Building Alive, Designing to Thrive

Here is book number one from My list of books I need to read: Hungry City- How Food Shapes Our Lives by Carolyn Steel. I really wanted to read this book after hearing her speak at the Willow School's Food For Thought event in April 2011. As a speaker, she has an amazing combination of enthusiasm, sarcasm, fact-based-knowledge, vision, and optimism. Her book reflects much the same. This book began to ring even truer after my very first trip to Whole Foods about a month ago. Needless to say, I was in love with the store. And while I've always actually enjoyed grocery shopping, this was Heaven. However, when I brought the $400 bill home to my mother, I was back to reality. Like Carolyn discusses in her book, modern society is spending less and less of their money on food- when it is the most important thing we need to sustain life, culture and community. The $400 of groceries lasted my family of four almost 3 weeks- which equals out to less than $50 per mouth per week. And this wa...

Yes, sorry mom. Here is yet another thing I am insisting we change in the house. Here's a couple Did-you-knows to help start proving my point (via Greenseal) : 40% of trash in landfills is paper products 30% of the timber harvested annually in the US is used to make paper products And yes mom, I hear your first argument " But when it gets to a landfill, it breaks down eventually. AND it still has to go to a landfill after it's used- recycled or not " First of all, nothing breaks down in landfills anymore. Since the 1960's the US has invested in something called sanitary landfills. Sounds nice, right? Well it means that be basically lead-line all of our landfills so nothing can seep into the soil and contaminate it because of all the toxins inside of things we use everyday: mercury, formaldehyde, BPA, etc. Things that, if they did leak into the soil could reach the water table and make a lot of people very very sick. So they are necessary. However, without...

Aristotle once said, "The energy of the mind is the essence to life". Too bad for him and us, buildings and modern society as we know it can't survive on the stuff. Buildings consume about 40% of the energy and 75% of the electricity produced annually in the United States. (usgbc), which means they are the largest demanders for power, heat, air and electric. So, for obvious reasons, these are the most important places to focus our energies (pun intended) in reduction and reuse. Reduction is probably the more obvious of the two, creating better buildings that don't leak heat and air conditioning, that are so well insulated the heat from the bodies of it's occupants actually warms the building. This will create a lower energy demand to control thermal comfort within the space. Reuse is the more challenging and yet I'd argue the more exciting way to increase efficiency in a home, building... or wherever. Something like using the wastewater from the toilets to co...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KeGhPZtF0c If you can't see the video directly below, click the link up there ^^^

It's a silly time to learn to swim on the way down Well why am I quoting this fabulous Tegan and Sarah song? It came on during my morning commute and it had me thinking- yeah! I bet a lot of society feels the same way about climate change. It is beyond me how people can deny that climate change exists- or say they 'don't believe in it'. It's not a religion, cult movement, theoretical ideal or ideas spun by your average street-corner crazy. It is a scientifically documented, million researcher strong, thousands of pages-per-volume fact. But- it would be so much easier to get by day to day if you didn't feel like the world around you was closing in and smothering you. We don't know how to swim through all this information- and with the policy makers in their later years, they have some trouble understanding what to do and think if they just ignore it, deny it, or drag their feet they can just tread water instead of swimming forward. I totally see how that gets...

Seems like some kind of oxymoron, doesn't it? But in order to create a new building lots of papers get signed, sent, edited, resent, negotiated, resent, signed, copied, and filed. Some standard papers that you'll see in any construction project include: permits, site plans, blueprints, contracts, and something called Masterspec- which I just became intimately acquainted with a couple of weeks ago. Masterspec is an 80-page booklet- just for the table of contents- titling all the different categories of stuff that are involved in building. So, it became a dandy little project when my boss asked me to take all of our researched materials and cross file them: First by contractor item then by Masterspec ID number. I didn't even know there was such an official book. So for example, now you see folders that say: Concrete, Grout, Steel, etc. Then when you pull out grout there is a label on the front that says: 03 60 00: Grouting. Beyond being helpful in specifically filing things-...

Well I'm glad you asked. The question should really be what are we doing. We, the design team; we, the environmentalists; we, the students; we, the community; and we, the pioneers. To bring about change you can listen to the inspirational quotes about how one person can make a difference, or how it is the efforts of only a few that change the world, yadda yadda yadda. Well, the problem is that those quotes don't mention scale. Because while the 'Environmental' building field is still considered small, I know that there are over 20,000 LEED certified buildings in the USA alone. Which means there are probably and equal number of projects that just couldn't afford to go through with the LEED certification process. And there are surely a few thousand buildings already living and communing off-grid. Then to think, when we had our last design team charette here at Willow, we hosted almost 40 people to work through design, production, philosophical, curriculum and...