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Article: Green Architecture is HOUSES!

This past week, the New York Times ran an interesting article about building green, not just in urban environments, but in suburbia too. The article deals with renovations as well as new construction and outlines some of the trials and tribulations home owners, architects, and builders can face when trying to build “green.”

In light of tuesday being earth day I wanted to take a moment and discuss Green Residential Building (I wouldn’t go so far as to say architecture). Lately we’ve been plagued with ads telling us that all we need to do to save the planet is:

change a lightbulb
drive less
use different soap
insulate our windows
switch to low flow faucets
use cloth bags instead of paper or plastic
etc

But in reality these are just stop gap measures. Yes, they help. Yes, they are better than not doing anything. But without creating a real paradigm shift, that is to say the way we eat, work and live, we will always be playing catchup. Not only do we need to eat foods grown locally, but we also need to eat seasonally and organically. We need to work closer to home and in buildings that do not constantly fight against nature to create ergonomically correct comfort level. Our houses need to not just take less, but also give back.

All of this is applicable the practice of architecture as well. Not only do we need low VOC carpets, but we need to design a space to reduce long term cleaning and wear on said carpets. It is not enough to choose low-E high transmissivity glass with a high diffusion and spread factors but we need to start actively using passive solar design and incorporating operable windows into buildings. White roofs to prevent urban heat islands are great, but green roofs which grow community gardens and have micro wind turbines to supplement building energy use are better. Even better still is to build sheltered into the ground such that there is no roof – only landscape. All of these possibilities are there, and they being debated and practiced on some of the more avant-garde Record Houses and buildings; but until the day that suburban tract houses are situated on their site to take best advantage of solar, wind, geothermal and other natural forces we will constantly be battling against the limits of technology.

The modernists, metabolists, futurists, hi-tech post modernists, et al had it wrong. The essence of the future is not to be found in crystals and made into glittering towers of glass and steel, but rather in the nooks and crannies of the world – the mythic caves of our ancestors – recreated as built landscape just as full of architecture interest and challenge as the glass spire, if not more.

Article: New York as the City of Lights

If you can’t be London, why not be Paris? At least that’s what NYC seems to think according to an article in New York Magazine. The article discusses that with the failure of the congestion surcharge, New York City officials are looking towards the changes that Paris has made since the turn of the century (from 20th to 21st) to be a more resident/pedestrian friendly place; specifically Paris-Plage, bike sharing and the new bus lanes and routes. It appears that NY may be looking at making some streets pedestrian only during the summer, and adding more bike routes.

Having lived in Paris for a summer, I believe that parts of New York City that the are the most talked about – lower manhattan and midtown – are already as Paris-like as they can get; It is the outer boroughs that need to be brought up to speed. The reason for this is mass transit. The Métro is extensive within Paris much as it is in Manhattan (though the Métro does seem to run more trains it closes at 2am). This allows rapid movement within the city for pedestrians, sometimes it can be faster than driving. In addition, nothing short of a massive double parking towing campaign paired with making all avenues and certain cross town streets (like each decade 30th, 40th, 50th, etc) no parking will clear the congestion from midtown. Also, Paris is much smaller than most people realize. The entirety of Paris is the same square footage as Manhattan. Once you add in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, NYC is easily 6 times as large by land area. This difference in scale can be held responsible for a great deal of the traffic. People who live in the boroughs still commute to Manhattan; many by car. This daily vehicular movement by residents is just not present in Paris. Yes there are commuters from the Banlieu’s, but with the expense cost of driving over there the numbers are just not comparable.

I personally feel that NY would do better to look to Tokyo and other cities plagued by high density urban sprawl such as LA and Mexico City, not just for ideas on what to perfect, but also to identify what to avoid.

Article: A house straight out of Beetle Juice

The New York Times home and garden section ran an article about a home in East Hampton, LI designed by Architects Arakawa and Madeline Gin. From the picture, description and accompanying multimedia slideshow this house seems to have jumped out of the pages of a surreal comic book or the celluloid of the Michael Keaton, Geena Davis, Winnona Ryder, and Alec Baldwin film, Beetle Juice. There is a moonscape of shifting non-planar concrete and a din of color and forms that fill the main living area, and the facade of the structure is an assemblage of multicolor planes. The general design concept behind the house is to stave off death by refusing to allow the inhabitants to feel calm and at ease: it is the Architect’s belief that ease is the precursor to death. Whether or not this is architectural post rationalization not withstanding, this house definitely refuses to allow the senses to rest. This project seems to be the culmination of a career’s worth of work for this pair in exploring and perverting the de stijl and pop-art movements as a rococo creation for for the 21st century.

The reason I wanted to blog about this building is its location. Growing up on Long Island, the Hamptons have always been a semi-mythic Xanadu where the rich and famous explore a simulacra of suburbia (much in the same way Marie Antoinette played “villager” in her hamlet at Versaille). The contrast that makes the Hamptons (and much of the peconic townships) something more than a vacation retreat of sprawling McMansions is that here, in this pocket of Über-wealth, is one of the few places on the Island that avant garde architecture is encouraged and nurtured. It was on the cutting edge of wood design and construction at the end of the 1970’s and beginning of the 1980’s and I would love to see a re-emergence of the East End as a new Architectural hotspot to rival Marfa, Texas.