Can New Urbanism and High Architecture Reconcile?

Mowing to Growing

Recently, the staff at JHP partook of a round-table discussion addressing the new One Prize: Mowing to Growing competition as the talking point.  Organized by Melissa Joesoef, one of our lead designers, we took up this challenge as an opportunity not to enter a design competition, but to generate ideas that can be then offered as part of a greater discussion (and stretch the design muscles a bit). The goal of Whole community Design is to create discussions that lead to solutions, and the more contributors involved, the more comprehensive design can become.

The competition brief states:

“We are launching this competition in the context of larger issues concerning the environment, global food production and the imperative to generate a sense of community in our urban and suburban neighborhoods. From Mowing to Growing is not meant to transform each lawn into a garden, but to open us up to the possibilities of self-sustenance, organic growth, and perpetual change. In particular, we seek specific technical, urbanistic, and architectural strategies not simply for the food production required to feed the cities and suburbs, but the possibilities of diet, agriculture, and retrofitted facilities that could achieve that level within the constraints of the local climate.

How can we break the American love affair with the suburban lawn?
Can green houses be incorporated in skyscrapers?
What are the urban design strategies for food production in cities?
Can food grow on rooftops, parking lots, building facades?
What is required to remove foreclosure signs on lawns and convert them to gardens?” Read the rest of this entry »

Rice Concrete Cuts Greenhouse Emissions

Rice husks form cases around edible kernels of rice. These husks could be used as a concrete substitute, which in turn could reduce CO2 emissions related to cement production.

I found this article on Discovery’s webpage (http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/07/07/rice-husks-concrete.html).  As architects, we always see new technologies like this come about, but what does it take for them to be fully realized, and not just an idea?

July 7, 2009 — A new way of processing rice husks for use in concrete could lead to a boom in green construction.

Rice husks form small cases around edible kernels of rice and are rich in silicon dioxide (SiO2), an essential ingredient in concrete. Scientists have recognized the potential value of rice husks as a building material for decades, but past attempts to burn it produced an ash too contaminated with carbon to be useful as a cement substitute.

The world’s penchant for consuming concrete is a huge problem for climate change. Every ton of cement manufactured for use in concrete emits a ton of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Worldwide, cement production accounts for about 5 percent of all CO2 emissions related to human activity.

Now, Rajan Vempati of ChK Group, Inc. in Plano, Texas, and a team of researchers have figured out a way to make nearly carbon-free rice husk ash. Heating husks to 800 degrees centigrade (1,472 degrees Fahrenheit) in an oxygen-free furnace drives off carbon, leaving fine particles of nearly pure silica behind.

“The process emits some CO2, but it’s carbon neutral. Any that we emit goes back annually into the rice paddies,” Vempati said.

In recent years, concrete has become a repository for various waste products. Slag from steel mills, coal fly ash and silica fume — a leftover from the silicon metal industry — all have found second lives as replacements for carbon-belching Portland cement.

“I think the reason rice husk ash has had difficulty making it into mainstream applications is it typically comes with quite a high carbon content,” Jan Olek of Purdue University, who was not involved in the study said. “If properly prepared, it could be a very useful, good material for efforts to limit emissions of carbon dioxide in the concrete industry.”

Adding the ash makes concrete stronger and more resistant to corrosion. The team speculates that rice husk ash could enhance performance by replacing up to 20 percent of the cement typically mixed into concrete in the construction of skyscrapers, bridges and any structure built on or near water.

Vempati presented his team’s results last week at the Green Chemistry and Engineering conference in College Park, Md.

The researchers are currently working on a pilot operation to test and refine their new method. If it proves successful, they will begin construction on an full-sized furnace that can produce 15,000 tons of rice husk ash annually.

If production is scaled up to use all of the rice husks produced in the United States, they could produce 2.1 million tons of ash each year. The potential is even greater overseas, especially in developing countries such as China and India, where rice and concrete consumption are much higher.

“Even at $500 a ton, that’s a billion dollar industry,” Vempati said.

Architect’s Websites – Dwell June 2009

“Arhitects’ Website”     – Philip Kennicott        DWELL June 2009

“I’m on a deadline, I need a fact, and once again my computer has frozen up, overwhelmed by the high-intensity graphics and animated introduction of yet another gloriously beautiful and utterly useless architecture website.  My needs are simple: I want to know for example, the floor space of a new building and whether it’s LEED certified, or the exact name of the client.  These aren’t hard questions, and it doesn’t seem worth troubling the firms office staff with a phone call.  This should all be on the web, right?

Not always. And even when you can find the facts you need, it’s often after a maddening tour through the Flash-fired fantasies of a web designer who approaches the presentation of actual information rather like a bloviating after-dinner speaker clearing his throat for 20 minutes.

Take the website of Zaha Hadid. First, there is an introductory page, in which a ghostlike rendering of the famous Iraq-born architect is seen as if through wind-rustled vertical blinds.  This entry page leads to yet another, where parallel bands of delicate white lines trace out an aimless but appealing patter of interconnected ribbons.  These sleek and flowing design recall the lines of her signature projects: the space-age ski jump in Innsbruck or the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

But where is the information?  Only to be discovered by passing your cursor over patterns until the categories – Projects, Publications, Gallery, Studio – emerge.  But you can’t actually get to the gallery by clicking on the word “gallery”.  That would be too easy.  And once you get to the gallery, you find a spectral presentation of  hard-to-decipher images floating promiscuously free of the text links.  This is a website that treats you like a Zen master confronting a dull-witted acolyte: There are no answers, little rabbit, only questions.

It seem the bigger and more adventurous the firm, the more Byzantine the website.  You might think that a professional that has always been prickly about accusations of megalomania would be little less megalomaniacal in its approach to the web.  Only Hollywood movie websites are as complicated, and perhaps there’s a connection.

Architect’s fret about the static nature of their work.  The crave the ability to control the experience of a building in a flowing, dynamic, narrative way. You enter here, see this, feel that, and move on to this room, where you feel something else.  It’s astonishing in public presentations of new projects, especially those involving memorable architecture or public space, how much effort has gone into anticipating and controlling the the serial experience of moving about in the new building.  That effort, of course, is all for naught, because people rarely follow the maps and plans laid out for them.

But not on the web.  Here, all is perfect order and control.  It is a proxy world of ambitions that are thwarted in the real one.  One beautiful screen follows follows another.  Unless, of course, I’m using my ancient laptop, which crashed when I clicked on “Skip Into”.

see for yourself:

http://www.zaha-hadid.com/

What is the Future of Suburbia?

It’s a simple question, but there are many views on where suburban sprawl is heading, if anywhere, apart from its current direction.

To the new urbanist, like Andres Duany, suburbia and the zoning codes that create it are inherently unsustainable because they completely rely on the automobile.  But with “green” emerging as the new societal trend, the notion of walkable communities is coming to the forefront.  Duany himself argues that suburbanism is becoming decidedly ‘un-trendy’ and that new urbanism is on the path to becoming mainstream.  You can listen to Duany discuss these views recently on KERA here.

To contradict this there is still evidence that people continue to leave the city and settle even further and further outward, not just to the suburbs but even further to exurbs, pushing the periphery of the community.  You can read a recent article addressing the Census Bureau’s study of this here.

Thus, the question is, what shape will the future suburban communities take?  Will new urbanist town centers, mixed-use infill projects and derelict mall conversions pave the way to a new retrofitting of suburbia?  Will the status quo continue, absorb higher energy prices, and continue to marginalize smart growth developments as an exception to the rule?  Is one course correct or is there a compromise?

Discuss…

Coming Soon!

The WCD blog will be a place for discussion about design and what design can do for people.