EcoTracks

Check out this information from Andy Giegerich, the Sustainable Business Oregon editor on Portland's new EcoTracks.  Pretty slick!

"As completion of the Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail line hits the 70 percent mark, TriMet officials want future riders to take note of what they’re calling an “eco-track” at one of the project’s new stations.

The vegetated trackway, which aims to reduce stormwater runoff, is among the first such efforts in the U.S. It will adorn a station at Southwest Lincoln Street and Third Avenue near the Portland State University campus.

The installation “will provide a colorful carpet of low-growing plants along 200 feet of light rail line,” according to the transit agency. The technique is common in Europe and consists of one-inch thick mats that contain various species of sedum, which are a hardy low-maintenance vegetation.
Stacy and Witbeck Inc. installed the track last month.

The 7.3-mile project is set to open Sept. 12, 2015. It will essentially link downtown Portland with North Clackamas County via light rail."1

 Works Cited

1  www.sustainablebusinessoregon.com/articles/2013/12/trimet-new-max-line-getting-on.html

A New Building that Uses Algae for Energy

"A grounbreaking new building in  Hamburg, Germany, "intends to generate heat, as well as revenue, from growing the micro-organism. The five-story Bio Intelligent Quotient (B.I.Q.) building, which was expected to become fully operational on Wednesday, has a high-tech facade that looks like a cross between a Mondrian painting and a terrarium but is actually a vertical algae farm."1

"Lukas Verlage, managing director of the Colt Group, part of the high-powered consortium that constructed the energy system, said in an e-mail that the building was “an outstanding and important development in the use of renewable resources in building technology,” comparable to advances in the space program."1

"And Rainer Müller, press officer of the International Building Exhibition, which introduced a competition in 2009 that led to the creation of the B.I.Q. house, said, “Using algae as an in-house energy source might sound futuristic now, but probably will be established in 10 years.”

The competition, won by a consortium including the Colt Group, asked entrants to use smart materials, defined as “systems and products that behave dynamically, unlike conventional building materials, which are static.”1

Read the complete New York Times article here:
When Algae on the Exterior Is a Good Thing



WORKS CITED:
1  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/business/energy-environment/german-building-uses-algae-for-heating-and-cooling.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
2  All images courtesy of the NY Times

Dilworth Plaza Parking Day Video

CCD Parking Day Rendering, Image Courtesy of OLIN

Check out the video that was made by OLIN for the Center City District's (CCD) Parking Day exhibition. Through his work at OLIN, Ben is assisting with the construction administration of Dilworth Plaza which includes collaboration with artist Janet Echleman (see her TED Talk here).  CCD reached out to OLIN, Urban Engineers, and Kieran Timberlake to help with a teaser space for the new Plaza.

Dilworth is located on the Western side of Philadelphia's City Hall at 15th and Market and is undergoing a major renovation.  In another OLIN video, Paul Levy, president of CCD, brilliantly describes the project here:

Meadows: From Livestock Feed to Landscape Design Popculture

Gene and Ben in a hay field, Perrys Mills, NY

 Before the meadow experts draw their metaphorical knives, let me first say that I recognize that there are different types of meadows and that I am not an expert in any of them.  I know that there are perpetual meadows from alpine to coastal and everything in between that stand to discredit the title of this blog.  But it seems as though every presentation, every rendering, and every landscape design is clearly discussing what was heretofore known as a hay field.  Clients, unless it is truly a project where a perpetual meadow naturally occurs, or a research facility, or a hardcore Eco-wealthy tycoon, are not going to introduce the types of conditions required to maintain those meadows.  Thankfully it is quite rare that someone would set fire to a field of tall grasses.

Agricultural meadows are not rare on farms in upstate New York where I grew up. There, we just called it "hay" (although the family farm is itself truly becoming a thing of rarity).  If you were lucky and had the right field you got a second or third cut and you didn't leave it in the field to dry for "good winter color".  And, if it was long enough to cut, you cut it for feed.  The winter color near my house was severely stunted by a 6" haircut that was soon covered with snow that was then soon covered with a layer of dried or liquified manure.  The effects of this practice are hotly debated particularly this year in the Champlain Valley where the blue-green algae blooms threaten the life within Lake Champlain, not to mention the tourist and recreation associated with summer fun.

Those hay fields were not described in glowing language meant to sell a design concept.  It was a fact of life and a toilsome one at that.  I was too small to really be involved in the process and did what I could apart from not getting stepped on.  It was a lot of long hours cutting and bailing, loading and unloading, stacking and unstacking and finally feeding and cleaning manure. When it was time to "do hay" my father would climb from what we called the hay mow, an elevated barn attic where bailed hay is stored for the winter, looking as if he had been caught in a heavy rain.  A literal heavy rain, the man was exhausted.

I've described a simple process made romantic in my telling and somehow cheapened by master degree holding esthetes: a club in which I clearly hold a card.  I say that perhaps to assuage the dread that I may be morphing into a griping middle-aged man lost in the noble past.  Maybe I am.  Or maybe I can't help but acknowledge not only the hypocrisy inherent in the sale of a "meadow" as a design element, but that I am, even in my criticism, inherently and inextricably connected to that hypocrisy.  The day I, like so many others of my generation, left the rural homestead to pursue higher education I both forfeited my right to defend the farm life and the right judge others who, like me, are so entirely over educated that they need to rediscover that noble past.

So now we have urban chickens, urban farms, urban bees and urban meadows.  All of which I took for granted and all of which I now see in an entirely different way.  And somehow it irks me that my urban and suburban born friends are becoming enlightened to this fact.  Maybe its because what I wanted most was to have all the things they did growing up.  That I grew up in a way that was different and difficult and somehow that chip is slowly being tipped from my shoulder.

And I feel like I carry another secret: it's that is there is a reason why my generation left those farms.  It's hard.  Beekeeping is hard.  Doing hay is hard.  Putting up fence is hard. Catching cows when they get out is hard.  Keeping chickens alive is hard. The "evil" of  large scale industrial farming is not abstract and the people affected directly by it are real.  Like warriors or athletes it's a lifestyle that makes men and women strong in their youth and wears on them in old age.  Not everyone is cut out for that life and when I hear about concepts deployed by newly minted experts as a weekend warrior activity or a design aesthetic I am somehow on some level oddly offended.

So the dilemma I face isn't the acceptance of agricultural processes as pop-culture (something that has been done more or less since the advent of agriculture), it's that I haven't been able to let that chip fall.

Micro Intervention: See Potential

Photo courtesy of Emily Schiffer

Similar to our last blog post on La Place du Geant  we would like to share this interesting spin on community based design visualization. Photographer Emily Schiffer has developed an idea that hopes to better serve communities suffering from poverty, blight, and underused infrastructure in the South Side of Chicago.  In partnership with Orrin Williams, the founder and director of the Center for Urban Transformation (CUT) [http://www.cutchicago.org/], she would like to engage the community with and public art with the goal of transforming urban blight into community potential.


With a focus on urban agriculture Schiffer would like to work with artists, photographers, and community leaders to use large-scale photographic installations and urban redevelopment as strategies for pre-visualizing a transformed landscape. Her hope is that this community cooperative approach will help to redirect attention towards solutions based in reality and "reframe individuals' relationships with food and foster new forms of healthy living."


The viability of urban agriculture in the United States is yet to be determined given the dominance of industrial farming operations. Family farms in rural areas all over the country are continuing to fail at an alarming rate.  If it can be accomplished in an manner that is economically and socially sustainable, perhaps part of the answer lies with urban agriculture.  The fact that it is unproven does not preclude attempts to create urban farms.  Organic farming at one time was considered a niche business, but it profitably continues now on a variety of scales.  Maybe the same can happen for urban agriculture.


We applaud Schiffer's project and value the creativity, courage, and vision it takes to make something like this happen.


To find out more about Schiffer's project, watch the video below or visit Kickstarter.



Photo and text courtesy of Kickstarter and Emily Schiffer.

Macro Intervention: The State Street VIllage, Raleigh

A megalopolis of single family homes arranged in a spider web of cul de sacs and cheap apartment buildings built around parking lots spreads along the I-85 corridor from Atlanta, Georgia to Raleigh, North Carolina.  From the perspective of contemporary urban planning and design theory, one could say that Raleigh North Carolina probably ranks right up there with sprawled out, petroleum based cities like Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Orlando.  In some ways, it's worse.  No light rail, miles and miles of highways and a transportation lobby that seems only interested in making those highways wider.

The Research Triangle Park is in many ways the economic life blood of what is called the "Triangle" of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.  For all of its 7,000 acres it's public transportation connections consist of 1 bus stop. Other nearby places are now challenging the big three for dominance such as Cary and Holly Springs.  All of these towns suffer from the same lack of public transportation and rely on a cheap supply of gasoline. One can say that our entire nation is dependent on gasoline, and that is true, we are.  However, places like Raleigh, because of their severe lack of transportation alternatives, are a canary in the coal mine for the repercussions of oil price spikes.

Oddly enough, within this rubric of unsustainable urban sprawl, we find one of the more sustainable practices of urban reuse one could hope to find in such a place.  It's called the State Street Village. It is being created by the non-profit, Builders of Hope that advocates and practices the up-cycling of homes all over North Carolina.  Their goal is to build safe, walkable communities by reusing the homes others no longer want or have the ability to rehabilitate.

The State Street Village project  involves 25 lots off of a new cul-de-sace off of State Street in south Raleigh- with homes starting just over $100 thousand.  For that buyers get spacious lots, quality homes, a great view of downtown and the chance to be part of improving our city as a whole.  State Street Village represents a redevelopment strategy that starts with creating a community that has great fundamentals and is cohesive aesthetic.

The houses are donated and transported from all over the area.  They priced below market value, but are a quality offering beyond both older and new homes.  Builders of Hope guts the frames- rewires them, plumbing, installs new or recycled finishes, new energy efficient appliances, energy efficient windows, and insulates them tight. The offer is one for people, who may not otherwise have a chance, to have a home to be proud of. The homes are built for quality with a focus on energy efficiency and aesthetics.  Builders of Hope works with Advance Energy to certify each house for energy efficiency.  Advanced Energy seals the house and tests for energy loss through the floors, walls and openings.  The certified homes are incredibly efficient and much more affordable to heat and cool.

New Urbanists will raise their arms a wail about the cul de sac.  Landscape Urbanists will argue that it lacks attention to the site and connections to public transporation. Maybe they are both right, but have either of those groups thought of an idea this good?  Or better yet have they built anything this well.  It is in the making that creates the thing, and neither theory has actually made/created/built anything that address the three basic tenants of sustainablity (economy, ecology, equity) as thouroughly this small non-profit.  Waldheim and Duany, please take notes.

An Ismism

Response to "Green Building: Are cities the best place to live? Are suburbs OK? A fight grows in urban planning, with Harvard at the center" from the Boston Globe.

Carl Wiens for The Boston Globe

When Waldheim and Duany descend from the shelter of their ivy league keeps long enough to exchange blows over whose theory concerning urban design and planning is most relevant, the result is both underwhelming and forehead-slappingly-ignorant. Waldheim's vision for landscape urbanism advocates and defends sprawl while Duany's stomps with pouted lip its rejection of the now vilified cul de sac (all the while eating up precious open space with arrogant greenfield development).

As the way of any good overly thought out idea, both are inordinately idealistic and naturally detached from reality. Both would benefit from admitting that development and sprawl are a direct consequence of the availability of two things: clean water and more importantly cheap energy.

If energy is cheap, sprawl will continue. If energy is expensive, a dense urban environment will be not only desired, but necessary. Prescription of taste and desire to the proletariat is a hold over of modernist classicist dogma while the simple action of the demand and supply curve more directly informs how we live. Just as in ancient Greece where the size of the city was dictated by a day's horse and cart ride from the nearby farms, the form, mass and density of our cities are limited only by our access to cheap gasoline.

Listening to the prattle from the detached vestibules of our so called elite universities, reminds one of a succinct Hardy quote: (The dog) …"was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o’clock that same day–another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise."