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?”

The problem is simple, the American love affair with expansive green lawns is not a sustainable practice in it’s current form, with so many water resources being funneled to a largely aesthetic asset, instead of toward a more practical focus like food production.  A recent article in the LA Times brought this point to jarring clarity with the recently publicised case of the Ha family in Orange County.  The family tore up the grass in their front yard to save money on their water bill, replacing it with wood chips and draught tolerant plants.  Orange County, whose city codes require that 40% of residents groundcover be “landscaped predominately with live plants” cited the family on multiple occasions.  According to the Ha family, their annual water usage of 299,221 gallons in 2007 plummeted to only 58,348 gallons in 2009, a savings of over 80%.

Issue #1: Code Reform

We felt very strongly that regulations and codes are one of the primary obstacles to dealing with this problem of the American lawn.  All too often, as illustrated in the Ha case, either municipalities or community HOA covenants prevent homeowners from having any option other than populating their 60 x 120 with grass and “feeding the beast”. Any competition can come up with a myriad of innovative solutions, but if we can’t remove the legal blocks from implementing them, then nothing sustainable will ever happen.

Proposed Solutions:

1. The path for change must first be cleared through community and local government involvement in order that legislative hurdles for sustainable design be removed.

2. Development according to sustainable design principles should, at the very least,  be encouraged by municipalities, and hopefully regulated and enforced.

Via London Permaculture

Issue #2: Education & Empowerment

We all have that guy in our community, he gets our there bright eyed and bushy tailed every Saturday morning.  Part of it is the smell of cut grass, part of it is the roar of the engine, but most of it is the physical, visible satisfaction of a job well done.  This is the guy who loves to cut his lawn, and wouldn’t have it any other way.  We felt that’s fine, we can live with this because the key to America is freedom.  Aside from being infeasible, it’s just plain un-American to forcibly take away people’s lawns.  It was brought up in our discussion that if you don’t have a lawn where do the kids play, and that is as fair an argument as the guy who measures his manhood by the color of his lawn.  But we also felt that for every one of them, there are dozens who are some shade of gray closer or further from that extreme, but they may not be empowered to realize that vision.

Proposed Solutions:

1. It was proposed that creating awareness of the amount of water usage may be as simple as separating indoor and outdoor water metering.  For the home resident they then have a visible, and tangible way of quantifying what amount of their water usage is absorbed by their landscaping.  Using the case of the Ha family, to come to the realization that 80% of your water usage is all exterior, would be very illuminating, and may spark a change in behavior.

2. An option for some may be as easy as converting a portion of their lawn to be used in the growth of vegetables.  While this sounds easy, we all admonished there probably wasn’t a true green thumb among us, but several of the people in the group admitted to being accomplished at small slivers of vegetable production, some herbs here, a whiskey barrel or peppers there, etc.  It was suggested that communities could be organized with a vegetable exchange program, where many different homeowners each grow one or two specific vegetables that they themselves are proficient at, and then there are regular get-togethers to freely exchange those vegetables amongst other such micro-growers.

Via --David and Jennifer--

Issue #3: Design

Suburban design itself is a relic of a post-war model that we feel can be updated in a way to be more sustainable without sacrifiing much of what people like about the suburbs.  Currently, many neighborhoods have strict regulations handed down from the city or their local HOA that, as we see in the Ha case, limit one’s sustainable options.  The HOA that governs the community that I’m in explicitly calls out is it’s design standards that the house must be set back from the curb or sidewalk a minimum of 20′ and that the front, side and back yards must all be fully sodded with either St. Augustine or Bermuda grass species and an automatic sprinkler system for irrigation.

Another issue in local neighborhoods is the lack of a front porch.  Drive around almost any subdivision with garages in the front and you will see dozens of residents with their garage doors open sitting in lawn chairs because that is the only zone afforded to them for the simple opportunity to enjoy the outside while publicly interacting with the community.

Proposed Solutions:

1. Move the house closer to the street and modify the requirement for a grass lawn to offer an option for native landscaping.  This would entail a modification of many municipal codes and HOA community regulations, but by reducing the amount of front yards, and adding to that space to the back yard, this facilitates a reduction the in amout of lawn required area, and opens up options to more native tolerant plant aterial.

2. Require home builders to offer alternative landscaping selection in new communities.  Everyone who buys a new home is usually subjected to a single option landscape design.  If, as the builders do with house plans, they offer say 3 different landscaping options like: 1) Fully grass turfed lawn; 2) Partially grass turfed lawn with partial xeriscaped landscaping (either in the front or the back), 3) Fully xeriscaped front and back yard.  If given the option, and educated about the water usage and cost differences between each plan, we feel that many new homeowners may well chose to partially or fully xeriscape their properties instead of immediately buying into the same unsustainable practice.

3. Encourage the inclusion of front porches in home design.  Aside from simply creating a more safe and interactive community by giving the option to have more “eyes on the street” the conversion of outdoor space in the front of the house from unusable lawn surface to a patio or deck again helps reduce the overall amount of water dependent material.

4. Encouraging the inclusion of more common green space in communities.  If we reduce the amount of turf each home has, that must be offset with community space for kids to play and groups to gather.  This must also be micr-neighborhood specific, somewhere that parents feel is a comfortable distance from their homes for their children to travel to independently (not a single central location as many communities now have, that is too large and too far away from most of the homes in the community).

Our firm found this excercise to be very stimulating, and we hope that by posting our thoguhts here, other will seek to engage in the discussion and offer their thoughts as well.

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.

“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/

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…