Eurotrash

The picture above is from the European Space Agency - a phenomenal coordination of international space exploration efforts by the EU countries and their partners. It's a representation from a database of space debris compiled by the ESA. Very interesting sequence is on this website. It seems our waste isn't limited to the biosphere. "Waste" is by far the biggest issue created by our human civilization, and it includes pollution and CO2 emissions along with the toxic stuff.

ESA has a page that talks about its mission and purpose, along with some history and background. In its discussion of business and market development, it outlines its earth observation platform. It's marketing earth studies for industrial and business purposes, and the science and technology page showcases some collaborative missions.

It's not a very active site; however one resource has been developed that's now for use in Google Earth. It concerns a topic of very recent concern, that of global warming and its impact on the biosphere as land dries out and temperatures rise. The ATSR World Fire Atlas is here. Select the country from the map, specify the timeframe, and select Google Earth output format. If you've got Google Earth installed, the dataset will come up mapped on an interactive globe that can be navigated very quickly.

I don't suppose there's anything further we can do to obliterate our planet? NASA hasn't said much about this...until very recently.

Update 1/17/14: The Japanese have come up with a proposal to deal with this problem - garbage management in Low Earth Orbit.

Update 2/19/20: Avoiding space debris might require new legal framework, US lawmakers say

Whoops

The "green building" movement has been evolving for over a decade now, and has produced a multitude of ways of measuring the design of building efficiency. This can be confusing, since there is no unifying legislation, and there are different standards for pubic buildings, institutional buildings, K-12 structures and residences. In addition, there's a cacophony of standards in Europe, inasmuch as they more effective than US standards because they start with a fundamentally passive approach and build energy systems into that. This is known as Net Zero design; examples here from US Dept. of Energy.

What has not happened consistently is the monitoring of performance, as this article points out, and there's still much disagreement about how this should be carried out by facilities managers in order to make sure that the building is performing as desired. This is also opening vast new grounds for liability for professionals, since one-off design can be highly engineered but not tested, like products, in a "reality check" field testing process against benchmarks, much like the ISO 9000 standards for the technology field. Some firms are taking control of this process by involving the owners, and limiting liability to their fees for the "green" certification, as well making the contractor responsible for any deviations from design or specifications, and the owner's process of commissioning the building after construction is complete. The owner's responsibility continues thereafter, with the possibility of incremental improvements to a higher certification.

There's a move afoot to bring these standards and guidelines into compliance via the international code, ICC, so that with today's global building practice, there's a way to effectively design and build structures that actually perform without having to wade through layers of regulation and conflicting codes that produce "camels" for buildings. Until then, building performance will continue to fall short of the desired design goals in spite of everyone's best efforts. There needs to be a systemic approach to construction, as well as conservation strategies in power generation, fuels production and water conservation.

See the eagle?

The photo above shows the flip animation for a project done on the Eagle Rock landmark in Northeast Los Angeles, in collaboration with The Center for Arts, by Jane Tsong. She has a wonderful website for her public art and other projects, done here locally. Delightful ideas.

Myriad small things, it's called.

Most impressive is a map of the streets around Occidental College that shifts to the underlying topography and streams when you roll the mouse over the pic. The theme of her work is natural environments and man-made "interventions" at many scales.

"This isn't the wiring I specified!"

Screams the architect played by Paul Newman in "Towering Inferno", as he rips live wiring out of a panel. One of my favorite flick send-ups of the building industry. More architects in the movies are here, Off the Record!

PS Architects don't specify electrical wiring sizes.

Shrinking Bigfoot

The building and development sector is undergoing a major learning curve as the impacts of carbon on climate change become apparent, and the linkages to carbon production are more and more centrally linked to development. More development and construction not only consumes resources, but creates the single biggest impact on the planet by the production of materials, consumption of all resources during construction, the shipping, trucking and transport of materials from all over the globe, in order to produce a result: a black hole.

The black hole, as I've talked about before, is the replacement of existing natural processes, using millions of btu's worth of energy, to create huge blocks of structure that consume even more btu's, water and resources over its lifetime (unlike nature, which returns water and oxygen to the area it covers) and produces waste that is environmentally destructive over a much bigger area than the structure itself. It now creates greater traffic demand, which is part of the entire destruction cycle, and the whole thing spirals downward.

This black hole is driven by expansionist and capitalistic development pressures, in our artificial system of monetary profit that does not recognize the value of the environment or even acknowledge that it's fundamental to our existence. Pressures such as legislation requiring more development, as SB 375 does in California, is a result of wholesale profiteering by an industry that is not only attacking the environment, but the residents who are trying to protect what remains. The truly ugly part of this setup is that public dollars are used to push this development into communities that are already at the limits of their resources, in direct opposition to resident concerns about existing overwhelming development and its impact on the local environment, such as the "heat island effect" created by urban development and the degradation of local terrain.
New systems of funding major "public private partnerships", or P3, have come into play to combat the cost spiral that has historically doubled or quadrupled original cost estimates at the beginning of these large projects. These systems of partnering combine financial, legal, and government process into a system that streamlines the project but eliminates the "firewall" of checks and balances that create public accountability for projects of this magnitude. Frequently these projects require projections of use to justify their existence and revenue, but have historically fallen far short of these projections leaving the public holding the bag for these projects as well as the destructive impacts. Understand that the monies are going into private pockets at public expense. Like the black hole of Iraq.

The scale of development, its funding and character, must change. Massive projects and overdevelopment have created damage that will take centuries to balance out, if ever. For example, the big dams have destroyed rivers and silted them over, creating far more problems than they attempted to solve, as well as failing to produce the energy to society over time that they remove from the rivers. A principle well known in the financial arena is "reversion to the mean". In the sciences, this is called entropy, and it means that a system cannot exceed the energy that exists within it, but can only move it around - and in so doing, convert energy to matter (heat to carbon).

A regenerative approach, which operates in a systems fashion and is flexible in scale and internal feedback, is the direction that natural systems have evolved on our planet, and it's critical that human society learns quickly to adapt this model. It'll be necessary to construct a financial system that follows this model instead of the destructive mechanisms we have now that devour resources to benefit the few. The scale of human habitation now dictates that we can no longer try to operate outside the laws of nature, but within its systemic capacity. In doing this, the existence and structure of human social capital and natural capital will finally be recognized and incorporated.

Ways to do this are outlined in books such as "Getting a Grip", by Frances Moore Lappe and "The Real Wealth of Nations" by Riane Eisler. I find this fascinating, because Nature is a woman, too.

Urban Food Movement

Sustainability web-mag Inhabitat and modern design site Dwell have just announced the winners of the Reburbia Design Competition. The competition, which has been running for the past 6 weeks, challenged architects, designers and concerned citizens to come up with solutions that would address the problems that plague present-day suburbia by envisioning different scenarios for the future. Proposals tackled foreclosed McMansions, vacant big box stores, strip malls, parking lots and more with design fixes ranging from community agriculture and algae-based biofuels to zeppelin-based transit and pools transformed into water treatment plants. The competition drew over 400 entries from countries all over the world.

Re-Greening NYC: Vision

The Grand Concourse in the Bronx has a rich heritage and is visioning its future development. The Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Design Trust for Public Space launched a competition earlier this year called Intersections: The Grand Concourse Beyond 100. The winning entries are posted here in The Architect's Newspaper.

In response to Mayor Bloomberg's goal of a green NYC by 2030, it represents another iteration in the idea of urban regeneration that is dynamic, green and community-based, interacting in the urban fabric instead of creating isolated building structures. This opens up possibilities such as vertical farming - using hydroponics and water recycling - to bring natural processes into the city that provides a local food supply as well.

We've come a long way from the earlier dystopian visions of NYC and the earth, in general, as the only logical endgame. Logan's Run, in particular, was specific to the much-envisioned dome over the city with the apocalyptic earth on the "outside". Human vs. nature. I think we get it now. There's no "versus"