Buildings

The next step in sustainable building: the Passive House

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The world must reduce its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions significantly, in the range of eighty to ninety percent over the next few decades. Every use of energy is now under review, and we are finding that the greatest generators of CO2 are not automobiles and airplanes but buildings. As a result, developers, architects, and planners are looking for ways to build structures that use significantly less energy than even the top-rated “green” buildings of today.

Lessons from a surprise bike town

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It came as a surprise to many when Bicycling magazine last year named Minneapolis, Minnesota as America’s “#1 Bike City,” (unseating Portland, Oregon, which had claimed the honor for many years). Shock that the heartland could outperform cities on the coasts was matched by widespread disbelief that biking was even possible in a state famous for its ferocious winters.

Architectural myopia: designing for industry, not people

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Have you ever looked at a bizarre building design and wondered, “what were the architects thinking?” Have you looked at a supposedly “ecological” industrial-looking building, and questioned how it could be truly ecological? Or have you simply felt frustrated by a building that made you uncomfortable, or felt anger when a beautiful old building was razed and replaced with a contemporary eyesore? You might be forgiven for thinking “these architects must be blind!” New research shows that in a real sense, you might actually be right.

Transition & solutions – Sept 27

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– Urban planting: Turning blight into bounty in the inner city (EB’s Olga Bonfiglio in “US Catholic” magazine)
– Chris Martenson interviews Rob Hopkins: “Making The Red Pill Taste Good”
– Hard-core environmentalist who practices the permaculture he preaches
– Portland as a “Resilient Community”
– Green Hands, green heart (EB contributor Clifford Dean Scholz)

How questioning economic growth left me feeling like a “Pilgrim from the 25th Century”

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Economic growth is a glittering prize that it takes a big step to stand apart from. To be the first person in any given situation to question it as an assumption is to risk being seen in the same way the Magic Band were at Heathrow Airport in 1968. While the reflections and discussion in the limited question time at the end of the evening showed that many people in the audience shared these concerns, sat on the panel I felt increasingly like Beefheart’s “pilgrim from the 25th century”. Yet it is vital that we continue not to just question this shared assumption, but that we propose imaginative yet entirely workable alternatives, ones that actually tick more of the desired boxes than what is currently being proposed does.

This is the house Transition built

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What is the house? Is it a dream we hold, a fairy palace, a shelter from the storm, perched on a hill, overlooking the sea, somewhere down a farm track or a long drive edged with lime trees? Or is it a nightmare, the haunted house, the house of childhood secrets we fear to reenter, the slum and the council estate we long to escape from, the little boxes on the hillside we are loathe to see?

From crushing distance to opening space – a meditation on speed and local consciousness

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We do not really cease being drivers when we step from our vehicles. Like television, automobile travel strengthens some of the more pernicious habits of the egoic mind. Bottom line: motor travel is addictive, and the effects of the addiction are likely to persist even if we can no longer afford to drive.

Citywatch: Taking the nature cure

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Once regional planners come alive to the planning considerations of cities designed for mental health, human scale and biophilic connections, they need to locate spaces and activities that can make pay the freight of high-spaced city land. This, in my opinion, is where urban agriculture wins its day in the sun. What Swiss army knives and scarves are to multi-tasking in the wilds, urban agriculture is to multi-tasking in the cities, which is how it pays down the high cost of urban land to support it.

Bill Gates wants to solve the poop problem

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Why don’t all of us country people (and I’m thinking especially of the imaginative and innovative readers of this blog) amuse ourselves by designing, and perhaps even building, the MOST COMFORTABLE OUTHOUSE IN THE WORLD. I am talking about an outhouse that even the Queen of England would die to have in her backyard. Can you imagine how we could change our cultural attitude toward shit with a photo of the Queen seated on her plush satin-covered outhouse throne, with a shining little cut glass chandelier overhead, surrounded by richly brocaded interior walls and exterior walls of beautiful soapstone?