“I love your big refrigerator...”

“I love your big refrigerator...” --Traveling Wilburys

I just got back from a quick and I carbon-laden trip to New Orleans where I was part of a series of panels convened by Autodesk at the giant SIGGRAPH convention. I have to admit that I had never heard of this event, which is a gathering of folks from the computer gaming, animation, film, research, and the general digerati elite. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay long enough to dive deep into the culture, so very unlike that on my home world, but I was there long enough to get a grasp on the myriad interconnections across the visualization spectrum. Thousands of attendees, most of whom looked barely old enough to travel unsupervised, are even now still roaming the cavernous halls of the New Orleans convention center sharing schemes to make the un-real ever more seductive.

Convention centers, like convention hotels and airports are strange liminal non-places. (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, by Marc Auge, which I confess to not having read, only read about) Once ensconced in the capsule of the event, I could have been in Crystal City except for the extra-vehicular activity for dinner a few blocks away. Had I been able to stay longer I would have gone on many more excursions, if only to escape the deep freeze. It’s an odd thing to say about an August visit to New Orleans, but, except for a few intervals of wet-blanket heat, I was absolutely freezing from the minute I boarded the plane here in Washington until I returned home yesterday morning. The airport, the plane itself, the taxi, the hotel—no operable windows in my 10^th floor room, which always gives me a queasy form of claustrophobia—the convention center, the restaurant, all seemed to have their collective thermostats set to 55.

It’s not that I like the heat; I don’t. But I like to know where I am, and that knowing comes from all of the senses. Seeing New Orleans from the window of an icy taxi is strangely disorienting. It’s like watching an animation, which of course is what the thousands of SIGGRAPHians spend their time doing. I prefer my reality real...even if there is some discomfort associated with it. Without the haptic verification of place, I am unconvinced I was really in New Orleans, boarding pass notwithstanding.

New Orleans has become such a complex knot of nostalgia and catastrophe, an icon veiled by its own mythology that it hardly seems real anyway. It is locked in a destructive relationship with oil, sucking it up out of the Gulf like a junkie, even though it knows the acute and chronic health consequences are dire. The businesses super-cool visitors, so know one has to see them sweat. Next time I go back, I’ll carry an umbrella for the sun, get a sandalwood fan, and get out of the animation.

But enough of that...One of the speakers on our day-long urban planning sessions was from the non-profit Environmental Simulation Center in New York. If you’re not familiar with them and what they do, you should be.

And, finally, I’m heading to an undisclosed location for the next week so the next post won’t be until the week of the 17^th.

The Good, the Green, and the Beautiful

Wandering through Form and Movement, the exhibition of Philip Trager’s photographs that just opened at the National Building Museum, is an unalloyed delight. I can feel my blood pressure drop as I gaze at one exquisite image after another of architecture, the landscape or dancers. There are three photos of Villa Almerico Capra, more commonly known as La Rotonda, Palladio’s masterpiece in bi-lateral symmetry. One photo looks up the entry ramp toward the villa; another looks askance across a portico into the sun; the third looks up to the villa from a distant field sprinkled with dandelions. In each the building is identical; its façade inscrutable to direction or environmental situation.

I can’t tell what time it is. That is partly the photographer’s intention; neither cars nor antennae fix the photos in any particular year. But my confusion comes from the architecture itself. I can’t tell what time of day it is. It is either early morning or late afternoon in the view from the portico, as we see long shadows stripe the floor. But I don’t know which. Even though I have visited La Rotonda more than once I carry no memory of its orientation.

The symmetry is Palladio’s hallmark and the photographer’s challenge. With infinitely thin center lines and architecture in perfect mirror to left and right, his buildings are more perfect than our bodies. But why should we even think of it as “perfect”? Why did I write that? Am I still tethered to the Neo-Platonist aesthetic that elevates abstract geometric purity over the handedness, inflections, tilts and biases that really define our life on earth?

Architecture is after all inescapably under the sun and he, (I’m still tethered to the Greek gods as well) not mathematics, should determine geometry. A building’s many faces should reflect its orientation. Orientation. It’s a good word to use, because its origin lies in establishing which direction is east. Knowing that, we can know the rest. Can we start to re-orient our architectural values? Begin to redefine what makes a beautiful building? Not that Palladio’s villas aren’t beautiful; it’s just that they come wrapped in their own historical context. Should they forever define what is “good architecture”?

I was a juror for the Washington area chapter of the USGBC’s annual design awards and that question—what is “good?”--dominated our deliberations. Because these were awards for projects that had already passed through one LEED filter or another, we were challenged to determine what made one better than its peers. Just being LEED Platinum didn’t guarantee a prize. I couldn’t help but wonder why it was so difficult to get the “green” and the “good” to snap into focus, like the image in a 3D film when you put on the dorky glasses. But there were a few clear cases where no glasses were going to help, because they were quite literally disoriented.

I was surprised, frankly, that the entrants in the LEED C&S category—that’s Core and Shell—paid so little attention to the S, the Shell. One entry’s glamour shot captured the building’s tight glass skin, unblemished by any exterior shading, reflecting the full force of the late afternoon sun. Great photo, I guess, but horrifically ill-suited to the task of celebrating the building’s sensitivity to its environment. Don’t blame the photographer: the building was not sensitive to its environment. It didn’t know its front from its back; its north from its south. It didn’t know where it was. The image represented a very traditional concept of beauty from the era of La Rotonda strikingly at odds with the new environmental concept it aspired to honor.

I’m not going to name names, because truly each of the competitors is striving to do the right thing; they’re succeeding incrementally, but all the parts aren’t working together yet. The USGBC is young as an organization, just a tween--a person that age would be dangerous with so much influence and ambition—but what they are doing is nothing short of changing our design value system. Focusing design evaluation on green building challenges conventional definitions of “good” architecture, of “beautiful.” What is the new canon? What is the “style for our time”? We’re still asking that Victorian question while trying to shake off both ossified Neo-Platonism and adolescent avant-gardism. To be beautiful, a building must know where it is. To be beautiful, a building must know its north from its south, its east from its west. To be beautiful, a building must know that rain falls. To be beautiful...add your own.

Here's to Edmonston, Maryland!

I read the news today. Oh boy. Shall I go on? About a little town that made the grade...

That would be Edmonston, in Prince Georges County, Maryland. As the Washington Post tells us in today’s Metro section, this town of 1500 has decided to redesign its Decatur Street as a green, pedestrian friendly, water-filtering, LED lit main street. There are so many wonderful things about this story I hardly know where to start, except to borrow the quote that ends Lisa Rein’s article: ‘"This will put us on the radar screen," Pooley said of the new street. "Even a working-class community can glom on to being a little bit aware of the environment."’

Spunky small towns figure so prominently in American mythology that it’s easy to forget the truth beneath them. In the Green Community exhibition we have two, Greensburg, Kansas and Stella, Missouri, both of which can hold their own against the likes of glam green Masdar City and transit savvy Portland. What Greensburg, Stella, and Edmonston share isn’t just their size; they share what Edmonston resident Maggie Pooley is pointing out in her comment. These are not the oft-caricatured organic-chardonnay sipping liberal environmental elites (like me?), nor the equally caricatured granola-crunchy un-reformed hipsters. No, these are blue-collar, service industry, construction workers, under- and un-employed who want and deserve a main street that can make them, their town, the Anacostia, and everything else downstream, healthier and more beautiful. And, make them proud of having done it.

As with Stella and Greensburg, Edmonston needed not only funding but expertise. Personally, I couldn’t be happier that the town got a little chunk of stimulus money. I’m proud that a penny or two of my taxes will fund permeable paving and the engineering and design necessary to lay it. It’s no surprise to read that the planners at EPA are involved; those initials show up in many of the Green Community projects. Professional help is also coming from the Low Impact Development Center. A non-profit located nearby in Beltsville, the Center is another example of the resources available to communities that want to, well, steward their resources. There are resources for resources.

Funding? Check. Expertise? Check. Hmmm, what are we missing? Oh yes...political leadership and citizen support? Check! The mayor’s statement that “we have to make things happen for us instead of making things happen to us” is just about the best call to action I’ve heard in a long time. It’s a true call to action, not an abstract exhortation or uplifting aspiration. And, it’s in the first person plural: we have to do it; it is in our hands. We will not remain a passive us, object of the action of others; we will take the action.

So, here’s to you Edmonstonians! Had I known about this a year ago, you would have been in the exhibition. Consider yourselves Honorary Members of Green Community but card-carrying, official members of the real green community.

more posts about buildings and food

No, today's post is not about the Talking Heads, nor gingerbread houses, although both are tempting subjects. There is a perverse delight in upending Maslow and consuming shelter and that wasn't far from my mind when I wrote a guest post this week on the Biotech Industry Organization's site What Can Biotech Do for You? Well, what can it do for me...in architecture, that is? I had at first wondered what I could contribute to the discussion as it seemed a little outside my area of expertise. But I gave it a shot, so here it is:

The Department of Energy’s semi-annual Solar Decathlon always offers a smorgasbord of amazing architecture, but the University of Colorado’s entry in 2005 was exceptional. It was just delicious. The structure, the finishes, the furnishings, and even the fuel to transport the house to the National Mall in Washington were all edible. Not that one would actually munch on the house, but the point was that the materials were all close to nature and made a healthier, more sustainable house. Using soy, corn, and canola oil among other ingredients, the young students who designed and built the house put a high tech twist on an old idea.

Vernacular architecture throughout the world has long made use of agricultural by-products, animal skins and bones, and other materials that today we would call “bio-based.” As the timeline in the National Building Museum’s current exhibition Green Community illustrates, there was a time when everything was on the table, so to speak, to build and power the industrial revolution. Inventors were tinkering with electric cars, solar hot water pumps and parabolic solar arrays. But by the First World War—and perhaps because of it—we had cast our lot with the familiar set of fossil fuels: gas, oil, coal and their derivative products. Oil seeps into everything now, from the obvious roads and transportation to the less obvious, such as cosmetics and building materials. As we start to make our exit from the Carbon Age, it’s time to put everything back on the table.

The options in the world of energy are familiar: wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, bio-fuels. But the world of materials needs rethinking too. Bamboo has proven a quick-growing worthy substitute for hard wood, but the material possibilities don’t stop there. Concrete manufacturers are looking at myriad additives, including rice hulls. As a judge this past winter for the Future City competition during National Engineers’ Week I saw middle school students embrace spider silk –though probably not the spiders themselves--for super-strong, yet light-weight building materials. This past March Popular Science gave one of their annual Invention Awards to the developers of insulation made from mushrooms. Thatched roofs are even making a bit of a comeback in the UK. And, the marriage of agriculture and architecture in vertical farming is challenging the conventional ways of building and farming, bringing food, shelter, and energy back into consonance. That may be one of the most problematic legacies of our carbon-based industrialization, splitting those 3 into separate domains and handing each to a different discipline. They are all much stronger when they are conceived as a set; triangulation, as any engineer will tell you, makes a strong structure.

The University of Colorado won 1^st prize in 2005, as they had in 2002, not because the house was edible but because it performed the best under the sun. The bio-based theme was, well, dessert. But the thinking was the same. If we’re going to be clever and imaginative about how to power our buildings we can be just as clever and imaginative about their materials. Building greener means paying more attention to where our materials come from, how they get to us, and how they contribute to, rather than diminish, our health and the planet’s health over time. I wonder what this fall’s Solar Decathlon will bring...