Architectural Story with Introduction

What if buildings could respond to us?

Road Speed

Ste. Elena, Costa Rica, near Monte Verde

Costa Rican engineers design streets so cars go slow.  No need for speed limits or patrol officers because the streets let you know how fast you can go.   In the center of the town, brick streets make tires rumble, parked cars on both sides narrow the lanes, so getting through requires some delicate navigation.  And people walk in the street as well as on the sidewalk.  Just outside the center paving smooths into asphalt, but the streets are narrow and people often walk along the side of the road, or ride bikes.  Drivers need to be cautious.  'Suave un toque' (easy does it)

Here's the best example that the engineers are designing road speed deliberately:  The steep roads up the mountain slopes are unpaved and rocky, even as they are generally well-maintained.   Go too fast and you get a very rough ride.   Therefore cars tend not to careen off the road into the abyss, even without guard rails, or emergency lanes, or concrete barriers.   Yeah, it's dusty, but no one dies. 

 

Salt Life

On vacation here in Marathon, in the Florida Keys, sitting on the patio facing a canal, I feel like Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock's Rear Window as I watch the neighbors across the canal hefting a cooler onto their boat, leaving, and returning with their catch. They celebrate a big wahoo, clean it, grill it and eat it all the while in full view.  Of course, they also see my family and I while we eat our meal on the patio. 

In Marathon every house has a boat.  The car is parked in the driveway in front and the boat is parked in the canal behind.  The house faces neighbors across the street and the back yard faces the neighbors across the canal.  No one expects privacy in either direction.  Perhaps that is part of the spirit of the salt life.  A fantasy of leisure, fishing, and socializing, without the hard edges of trying to make a living.  I imagine that salt life is lived almost in quotes, as a demonstration of the good life, a spectator sport that invites others to watch.

A circular sense of time

Here’s a hypothesis…

Is it possible that sustainability will give back to us a sense that time moves cyclically, and give us a new idea of “progress?”

“Progress,” the idea that human society advances ever forward into a better future, is tightly associated with modern thinking.  In particular the brave-new-world notion that progress in technology will always make our lives better and will always leave the past behind to be remembered but not repeated, is now almost a caricature.  The forward thrust of modern ‘progress’ mirrors the cradle-to-grave manufacturing model of making new things (out of ‘raw materials’ or ‘natural resources’), using them up and throwing them away (where they disappear).  The process moves always ahead toward the new.  Several squirrelly ideas and a fatal irony are embedded.  First, what’s new about something new? I’ll just leave that one to ponder.  Second, using things up suggests that nothing is left behind, an obvious falsehood – even food eaten up leaves poop behind and fuel used up leaves CO2 at least.   Thirdly, throwing things away doesn’t get rid of them, just takes them out of sight.  We clearly know by now that there is no ‘away,’ everywhere is somewhere and the more we insist on an ‘away,’ the more it crowds in on us.  In Freud’s terms, denying things or feelings by putting them out of sight or “foreclosing” them simply embeds them more deeply in our mind and body, until they infect our every action.

And the irony… progress implies a utopia or state of perfection always ahead like a mirage.  There, presumably everything is perfect, progress stops and time becomes cyclical again.    Hmmm.  So cyclical time is the goal.

Sustainability however proposes that we live in the world without diminishing it.  No graves.  No ‘away.’  No using things up.   It embraces the fact that everything exists before we ‘use’ it and continues to exist after.  Technology may transform materials and move them from place to place, but nothing is left as waste. Everything is recaptured and returned to the cycle.  Progress means innovation that improves the cycle in all its phases, not just the ‘making stuff for our use’ part of the cycle.  Life can be excellent, and everything returns, so that it can go around again and again.  

Thinking of materials in this way implies a cyclical sense of time: that all things return, in different forms, with an accumulation of memory perhaps, but always already present.  Same, same, but different.  We are part of the cycle of the natural world, and progressively innovate new ways to keep it strong and healthy, year after year, century after century, and millennium after millennium, always changing and, if we do our jobs well, always the same.

Ode to a Plastic Bag

Rooftop Solar could generate half of Miami-Dade County's Electricity

Solar panels on the roof power both house and electric car

The solar train is leaving the station (with or without FPL).

Here are some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

The total area of roofs in Miami Dade County is:  116 million square meters. Or 1.244 billion square feet.  Or 44.6 square miles. Thanks to Jeffrey Onsted, an FIU colleague, who wrestled this figure out of the Miami Dade County Property Assessors map of 2011.

Electricity use in Miami Dade county in 2008 was about 27.3 billion KWh.  Here's the source: Greenprint
I’m sure it’s more now, but that’s a figure I could find.

A solar panel in Miami generates about 216 KWh per square meter per year, more or less. 
This figure comes from from the universal formula for solar yield:  E = A * r * H * PR

E = Energy (kWh)
A = Total solar panel Area (m²)
r = solar panel yield (%)  (usually about 15%)
H = Annual average solar radiation on tilted panels (shadings not included) (Miami is about 5.25 kWh/ sq m/day, or 1916kWh/square meter/year)
PR = Performance ratio, coefficient for losses (range between 0.5 and 0.9, default value = 0.75)

Therefore, take the total square footage of the roofs, 116 million sq. meters then reduce it by about 40% (I’m guessing) because panels must be 3’ back from the edge and roofs are populated with air conditioners and stuff.  That comes to about 69 million sq. meters

Multiply by 216 KWh/sq.m/yr.  Equals 14.9 billion KWh.

Therefore, Miami Dade County could generate about half of its electricity use from rooftop solar.  Hmmm.

I did a similar calculation for all of Florida’s energy use, including electricity, gas, oil, jet fuel etc, to figure out the area of solar panels needed.  It came out to about 2,200 square miles (47 miles per side of a square)  Here’s the map:

Area of solar panels needed to power all of Florida at current energy usage

Creative Maintenance

Friedrich Hundertwasser, Residential building of the
City of Vienna 1983-5 (Photo: Schwingenschlögl)
http://www.hundertwasser.com/arch/view-44

 A building usually looks its best on opening day, or perhaps a few weeks later when the final punch list is complete.  Then the photographers are called in, the people are cleared out, and images created for publication.  That’s the best and freshest, and most stylish the building will ever be.   All that’s left after that is maintenance.  

The life of a building, however, takes some time to emerge, years even for people to adjust their habits and discover new patterns and relationships.  Some say it takes twenty years or so for a neighborhood to mature until it has older families and young people and a broadly-recognized identity in the larger community – not just as ‘that new development.’   When the life of the place comes into focus as the goal of design, then maintenance takes on an entirely different meaning.

If the life of a building were considered primary, then maintenance would require looking after the health and well-being of the occupants, community and ecosystem.  To that end the physical object would not only only accept modification but welcome it.  Maintenance would be a continuing process of adjustments to respond to changing conditions of the city, and inhabitation by creative people who build their lives there. 

The best example I can summon is artist Friedrich Hundertwasser’s apartment buildings in Vienna.  He wrote in 1983, “Only a building which grows organically after the occupants have moved in and steadily changes through the constant alterations of the occupants is the alternative to the concentration camps in which we live…”   He went on, “Everyone must have the right to lean out of the window and redo the third skin, the outer wall, as far as his arm reaches, so that people on the street can see from far away, “There lives a human being”.

Was Hundertwasser’s artistic vision diminished by inviting residents to modify the building?  Hardly.  His design strategy is strong enough to welcome change and become richer for it.

Notes:

Jacques Derrida considered the issue of maintaining the ‘maintenant’ or the ‘now’ in an essay on Bernard Tschumi’s design for Park de la Villette.

Friedrich Hundertwasser, “Concrete Utopias for the Green City” delivered at the International Gardening Association symposium in Munich July 27, 1983 http://www.hundertwasser.com/text/1.3.2.5/hl/69.