How would you say that your practice differs from what one might typically associate with an ecologist?
For a long time, the field of ecology has been focused on understanding how nature works: a range of practices and methods that build on observation and an understanding of natural history to describe and interpret biological systems, interspecies interactions, and interactions with our environment. I would say that my interests differ from traditional ecology in that I am interested in shaping systems, in addition to studying systems. Certain areas of ecology – like restoration ecology or ecological engineering or, increasingly, urban ecology – are beginning to translate ecological information into choices and decision-making processes. But this shift is very new for the ecological sciences, through initiatives including Earth Stewardship, Designed Experiments, and Actionable Science, and I’m centrally involved in trying to move this kind of work forward.

In your view, does the way in which ecology has traditionally operated constrain our ability to address impacts of climate change, particularly in coastal conditions?
Ecologists struggle to position science to inform policy-making or design decisions. Scientists seek to be “honesty brokers,” or figures in society with an objective stance rather than a politicized one. This is a challenging position to maintain and the boundaries between advocating for a position and providing objective information are often blurred. That mantle is very important for shared knowledge creation across society, broadly speaking, but it complicates the ecologist’s ability to affect specific decision-making. Because ecology deals with complex biological systems, often studied in situ, much of the research results lack the controls inherent to a laboratory environment, such as being able to reproduce experiments easily (which is one of the bases of the scientific method). Ecologists are said to have “physics envy”, and ecologists find themselves defending the scientific validity of their research. Politicians don’t make decisions based on science alone, and a lot of ecologists feel that playing a role in that process would position them in an advocacy role and compromise their authority as scientists. Yet, when it comes to climate change, we need to find a way to expand the role of the ecologist in the decision-making body and make sure that scientific knowledge, including the associated uncertainty, inform those policies.

And with that desire to shape systems and affect decision-making in mind, you have developed a methodology for integrating research into your applied work. Can you explain the concept of the “Designed Experiment”?
The idea of Designed Experiments is to design and build real-world, urban projects that incorporate research experiments, in order to study, adapt, and reshape human settlements and their associated biological and socio-ecological systems. Essentially, it’s a framework for the scientist to collaborate directly with designers towards developing a product. And that product is both a work of urban design and a research experiment. It provides a platform for the ecologist to design and situate hypothesis-driven research in urban sites that are historically inaccessible for that kind of research. They reposition ecological science and the ecologist as an active participant from the conception of a design project through the entire design process and ongoing assessment of the built results. Designed Experiments provide a framework that allow the designers and ecologists to work iteratively while maintaining the integrity of the theory, methods, tools, and norms of the scientist and practitioner. And it’s a method for generating replicated scientific data about the particular ecological processes of constructed ecosystems.

So the ecologist’s research protocol enhances the design results. And beyond the research, this is a framework for connecting ecologists with stakeholders, including designers. It positions the collaborative designer-ecologist team as a synthesizer of all that ecological information along with the range of other factors that inform a design process. I think this could potentially point a way towards changing how we design land for urban sustainability.

We talk about sustainability a lot, but we don’t actually know what it looks like in terms of physical design or management. So we are in a phase of both trying new configurations and gathering data in order to understand how these configurations function ecologically in terms of sustainable practices. Structured collaboration between the ecologist and the designer provides experimental landscapes that can be evaluated over time. And it can also change the aesthetic and framing of urban systems.

Researchers tracking survival, growth, pest damage, photosynthetic capacity, drought stress, and seedling recruitment of woody vegetation to determine how incoming vegetation competes with natives for the Million Trees Project.

Can you give me some examples of Designed Experiments?
One could imagine Le Corbusier’s plan for Chandigarh, India, as a Designed Experiment: the idea of parcels of organized urban cells designed for a specific population size of up to 15,000 people each, constructed in such a way that they replicate certain conditions with some specific differences. That idea of organizing space and people in a way that allows for research and analysis of performance is akin to the Designed Experiments model.

When I worked with AECOM as a project director on the Reforestation Plan for New York City (MillionTreesNYC), we developed the project as a Designed Experiment. We worked with the Parks Department to expand their original agenda for the long term, and we fed that back into the future management and design choices. To do so, we identified critical questions that the Parks Department had about the construction and management of urban forests, and we converted those questions into hypotheses with the project’s group of scientific advisors. We then fed those hypotheses back into the design and developed an experimental design, which we translated into the construction drawings to develop a set of replicate plot systems for nested research. So we have embedded research into the Million Trees Project – the largest urban forestry study in the United States – that will yield information about species recruitment patterns over time, the value of amended soils on tree performance, and different ways of constructing a forest in terms of performance for carbon sequestration or biological development.

Do you think the Designed Experiments model could be applied to social-scientific hypotheses as well? For example, to test theories about the stewardship of reforestation projects?
Absolutely. The values of the Designed Experiments model extend beyond the potential to produce an ecological experiment as a research tool and urban design intervention. The model creates a framework for an iterative dialogue relationship between the scientist and the designer, an evolving social dynamic that can lead to experiential learning as well as public input.

For example, I’ve been working on Connecticut’s Coastal Resilience Plan with the Nature Conservancy along with my PhD student, Tim Terway. One aspect of the project is a bio-retention garden system in Bridgeport designed as an experiment that’s also a coastal adaptation tool. In a way, the experiment was a means to an end, because it enabled the community and a range of institutional partners – the City of Bridgeport, Yale, UConn, an organization called Groundwork Bridgeport – to work together. The visions of each of these partners don’t necessarily overlap. But the experiment was a way to involve the ecologist and the designer in creating a platform for other stakeholders to get involved in the process. The result of the Designed Experiment isn’t just the experiment or the design project, but a process that engages people with diverse perspectives in collaboratively manipulating a shared landscape to promote sustainability. The process was valuable in changing attitudes and bringing people together.

Masterplan for a community in Bridgeport, CT that mapped the neighborhood watershed and coordinated green infrastructure to work collectively and across property lines.

Are other projects taking on the Designed Experiments model? Or is it still a vanguard concept?
Mary Miss, the New York artist, has been pushing this concept through her City as Living Laboratory initiative. Designed Experiments have also been used as a teaching tool at universities like Yale, the University of Utah, and elsewhere. Some practitioners have set up projects based on this model as well, like the Washington Stormwater Center, where experimentation is a component of the design program for the site.

Methodologically, it seems like Designed Experiments could inform post-occupancy evaluations of buildings or otherwise contribute to how we measure the performance of a design project after it’s built.
Yes, a lot of post-design monitoring programs are being developed; some are driven by LEED, others by the Sustainable Sites Initiative. Monitoring systems give a sense of the performance of the system, but they don’t necessarily allow for the development of an experimental question – to establish and evaluate a hypothesis – up front. What I’m rallying for is the involvement of the ecologist earlier in the process so that ecologists can inform the design as an experiment, so the design outcomes can embrace experimental research.

And part of how you’ve been able to rally for this idea is by working not only with community groups, educational institutions, and the public sector, but also with real estate developers. Tell me about that.
I’ve been trying to identify opportunities to situate my research and my practice within the context of real-world projects in order to accommodate an innovative integration of science and design towards broader societal benefit.

For example, I worked on a project with AECOM, Related Companies, and Rutgers University in Tuxedo, New York – about 42 miles north of New York City – for a 1,200-acre site of almost 900 residential units. The planning process had been underway for over a decade when I became involved. It’s a greenfield site with a very healthy ecosystem and numerous vernal pools. As part of the master planning team, I helped to redesign road alignments and housing lot locations, and some of the roads looped around these vernal pools.

Vernal pools are a type of seasonal wetland that support a rich variety of amphibian and other species, but they are difficult to conserve because they dry out in summer and fall and become invisible. Through my research, I found that the regulations around vernal pools just don’t match the science. Typically, regulations focus on preserving individual ponds with limited buffers; they don’t look at clusters of ponds at all; they don’t look at the seasonal migration patterns of the animals that they’re trying not to disturb.

The developer had planned for roads and a subdivision in close proximity to some of these vernal pools and they were worried that approval for this subdivision would be denied – and over 20 houses at roughly $500,000 a pop would be lost – because of the local regulations.

So I began looking into ways of incorporating Designed Experiments as a means to study the site-specific conditions and inform the masterplan. I made the case that if we studied into the migration paths of the amphibians, we would be able to integrate that information into our design and develop spaces within the housing to accommodate the migration. At first, the developer and the environmental consultant thought this idea was far-fetched. But over time, they came back to the idea and we went for it.

The Tuxedo project created an opportunity for an ecologist to insert himself at the site analysis phase, early enough in the design process to inform the layout of road locations and housing lot locations. The research itself was a means to an end, and it reflected this shift in attitude as to what the ecologist’s position is in a design process. And it’s also a shift in attitude for the developer as to what the value of scientific research can be when negotiating with a local planning board around environmental issues.

Development plan in Tuxedo before ecologist involvement (top) and after adjusting for salamander habitat (bottom). | Dark blue: Vernal pool, Light blue: Salamander habitat zone

Can this kind of thinking scale up beyond any individual development to towns, cities, and coastlines?
Yes. One of the side benefits of the Tuxedo project was that the Designed Experiments became neutral ground that facilitated opportunities for interactions between the local planning board and the developer. Having a common framework to rally around is very valuable in a multi-stakeholder process of land development and land negotiation. In this way, ecological experiments have other benefits; they facilitate an iterative process of engagement.

And with a politicized issue like climate change, a topic that stimulates different attitudes and different beliefs amongst the population, we need to start developing processes of engagement that involve local communities in long-term planning. The Designed Experiments framework provides one system of engagement through experiential learning, collaborative decision-making, and the processing of multiple streams of information. Designed Experiments enables the integration of, say, coastal ecological research across multiple municipalities as a component of the design process itself. It can yield science-driven structures for documenting and understanding the relationships among the different decision-makers and stakeholders.

And Designed Experiments also relate to an even broader scale, that of Earth Stewardship, which is a new agenda of the Ecological Society of America. It’s an effort to try to position the ecologist as an information provider and participant in policy and planning around ecological and climate change issues. Earth Stewardship seeks to enhance ecological design and human wellbeing, to clarify what needs to be studied, to expand on how research can inform the shaping of strategies, to improve interdisciplinary communication among multiple parties, and to identify pragmatic actions for scientists. The Designed Experiments model, I think, offers a way to operationalize this agenda, to reposition the ecologist’s role in society as one of stewardship and actively shaping trajectories of ecological change.

And while you’ve said that you are calling for the ecologist to be involved earlier in a design process, it sounds like you are also envisioning involvement long after the design is complete, in terms of stewardship as well as the data collection that’s been designed into a given project.
Definitely. The adaptive management concept of establishing a research experiment anticipates observation over time as well as the subsequent use of those findings to inform subsequent choices of how to design the experimental system. This idea also fits in with the current movement towards community science and citizen science: if a scientist establishes an appropriate framework and technology, lay citizens can gather the data, and those data feed into the scientist’s choices going forward. Designed Experiments have a lot of plug-in opportunities.

There is no easy solution for how to quantify or evaluate the value of biological systems in a human context, and that causes a lot of debate surrounding issues of invasive species, restoration ecology, and the impact of climate change on ecosystems. There are definitely efforts underway to understand what kind of biological communities we’ve created, how they function for human society, how they function for biological health or not, and what the dilemmas and ethical challenges are with manipulating those systems.

A constructed eco-system | Bio-retention garden system in Bridgeport, CT

That brings us to the role of the designer. You’ve spoken about the tendency to treat natural systems as inherently optimum, when in fact there are certain landscape technologies and constructed environments that we can incorporate into natural systems that might actually improve performance and productivity. What is the role of the designer in these interventions, and how does that overlap with the changing nature of the ecologist that you spoke about earlier?
Constructed ecosystems — or “novel ecosystems,” which is the term that’s being thrown around — are a really debated topic among ecologists. That partly has to do with our understanding of and how we define disturbance, which is an important component of ecological science that forms a lot of our understanding of how biological communities evolve. How you document what is novel in these biological systems, what underlying ecological influences might come about when trying to maintain something that is native or existing, what to maintain from the past versus a new set of biological communities — that’s a big dilemma for ecologists.

Designers can play a lot of roles in that realm, but they don’t. In the context of the design world, it can be a hard sell to figure out where we fit scientific information and scientific method into the effort to become more sustainable. Part of it is the challenge of grappling with scientific information and uncertainty, and part of it is making an effort to pull out of old notions of what a park should look like, and what design should be about. When you think natural, you think of a picturesque park designed by Olmsted, but in an urban modern context, natural could look very different from that.

Community, government, and institutional partners working together in Bridgeport, CT

In an urban studies context, ecology often operates as a metaphor for the neutral analysis of interdependent parts, rather than evoking the shaping function that you’re talking about.
Yes, ecology has been used for years by the design practice as a metaphor, and that’s really valuable. But there’s more to it than that, and I think we need to start to develop a language for facilitating multiple parties weighing in in different ways. That’s partly through education. There’s a long history of dialogue and debate in design education and it’s gone back and forth, the influence of the ecologist on the designer and vice versa has expanded and contracted at various points.

We need to enhance the idea of the designer as a synthesizer of information, and we need to develop better ways for designers and scientists to collaborate. I’ve been arguing for the idea of an ecologist-designer hybrid, somebody who really understands the science components and can negotiate opportunities for ecologists to situate themselves and participate throughout the design process. Hopefully that process of engagement would also feed back into the regulatory framework. We’re many steps away from it, but I have a long-term goal of getting ecologists into a position where they sign off on drawings, the same way that an engineer does, for ecosystem health.

Ecologists today are mostly focused on conservation. They’re not so interested in the notion of urbanization and development as a driver. But they’re also not in a position to weigh in on design development projects. That needs to be an education goal. In the meantime, more designers need to solicit ecologists and work with them so there can be a kind of experiential learning process, an integration of knowledge and understanding with practice.

More science and more information are only one component of what we need to lead to better, more sustainable systems right now. Our planning and design practices have a lot of room to grow and develop, and, as Kevin Pratt from Cornell argues, we need to enter into a sort of Precambrian phase, an intensive development phase of coming up with different ideas and identifying obstacles to figure out how we can redevelop society in a sustainable fashion. The designer is critical in this next phase of human adaptation.

A constructed ecosystem | Bioretention Gardens in Bridgeport, CT

Alexander Felson is an urban ecologist, a registered landscape architect and an assistant professor at Yale University. He is jointly appointed between the School of Architecture and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. His research focuses on integrating ecological understanding and research methods with urban design and land development strategies to study and shape the feedbacks, adaptive capacity, vulnerability, and resilience of coupled human and natural systems.

On January 10, 2013, in the Great Hall of The Cooper Union, Alexander Felson was a panelist at The Future of Zone A: New York Neighborhoods on the Frontline of Climate Change, an Urban Omnibus organized event with experts in urban ecology, design, and community planning discussing the future of high flood risk neighborhoods in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Click here to watch a podcast of the presentations and discussion.

All images courtesy of Alexander Felson and Timothy Terway.

Retrieved Tuesday, April 02, 2013

http://urbanomnibus.net/2013/03/experimental-landscapes-alexander-felson-on-ecology-and-design/