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Why Are They Greener Than We Are?
Nicolai Ouroussoff, NY Times
The headquarters of the federal environment agency in Dessau, Germany, occupies a low-slung building on the edge of an abandoned gasworks. Dessau, a center for munitions production during the war, was virtually obliterated by Allied bombs. Over the next 50 years, East German factories saturated the soil with chemical and industrial waste. Yet both the agency building and its location might be said to embody a new, ecologically sensitive Europe.
Designed by a young Berlin-based firm, Sauerbruch Hutton, the building is touted as one of the most efficient in the world, but it doesn’t wear its sustainability on its sleeve. Four stories high, it wraps around a vast interior courtyard that is cooled and heated by a system of underground pipes. …
After more than a decade of tightening guidelines, Europe has made green architecture an everyday reality. In Germany and the Netherlands especially, a new generation of architects has expanded the definition of sustainable design beyond solar panels and sod roofs. As Matthias Sauerbruch put it to me: “The eco-friendly projects you saw in the 1970s, with solar panels and recycled materials: they were so self-conscious. We call this Birkenstock architecture. Now we don’t need to do this anymore. The basic technology is all pretty accepted.”
In the United States, architects cannot make the same claim with equal confidence. Despite the media attention showered on “green” issues, the federal government has yet to establish universal efficiency standards for buildings. Yet, according to some estimates, buildings consume nearly as much energy as industry and transportation combined. And the average building in the U.S. uses roughly a third more energy than its German counterpart.
(20 May 2007)
Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU)
James Howard Kunstler, Cluserf*ck Nation
New Urbanists from all over the land — and as far away as Australia — converged in Philadelphia this past weekend to sort out their gains and losses for the year against the background of a nation punch drunk on “liquidity” and free-floating dread. …
The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) was formed in 1993 by a cadre of revolutionary architects who had decided that enough was enough with a nation bent on committing suicide by strip mall. From the start, their mission was bold, coherent, and heroic: to present a clear alternative to the mindless devouring juggernaut of suburbia.
Also from the start, they were accused of being “elitists,” “un-American,” “enemies-of-art-and-free-expression,” “snooty enablers of white yuppie separatists,” “footlings of the Neo-cons,” and “sentimental saps” — all for suggesting that perhaps human beings might benefit from living in places worth caring about.
The New Urbanists became known mostly for the real estate ventures that were produced in their name — first the iconic “new town” Seaside, Florida, and then scores of other projects based on what they called the Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND). Some of these projects were badly compromised by the zoning boards who ruled on their details. Some were wannabes and co-opted rip-offs. Some, like Vincent Graham’s I’On project in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, achieved high levels of artistry despite the obstacles thrown up by the mental defectives who opposed them.
The New Urbanists were equally active in the existing cities, leading in the adaptive re-use of industrial ruins, brownfields, and whole districts that had been written off as hopeless beyond the pale. Figures like Mark Nikita and Dorian Moore, who worked in the rough context of downtown Detroit, and Ray Gindroz of Pittsburgh who pioneered the conversion of reviled and decrepit public housing all over the country into places where a human spirit might rediscover itself.
The greatest achievement of the New Urbanists in these years was not the long list of TNDs or the urban interventions that saved whole districts, but in the retrieval of knowledge and principle that had been thrown away by a hapless and craven officialdom of planning — abetted by the mandarin ideologues who ruled the university architecture schools, and who were dedicated above all to defending the antisocial prerogatives of their jive-narcissism. Despite all that, the New Urbanists worked doggedly to reconstruct a body of culture (i.e. urban design). They processed it in a series of brilliantly clear manuals like the Transect and the Smart Code, and gave everyone from the carpenters to the bankers a lexicon for understanding the difference between plain crap and stuff with a plausible future.
The New Urbanists came on the scene just as the final exuberant phase of the cheap oil fiesta was getting underway — meaning the climactic phase of American suburban expansion. They positioned themselves as a minority opposition to the “conventional” developers who utterly dominated the landscape. The things that were built under the New Urbanist name represented probably less than two percent of everything built since 1990. The work they did occurred as a valiant swimming against the tide — or, more specifically, against a huge blast of reeking, toxic entropy.
(21 May 2007)
Green groups hit out at UK planning reforms
Hilary Osborne, Guardian
Far from tackling climate change, today’s planning white paper will increase CO2 emissions and fast-track controversial and damaging developments, environmentalists said today.
Introducing the white paper, Ruth Kelly, the communities secretary, said that new planning laws would address the “challenges of low-carbon living”.
Ms Kelly said that planning policy would put tackling climate change at the heart of building new communities, and that red tape would be cut for homeowners and businesses that wished to install renewable energy technology.
But environmentalists were more concerned about new plans to speed up the planning process for large-scale developments, which could include new airport runways, road-widening schemes and nuclear power stations.
Friends of the Earth’s planning coordinator, Hugh Ellis, said that a new system to decide major infrastructure projects on a national level would “limit local involvement in decision making”.
“You won’t be able to object to a new a nuclear power plant in your community, but you may be consulted on what colour gate it has,” he said.
“Government claims that today’s white paper will cut red tape and help them to tackle climate change are a misleading smokescreen. The UK has one of the most deregulated planning systems in western Europe.”
(21 May 2007)
Related from The Guardian: Kelly launches contentious planning shake-up.
