Design Explorations of the Lower Colorado River, a landscape architecture course taught by a friend of mine at Cal Poly, in which the Colorado River is taken to be the primary client, and human needs are assumed to be real, but secondary. All we have left is gardening. We might as well do a good job of it!
Tag: design
The Diverging Diamond
Strong Towns takes on The Diverging Diamond and suburban traffic engineers everywhere. It’s nice to see someone on the conservative end of the spectrum also arguing passionately for livable density and good urban spaces. He comes to it from an economic point of view — we don’t have anywhere near the pile of cash required to maintain the infrastructure we’ve built (and we never will, because it’s expensive and does not come close to paying for itself in terms of economic benefits) so we need to let it crumble or actively remove it, and go back to a network of roads connecting places, which are filled with streets — networks that facilitate local activity, especially economic activity, and which are cheaper to maintain as well. And better for pedestrians, and kids, and biking, and sidewalk cafes too.
He’s got a good TEDx talk too, up here:
Taking Parking Lots Seriously, as Public Spaces
An article from the New York Times about the architecture of parking lots, and how they might be much better used as public spaces with some design tweaks. Some cities like Houston and LA, dedicate a full third of their land area to parking lots, creating hard paved urban deserts and storm runoff disasters. They say that simply suggesting that we “buy fewer cars” is glib (I disagree) but clearly point out the folly of requiring vast quantities of parking by law, and then giving it away for free, thus hiding the true costs.
Alex Steffen’s SXSW Eco Keynote
Alex Steffen gave one of the keynotes, at the first SXSW Eco Conference this fall, talking about good cities as the single best leverage point we have in reducing GHG emissions. It’s broadly the same collection of ideas as his forthcoming crowdfunded book Carbon Zero: A Short Tour of Your City’s Future. Looking forward to its eventual release.
Debunking the Cul-de-Sac
Highlights from a study looking at how different street network designs affect things like health and safety. Traditional interconnected grids fare better in just about every way than the dendritic cul-de-sac neighborhoods of the automobile dominated late 20th century.
Automotive Death Revealer
We hide many of the financial costs of our automobile culture, such as the exorbitant true price of parking, but just as much, we hide the cost in human lives. By far, the most common source of violent traumatic injury and death in the developed world is our beloved motor vehicle. In the US alone, every year 10 times as many people are killed by cars than were killed in the World Trade Center attacks, 10 times as many as have been killed in the Iraq war. Every two years we kill more Americans with vehicles than we did in all of the Vietnam war. Every three years, more than WWI, every ten, more than WWII.
Why do we deem these losses acceptable? They aren’t inevitable. The UK, Iceland, Sweden, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland and Switzerland all have vehicular death rates less than half of our 12/100,000 people per year (which puts us on par with Bangladesh…). We can re-design and re-build our cities and our streets to avoid this carnage, for a fraction of the cost of our ill-fated War on Terror, and many other governmental actions supposedly undertaken in the name of keeping us safe. Safe from threats which do not really exist, in a statistical sense, but which loom large in our monkey minds.
Would it be different if we left the corpses out on the roads to rot? If we hung the out skeletal remains as a ghastly reminder? Some software developers in Moscow are trying to do just that, with a mobile augmented reality app called the Death Revealer:
(via Copenhagenize)
Location Efficiency and Housing Type
According to this EPA study, regardless of the type of housing, living in an area with good transit access saves more energy than building a “green home”. Of course, living in a mixed use, transit accessible apartment that’s also energy efficient uses the least energy, but it’s important to realize how limited the potential for cost-effective energy efficiency is in a sprawling suburban context.
Leveraging digital design in synthetic biology
Automatic Design of Digital Synthetic Gene Circuits from PLoS Computational Biology. They seem to be saying look, real biology isn’t generally digital, and all that continuum behavior means we need a bunch of new and complex tools to do anything with it. However, there are plenty of instances of pseudo-digital biological control systems, and we’ve already got a gigantic toolbox from EE/VLSI world for building very complex digital circuits, so why not limit ourselves to using an artificially digitized subset of biology so we can leverage the existing design tools, and see how far we get? Weird to think of this particular kind of very intimate digitization of life. Talk about historical effects. What would our post-dark-age descendants think, rediscovering a strange class of metabolic networks, in which everything is binary?
Into Eternity by Michael Madsen
I am now in this place where you should never come. We call it Onkalo. Onkalo means hiding place. In my time it is still unfinished, though work began in the 20th century when I was just a child. Work will be completed in the 22nd century, long after my death. Onkalo must last 100,000 years. Nothing built by man has lasted even a tenth of that time span. But we consider ourselves a very potent civilization.
If we succeed, Onkalo will most likely be the longest lasting remains of our civilization. If you, some time far into the future find this, what will it tell you about us?
It isn’t often that you find people seriously thinking about deep time in a concrete way. Usually it’s abstract, just a thought experiment, not an engineering problem or a gut wrenching moral quandry. But this is apparently not the case for the Scandinavians who have taken on the task of storing their spent nuclear fuel. Finland has decided to go forward with permanent storage, in a typically responsible, deliberate, earnest Nordic way.
Construction of a Canadian PassivHaus
A great slideshow with captions showing the construction of a PassivHaus in Ottawa. Relatively high density, and relatively high end. I’d love to build something along these lines… and live in it.