Bare Necessities

What do we value about our natural resources?  A survey of residents in a Mississippi gulf coast county in 2003 indicated strong incentives to maintain good water quality in rivers, bayous, and the waterways leading to the Gulf of Mexico.  Last summer, the importance of this natural resource was reinforced following the devastating oil spill.

The Hancock County Greenways project undertook a survey of community conservation values in April 2003, with eight goals.  These are listed in order, as respondents ranked them from highest to lowest importance:

1 protect water quality streams/wetlands

2 protect wildlife corridors and native habitats provide recreation areas

3 preserve scenic views

4 keep land in undeveloped natural state

5 protect floodplain areas

6 preserve agricultural or forestry land

7 preserve archaeological and cultural resources

We also recorded the reported use of recreational facilities in the county, with the beach walking/biking path identified as the most popular, a neighborhood bike path as the second most highly used, and playgrounds, hiking trails, and waterways in quick succession.  Many people responded with recommendations for additional recreational uses, including more biking paths, tennis courts, and a community swimming pool.

One of the most popular requests was for restrooms along the beach.  The county provides portable toilets at the beach parking areas.  Restrooms with showers would provide a place for families with children to come from a neighboring community and spend the whole day, first on the beach, then walking through the shops downtown, and staying for dinner.  Without a shower and a change of clothes, we found that people cut their visits short, and thus reduced the economic benefit to the county. 

The lack of permanent facilities also impacts water quality.  Many people shy away from portable restrooms, preferring to use the water for most (non-solid) necessities.  The lack of a facility to wash hands after toilet use may also have impact on water quality.  There were concerns about permanent restrooms too, that they would become havens for undesirable drug dealers, homeless, and others; and encourage camping on the beach.  These are public safety issues with merit, but the solutions lie in enforcement of existing laws.

After the unnatural disaster of 2010, we need to reconsider the importance of what enters our waterways.  Any opportunity to improve the quality of water, from reducing pesticide and fertilizer use upstream to ensuring dog owners clean up after their pets, may help keep the beaches open and recommended for human use.  After the terrible impact on our coastline, we must do all that is within our power to maintain the natural systems, so that when the unexpected occurs, there remains some capacity in the system to counter new threats.

Choreographing Water in the Built Environment

Water, simple and necessary, threatens vulnerable citizens throughout the world.  The need for safe drinking water is severe.  There are two obstacles to providing clean water: the “inadequacy” of local supplies, and the presence of contaminants.  How can better design find solutions to this growing problem?

There are often seasonal differentials in water supplies, when excess precedes drought.  The ability to find and store water was essential to human development, with the discovery of how to find and protect water sources, and how to keep water in every size of vessel from a clay pot to a reservoir.  Human life requires a minimum of 1 liter of drinking water per person, per day.  We use much more: the average citizen in the U.S. uses 575 liters/day, a citizen of India uses 135 liters.

Public water distribution systems allow many the luxury of forgetting the drudgery of collecting, transporting, and storing water.  In places without reliable infrastructure, collecting water requires significant time and energy that could be spent by children studying at school, or by women at work. 

Extending infrastructure to serve all people comes at a high cost.  In urban areas with high densities, this cost is borne by the great number of people.  Rome constructed nine aqueducts by the year 52 to provide water for a population of nearly one million.  Roman engineering not only provided the distribution system but built storage to guard against evaporation, interruption, and defilement.  The basilica cistern in Istanbul is a wonder of architecture with carved capitals and vaulted ceilings, constructed to house only water.

Massive engineering projects of the last 100 years include hydroelectric dams and channelized water, resulting in long-term environmental degradation.  These community-scale “solutions” harmed natural cycles, but direct new efforts to site-scale, self-sufficient alternatives that capitalize on existing technologies and products.

Streets and buildings may become the new aquifers to collect and store water.  In urban areas, green spaces may be “manufactured” by reclaiming and transforming brownfields and impervious edges along streets.  Green boulevards enhance the aesthetic quality, and also collect, filter and store stormwater in swales, restoring water to the aquifer through groundwater recharge and to the atmosphere through vegetation.  Options to impervious surfaces for roads and parking are growing with pervious concrete, interlocking pavers, grasspave or gravelpave systems.  In addition, green boulevards cool the microclimate and reduce the heat island effect.

Construction of waterworks is incomplete without purification.  A number of techniques are available to remove contaminants using physical processes (filtration), biological processes (microbes), chemical processes (chlorination), and electromagnetic radiation (exposure to UV light).   These techniques are resource-intensive and require community-scale facilities to remove solids, salts, organic pathogens, and toxic ions.

One promising technique is solar disinfection using plastic bottles exposed to direct sunlight.  UV wavelengths react with oxygen dissolved in the water to produce hydrogen peroxide that damages pathogens and destroys cellular structures of bacteria.  The use of titanium dioxide film over glass cylinders in conjunction with solar disinfection took only 15 minutes on a sunny day to render coliform bacteria undetectable in trials, and the water remained free of bacteria for seven days. 

When UV radiation is not available due to rainy weather, rainwater harvesting may be employed.  Most buildings have some form of rainwater collection: gutters, roof drains, scuppers, and downspouts.  These building elements are an asset for collecting rainwater; all that remains is the storage component.  Project-scale collection systems collect, channel, treat, and store rainwater on site until needed by the building users.  South-facing metal roofs overlaid with TiO₂ glass tubing can collect, purify, and store rainwater for potable water.  This system has the added benefit of providing hot water, lowering energy use.

And finally, not all water has to be treated to drinking water standards.  Rainwater and greywater captured from showers and sinks may be used for flushing and irrigation.  Buildings may repurpose “used” water for non-potable functions; this slightly used resource offers a measurable contribution to the global water cycle, the endless connection between vapour and beverage, droplet and sea.

Sustainable Cities

Humans build cities as an expression of our hunger for others.  Cities provide human security through a comprehensive mix of uses and opportunities for work and education, and in the diversity of people and built forms.  The sustainable city produces and markets food within its boundaries, allows options for living and working that don’t require fossil fuel use, collects energy and water, offers a glimpse of the past and the future, and connects to other places.  The identity of a city is read from the air and the street, in the facades of buildings and the faces of the people.  The abandoned canyons of most American downtowns after dark do not offer a model precedent, but a canvas for new ideas.

unabridged Architecture creates projects that contribute to city sustainability and resilience, including: streetscapes with durable green infrastructure, infill commercial projects that add mixed use and density to downtowns, restoration of special buildings, and civic and institutional structures that support economic development in downtown areas.

WORK, LIFE + FORM

The spaces of life and work are increasingly defined by land use prescriptions and prohibitions.  Since the 1950’s these have created difficult transitions between the zones of work and life that require transportation to bridge.  We can turn compactness into an architectural and ecological advantage by promoting greater density in areas already served by infrastructure, and preserving greenfields.

The most sustainable building is the one that already exists.  It may require renovation to supply new functions, innovative technologies to serve the occupants more efficiently, but the shell of the structure has environmental as well as sentimental value.  An authentic commitment to historic preservation does not allow building in a false historic style; true architecture speaks of its own time and place, its forms consistent with the specifics of material and site rather than a jumble of favored ornaments.  Building in an old-fashioned way – with local knowledge, local materials, and in response to the particulars of site and climate – is the new paradigm for sustainability.

unabridged Architecture believes that every new structure should add to the capacity of the city in regenerative ways: to enable citizens to operate self-sufficiently, reduce external impacts, provide for occupant needs with abundance, and to assist recharge of larger systems (such as water and power).  We can convert our assets into urban living spaces, and reap the benefits of greater community, less maintenance, and better health.

MOVEMENT + UTILITY

Cities coalesce into polycentric forms, with work and home separated by miles and opportunities for learning, shopping, and play distant from either hub.  Access to many modes of transportation is critical to overcome the barrier of distance without adding to the burden of pollution.  Mixed land use reduces the need for transportation by allowing people to meet their daily needs within a ten-minute walk to restaurants, shops, laundry, sports, work, school, and library.  Alternative transport (bus, subway, bicycle) may connect us to wider offerings within the non-linear city, to events and destinations that are special and shared.

More critical than access to transportation is access to water, sewer, solid waste removal, and electricity.  These finite resources must be managed carefully to avoid inequity; the current strategy is to maintain a central source and distribute from a single point.  A total of 63% of electrical power generated at the average plant is used in the transmission.  With advances in clean technology, it will become much more efficient to generate a household’s own power needs on site through silent and dependable renewable sources; collect adequate rainwater to irrigate the garden, feed the animals, and flush the toilets; compost table waste and collect recyclables – in other words, to decentralize the provision of the public good and develop self-sufficiency instead of underground piping.

LANDSCAPE

If people do not preserve nature in cities, the original inhabitants will be excised and we will change the places we live.  Restoring urban forests and street trees reduces the heat island effect of cities by producing more shade, lowering energy use, filtering stormwater, and transforming the very air we breathe. 

The monoculture of lawn grass has dealt the most destructive blow to biodiversity.  An unhappy feature of global suburbanization, the narrow mix of species allowed in the public domain requires significant maintenance, increased chemical use, and provides extremely limited benefit for wildlife.  Replacing lawns with food production plots becomes more desirable as fuel prices rise and food costs skyrocket.  Even in small numbers, keeping chickens in the backyard provide an immediate source for eggs, manure for the garden, and a disposal for food waste from the table – the perfect cycle.  There are growing methods to accommodate urban farming, even in vertical towers; many of these utilize the roof for allotments, or create green screens for climbing vegetables.

Areas of open space have the greatest benefit to the city when surrounded with dense human inhabitation.  The ideal park can serve great numbers of people with unprogrammed green area useful for active recreation, festivals, visual and performing arts, and passive pursuits, in addition to the environmental benefits.  If the park is large enough and connected to other open spaces to create corridors, it can help to restore wild nature to the city and contribute to the sustainability of all species, including our own.  

unabridged Architecture believes that developing sustainable cities requires collaboration in order to transform the public domain into green infrastructure, improve community resiliency, and conserve resources for the future.  Our mission is to recover urban forms, rewrite density, and facilitate localism.  Please contact us if we can help your community with proven expertise in sustainability planning, historic preservation, or developing new building programs and prototypes.

Curtain Wall

The term “curtain wall” evokes a plane of insufficient material to form a solid, a wall made from glass.  Mullions began shrinking to imperceptible dimensions since Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion of 1929, culminating in the current infatuation for butt glazing, the joint between glass panes limited to a bead of silicone.  Curtain walls are irrevocably associated with the skyscraper, the city, and the panoramic views through the expanse of glass.

There is an archaic definition, an almost directly opposite meaning.  In the Middle Ages, a curtain wall was the “the plain wall of a fortified place; the part of the wall which connects two bastions, towers, gates, or similar structures” (first referenced in 1569, according to the Oxford English Dictionary).  Associated with curtain fire, or the rapid shelling to prevent enemy advance, the curtain wall was the outermost cover, the first layer of a castle’s defense.

The towne was well manned… and the curten of suche height and thicknes that the besieged with great ease became victors. 

(Thomas Stocker, Diodorus Siculus, 1569)

Architects man defenses with technology in place or armies.  The component material of glass is silica; sand, but not the sand of most coastal beaches.  Glass is fine quartz sand with other elements (about 30% by weight) including sodium carbonate, lime, and aluminum oxide.  It seems impossible that heating a handful of rock grains transform it into liquid, clear and cold.  Holding a fragment of glass does inspire care for the fragile and intemperate matter, as if it may continue to melt (which it does – a promise evidenced over the long life span of many a Victorian glass lite.)  The more likely demise will be to shatter into dangerous and splintered shards.  Glass was first devised in Mesopotamia over 5,000 years ago for pottery glazes, tools and jewelry.  Egyptians created glass drinking vessels, leading to the Romans’ experimentation with cast glass to fill wall openings.

Modern construction uses glass less discriminately.  Reliant on materials such as polycarbonate, frames can approach impossible thinness with windows of great spans.  Although it still allows views, glass may now do much more: generate electricity through thin-film solar collectors, reduce heat gain and ultraviolet rays, create patterns through shape or sandblasting, and eliminate views into private spaces.  Glass with plastic interlayers can bounce back after impact with a 2x4, even launched at 100 miles per hour.

Although the UAE has just announced limitations on the use of unshaded glass for new structures in Dubai, glass is one of the most sustainable products available.  Fabricated widely and requiring very little of scarce mineral resources, glass is endlessly recyclable without loss of quality.  But glass must be treated with respect.  Glazed openings must provide views and daylighting, promote thermal comfort and enhanced ventilation, and provide protection from exterior threats.  Double-wall facades may guide innovative design for all-glass cladding – harkening back to the original, protective definition of a curtain wall - the enemy now transformed into high energy use and emissions.

Working from... Anywhere

The United States Congress has approved the Telework Improvements Act of 2010 (H.R. 1722) to allow federal government employees to work from home or another remote location, on work that does not require security clearance or other special circumstances.  This is primarily to enhance emergency readiness capacity and to promote “Continuity of Operations”, a continuity which is threatened from challenges such as severe weather, threats, strikes, and outages.

The second critical reason to introduce this program is to conserve resources.  Four-day work weeks have been used widely during these budget-conscious days to reduce operations costs.  Lower demands for heating and cooling, and reduced need for transportation to central offices  has an immediate positive and quantifiable effect on the government budget.

The idea of telework may seem to reduce productivity, but if employees can work in their own comfortable space (not necessarily in their pajamas) and away from the inevitable distractions of office mates, the increased concentration may lead to increased performance.    Increased control over one’s work environment, whether it be the hours devoted to a task, lighting and temperature, view or furnishings or posture – all of this contributes to personal satisfaction with the job.  This leads to greater retention of employees, a tremendous cost benefit to the government.

Telework also seems likely to reduce camaraderie of the work community and foster individual acts of rebellion, but this may also be false.  Daily exposure to the foibles of co-workers may result in annoyance or even violence.  Occasional work days away from the “duty station” may restore pleasant temperaments.

Working in public may increase community connections and improve awareness of government initiatives.  Sipping coffee at the local marketplace while telecommuting to a central GIS site may inspire curious and brilliant onlookers to explore government employment opportunities.   On certain projects community input may be desirable, and easier access to the public by employees drafting new policies may provide more accurate and timely feedback.  

The ability of people to work from different locations extends the resiliency of the government through emergency readiness, cost savings, and a public presence in the community.  Private corporations have seen the benefits, and extended the ability of their employees to do the same.  The coffeehouse better add a few chairs.