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This video documents one of what I think is the more interesting approaches being proposed – by Andres Duany of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. There’s obviously much I like about the approach he is suggesting, not the least of which is the careful use of design to solve social, urban design and architectural problems. Too many people approach situations such as these and don’t consider how design can solve many of the pre-existing issues, or certainly how it’s critical to look at urban design in addition to simply building design.

A few random thoughts as I watched the video:

- “high-tech” materials such as this always make me a bit nervous, since they’ve rarely been applied in such a large quantity. I’m interested to see the results on the ground, but also wonder about the opportunity for more traditional building materials.

-I love the “gridded” plan that he proposes for the settlement. It shows again (pet issue of mine) how a seemingly simplistic approach to urban design can in fact have many excellent nuances for daily life

-The scale of this particular problem is staggering. I hope that casual observers can get a feel for how this effort is still just a very small first step. So much needs to be done.

Enjoy the video-

Rebuilding Haiti from Marvin Joseph on Vimeo.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Elisha Graves Otis invented the elevator, and predicted it would revolutionize cities everywhere.

Now houses made of trees, high-rise wind tunnels and cars that climb walls to find parking could do the same thing, said ecological designer Mitchell Joachim at the Field Museum Thursday night.

Speaking about the Future of Sustainable Design, Joachim and Chicago architects Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill painted a dramatically innovative and greener future.

“We’re looking at a more holistic, pluralistic approach,” said Gill, speaking after the event. The Chicago partnership of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture is doing just that.

In a planned retrofit of Chicago’s Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower), the partners propose to reduce electricity use by 80 percent, the equivalent of 68 million kilowatt hours or 150,000 barrels of oil per year.

Smith and Gill presented a string of similarly mind-boggling statistics throughout a half-hour lecture that covered wind-farms built into high-rises, self-insulated structures that operate like thermos bottles to eliminate air conditioning and green roofs.

Their Chicago Central Area De-Carbonization Plan even proposes to create an emission-free downtown by 2030.

Smith said that when people think of climate change, they don’t realize that buildings contribute a whopping 50 percent of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, beating out the more commonly-conceived villain: vehicles.

With the city's help, the partners built an interactive model of the Loop with massive amounts of data on building use, emissions, square footage and other details structure by structure.

“We realized this was an enormous challenge and we wanted to understand what it would mean to meet that challenge or exceed it,” said Gill.

A New Yorker with the design firm of Terreform ONE, Joachim also had a lot to say about the revolution he hopes to see in cities.

For starters, he wants to reinvent the wheel.

With just a little vision, cars could contribute, rather than detract, from a greener future. By stacking cars that operate something like shopping carts horizontally along a curb, drivers could park over 300 of them in a single block. By changing the wheel structure, cars could move vertically up the sides of building. By "talking" to each other through “smart” technology, cars and streets could find the driver a parking spot without endless circling and searching.

Cars could even be made of Nerf-like plastics. Joachim calls them “Soft Cars,” with built-in collision-proofing.

It doesn’t end there.

Joachim’s idea for a living tree house, designed with a team from MIT and named Fab Tree Hab, is composed of 100 percent living nutrients – trees grafted into place with reusable scaffolds. He also proposes water-borne gyms, powered by the pump of your workout.

There’s no reason these visions can’t become a reality: the trick is changing the value system, all three speakers said.

Joachim used the example of New York City, which produces enough waste every hour to fill the Statue of Liberty. What if waste were seen as a resource? What if it could be used as a construction material instead of merely contributing to landfill?

“We imagine a future city where nothing is thrown away, we just move from creation to creation to creation,” he said.

If this seems a little futuristic, that’s because it is. If it seems a little familiar, that’s because Joachim helped work on the technological vision behind the movie “Minority Report.”

But that’s what makes his work so commendable, said Stephanie Comer, president of Chicago's Comer Science and Education Foundation. The foundation funds climate change research and initiatives such as a series of five symposia at the Field Museum. The Future of Sustainable Design marked the fourth annual event.

“What Mitch had to say was out of the box but very much rooted in reality: holistic, organic, with a lot of soul,” she said. “He dares to dream.”

Comer said she has confidence in the presenters’ ability to help solve these issues.

“They have a lot of experience working in a variety of major cities and working on urban issues,” she said.

Comer is the daughter of the late Gary Comer, founder of Lands’ End and a well-known philanthropist who supported climate change research and development by scientists across the country. Comer continues her father’s legacy.

Almost 200 people attended the talks given by the three speakers with a follow-up Q&A.

The previous three programs focused on the nature of climate change, global responses and domestic responses.

And this year?

“This year we are trying to understand sustainable design on a larger architectural scale,” said Beth Crownover, director of education at the Field Museum.

The lectures are slowly focusing in on the problem, Crownover said, adding that she was excited by the different approaches the speakers were taking to similar problems.

“Next year we will continue to look at applied approaches but drill down deeper and look at what the everyday individual can do,” Crownover said, adding that the possibility exists for extending the Comer Symposia.

Dutch architects Mecanoo have won a competition to design a cultural centre in Shenzhen with this design composed of a row of overhanging red volumes.

Most are artifacts of the city's building boom from 1880 through the 1920s, when Buenos Aires was one of the world's richest, fastest growing cities. The capital was a blank canvas and its architects wanted to create their dream city at the beginning of a brand new century.
The resulting architectural styles reflect the utopian ambitions of the designers as well as their immigrant heritage. At the height of the great European migration to Argentina in 1914, 30 percent of the population was foreign born. Neighborhood architects built in their own styles flavored by their home country or that of their patron.
Take a tour of Buenos Aires with architecture detective Alejandro Machado, who rigorously documents the architectural heritage of edifices across the city.

A guide to Buenos Aires architecture
It's not hard to be an architecture detective in Buenos Aires. Just pick a street and take a walk. While some neighborhoods are known for certain styles, most offer an impressive sampling of the city's architectural heritage.
The overall style of a neighborhood building can tell you a lot about when it was built and the people who built it. Three styles dominate the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires: neoclassical, art nouveau and art deco.

Designers at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi unified on saying 'yes' to fight global climate change, but the fight doesn't have to be ugly or even comfort restricting.

The fight is all about community living, returning to the good old days and the good old cities, which functioned on interaction and interconnection, and in the words of Lord Richard Rogers, "beauty and function combined is one of the great drives of sustainability."

A superhero among urban planners and designers, Lord Rogers is a British architect, who has in his portfolio iconic buildings such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Millennium Dome, the Lloyds Bank in London and the terminal four of Madrid Airport. His message to Abu Dhabi? Build a city that everyone can enjoy. "There is a direct link between social inclusion and a beautiful environment. If you live in a slum, life will be very difficult and it will brutalise you," said Lord Rogers. With population growth expected to reach 80 per cent by 2050, and the threat of climate change, which may lead to death, poverty, migration and wars, future urban planning must be sustainable. One element of sustainability that Lord Rogers emphasised on was public transport. Individual cars are not just big polluters and "infesters" of carbon emissions, but they also slow down the economy, as people get stuck and waste hours in heavy traffic.

"In Mexico City the congestion is bringing the traffic to a standstill and this will happen in Abu Dhabi too if the public transport is not developed," he warned. Gerald Evenden, also an architect and senior partner at Fosters and Partners in UK, could not agree more.

"When cars dominate, people become second," he said.

"Even well designed, electric cars will create congestion."

For Evenden, who is involved in the urban design of Masdar city, the cities of the future look more like the cities of the past. This means that the city must be built, sustainably, for a community, not a bunch of individuals, with easy access to public transport, pedestrian walkways and attractive public spaces.

"When designing sustainable buildings, two big elements must be considered the orientation and the shading of buildings," added Evenden.

For Masdar, he proposed two such types of buildings a high rise structure that absorbs light and disperse it indoors to create evermore pleasant spaces for people, and low buildings, ideal for homes, with lots of shading that keep them cool and reduce energy consumption. For the award-winning architect, author and professor of architectural engineering, Susan Roaf, who has conducted a lot of research and studies in the Middle East, this is not good enough.

Back in the 60s, western travellers coming to the Gulf used to say that the best way to cool off in summer days was to hide in mountain caves and beat the drum to scare off the heat.

Anecdotes apart, Roaf pointed out that back then, people's houses here were built in such a way that it kept them cool enough. "Leed buildings do not save energy, they are just more efficient consumers of air conditioning," she said.

Leed certified buildings are supposed to use resources more efficiently when compared to conventional buildings, but they concentrate primarily on the efficient use of fossil fuels, rather than sustainable alternative energy sources.

Along the National Mall in Washington, D.C., memorials honor the service of Americans in wartime, but the site’s newest addition will be one that fosters conflict resolution and peace. The 150,000-sq-ft permanent headquarters for the U.S. Institute of Peace, being built at the mall’s northwest corner near the Lincoln Memorial and the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge over the Potomac river, will greet visitors with a dramatic new structure that its designers say both respects the context of its historic surroundings and offers a strikingly modern contrast.

The New York City office of Moshe Safdie and Associates, Somerville, Mass., designed the base of the five-story building, which is clad in precast panels to blend with its neoclassical neighbors and features a sweeping white glass roof intended to make a strong statement of the institute’s mission. Designed as three buildings connected with glass-enclosed atriums, the structure is topped with two large-span undulating roofs, including one that evokes the image of a white dove of peace in flight. “We see it as a gateway to the city from the Roosevelt bridge,” says Paul Gross, Safdie principal in charge of the project. “It respects the vocabulary of the National Mall and offers a symbolic gesture to the city.” The $108-million project is funded by public and private monies.

Bringing this visual statement to reality created significant challenges for Safdie’s design team and construction crews, led by Clark Construction Group, Bethesda, Md. German firm Seele, LP, was added to the team in late 2006 to assist design and installation of the steel-frame and glass-panel roof system. Using building information modeling with Autodesk Revit and Rhino, designers devised two grid-shell systems that would be built using preassembled pieces of roughly 400 sq ft each in surface area. The south roof has a total surface area of 12,000 sq ft and spans 80 ft between buildings. The north roof has 7,500 sq ft of surface area and a 55-ft span. Project engineer is U.K-based Buro Happold.

A framework of 4-in. by 8-in. hollow steel beams holds 1,500 triple-layered glass panels, the majority of which measure 4 ft by 4 ft, except for custom-sized pieces along the edges. Each panel is fritted on the exterior to give it a white appearance at all times during the day. A white translucent membrane along the interior side of the panels gives it a white glow when illuminated from inside at night.

Clark broke ground on the project in March 2008 and roof installation began in June 2009. Because the roofs would span multiple structures and be exposed to winds blowing off the Potomac, structural analysis was a critical element of the complex design. To minimize loads on the concrete-structure buildings, designers opted for a mix of sliding and spring connectors that would allow for up to 2 in. of expansion.

Portions of the roof also cascade off the edges. Along the south elevation facing the National Mall, one “wing” of the roof extends 40 ft away from the building. Three 35-ft-long steel props fan out from a horizontal structural beam along the facade and meet the roof near the middle of the cantilever, leaving the tip of the roof untouched.

“Those moving connections were the most challenging part of the design,” says Mark Goodwin, project executive with Clark Construction. “Once you allow the facade to move a few inches, then you are dealing with tie-ins to other materials such as a metal roof to the north, a PVC membrane along the roof and fixed metal flashings above it. You need to create expansion joint details to allow this structure to move significantly compared to the building.”

Since the roof is going up in vast atrium spaces, a complex scaffold system had to be designed to not only fill the void between the buildings, but also be precisely tiered to match up with the roof curvatures. The five-story, 20,000-sq-ft horizontal scaffold is fully loaded down to slab-on-grade at the parking level below the main floor. Reshoring was added in the garages to support the scaffold above. After several months of design, the scaffold took nearly six weeks to assemble.

To build the roof, sections of the shell were preassembled on the ground using mostly bolted connections to minimize welding in the field. Each piece was then picked up and placed with a tower crane. Once the entire shell is set, the scaffold is designed to allow workers to stand in each frame and receive each 200-lb glass panel as it is individually picked and placed by the tower crane. Placement of the first glass panels began in mid-October and is scheduled to finish next month. Substantial completion for the entire project is scheduled for October 2010.

As panels move into place, the signature white dove is beginning to reveal itself to city residents, commuters and throngs of tourists. “When it first came out of the ground, it looked like your typical Washington building,” says John Stranix, owner’s representative for the institute. “Now that the roof has started going up, people are taking notice. This is going to be a very important addition to the mall.”

Via archrecod

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Mile High Illinois

"We're going to need a new word. The Burj Dubai doesn't scrape the sky; it pierces it, like a slender silver needle, half a mile high. It's only because Dubai never has any clouds that we can even see the tower's top. And, judging by the images released so far, the view is more like looking out of a plane than a building. It has made reality a little less real.
The facts and figures about the tower are equally surreal – like the one about how it could be eight degrees cooler at the top than at the bottom, or the one about how you could watch the sunset at the bottom, then take a lift up to the top and watch it all over again. It's a new order of tallness, even compared to its nearest rival, Taiwan's Taipei 101, which it exceeds by more than 300 metres." The Guardian

Concrete jungle ... the view from the 124th floor of the Burj Dubai. Photograph: Imre Solt/Barcroft Media

In environmental terms, the Burj Dubai is way too tall to justify itself, but there is at least some structural efficiency to the form. Its Y-shaped plan – three wings extending from a central core, like the roots of a tree – "confuses the wind", in the architects' words, while the core stops the wings from twisting (which would give top-floor occupants nausea). For super-tall buildings – and surely there will be more, one day – this "buttressed core" design is likely to become the prevailing form.

A discussion with Pritzker Prize Winners Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Renzo Piano.

This interview happened to be pretty interesting.

A number of projects similar to Abu Dhabi's $22 billion (Dh80.8bn) Masdar zero-emissions city are being planned in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and other countries, said an official from Sharp Solar.

They include Dubai's proposed eight million sq ft Enpark, the Qatar Energy Park, the Shams Maan project in Jordan and a zero-emissions city in Saudi.

"Masdar is the first major alternative energy project in the region but there are others in the pipeline in other emirates, Qatar and Jordan," Mohannad Al Shami, Solar Business Development Manager at Sharp Middle East, told Emirates Business at The Big 5 exhibition.
"Enpark, Dubai's first energy and environment free zone, is a long-term project to address power shortages in the city and the industrial areas of Sharjah, Ajman and Ras al Khaimah. It was announced earlier but has been delayed by the financial crisis.

"Such projects will require not only solar panels but also other power infrastructure. There is great potential for tapping solar energy in the emirates. There are 310 sunny days in the region and solar power can be integrated into the grid to provide power to factories during daytime."
Many industrial units in the free zones and other industrial areas in the Northern Emirates face acute power shortages and there are serious plans to develop alternative energy, especially solar power. "A number of factories in the Sharjah industrial zones and many new buildings in Ajman and other Northern Emirates depend on diesel generators," said Al Shami. "Some factories in industrial areas get only five or six hours of electricity each day."

Sharp, which is showcasing its solar products at The Big 5, has expanded its production in six factories to meet the expected demand.

Annual electricity demand in the UAE is growing at between seven and 10 per cent – double the global rate. Despite the slowdown, there will be a need for power and the proposed nuclear project will take many years to complete. – Emirates Business 24|7