(WebUrbanist) Outdoor advertising is so ubiquitous in almost every urban setting around the world, it’s difficult to walk down a street, take an escalator or sit on a bench without getting slapped in the face with one product or another. But the city of São Paulo, Brazil is like an advertising ghost town: all of its billboards stand oddly blank and empty.
In September of 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis was scrubbed of almost every type of outdoor advertising – even pamphlets. It’s all part of mayor Gilberto Kassab’s quest to eliminate visual clutter, making the city itself the focal point rather than colorful, increasingly desperate marketing campaigns.
Aerogels are made by removing the liquid from gels, resulting in a material that is more than 90 percent air. The porous structure of that nanomaterial makes it difficult for heat to pass through. As a result, aerogels make very good and light-weight insulators.
Because of costs, aerogel manufacturers have focused on high-end industrial applications, such as insulating oil and gas pipelines and even the Mars Rover spacecraft.
But now, a handful of aerogel companies are offering thin blankets that serve as replacements for traditional fiberglass, foam, or cellulose insulation. It’s still more expensive upfront but the costs have fallen to the point that it can make sense in certain cases, particularly masonry or curved walls, according to Aspen Aerogels.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Urban gardening used to seem subversive. People planted tomatoes in public parks, strung their hops to rooftops to make homebrew and reclaimed empty lots as community farms, never mind the property owner.
Yet here in one of the more thoroughly tilled cities in America, subversive has come full circle: the federal government plans to plant its own bold garden directly above a downtown plaza. As part of a $133 million renovation, the General Services Administration is planning to cultivate “vegetated fins” that will grow more than 200 feet high on the western facade of the main federal building here, a vertical garden that changes with the seasons and nurtures plants that yield energy savings.
“They will bloom in the spring and summer when you want the shade, and then they will go away in the winter when you want to let the light in,” said Bob Peck, commissioner of public buildings for the G.S.A. “Don’t ask me how you get them irrigated.”
To read complete article by William Yardley go to NYTimes.com
Lots of cities have farmers markets, but most — if not all — of the produce comes from rural farmers that use oil-intensive methods of transportation to cart around their food. With 80% of all people on the planet projected to live in cities by 2050, food production will have to move into cities if it is to remain cost-efficient. A Swedish-American company called Plantagon has conceived of an incredible solution: a massive urban greenhouse contained within a geodesic dome. The vertical farm, which consists of a spiral ramp inside a spherical dome, is currently in the development stages.
To read complete article by Ariel Schwartz go to inhabitat.com
THE country has fallen on hard times, but those of us who love cities know we have been living in the dark ages for a while now. We know that turning things around will take more than just pouring money into shovel-ready projects, regardless of how they might boost the economy. Windmills won’t do it either. We long for a bold urban vision.
With their crowded neighborhoods and web of public services, cities are not only invaluable cultural incubators; they are also vastly more efficient than suburbs. But for years they have been neglected, and in many cases forcibly harmed, by policies that favored sprawl over density and conformity over difference.
Such policies have caused many of our urban centers to devolve into generic theme parks and others, like Detroit, to decay into ghost towns. They have also sparked the rise of ecologically unsustainable gated communities and reinforced economic disparities by building walls between racial, ethnic and class groups.
Correcting this imbalance will require a radical adjustment in how we think of cities and government’s role in them. At times it will mean destruction rather than repair. And it demands listening to people who have spent the last decade imagining and in many cases planning for more sustainable, livable and socially just cities.
The changes needed may seem extravagant, but they are not impossible. Many of those who see the current economic crisis as a chance to rebuild the country’s infrastructure have pointed to previous major government public works projects, like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration in the 1930s and 1940s and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, as a reminder of what this country was once capable of.
To read complete article by Nicolai Ouroussoff go to NYTimes.com
Morris Architects, a Houston-based architecture and design firm, recently took top honors for two of their submissions in the Radical Innovation in Hospitality design competition. The grand prize winner, the Oil Rig Platform Resort and Spa makes use of one of 4,000 oil rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico and transforms it into a luxurious eco-resort and spa. We love how the inspired renovation takes an iconic source of dirty energy and converts it to an eco-haven that generates all of its power from renewable sources.
To read complete article by Bridgette Steffen go to inhabitat.com
WASHINGTON — Tiny Greensburg, Kansas, rebuilding from scratch after nearly being wiped away by a tornado last year, is quickly becoming a model for going green.
Along with Masdar City, a planned car-free community outside Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and other developments, the rural Kansas town offers vivid examples of sustainable living in “Green Community,” a new exhibit at the National Building Museum. The exhibit opened Thursday and will run for a year.
“They are really making a wonderful opportunity out of an absolute tragedy,” curator and architect Susan Piedmont-Palladino said of Greensburg. “Masdar and Greensburg do make a really good pair because they’re both looking at the whole package of green technologies — from very old ways of doing things to high-tech ways.”
To read complete article by Brett Zongker of Associated Press go to USA Today.com
Nine years ago the California Academy of Sciences asked: What’s a natural history museum in the 21st century? Its stunning new building is the emphatic answer.
The new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, is a building of mythic proportions. At 410,000 square feet, it’s expected to be the largest public building ever to attain a LEED Platinum rating. And, with a $488 million price tag, it also represents the largest fund-raising effort for a cultural institution in San Francisco history. How did this low- profile natural history museum and research facility become a half-billion-dollar marquee project by a Pritzker Prize–winning architect, not to mention a landmark in sustainable design?
According to an oft-told origin story, it all started on the roof. In late 1999, architect Renzo Piano visited the site, climbed up on top of the Academy’s former building, and—there amid the canopy of trees—declared that the roof itself needed to be-come an exhibit of the museum. “This was a magic place in the middle of Golden Gate Park,” Piano recalls. “I said, ‘The roof has got to be part of the experience of the building, part of the itinerary.’”
Ten years ago, Portland developer Mark Edlen and his partner, Bob Gerding, were scarcely known even in their home city. Today, they run the top development company in Portland. Over the past decade, Gerding Edlen Development has been responsible for over ten different LEED-rated condo and office projects, as well as a renovation of a 19th Century armory that became the first building on the National Register of Historic Places to achieve a Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. Along the way, the firm helped transform two blighted industrial areas in Portland, the Pearl District and the South Waterfront (which now boasts one of only two aerial trams in a U.S. city.)
The firm has been busy outside their hometown as well, and are active in transforming downtown Los Angeles. In September of 2007, the Elleven project became the first California condominium to receive LEED Gold and was later honored as the Best Multifamily Highrise at the Los Angeles Architectural Awards.
To read complete article by Brian Libby go to Metropolis.com
A green designer says we need to save energy by making our architecture more efficient.
Architect William McDonough draws his green-building techniques from the world around him. Before attending architecture school at Yale, he worked on a redevelopment project in Jordan and observed the clever way the Bedouins’ tents utilized natural materials to protect them from the elements. His most ambitious project, a redevelopment of the Ford Motors complex in Dearborn, Mich., incorporates a “living roof” that features nearly 11 acres of vegetation to purify storm water and provide natural air conditioning. NEWSWEEK’s Fareed Zakaria spoke to him about energy efficiency in architecture, the future of environmental design and the possibility of eliminating all industrial waste from the planet.
To read complete article by Fareed Zakaria go to Newsweek.com
