Worried you won’t be able to sustain your privileged lifestyle after the coming apocalypse? Vivos may have a solution for you; luxury underground bunkers.

The Vivos design is based on a spoke and hub complex, with 10 radiating wings surrounding a 2 story central dome. Vivos designed its shelters to provide as much comfort as reasonably possible for its co-owners, with a population density of 1 person per 100 square feet of floor area. FEMA recommends just 50 square feet per person for long-term shelter.

The Vivos web site has a lovely bar along the bottom which lists “Nuclear War / Bio War / Terrorism / Anarchy / Electromagnetic Pulse / Solar Flares / Pole Shift / Killer Comet / Global Tsunami / Planet X / Super Volcano” to remind you of all the horrible things that are probably JUST ABOUT TO HAPPEN!

Notice the 3 man-sized safes for the storing of loot

I’m not sure if this is for real – the renderings look like screen captures from someone’s weekend project on The Sims and the idea seems to have been borrowed from Fallout, but I have no doubt that there’s a market for this.  I wonder what other frontiers are waiting to be gentrified?

This is the second proposal I’ve seen lately which involves renovating 60′s-era missile silos (the other being for a secure data center).  What other uses could these things serve?  They would probably make great wine/cheese caves!

Here’s an Atlas-F silo for sale which has been renovated into “a 2300 sq. ft. 2-story (3 bedroom, 2 bath) luxury home with fiber optic lighting and a contemporary finished interior… Breathtaking mountain views surround this lovely, secure home.”

Designer lighting and tan carpet really set off the 2000-lb blast doors!

I’ve been looking into methods of excavating stone for a new project, and it turns out that the world of rock excavation is much more interesting than I realized.

If you’re looking for crushed stone, a rock drill and some dynamite is all you need, but to get large usable slabs of stone requires a bit more finesse.  Cararra marble used to be quarried by drilling a series of holes on the edge of a cliff, inserting wooden ‘wedges’ and then soaking these with water – the expansion would cause the stone to crack along the line of holes and the resulting ‘bench’ was then moved to another facility to be cut to the proper sizes.

Modern methods are much cooler, and use two basic tools; gallery saws and wire saws.  A gallery saw is basically a 12-foot long chain saw for cutting stone.  They move along tracks and can cut either vertically or horizontally.  Wire saws are basically big motors attached to a huge rubber band studded with diamond discs.  The rubber band gets wrapped around the piece of rock you want to cut, then the wire saw pulls it tight and starts rotating it.  The diamond discs slowly slice the stone in half, like a cheese wire.

This video shows one of those chain saws in action.

Here’s a horizontal cut

This shows the wire saw – isn’t the space created after removing the slabs amazing?

And here’s what happens after the cutting’s finished…

As much as I’d like to hate Mr. Gates for foisting that other operating system on the world, I have to respect what he’s chosen to do with all his cash.  Pouring money into disease prevention and treatment (as well as his earlier attempts to ‘save’ our educational system) seems like the type of thing people should do when they have more wealth than many countries.

It seems he’s finally started to think about the effects of climate change, and seems to have come to the conclusion that climate change poses a more serious threat to the world.  He gave a talk at TED in which he outlined his analysis of the problem:

CO2 = P x S x E x C

Meaning this: the climate emissions of human civilization are the result of four driving forces:

* Population: the total number of people on the planet (which is still increasing because we are not yet at peak population).

* Services: the things that provide prosperity (and because billions of people are still rising out of poverty and because no global system will work unless it’s fair, we can expect a massively increased demand for the services that provide prosperity).

* Energy: the amount of energy it takes to produce and provide the goods and services that our peaking population uses as it grows more prosperous (what some might call the energy intensity of goods and services). Gates believes it’s likely cutting two-thirds of our energy waste is about as good as we can do.

* Carbon: the amount of climate emissions generated in order to produce the energy it takes to fuel prosperity.

Those four, he says, essentially define our emissions (more on that later). In order to reach zero emissions, then, at least one of these values has to fall to zero. But which one? He reckons that because population is going to continue to grow for at least four decades, because billions of poor people want more equitable prosperity, and because (as he sees it) improvements in energy efficiency are limited, we have to focus on the last element of the equation, the carbon intensity of energy. Simply, we need climate-neutral energy. We need to use nothing but climate-neutral energy.

To do that, we need an “energy miracle.” We need energy solutions that don’t yet exist, released through a global push for clean energy innovation. That, in turn, demands that a generation of entrepreneurs push forward new ideas for renewable energy, unleashing “1,000 promising ideas.” He described one of his own investments, but went on to note that we need hundreds of other ambitious companies as well, and he plans to put his own efforts into this arena.

This is a very accessible way to approach the problem; it comes with a handy acronym, presents the problem as a simple equation that needs solving, and makes intuitive sense.  Framed in this way I have to agree with him; developing net-zero energy sources seems like the best way to zero out the problem.

So after reading this I felt all warm and fuzzy; Bill Gates is on the case, and he has tonnes of cash to throw at it!  Surely we’ll have this engineering problem solved in the next decade or so right?

Then I read this response written by Joe Romm (former Acting Assistant Secretary at DOE and current senior fellow at the Center for American Progress), which basically shreds both Gate’s premise and his solution.  Here’s the basic problem; quantifying ‘Services’ distorts reality beyond utility, developing ‘energy miracles’ will take too long to work, and even if it didn’t we already have all the technology we need to fix the problem.

So I have thought a lot about whether Gates is right that we need multiple “energy miracles” developed through a $10 billion-a-year government R&D effort to stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm.

Put more quantitatively, the question is — What are the chances that multiple (4 to 8+) carbon-free technologies that do not exist today can each deliver the equivalent of 350 Gigawatts baseload power (~2.8 billion Megawatt-hours a year) and/or 160 billion gallons of gasoline cost-effectively by 2050? [Note -- that is about half of a stabilization wedge.] For the record, the U.S. consumed about 3.7 billion MW-hrs in 2005 and about 140 billion gallons of motor gasoline.

Put that way, the answer to the question is painfully obvious: “two chances — slim and none.” Indeed, I have repeatedly challenged readers and listeners over the years to name even a single technology breakthrough with such an impact in the past three decades, after the huge surge in energy funding that followed the energy shocks of the 1970s. Nobody has ever named a single one that has even come close.

…

I don’t know why the energy miracle crowd can’t see the obvious — so I will elaborate here. I will also discuss a major study that explains why deployment programs are so much more important than R&D at this point. Let’s keep this simple:

• To stabilize below 450 ppm, we need to deploy by 2050 some 12 to 14 stabilization wedges (each delivering 1 billion tons of avoided carbon) covering both efficient energy use and carbon-free supply (see here). The technologies we have today, plus a few that are in the verge of being commercialized, can provide the needed low-carbon energy [see "How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution (updated)"].
• Myriad energy-efficient solutions are already cost-effective today. Breaking down the barriers to their deployment now is much, much more important than developing new “breakthrough” efficient TILTs, since those would simply fail in the marketplace because of the same barriers. Cogeneration is perhaps the clearest example of this.
• On the supply side, deployment programs (coupled with a price for carbon) will always be much, much more important than R&D programs because new technologies take an incredibly long time to achieve mass-market commercial success. New supply TILTs would not simply emerge at a low cost. They need volume, volume, volume — steady and large increases in demand over time to bring the cost down, as I discuss at length below.
• No existing or breakthrough technology is going to beat the price of power from a coal plant that has already been built — the only way to deal with those plants is a high price for carbon or a mandate to shut them down. Indeed, that’s why we must act immediately not to build those plants in the first place.

For better or worse, we are stuck through 2050 with the technologies that are commercial today (like solar thermal electric) or that are very nearly commercial (like plug-in hybrids).

I have discussed most of this at length in previous posts (listed below), so I won’t repeat all the arguments here. Let me just focus on a few key points. A critical historical fact was explained by Royal Dutch/Shell, in their 2001 scenarios for how energy use is likely to evolve over the next five decades (even with a carbon constraint):

“Typically it has taken 25 years after commercial introduction for a primary energy form to obtain a 1 percent share of the global market.”

Note that this tiny toe-hold comes 25 years after commercial introduction. The first transition from scientific breakthrough to commercial introduction may itself take decades. We still haven’t seen commercial introduction of a hydrogen fuel cell car and have barely seen any commercial fuel cells — over 160 years after they were first invented.

The article goes on to discuss how technologies move from lab discoveries to commercial energy sources – the gist is; it takes a really long time and we should be spending the next 40 years trying to push existing technologies into wider use rather than trying to develop brand new ones.

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.

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.

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.

Dezeen just published some photos of a cathedral remodel; the cathedral had been turned into a retail store.

I have mixed feelings about this project.  On the one hand, the design itself is both sensitive to the nature of the existing building and interesting in its own right.  The space is being used as a book store, and the ‘stacks’ have been placed in the center of the space two levels high to retain the open majestic feeling of the nave.  The apse had been converted into a reading area filled with seats surrounding a cross-shaped table.  In all, the design is well executed.

But there’s something about this project that makes me uneasy.  Something about taking a cathedral – likely the result of centuries of work by thousands of craftsmen built as a sanctuary from the world of the profane being converted into a retail store seems like an unflattering commentary on the world we live in.

I’m neither religious nor a fan of historical preservation, so it surprises me that this project makes me uneasy; I suspect this is reflecting a growing uneasiness I’ve been feeling about our culture’s recent experiment with consumerism.  I feel like the slow monetization of virtually every aspect of our lives leaves us with a world that is lacking in both poetry and humanity.  Perhaps I’m just growing old enough to feel nostalgic for a past that never existed.

Or, as he’s known to his friends, the anticube

I was pondering how one might go about elevating a building (think tree-house) and it occurred to me that there might be some interesting starting points in the platonic solids.  Wikipedia led me to this guy, who interests me for a couple reasons.  First, it uses a square base and cap, allowing it to be used to construct spaces which don’t have odd angles on top of it.  Second, it stacks both horizontally and vertically – this basic geometry can be repeated outward to make a square grid and upward to make multiple stories.  Finally, I suspect this is the optimal structural way to support a square in space using only tensile/compressive members (ie, no shear walls).

So the blogosphere is abuzz with some early entries to the Re:Burbia competition, and I thought I’d take this occasion to explain why I personally had no interest in the competition.  For anyone not familiar with the competition, the brief states “In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution and we want you to create the vision!”.  My basic response to this question is that we don’t redirect these existing spaces to promote all those wonderful things; we redirect the people living in those spaces to to our existing urban centers.

There’s a great article in the Atlantic which gets to the heart of the reason I have no interest in ‘fixing’ the suburbs:

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas—roads, sewer and water lines—cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.