Well this is cool – steel velcro

A square metre of the new fastener, called Metaklett, is capable of supporting 35 tonnes at temperatures up to 800 ºC, claim Josef Mair and colleagues at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. And just like everyday Velcro it can be opened up without specialised tools and used again.

It’s like superglue for buildings!

There’s an interesting post on archizoo about the concept of ‘Cathedral Thinking’:

For Rogers, the concept was about the care and commitment of people who contributed to building the cathedral, a decades-long task, yet would never see its completion. Its implications on vision and strategy development seemed to be about their outcome, a recognition that the successful implementation of the strategy may not be measured until long after it authors have moved on.

I think  starts to hint at the basic reason I’m so ambivalent about the project I posted earlier where a cathedral was converted into a bookstore. There’s something serene and foreign in the concept of thousands of people devoting their lives to a project they know they will never see finished; the sacrilege of that conversion in my mind has less to do with replacing religion with commerce and more to do with respecting the aspirations of all those craftsmen.  Especially in the US, there are very few objects which have remained important for more than a couple generations. We’re not going to be able to embrace long-term sustainability as a culture without retaining some reverence for the past; they’re two perspectives on the same process.

Not a big fan of clay roof tiles- it reminds me of UT Campus….. and its Board of Regents……. and how they passed up an opportunity to have Herzog and de Meuron design the Blanton……….but this is still a cool product.

Here’s a great exchange of ideas, the first from Paul Krugman in the NY Times regarding the failings of economists to foresee the recent implosion:

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

And then some commentary from Sean Carrol, writing on my favorite physics blog, Cosmic Variance:

Without knowing much of anything about the relevant issues, I nevertheless suspect that this moral might be a bit too pat. Sure, people can fall in love with beautiful theories, to the extent that they overestimate their relationship to reality. But it seems likely to me that the correct way of understanding all this, once it’s properly understood, will look pretty beautiful as well. General relativity is widely held up as an example of a beautiful theory — and it is, when understood in its own language. But if you put the prediction of GR in the Solar System into the language of pre-existing Newtonian physics (which you could certainly do), it would look ugly and ad hoc. Likewise, Newton’s theory itself is quite elegant, when phrased in the language of potentials on a fixed spacetime background; but if you express the theory in terms of differential geometry (which you could certainly do), it looks like a mess. Sometimes the beauty/ugly distinction between theoretical conceptions is more a matter of how well we understand them, and less about their intrinsic qualities.

So my counter-hypothesis would be that it wasn’t beauty that was the problem, it was complacency. If you have a model that is beautiful and works well enough, you’re tempted to take pride in it rather than pushing it to extremes and looking for problems. I suspect that there is a very beautiful theory of economics out there waiting to be developed, one that understands perfectly well that individuals aren’t rational and markets aren’t perfect. One that has even more impressive-looking equations than the current favored models! Beauty isn’t always a cop-out.

Both those links are well worth a full read (the NY Times one is fairly long – schedule a cozy evening for it). In the spirit of dialogue, my feeling is that both Paul and Sean are coming at this from opposite ends of a single phenomena; well defined systems which involve feedback loops quickly become chaotic at larger scales. This is true for weather (we understand the basics of fluid dynamics and thermodynamics, but weather forecasts will never be very accurate), it’s true for the scale shift from quantum to relativistic, and it’s true for enormous economic systems. In other words, beautiful theories can both be true and useless – it’s all a question of scale.

On a rented lot that’s hidden from the street a few enterprising developers have erected what they call a lo-fi urban country club: three connected pools housed in Dumpsters; a boccie court; some lounge chairs, grills and cabanas. An experiment in Brooklyn which attempts to make use of underused space and materials, repurposing them with urban renewal in mind. NY Times article

The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum just announced their annual selection of ‘Europe’s emerging young architects and designers‘, and we are honored to have been selected as one of the highlighted firms. From the press release:

A total of 61 architects and industrial designers from architecture and industrial design and manufacturing firms across Europe were selected by a jury of architects that convened in Chicago June 2009.

An exhibition of work by the 2009 Laureates opens at Contemporary Space Athens (46-48 Megalou Vassiliou, Rouf-Athens, Greece) on Wednesday, September 16 and continues through November 1. A more formal exhibition and presentation takes place at the symposium, “The City and the World,” in Florence, Italy the second week of November 2009.

The “Europe 40 Under 40” program was initiated by The European Centre and The Chicago Athenaeum to spotlight and identify the next generation of European architects and design professionals who will impact future living and working environments, cities, and rural areas in Europe and around the world.

In 2008, hundreds of architecture and design submissions for 2009 were received by The European Centre from across Europe (both Members States of the European Community and Accession States). “The jury selection and process was extremely difficult,” states Ioannis Karalias, Museum Vice President, The Chicago Athenaeum. “The jury was presented with hundreds of excellent projects and designs from skyscrapers and large-scale urban planning projects to the highest quality industrial design for commercial and consumer use. It was difficult to narrow the number down to simply 40 design firms (60 designers and partners of design firms in total).”

I spent a lot of time thinking about the Mueller development a few weeks ago (considering a blog post that hasn’t materialized yet), and one of the main themes I kept coming back to was incremental improvement vs systemic redesign.  In the context of urban development, the former essentially means making modest (although not necessarily insignificant) changes to the existing development paradigm, while the former means completely rethinking the system from the ground up, from the financing model to the energy systems to the interactions between tenants. Mueller is clearly in the incremental improvement camp, and viewed from that perspective it is a highly successful project; the developers and designers have done an excellent job of adding ‘green’ features where it’s easy, pushing the typical building style towards something more sustainable and bringing as many stakeholders on board as possible (the city, neighborhoods, big box retailers, community organizations, etc).  Mueller is about as successful an example of ‘New Urbanism’ as you could imagine.

I mention this because there was a post a few days ago on WorldChanging titled “57 Million Chances to Get Housing Right”, discussing the potential impact of substituting sustainable developments for typical developments over the next few years:

he National Research Council’s Transportation Research Board calculated the greenhouse gas savings if new housing was more compact and put homes close to jobs and other amenities. “Driving and the Built Environment:  Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emission,” a report requested by Congress and published last week, determined that 57 million US homes will be needed by 2030 to accommodate population growth and replacement housing. … So what are the benefits to the climate? According to this study, they were fairly modest. Assuming:

• 75 percent of development is compact…
• leads to residents driving 25 percent less…
• the result is vehicle miles traveled, fuel use, and CO2 emissions of new and existing households would decline up to 8 percent by 2030, increasing to up to 11 percent by 2050.

In order to achieve more substantial progress, a second report identifies 4 primary ‘roadblocks’:

1. Inadequate infrastructure: a lack of public transit, insufficient, or aging utilities, and under-performing schools in city centers and other areas that are prime locations for sustainable development.
2. An uncertain regulatory process: myriad local government requirements, planning and zoning restrictions, fire and other code limitations, extensive project-specific environmental review processes, and local opposition (“no growth” advocates and unhappy neighbors).
3. Higher economic costs: a typically more expensive construction process, longer permitting time, and additional infrastructure burdens make sustainable development in existing neighborhoods less economically competitive than constructing in undeveloped areas.
4. Skewed tax incentives: local governments prefer to permit large single-use retail buildings to maximize sales tax revenue and minimize infrastructure costs, rather than mixed-use development.

And this is why I mention the incremental/systemic issue; a thousand new urbanist developments like Mueller won’t make half as much impact as a few systemic changes.  Our systems were not built to promote sustainable cities, and the first thing you learn in economics is that incentives matter.  In order to implement the massive changes which are needed in our built environment, we need to fundamentally restructure the incentives which influence them.  As helpful as Mueller and it’s type of development are, they are struggling against multiple systems which undervalue such developments.

In the short term, systemic change may be as difficult to implement as massive incremental changes, but from the perspective of a developer or designer who is hoping to generate change there is one key difference between incremental and systemic proposals; systemic proposals at a small scale can become models for new systems at larger scales.  The data above shows that applying ‘New Urbanism’ universally is an inadequate solution; it is an insufficient model for systemic change.  What we need are new perspectives capable of fundamentally reducing our energy consumption and encouraging long-term planning by individuals, proposals that not only take advantage of higher-quality infrastructure but supplement it as well, proposals which are not only profitable, but which encourage business practices which will be sustainable in the long term.  In my opinion, even a modestly successful proposal which addresses these aspirations is more valuable than another highly successful New Urbanist development.

My Ninja, Please! just posted about a project I completely love: Sietch Nevada.

For those of you who don’t read a lot of Sci-Fi, the term ’sietch’ comes from Frank Herbert’s masterpiece ‘Dune’.  The dune series takes place largely on a planet covered by (you guessed it) dunes; an entire planet covered by desert.  The inhabitants of the planet live in scattered settlements built into rock formations and their culture is largely based around an eons-long process of capturing water from the atmosphere to terraform the planet into a lush green forest.  The project above is a proposal which takes these settlements as a conceptual starting point and applies the idea to the imminent water shortage in the American Southwest.  From AMNP’s description:

MATSYS has created a subterranean city – taking the idea of waterbanking one step further, creating an underground canal system that both provides water to the inhabitants and allows for necessary irrigation of the proposed garden spaces in the center of each of the sietch’s cells.

There are so many things to love about this project; the apocalyptic desperation of moving underground, the synthesis of urban space and food production, the geothermal cooling approach, the voronoi diagram of the towers and canals, etc.  These are the types of though experiments that we need more of in theoretical architecture.

I’m generally annoyed at architectural proposals this divorced from the reality of what can be practically implemented; what makes this project different is that it starts from the perspective that eventually we will be forced to start thinking with a much longer time horizon that we have been, then proposes a design that could be plausible in this inevitable future.  This seems more like a contingency plan for an uncomfortable future than an ill-conceived and under-informed plan for what to do now.

Form Magazine just included Bercy Chen in their ‘5 to watch‘ issue.

We canvassed more than 100 architects and industry experts, asking them to nominate firms that embodied emerging talent.  After sifting through the candidates, we narrowed the list to five, examining their design philosophies and developing portfolios.  Keep an eye on their work; you’re bound to hear these names repeated over the next decade

Full article available here (PDF)

For those that aren’t familiar with his work, this Spanish architect is pretty remarkable.  Francisco Mangado’s work is rich and simple- embodying the kinds of spaces that warm your belly.

Centro de Exposiciones y Congresos de Ávila

Centro de Exposiciones y Congresos de Ávila

Museo de Arqueología de Álava, Vitoria

Museo de Arqueología de Álava, Vitoria

Museo de Arqueología de Álava, Vitoria