the Original Green Blog

Neighborhood Schools

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:19:47 -0400

Schools should be located in neighborhoods for many reasons, and their positioning is important to the walkability of the entire neighborhood. This is a far cry from the way schools are usually built today. Now, they’re located out on the highway somewhere, and walking to school is impossible because even if the school wasn’t several miles from home, no sane parent would let their kids walk beside the heavy speeding traffic of a typical highway. As a result, our schools have taken on the character of something more like a warehouse, instead of the civic buildings they used to be.
Let’s look at the difference between the way we used to build schools, the normal way we build schools today, and a better way of building schools today. All three schools shown here are elementary schools, and are located in the state of Alabama so that it’s close to an “apples and apples” comparison. Satellite views of the schools are shown at the same scales for equal comparisons. I’ve darkened the land outside the property lines of the school to make the school property obvious.
Here’s the Pine Level Elementary School in Deatsville, Alabama. Hard to tell it’s not a supermarket, isn’t it, with that big parking lot out front. And of course, the parking lot is completely necessary because everyone must drive to get there. Here’s how Pine Level Elementary sits on the land:
It’s a behemoth, sitting on about 22 acres that stretch roughly a quarter-mile down the highway. To put that in perspective, a quarter-mile is the distance that an average American adult will walk. Beyond that, they usually decide to drive instead. So this site is so big that if someone had to go from one end to the other, they just might decide to drive! Forget walking to school, because as you can see, there’s only one house that can even be seen in this view.
One other thing... see those two things that look like racetracks, one to the left of the school and the other below? Those are “stack lanes.” That’s where the cars stack up before school lets out, as the parents wait for their kids. The one to the left consumes over 2 acres, while the one below eats up about 1-1/2 acres of land. These are completely necessary when everyone has to drive to get there, but the land they consume is substantially bigger than the entire campus of a 56-classroom high school design we’ll look at towards the end of this post. Matter of fact, the 56-classroom school is scarcely larger than just the stack lanes to the left of the Pine Level school!
The second school is in the Village of Providence, a traditional neighborhood designed by DPZ. I’ve been involved as a consultant from the very beginning, and serve as Town Architect there.
One of the biggest hurdles we faced at Providence was the school design. As in most states, the state school board has certain minimum land sizes approved for schools. In Alabama, it’s 11 acres for an elementary school, 17 acres for a middle school, and 35 acres for a high school... almost twice as big as the Pine Level school.
In comparison, the entire world-famous town of Pienza, Italy, located in Tuscany, takes up just under 11 acres, and houses over 2,000 people. Think about that a minute... if Pienza wanted to build an elementary school using Alabama standards, they would have to bulldoze the entire town, and it still wouldn’t be quite enough land!
But back to Providence: the local school board was set on doing things the “normal way,” which was no surprise, but that would have resulted in a school similar to Pine Level. Consuming that much land would have eaten up most of the Providence neighborhood adjacent to the school. One of the big sticking points was the stack lanes. I pointed out that the oldest schools in Huntsville had no stack lanes because parents waited on the streets surrounding the school as described in detail below.
There were major objections to the idea of kids walking to school because “that’s not safe today.” But guess what happens at Providence? You guessed it... parents are pretty smart when it comes to the safety of their kids, so the neighborhood parents simply walk to the school when classes are over and walk their kids home. It’s actually quite a social event, with parents visiting all the way over and back. And back when I was a kid and groups of kids walked to school and back without parents, we could get into all sorts of mischief that wouldn’t happen in Providence with parents coming along.
The school board also objected to our call to build a two-story school. I pointed those same schools they had been running the longest, most of which were two stories. They said “people don’t like to climb stairs,” but their own administrative offices were located in the original Huntsville High School, itself a two-story building of which most of the administrators were clearly fond. Eventually, we worked past these hurdles. Here’s how the Providence school sits on its site:
You can see the neighborhood below it that was preserved by using a smaller site. Roughly 80 homes would have been lost using a Pine Level-size site. The Providence school has almost as many students (781) as Pine Level (931,) but look at the difference between the land consumed by each. But this is still too much land. Below is one of those early Huntsville schools (East Clinton.) It has fewer students (204,) but as you can see, it makes the most efficient use of the site of any of the three. The racetrack you see here is for kids, not cars, and there’s only one tiny parking lot at the back, for the teachers.
What have we learned? Here’s an illustration of the ideal way of building a neighborhood school:
This illustration shows the largest two-story high school that can easily be put on a single 320’ square block. A high school is illustrated because it is the worst-case scenario on two counts: some of its students drive, and high school athletic field requirements are larger than those of middle schools or elementary schools. The school should be slid to one edge of the neighborhood for two reasons: First, playing fields can occur within adjacent parklands, making it easier for the neighborhood to use the playing fields after school hours. Also, the school and its playing fields creates a “pedestrian shadow” because if you’re walking somewhere on the other side of the school, you have to walk around the school and its playing fields to get there. Moving the school to the edge of the neighborhood solves both these issues.
Two huge auto-related problems of schools are parking spaces and stack space described above for parents picking up and dropping off their children. When schools are embedded in neighborhoods, students within walking distance can walk. The illustration above assumes an average density of 5 units per acre in the surrounding neighborhood, and assumes that 8% of those households have children of high school age. Of those, half of the students are assumed to be legal drivers. Given these assumptions, and the assumption that the walking distance for students walking to school is the ten-minute walk (American kids will walk about twice as far as their often more sedentary parents,) there are a total of 250 acres within the ten-minute half-radius (the other half is park and playing fields, since the school is assumed to be on the edge of the neighborhood as noted above.) If 2.9% of the population are high school students of driving age and there are 1.8 children in each household that has children, then there could be between 100 and 120 driving-age high school students within walking distance of the school.
If 80% of them walk (once they rediscover that walking to school is a tremendously social thing to do when it’s possible) on any given day, then the student parking lot can be reduced by 80 to 100 spaces. The school parking requirement is therefore reduced to the teachers, staff and a few students. In the illustration above, 107 spaces are provided in diagonal on-street parking around the perimeter of the school, so there’s no need for a parking lot at all. This takes care of the 56 teachers, an assumed 14 administrators and staff, and 37 students and visitors.
Stack space for pick-up has an exceptionally simple solution noted above for schools embedded into the fabric of the neighborhood: Cars are allowed to stack on neighborhood streets. Embedded schools actually need no drop-off lane at all in many cases where parents can drop off children on the school lawn and let them walk to the door. Because parents are sitting in the cars waiting to pick up children, anyone blocking a resident’s driveway can easily move because they are already sitting behind the wheel. And because most high schools end at 3 PM, most residents are still at work and should not need to use their driveways at this time of day.
This building is two stories and surrounds a central courtyard with double-loaded classroom wings. A two-story gymnasium and a single-story lunchroom are located to the rear of the building, which also includes the loading dock. The library is located over a portion of the lunchroom. There are a total of 56 classrooms plus administrative offices.
The many health and other sustainability benefits of walking are thoroughly documented. It’s high time to begin building all parts of our communities in a more walkable way, including our schools. Fortunately, there are a growing number of resources available to help us build neighborhood schools again, rather than highway schools. My colleague Nathan Norris founded the SmartGrowth Schools initiative, which I blogged about here.
Other resources you might want to check out include Pennsylvania’s study on reusing old schools, which are far more likely to be walkable, the New Urban News article on neighborhood schools, and Raleigh, North Carolina’s design guidelines for walkable neighborhood schools. The list is growing... a quick Google search turns up many other such results. Let’s use them, and build neighborhood schools again.

~Steve Mouzon

1 Bryant Park and the LEED Problem

Fri, 2 Jul 2010 11:19:45 -0400

1 Bryant Park in New York, which opened recently to great fanfare as the first LEED Platinum skyscraper, highlights one of the biggest problems with LEED: Because it's a system of additive credits, you can accumulate credits in a number of ways while doing some really silly and unsustainable things, like building with a glass curtain wall. Let’s look at the glass wall problem first, then look at the LEED problem.
The Glass Problem
Here’s an image of 1 Bryant Park. The rest of the images are of other buildings in other cities, but it doesn’t really matter because it’s a problem everywhere that there’s a summer or a winter.
Why is this a problem? There are several reasons:
1. The smartest glazing I’m aware of is from a company called Serious Materials. They really live up to their name; everything they sell is very high-performance. Yet their best glass isn’t quite as good an insulator as a plain old 2x4 wood frame wall with fiberglass batt insulation. So the best glass you can buy leaks more energy than the cheapest tract house wall it’s legal to build in most places. And most glass isn’t nearly as good as Serious. Typical “high-performance” glass curtain walls leak three times as much energy.
2. Ask anyone on the street whether they like more light or less light in their workplace, and most of them say they like more light. Yet a solid wall of glass over-lights a room so badly on a sunny day that curtain walls are typically tinted or mirrored to exclude more than half of the light (often up to 2/3,) otherwise it would be so bright you couldn’t work. So clearly, you don’t need the entire wall to be made of windows in order to daylight the space. Windows with clear glass occupying 1/3 of the wall would provide the same amount of light as a wall of glass that lets in 1/3 of the light that shines on it. Old buildings did this naturally, it should be noted.
3. A typical office tower in most regions requires air conditioning year-round because of the amount of heat generated by lights, computers, equipment, people, etc. This means that these buildings never need any solar heat gain... yet half of the walls of a square tower face either east or west, and anyone who knows anything about passive heating and cooling knows that one of the very first things you want to do is to reduce east- or west-facing glass because that’s where the sun is low in the sky, shining directly in the windows.
4. Glass curtain wall buildings carry health consequences for their occupants that have been well documented over the years. There are a number of reasons for this that are beyond the scope of this blog post, but you may have heard of one of the big ones, which is Sick Building Syndrome (SBS.)
I did this rant on glass walls while at the AIA convention recently. More recently, Alex Wilson did an excellent and well-documented post on the problems of glass wall buildings on Building Green. You need a membership to get to the article, but his stuff is so good that it’s well worth the annual subscription. The bottom line is that fewer things you can do to a building are less green than coating it in glass... which brings us to the other item:
The LEED Problem
Before getting into the details, let me say that I’m a big supporter of the mission of the US Green Building Council, which is to provide incentives for building in a more sustainable fashion. As a matter of fact, I serve on a USGBC Technical Advisory Group that advises on issues having to do with building location and context. Our work primarily affects LEED-ND, the neighborhood rating system. So I’m not a typical LEED-basher... but the system isn’t perfect, either.
The glass wall problem shows one fault of an additive points-based system: you don’t have to consider far smarter systems that are fundamentally better, such as walls that are solid, punctuated with only enough windows to provide the light, ventilation, and view that we need. Instead, you can do something much less intelligent like a glass wall and score points for doing so more efficiently. In other words, it’s a system that encourages us to continue our enormously wasteful modern construction systems, so long as we build them a bit more efficiently.
Here’s another illustration of the weakness of an additive point-based system: adding a bike rack and a changing room scores as many points as re-using 75% of an existing building. Is biking to work good? Absolutely. But there’s no question which is easier for a developer to do: “crank up those bulldozers and trash the existing building, boys... we’ve got our LEED credit with the bike rack!”
It’s important to point out that these issues are not problems with LEED calibration. The USGBC hasn’t done a bad job fine-tuning LEED, in other words. Rather, these are structural flaws of additive points-based systems. It’s time to consider a change.

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there. The only exception is the 1 Bryant Park image, which isn’t one of mine.

Losing the Second Battle of New Orleans

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:47:53 -0400

Why is nobody nationwide paying any attention to the new disaster in New Orleans? Katrina was an act of nature. The oil spill was an act of stupidity. This third great disaster, however, is an intentional act by the old-boy network, and they’re winning. What’s at stake?
Ever heard about about when Robert Moses tried to ram an expressway through the middle of Greenwich Village in the 1960’s? This is every bit as egregious. The basement and first level of Charity hospital was flooded during Hurricane Katrina. “Three weeks after Katrina, then-Governor Kathleen Blanco said that Charity Hospital would not reopen, even though the military had scrubbed the building to medical-ready standards.” (see full story here)
Now, the power brokers (including the Veteran’s Administration) are trying to demolish 27 square blocks of the historic mid-city neighborhood around Charity. They’re proposing to replace it with a suburban-style medical complex that has nothing to do with the character of New Orleans or its urban setting.
Let that sink in a minute... 27 square blocks! That’s comparable to the portion of the Lower Ninth Ward that was smashed when the levee burst.* But unlike the Lower Ninth, where most of the houses were postwar ranchers, scores of houses within the path of destruction of the hospital abomination are actually listed on the National Register, and many others are excellent as well. And yet there’s no outcry. Matter of fact, outside of the city of New Orleans, other than Roberta Gratz’s excellent article on citiwire, there has hardly been a whimper.
How can this be happening? How is it that we are proposing to throw away excellent buildings... again... and replace them with something less? When will we ever learn that sustainability is just meaningless marketing fluff so long as we continue to throw things away so easily?
To understand how it’s happening, just follow the money. Billions of dollars will be spent on the projects, which include both a VA hospital and an LSU hospital on the same mega-site. How can a city that has been so battered in recent years turn its back on an influx of cash like that?
Most cities tend to focus on big silver-bullet projects they hope will save them. Everyone wants the “Bilbao Effect.” More often, they get the “Renaissance Center Effect” instead: a big project on which lots of money has been spent, but which doesn’t revitalize the surrounding neighborhoods. Detroit got the Center, but not the Renaissance. In short, it was false advertising... as it almost always is. Here’s why:
The cash influx lasts as long as construction is ongoing, but even that is deceiving. Roughly half of typical construction cost is materials. If your town doesn’t produce those building materials, then that money immediately leaves town. The other half is for labor and administration. Projects of this size ordinarily draw a lot of attention from companies all over the country, so it’s highly unlikely that most of the buildings will be built by New Orleans contractors. That means that a substantial portion of the labor and administration costs is leaving town, too. So only a small fraction of those big budget numbers will actually get plowed into the New Orleans economy. And it’s temporary... lasting only until the completion of construction.
After that, the city is left with the repercussions of the design that was built. Far too often, the design is corrosive, as it is here. There are several problems:
* Trading historic buildings that look like they belong in New Orleans for buildings that look like they could be anywhere seems more like an esoteric architectural discussion than an economic development debate. But consider the fact that New Orleans takes in over $5 billion from tourism. Now ask yourself this: do tourists come to a city full of buildings that look like they could be anywhere, or do they instead go to places with a strong identity? The answer is clear.
* The hospital projects create a completely unwalkable environment around them. We know the physical characteristics of walkable streets, and also of unwalkable ones. It’s no mystery anymore where people will walk and where they won’t walk. And this hospital district fails every test of walkability. Why should walkability matter? Several reasons. Ever seen a tourist destination where people travel from far away just to drive around? Of course not. The billions of tourist dollars New Orleans rakes in each year are a direct result of the high walkability it has created.
* It’s not just tourism, either. It’s true that hospital patients come from all around, so they’re highly likely to arrive in a car (or ambulance.) But as fuel costs continue to rise, walkable workplaces are going to become more and more important to both employees and employers. With the pace of urbanization in China and India, it’s likely that between them, there may be a billion cars on the road in those two countries in a few years that don’t even exist today. Imagine those billion cars competing with America’s 300 million cars for gas, all at a time that we’re having to go to more hostile places to find oil. Not much doubt where the price of gas is going, is there? It’s not so hard to imagine a near future when corporate recruiters include the caveat that “you can walk to work from a cool nearby neighborhood. Too bad for these hospitals that it’ll never happen there due to their physical design.
* Even if you don’t work in the hospitals, the “walkability shadow” their suburban design casts can still impact you if you live or work nearby. The coolest and most valuable places in New Orleans are almost always the most walkable, as they are everywhere. Unwalkable places, on the other hand, are almost never the coolest in town. It’s quite apparent that walkability is a significant threshold for coolness in cities all over, including New Orleans. It’s equally obvious that coolness is a huge driver of increasing values: cool places increase in value, while uncool places are much more stagnant, or even decline. So the walkability shadow cast by this design is also a coolness shadow and a potential value shadow as well. If the walkability shadow only extends 3 blocks all around the hospitals, that means over 100 square blocks of real estate values could be impacted. Add up all the real estate value on those blocks. Even if it’s only $5 million per block, that’s a half a billion dollars worth of real estate value on 100 blocks. So even if the walkability shadow only makes difference of a few percentage points in value, we’re still talking about a huge potential impact.
* The hospitals sever the grid repeatedly by cutting off a number of streets. This is a bad idea on several counts. Going from destinations on one side to destinations on the other require more time, gas, and therefore money. This may not seem like a big item, but consider this: If each of the 9 streets cut off currently carry only 10,000 cars per day (probably a low number) and if the average detour is only 2 blocks each way (also a somewhat low number,) then that’s 9 x 10,000 x (2+2) = 360,000 extra blocks that citizens of New Orleans will have to drive every day. At 350’ per block, that’s nearly 24,000 miles per day that New Orleans residents will have to drive out of their way because of cutting these streets... roughly the distance to go all the way around the world... every day! And at an average speed of 15 miles per hour (counting stopping,) that’s a waste of 1,600 hours per day by residents having to drive around this thing. New Orleans’ Living Wage is nearly $10/hour, which means that the impact of clipping the streets in terms of time wasted is $16,000 per day. That’s on top of the costs of driving.
I could go on, as there are many other detrimental aspects of these designs, but let’s listen to some of the locals who have been bravely fighting this monstrosity with very little outside support until now. Michael Rouchell is a local architect and preservationist who has been prolific in his writing, including this post on Roberta Gratz, this cost comparison of renovating Charity versus building new, and this overview of the whole sordid affair, which includes excellent illustrations.
Michael pointed me to a number of other resources, including the Save Charity Hospital blog, the Foundation for Historical Louisiana’s page on the wasting of Charity, and Inside the Footprint.
Gate Pratt, another local architect who’s also fighting, suggested these resources as well: PreserveNation has weighed in on the issue, as has the Louisiana Landmarks Society. Save Mid-City Houses is a blog devoted to the fight.
Michael and Gate are two of a small but committed band of preservationists in New Orleans who have been doing the street-fighting, but they’re exhausted, and just about out of time. The Mayor just established a 45-day final review period, but if nothing changes, then the rumbling noise you’ll hear will be the bulldozers cranking up to level block after block of historic structures.**
The bottom line is this: the detrimental aspects of this design will cost the city more in the long run than the billions of dollars spent on its construction. Please help by lending your voice to the effort to save New Orleans from this mammoth act of disastrous short-sightedness. Say something! In 45 days, it will be too late.

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

Corrections:
* “... comparable to the portion of the Lower Ninth Ward that was smashed...” refers to the portion that was physically smashed by the force of the water, not just flooded. This was roughly the first 3 blocks from the levee. At 10 blocks wide, that was essentially 30 square blocks.
** Michael told me this evening that only the LSU portion of the project got the 45-day review period. The bulldozers are already demolishing the historic houses of the VA portion, so timing is critical.

BP or Us?

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:53:32 -0400

Who’s the biggest culprit in the Gulf disaster? Everyone’s talking tough about BP and their culpability. The President, in my opinion, said exactly what he had to say about the catastrophe 36 hours ago. Late last night, I saw where one lawmaker, referring to BP CEO Tony Hayward’s testimony before congress later today, said “They’re going to take his hide off, as they should.” All reports point to a corporate culture of risk-taking at the expense of safety, the story says. There’s talk of extracting massive reparations from BP for damages to the region.
This is reasonable. Livelihoods are being lost. In all likelihood, thousands of jobs will be lost as a result of the fact that you can’t fish there anymore. And it isn’t just commercial fishermen, either. The sport fishers support local hotels, restaurants, retail, and the like.
And that’s only the human side of it. Most of the victims in this disaster can’t hire attorneys for a class-action lawsuit. Countless creatures are dying, and precious wilderness is being spoiled for decades, or even generations. We likely have very little idea what the long-term toll to the environment will be. So clearly, BP should pay.
But the BP blood-lust, and the countless newspeople who are fanning those flames, are completely missing the real point. Because the ultimate fault lies not so much with some foreign corporation, as with us. We are to blame, and we’re going to cause even more of these disasters. How can that be?
We’ve created a suburban nation, where the only way to get around is to drive. The easy oil to support that lifestyle has been pumped years ago, so oil companies are having to go to greater and greater lengths to find new reserves. Much has been made over the fact that the gusher is buried a mile deep in the Gulf. Drilling so deep was unthinkable just a few years ago, but expect it to become much more common in the near future. Here’s why:
Two really big things are happening at once: We are arguably reaching worldwide Peak Oil right about now, a condition that was predicted in 1956 by Shell Oil geoscientist M. King Hubbert. We reached Peak Oil in the lower 48 states of the US in 1970. Since then, we have pumped less and less oil as reserves have dwindled. The same thing has happened or will happen in other countries, of course. No finite resource lasts forever.
The other really big thing happening right now is the fact that in China and India alone, there are roughly 2-1/2 billion people who have until recently lived in very low-impact agrarian settings who are now moving to the city... and that’s not counting other populous nations like Brazil that are going through similar changes.
In the US, we have roughly 300 million cars for 300 million people. If China and India do 2-1/2 times as our ratio of cars to people, then there will still be a billion cars on the road in those countries in a few years that don’t even exist today. Combine that with the fact that oil supplies are going to decline, and any student of Economics 101 knows we have a major problem.
So whether or not we put BP out of business, we’ll be clamoring for whatever oil companies remain to keep drilling, and they’ll have to keep going to more treacherous lengths to extract the stuff. And as all humans do, they will occasionally have accidents. The problem is that these increasingly inhospitable sites raise the stakes. The harder it is to get to, the bigger the risk and the worse the accident. It is going to happen again! More frequently. And the damage will be worse.
So who’s really to blame? In the words of the long-ago cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” It’s us, and our suburban lifestyle, that have created the massive demands for oil, because it simply isn’t possible to live in sprawling suburbs without driving everywhere. We drive to work, to shop, to school, to worship, and to play. We have no choice because of the design of our cities... if you live in the suburbs, try walking to work. It’s likely so far that you just might get there by quitting time. But the walk would be so dangerous that you just might not make it in one piece.
What’s the solution? There are several, actually, and it’s high time to get to work on them. First, we really must quit building our world in its currently highly segregated fashion, with subdivisions, shopping malls, office parks, and pods of other uses connected only by massive roads. The New Urbanism movement has been working on solutions to this for years, and they’re really quite good at what they do. Next, we can’t just discard the suburbs... far too many people have their life’s savings tied up in their homes there, and most of them are unlikely to be able to walk away, even as the price of gas skyrockets as the reality of Peak Oil hits home. So we’ve got to find ways of repairing the suburbs to transform them into real hamlets, villages, and towns, where you can live, work, shop, learn, worship, and play, all within walking distance. Fortunately, the New Urbanists have been working on that, too. Look for the Sprawl Repair Manual, to be released shortly. If we get to work now, we just might be able to turn the tide before another disaster occurs.

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

the Original Green and the Transect

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:14:45 -0400

As promised, here’s the first Original Green post by another voice... this one is by Ann Daigle. If you have noteworthy insights on issues either surrounding or central to the Original Green, please write them up and send them in. This blog should be our voices, not just my voice.

For over 5,000 years, people have built settlements. They gathered together for safety and economy, and formed societies to share resources and responsibilities. While the earth and its civilizations are vast, people and the settlements they built are remarkably similar. Very early on, humans recognized that the impermanence of life could be overcome through a society’s built legacy – and that what they built formed lasting impressions about their civilization.
Note from Steve: I’m illustrating Ann’s post with images from the French Quarter of New Orleans because it’s Ann’s adopted hometown.
No matter what country or culture, what geography or climate, permanent villages, towns and cities shared (and still share) particular design characteristics thanks to the similar aspirations and physical makeup of their inhabitants. The way they grew was organic and naturally sustainable.
Building followed eight simple rules that ensured people’s and community’s needs were met:
• Settlements were close to food and water sources to nourish inhabitants,
• They were easily accessible to better foster society, governance and commerce,
• People were able to meet their daily needs within easily walkable distances,
• Buildings and public spaces were safe and secure,
• Land use and buildings were frugal to conserve resources,
• Buildings and public spaces were durable and enduring so they lasted for generations,
• Buildings were flexible so that interiors could be accommodated for changing times, and
• Places were built to be beautiful so they were lovable, comfortable and made people happy.
Lasting settlements grew at choice locations near abundant natural resources. These locations and the settlement layout maximized environmental and geographic conditions to offer protection from wild animals and human enemies. They were strategically accessible for trade by land or water, and shared paths for exploration.
When people settled, they built communities in compact configurations that leveraged available resources and provided internal safety for the people and their possessions. The design they chose expressed the favored customs and aspirations of their society. They set aside key sites – the highest and best land – for important buildings and shared spaces, and the most fertile land for grazing and farming.
Early builders developed geometries for stable buildings with locally available materials. Their designs maximized assets of light and air, while minimizing impacts of rain, harsh sun and wind. More valuable permanent materials, difficult techniques and ornamentation were saved for buildings that housed important community functions so that the cultural, social, spiritual and economic longevity of the society could be furthered for posterity. Shared housing was substantial. Individual houses were less permanent, a characteristic that paralleled the mortality of individual residents.
As settlements grew and prospered, people organized their buildings in more formal and sophisticated configurations that favored efficiency, accessibility and ambiance, and that brought comfort and delight to inhabitants. Street widths and spaces between buildings were appropriate to the climate and topography, as were building heights and details. Street size and connectivity facilitated mobility and way-finding by pedestrians, and paired with strategically placed buildings, generated a comforting sense of enclosure. As early as 2,000 BC, dimensions were codified into regulations to ensure all building was compatible and to promote “equal ability to enjoy property.”
Public space was balanced with private to support social mores and customs and reinforce the importance of common goals. Special public gathering places were carefully selected at central intersections so that all paths lead to them. Bounded with the most important buildings, these spaces were beautifully framed and ornamented like grand outdoor rooms. Physically and symbolically they were the centers of community, and provided a stage for gatherings.
Comfortable arrangements of houses, shops and religious, government and institutional buildings reflected important economic relationships. Shops were situated at intersections and congregated together for easy access and visibility. The majority were at the centers near key gathering spots and public buildings. Housing surrounded this urban core of activity. Most were raised above the streets in upper stories above modest shops and offices where residents made their living.
Buildings closest to the center shared permanent materials, and accommodated as many people as comfortable in close proximity to the center where they could enjoy the vast array of services and civic life. Houses further away were less permanent, and less defensible. Street intersections were punctuated with shops to provide daily necessities. The urban fabric eventually feathered into less-formal arrangements of sheds, farms and fields at the settlement’s edge, beyond which wilderness reigned.
The organic growth of settlements followed geography and topography. As growing populations and the need for services increased, compact neighborhoods were replicated, growing next to one another so that new and more precious resources could be shared at their edges. The overall pattern that formed towns and cities resembled a constellation, with satellites of smaller commercial nodes encircling the major center. All were connected and easily accessible, generally equidistant from the center and one another, with numerous pathways to get from one place to another.
The natural inclination of early settlers and builders to build sustainably is what architect and town designer, Steve Mouzon, calls, “the Original Green.” Every decision about how, why and where the community and buildings were formed was guided by rational environmental, economic and cultural reasons. The organization of spaces and the building techniques that worked best were replicated, modified and enhanced, then replicated again by successive generations. Successful solutions eventually became what we call, traditions.
One of the most obvious historic patterns inherent in all communities throughout civilization and across all cultures is what planners today have named the “rural to urban Transect of human settlement.” It reflects the Original Green principles, and has been researched and analyzed internationally. It now forms the framework for policy and codes for community building that are healthy and sustainable.
The Transect is observable in all walkable pre-automobile and pre-zoning code communities, and in most places built before the era of Modernist urban and building design. It (or its remnants) is often recognized as the locations in today’s cities and towns that feel authentic and have a greater sense of place and local character. The Transect can be viewed in ancient Chinese scrolls, maps of 1700 London, illustrations of 1850 New Orleans and in photographs of 1900 San Francisco.
At its most simple, the Transect is a gradual change and undulation in character as one moves from the city center to the rural edge. More complexly, the Transect borrows from environmental study. It describes the city as a series of “human habitats” that like natural ecosystems are at their healthiest when they co-exist, are integrated, mutually beneficial and self-sustaining.
For planning and coding purposes, the Transect can be expressed as a hierarchy of “Transect Zones” that exist within a sustainable city from its center to its edge. Planners have identified six “T-Zones” that are evident in healthy, walkable places in varied mixes and patterns: (T6) Urban Core, (T5) Urban Center, (T4) Urban General, (T3) Suburban, (T2) Rural and (T1) Natural.
Transect zones do not exist alone, as monocultures, but rather work in concert with other T-Zones to form complete neighborhoods. The most delightful places are those in which transition from T-zone to T-zone is fine-grained and complex. Real neighborhoods are not subdivisions, but rather walkable places with a mix of uses, housing types and public spaces, such that people can meet their basic daily needs within a five to ten minute walk. Historically neighborhoods cover a ¼ mile radius “pedestrian shed,” which is an approximate five-minute walk from center to edge.
Here’s an example of the French Quarter’s T3:
All T-Zones share similar elements - they all have buildings, landscape, infrastructure, public and private spaces. However, the elements of each zone also have distinct characteristics that make each habitat or zone unique. For instance, while barns are common buildings in T2 Rural, they are inappropriate buildings for the Urban Center. Likewise townhouses belong in Urban areas, but are inappropriate in Suburban or Rural zones.
In general, as one travels from Urban to Rural areas, density, building height, the mix of uses and public amenities are reduced, and the natural landscape becomes more dominant. Important civic buildings, commercial and mixed-use buildings give way to sparsely sited houses, then to farms and agriculture, and there are fewer opportunities for entertainment, culture and socialization. Streets and sidewalks move from formal hardscaped boulevards and avenues to unpaved roads with swales and nature paths.
Here’s some of the French Quarter’s T4...
The characteristics of T-Zones, while sharing common elements and similarities, also vary in regions based on local geography, climate, social culture and building traditions. Their evidence can be observed, analyzed, measured and documented, and the most desirable characteristics entered into form-based codes and polices for new and infill development.
Planning, coding and (re)building a neighborhood with a mix of Transect Zones ensures that what came naturally at one point in city development - the places that people love and admire - can once again become the DNA of growth. Transect Planning is based on the premise that for people to be happy and healthy throughout their lives they must have access to the full diversity of rural to urban habitats within their community – ideally within walking distance. This mirrors the basic principles of the Original Green, and emphasizes the idea that sustainability and human happiness go hand in hand – naturally.
... and this is a sample of the French Quarter’s T5:
The goal for a city seeking sustainability is to nurture authentic places that accommodate the Original Green via a full set of Transect habitats. This gives residents the option to “age in place” by offering opportunities for children, young singles, families and those in their prime to safely live, work, shop and play within their neighborhood.
Just as the gulls on the seashore could not exist without the wetlands or upland forests, so man cannot exist without access to urban civilization or the rural landscape. Suburban places, no matter how seemingly pastoral, cannot exist as monocultures without farmland and wilderness or the greatest achievements of urbanity.
The Original Green and the Transect provide for places – and life - that is enriched with quality. This is the DNA of “Community Building.”

~Ann Daigle

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on Steve’s Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

Opening Up the Original Green

Tue, 25 May 2010 22:05:44 -0400

I believe it’s time to open up the Original Green... let’s discuss your ideas on how best to do it. I’ve always intended to open it up for everyone to use once it properly matured. Andrés Duany followed a similar course with the Transect, holding it close to the vest until it was robust, then releasing it for everyone to use. Today, the Transect is broadly useful to many people. There’s no reason the Original Green can’t be widely useful once released, too.
The last several weeks have been fascinating on several counts, including the fact that the Original Green book has been released, but it’s possible that the most important event might have been the CNU Open Source strategy session on the opening of the Original Green. Here are some of the things we discussed, in the order in which we discussed them:
Voice
Every Original Green blog post to date has a single voice. That’s about to change. Ann Daigle wrote a piece on the Original Green and the Transect that will become this blog’s next post. Look for it in the next few days. If you have noteworthy insights on issues either surrounding or central to the Original Green, please write them up and send them in. This blog should be our voices, not just my voice. I’d like nothing more than for there to be such a flood of great ideas that my posts become a small minority of the total number.
Patterns
We’re going to find a way to build a resource bank of Original Green patterns that everyone can contribute to. Likely, it will be a wiki of some sort. I’ll set the graphic standards, then everyone will draw up their own patterns. The standard likely will be similar to that which I’ve set up for the Living Tradition series of books so that patterns from this series can be used, jump-starting the process.
Principles
We’ll develop a series of illustrated Original Green principles that anyone can download from the site. The idea is that if your project embodies Original Green principles, you ought to be able to promote it as such, without having to write up every word and draw every drawing from scratch. Obviously, the idea here is to help those who are upholding Original Green principles to set themselves apart from others who are not.
Standards
This one will likely take some time to develop, and we need to do other things first, but Original Green principles could eventually lead to Original Green standards. Could this turn into a rating system someday? Possibly. What about LEED? This system should be supportive of LEED, not competitive with it. If we move forward with this, my objective would be to create a simple and transparent system that does two things: rates places and rates buildings. Multiply your place rating by your building rating to get the total rating, so a good building in a bad place doesn’t get it, nor does a bad building in a good place. One person should be able to produce a neighborhood rating in an hour or less. One person should also be able to produce a building rating in an hour or less. And it should be free. Quoting from Apple, it should be “a rating system for the rest of us.”
Creative Commons
We’ll look into Creative Commons licensing to help assure that the free resources are not misused. I don’t yet know precisely how this will work, but the intent is to make sure that both the core principles and the resources can spread freely.
Presentations.
A few of the Original Green presentations given to date are already posted on this site’s Presentations page. Eventually, I’d like to post most of them, or at least most of the recent ones. Download them and use them wherever they’re useful in your work. The only thing I ask is that you don’t alter the images or the text on any of the slides... but feel free to pull out the slides you need and rearrange them any way you like. And if anyone asks, tell them where you found them, so that they might find something useful here, too.
Original Green Buildings
If you either find a building that’s especially representative of Original Green principles and patterns, whether it’s new or whether it’s old, please photograph it, write a story on it, and send it in. It can even be one of your buildings... just make sure that it is as Lovable, Durable, and Flexible as it is Frugal. I’ll eventually take the best of these and write a book about them.
Original Green Places
I plan to do the same thing with Original Green Places. Matter of fact, I’ve already done one blog post on South Main. Take a look at it as an example of the amount of writing and photography you’d need. As you can see, you don’t need a ton of images... just make sure they’re good ones. Also, please follow the general layout of the article, stepping through each one of the Original Green foundations the place fulfills.
What do you think? Let’s talk about it!

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

A Gift to the Street

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 07:23:00 -0400

There is no greater expression of neighborliness than showing kindness to someone you may never know. We can give gifts to strangers in person, of course, but our buildings can do it, too. Imagine what your neighborhood would be like if every home and shop gave a gift to the street! Wouldn’t it encourage you to walk more, where you could savor those gifts, rather than just zipping by in a car? And as we’ve discussed here on numerous occasions, encouraging walkability is one of the most important things you can do to make your neighborhood healthier and more sustainable. There are several types of gifts you can give to the street:
Refreshing
A Gift to the Street can refresh people. The most active way of refreshing people is by providing a sidewalk cafe, such as the one shown here. But there are simpler ways, too, such as a simple water fountain along the street, or a much larger street fountain which children can run through on a simmering summer day.
Sheltering
This shopfront gives several Gifts to the Street, including sheltering people who stand under the awning from sun and rain. There are other good ways of sheltering people. A gallery can be as light and lacy as those lining the streets of New Orleans’ French Quarter, shielding passers-by from torrential Gulf Coast downpours. A colonnade is very similar, except that it’s much more heavily constructed, supported by brick or stone piers. An arcade does the same job, reaching across the sidewalk to shelter those walking by under its shade... the only difference is that it’s supported by arches instead of a beam.
Delighting
This frontage garden has no place for the owner to sit, because it’s too public. Rather, it exists solely to delight those who pass by. Frontage gardens are by far the most common forms of gifts to the street that delight people. Occasionally, there are others, however. Civic art can serve this purpose, for example.
Directing
Sometimes a gift to the street serve to direct people along their way by proving a goal at the end of a path, such as the steeple of this chapel on the hill. Planners call this a “terminated vista” because at the end of your view, you see something to walk towards, helping to entice you along the way. Vista terminations are usually tall, so that they can be seen at a great distance.
Entertaining
Some gifts are simply entertaining, such as this storefront which has many things to entice the eye. People “window-shop” on Main Streets or High Streets where there are many entertaining storefronts, for example. We normally think of entertainment as something where we watch others play or dance, but an entertaining gift to the street makes our eyes the performers as they dance around on many interesting things.
Informing
The sundial is an ancient method of informing people of the time. More recently, the wall-mounted clock does the same thing.. You might ask “but what about a billboard; doesn’t that inform people, too?” It does... but is it a gift? Not at all. It’s asking you, either directly or indirectly, to buy something. A gift asks nothing in return.
A Gift to Help Them Remember
Memorials remind future generations of the things that their forbearers found most important, such as this memorial to the citizens of this city who died in World War I.
A Place to Rest
There is often no gift so welcome as the gift of rest. The sidewalk bench is an obvious gift of rest, but there are other ways to provide this gift. Wanda is resting here in front of the New Old Inn across from the River Windrush in Bourton-On-The-Water on her 50th birthday. (Sorry, I just had to tell the whole story on that one because those Brits have such a knack with names!) But in any case, she’s resting against a stone bollard with a thoughtfully rounded top edge which makes for a comfortable surface to lean onto for a while as you decide where to go next.
Gifts to the street are one of the top ten things you can personally do to be more sustainable, as described in the Original Green [Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability]. It will be released a week from today (May 7.) If you’re in Miami, please join us for the South Beach Launch Party!
The book outlines three top tens: the top ten things we’re doing now to be green that can’t work, the top ten things our nations and our cultures should be doing if we want to be truly green, and the top ten things each of us individually can do by ourselves to be more green. Some of the items near the top of this last list might require major changes in your life, and might take a while to accomplish, such as living where you can walk to the grocery, or making a living where you’re living.
A gift to the street, however, is different. Depending on which gift you want to give, it’s actually possible to do some of these things today! So let’s get started!

~Steve Mouzon

Original Green Book Launch Party Next Friday!

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:22:13 -0400

If you’re on South Beach next Friday night (May 7,) please stop by Books & Books at 927 Lincoln Road between 7 and 9:30 for the Launch Party of the Original Green book! I’ll be signing books if you’re interested in one. Please RSVP to Ty Reid if you can make it... thanks!
Beyond that, there will be book tour destinations posted, beginning with the Congress for the New Urbanism in Atlanta. Other events are in the works. If you’re on facebook, please go to the Original Green book page and click “Like,” and well keep you up on the events as they unfold.
*********************
From the earlier post...
18 months after work on the book began, the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability] is complete! ... Here’s how it’s laid out:
The first chapter, “What’s the Problem?” is a Top 10 list of the things we’re doing to be green, but which are not winning strategies. Each has a secret (or with some, not-so-secret) flaw that prevents it from achieving real sustainability.
The second chapter, “What Can We Do?” is also a Top 10 listing of the most important principles that should underlie real sustainability. Several of the mechanisms described here are nowhere to be found in most current green discussions, but they should be. I serialized these first two chapters on this blog, beginning a year ago today... Because of many comments posted on this blog, and also much off-list email discussions, many parts of these chapters have been refined, so what’s contained in the book will be improved from what you read here.
The third chapter, “What’s the Plan?” outlines the Original Green, which begins with sustainable places, in which we can then build sustainable buildings. Sustainable places are nourishable, accessible, serviceable, and secure. Sustainable buildings are lovable, durable, flexible, and frugal.
Everything until this point deals with big-picture stuff that needs to be done by regions, by cultures, and by nations. The fourth chapter, however, gets personal. “What Can I Do?” is a Top 10 list of the things that each of us can do individually to help become more green. It begins with things we can do easily, and moves up to the life-changing things that make the greatest impact.
The book closes with a Resources chapter that includes websites, blogs, Apps, and books that support Original Green principles. After the index and glossary, it closes with a page on the New Urban Guild’s Project:SmartDwelling.
~Steve Mouzon

Earth Day - A Symptom of Our Disease?

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:11:45 -0400

Is it possible that Earth Day, conceived as an event to raise environmental awareness, is actually part of our immense environmental problem? Let that sink in a minute, then let’s consider the facts:
Take almost any metric of environmental impact and look where the charts have gone for the past forty years. The water and the air are definitely cleaner, but those changes were mandated on a relatively few industrialists, because there are tens of thousands of times as many people as there are industrial corporations. But how about the metrics that involve us? Are we driving more? Are we consuming more stuff? Are we building bigger houses? Are we building them further out from where we work? Are we fatter? Is it because we’re consuming more food? Is that food coming from further and further away? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. So after 40 years of Earth Day, all the metrics of our own behavior are getting worse.
I clearly remember the first Earth Day 40 years ago; I was ten years old at the time, and in fourth grade. My school made a really big deal of it. I recall the great optimism of those days, when we thought we might finally be making a difference. My mother would shortly open a health food store, and she regularly had lecturers come in and speak about the more natural ways of doing things. Hopefulness hung thickly in the air.
So how could we have gotten it so wrong? Do you remember Earth Hour a few weeks ago? Everyone was supposed to cut off their lights for one appointed hour early in the evening. Did you do it? Did it make you feel good? But was it a bit inconvenient? Stubbed your toe on something you couldn’t see, or stumbled over something? Have you cut off your lights more often as a result? I didn’t think so.
Here’s the problem: Annual events that require us to give up something for an hour or a day in exchange for a warm fuzzy almost never result in long-term change. It’s simple human nature: we’ve filled our “warm fuzzy quota” for the environment (or whatever the cause is) and we’ve suffered a little bit. The natural reaction is to think “I certainly won’t be doing that tomorrow!” The net effect is that one-time events in which we’re inconvenienced a bit in exchange for feeling responsible may actually act like a vaccination against the very thing we’re trying to encourage! It’s a small dose that ensures we won’t get the big infection.
If we’re serious about making a difference, then several things must happen: Everyone must be involved. The manufacturers can’t get the job done just by making more efficient stuff. We won’t solve sustainability by going shopping. And if our behavior doesn’t change, our machines can’t save us.
So our behavior ought to change... but there’s a big problem with things we ought to do. Simply put, we often do what we want to do, but only infrequently do what we ought to do. The bottom line is that if we really want people to behave differently, we’ve got to entice them to do it, not nag them to do it. We will not scold the world to sustainability.
So what should we be enticing ourselves to do?
Here’s the Earth Day Top 10 I did last year that has a lot of ideas, but really it comes down to this: to cut stuff off as part of our daily life. To need less heating and cooling, and less electrical light. Less driving. Sounds a bit like suffering, until you realize that it actually results in a condition I call Living In Season, where you live in a way that you can throw the windows open much of the year.
Doing this means you’ll need to spend more time outside, getting acclimated to your local environment. You might spend some of that time in your neighborhood park, or in your garden. And your garden doesn’t have to be just ornamental; it can also help to nourish you. If your neighborhood really is a neighborhood instead of just a subdivision in sprawl, it’ll be compact, mixed-use, and walkable so that there are actually destinations to walk to, and it’s pleasant along the way. New Urbanists have been figuring out how to do this for years. They’re meeting next month in Atlanta... you might want to check it out. Some of these things aren’t possible today in a sprawl subdivision, but they’re also working on ways to repair sprawl, and to re-write the rules for how cities are built to be far more sustainable.
Our homes and shops need to change, too. Buildings must first be lovable, so that they will last. We need to build them with materials for the ages, not stuff that falls off in the driveway in ten years. And this isn’t just buildings; the rule should be: “Choose it for longer than you’ll use it,” or “choose stuff you can hand down to your grandkids someday, and they can hand down to theirs long after you’re gone.”
If this sounds a bit like some sort of American Eden; some paradise this country lost long before Earth Day began, then you’re exactly right... that’s precisely what it is, and can be again. My Original Green book, which will be released May 7, puts all these things into a coherent story. But if we want these things, then we need to stop doing things that temporarily make us feel good, and begin enticing people to make real change by building places and buildings where they will love to live. Does this mean we’ll have to rebuild much of what we’ve built in recent years. Yes. Isn’t that wasteful? Yes. But don’t worry... it’s falling down soon anyway, because it was never built to last.

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

Curing Cancer of the City

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 06:08:01 -0400

Sprawl is Cancer of the City, as we’ve discussed earlier. But what’s the cause? And what’s the cure? The answers might shock you. It all begins with the things we’ve been doing to the city for years:
We’ve polluted the air with our factories, our powerplants, and our cars. We’ve polluted the water not only with our factories, but also with things we spill from our cars and trucks, the detergents we use to do our laundry, and the chemicals we spread on our lawns. We’ve even polluted the earth when our chemicals seep into the soil.
We’ve trashed it building places and buildings that are so unlovable that they’re quickly abandoned, like this failed shopping center. Look how small all but one of the trees here are... this place probably isn’t even ten years old! This is the worst way to trash a city: by building places and buildings that are quickly discarded, left as a scab and then a scar on the city.
We’ve damaged the built environment by ramming huge highways through it. This used to be someone’s neighborhood. We’ve also damaged it by tearing down entire neighborhoods in our cities because we wanted buildings that were shiny and new, even if it meant losing thousands of buildings that were like old friends.
And we’ve made the built environment much more dangerous, primarily because of our cars. Most wild animals have long since either left places like this or become road kill. The one’s we’re killing and injuring now are ourselves. Cars kill tens of thousands of people every year and injure many more. Can you imagine trying to cross this street on foot? It’s even dangerous if you’re riding in a car!
Matter of fact, we’ve damaged the built environment so much that lots of people say “I can’t live there anymore.” And so they leave. But in doing so, they create the thing that spoils the environment worst of all: sprawl, or Cancer of the City. For fifty years, we’ve built our suburbs in a sprawling way, leap-frogging across the landscape, taking up far too much land. Here, you can see sprawl at the top of the picture about to gobble up lots of farmland. Other times, it gobbles up wetlands. Why is sprawl so bad? Let’s take a look:
Sprawl puts all the houses in subdivisions by themselves and spreads them out. If you’re at home and want to visit a friend at their house, it’s probably too far to walk, so you have to drive. Sprawl puts all the shops together in one district, then it spreads them out, too. Ever walk from Barnes & Noble to the Old Navy? Sprawl puts all the offices together in another district, then it spreads them out, too, with huge parking lots and landscaped berms in between, so that you have to drive everywhere. Think about the lunch-hour traffic jams. Sprawl puts places to play together in huge recreation centers. Because you have to drive there, and because there are usually several types of sports there, the parking lots in front of them separate them from everything else. And of course, the schools are in their own district, too, normally out on the highway at the edge of town. They’re so big today that kids have to ride in from miles away.
By separating all these things, we’ve gotta drive everywhere. At home and wanna go shopping? Gotta drive. At work and wanna go home? Gotta drive. At the rec center and wanna get something to eat? Gotta drive. So whatever you’re doing, if you want to do something else, you’ve gotta drive.
So why does sprawl spread everything out? Here’s why:
If you’ve just moved out of a city that’s been spoiled, then it’s probably because you’ve felt the pollution, the trash, the damage, and the danger of the spoiled city closing in tightly around you. You want out, towards the country, where the air is clean, and everything is neat, tidy, and safe. And you want more space. A lot more space, where you can kick up your heels. So everything gets spread out, like we’ve already seen. It’s the natural reaction we should expect to the pollution, the trash, the damage, and the danger.
Why is it bad to spread & separate? Because when things spread out like this, you have to drive everywhere. This pollutes our air and water like we’ve already seen. Sprawl is already trashed before it’s even fully built by unlovable buildings and places. Ever seen a lovable Wal-Mart? Sprawl damages the land by disturbing far too much of it, and leaving useless strips of undeveloped land in between. And it’s a very dangerous place, because it’s filled with streets and highways that are big and fast.
It’s all a cruel joke because when we build sprawl, the things we fled the spoiled city to escape will soon spoil our suburb, too. And so we move out of those suburbs to new suburbs we build even further out. And on and on it sprawls, eating up our land like cancer, leaving discarded, unwanted places behind. But we can’t go on this way, because we’ll run out of land someday, eating up the natural environment. What then? Sprawl is Cancer of the City... and it doesn’t just eat up the city, but it eats up the land for miles around it, too. And we all know how cancer ends.
Suburbs aren’t evil; sprawl is evil. Cancer and sprawl are unhealthy growth. There’s also such a thing as healthy growth, which we’ll talk about in a minute. it’s only bad growth when the wrong thing grows. And for many years, we’ve been building our suburbs in a sprawling pattern.
What’s the cure? There’s a light around the corner now. The cure for Cancer of the City is to build a sustainable city, and not let it get spoiled by pollution, trash, damage, and danger, or heal it if it’s already spoiled. What does it mean to be sustainable? It means “keeping things going in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future.” What is a “healthy way?” It’s a way that’s free from illness or injury, which for a city, are things like pollution, trash, damage, and danger. What’s an “uncertain future?” It’s one where we don’t know what the price of gas will be, or when we might run out of it. In an uncertain future, it’s much better to rely on things nearby rather than things further away.
So a sustainable city is a healthy city. And precisely because it is a healthy city, people don’t feel like they need to flee to sprawl. This means that countless acres of the natural environment are preserved instead of gobbled up with endless sprawl. Put another way, we can’t have a healthy natural environment around us if we don’t have a healthy city. This means that we need to design and build cities differently than how we’ve been building them recently, if we want to cure Cancer of the City.
If you’re serious about helping cure Cancer of the City, then you need to be at CNU 18 in Atlanta next month. The Congress for the New Urbanism has for years been leading the charge to find a cure for sprawl, both in the new places we build and in the repair of sprawl that’s already there. This year’s CNU focus is New Urbanism: Rx for Healthy Places. Come help us find the cure!
~Steve Mouzon

Parks vs. Recreation Centers

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:34:03 -0400

Parks are essential elements of vibrant and sustainable neighborhoods, while recreation centers get most of their DNA from super-sizing and sprawl. Both parks and recreation centers foster fitness activities, but there are several differences crucial to the health of the neighborhood and the greenness of the city.
Parks are places where people can enjoy countless outdoor activities. See the patch of grass the people above are sitting on? Earlier that morning, it might have been used for a pick-up softball game. After these people leave, a few kids might kick around a soccer ball. Later in the day, you might see a couple young lovers on a stroll along the shadows at the edge of the field. Most activities are relatively unplanned. Most often, park recreation planning goes something like “hey, let’s go down to the park and see if anyone wants to play ball,” like the guys in the picture below. You don’t have to pay admission or get permission to go to the park.
Recreation centers, other than the fact that they also involve physical activity, are quite the opposite. Recreation centers have extensive facilities for certain organized sports: a swimming pool, baseball diamonds, soccer fields, tennis courts, basketball courts, etc.
Because recreation centers require major investments, they often have to charge admission of some sort to help pay back that investment. You also may need to be a member of the recreation center’s association to gain access. As a result, many of the activities in recreation centers occur behind walls or chain-link fences.
Once, a basketball court or two, a baseball diamond, a couple tennis courts, or even a soccer field were often tucked around the edges of many parks. More recently, however, our penchant for super-sizing everything, plus our deference to major sporting events that might happen only once or twice a year have resulted in the need to expand one or two of everything to dozens of everything. Two tennis courts are now no longer good enough... gotta have a couple dozen in order to possibly host a city-wide tournament at some point in the future. One baseball diamond? Forget it... gotta have eight so you can host a tournament there, too. There are several hidden problems with these super-sized recreation centers:
You can’t walk your dog on the tennis courts. Or in the swimming pool. Or on the basketball court. A tennis-focused recreation center, for example, is only useful to people who play tennis. Because recreation centers focus on single-use recreational uses (like sprawl does with land use in general,) they eliminate fields for dog-walking, tossing a frisbee, pick-up games of whatever you want to play, or just laying in the sun or sitting on the park bench watching the world go by.
Do we need specific-use recreational facilities like tennis courts, swimming pools, etc.? Of course. It’s just a question of proportion.
Here’s one of the problems with proportion: If only a fraction of the population within walking distance of a recreation center play tennis, then building enough tennis courts to hold a major tournament means that most of the people playing on those courts will have to drive to get there. There are several sustainability ramifications here: Most obvious is the fact that you’re burning a lot of gas to get there. But you also have to surround the recreation center with lots of parking for all the cars. Plus, you’re clogging the streets of the neighborhood with traffic. Also, because the recreation center doesn’t attract nearby neighbors for all the general-use stuff like dog-walking, you’re starving the neighborhood streets of pedestrians that would otherwise make the neighborhood more vibrant and safe as I described in this post.
There are a couple rules of thumb distinguishing between parks and recreation centers: First, parks are made up primarily of multi-use fields. This means that less than half of the space in a park should be dedicated to single-use recreational facilities. A much better number is less than one-fourth single use, with the vast majority being multi-use. Many great parks are completely multi-use.
There’s also the Grandstand Rule: If an activity needs a grandstand, it’s probably drawing a crowd from further around than just the neighborhood.
So is there a place for a recreation center? Yes: Out on the highway somewhere. They are large, expensive, sprawl-based facilities, but if your community can’t do without one, then put it where it belongs: where lots of traffic can get to it quickly and easily. But by all means, don’t put it in a neighborhood. It’s not a good neighbor. It needs to keep to itself.
Parks, on the other hand, are necessary parts of a sustainable neighborhood. Everybody should be within a five-minute walk of a park, and smaller playgrounds for kids should be scattered throughout the neighborhood so that every kid is within a two-minute walk of a playground. Town planners such as those at the Congress for the New Urbanism, of which I’m a member, support these park principles.
There is a growing threat to neighborhood parks today: they’re increasingly being eaten up for single-use recreational activities, so in effect, they’re being transformed into recreation centers right under our very noses! My own Flamingo Park in Miami Beach is in grave danger of this fate. Already, so much of the land has been given over to single-use activities that there are only two general-use fields left, and they constitute a ridiculously low percentage of the entire park. Now, the tennis advocates want to take one of those two fields so that they can add to the seventeen tennis courts they have already! Might as well change the name to the Flamingo Rec Center and build a new parking lot on the other remaining field to handle all the extra traffic!

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

Havana vs. Sawgrass Mills Mall

Fri, 9 Apr 2010 11:14:59 -0400

Look carefully at the images above. On the left is La Habana Vieja, or Old Havana. It’s an entire city. And a great city... a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as a matter of fact. No US city has yet made that list. Renowned New Urbanist Andrés Duany calls Havana “Rome, 90 miles from Key West.”
On the right is Sawgrass Mills Mall, not far from Miami, including its outparcels. In both cases, I’ve included the roads and port facilities required to make each place function.
Here’s the kicker: both are shown at the same scale! The choice is almost unthinkable, but true: we can build a great city using less land than it takes to build a shopping mall!
Kaid Benfield has a must-read blog post today entitled The Environmental Paradox of Smart Growth. It deals at length with the environmental benefits of building more compactly.
But before the facts and figures, there’s the “blink test” written about incisively by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, where he makes the case that a first glance is often more accurate than long deliberation. The first glance here shows there’s simply far more stuff in the city than in the mall, which is made up primarily of parking lots and roads. Simply put, most of what we build today is mostly empty most of the time.
It’s not just about how full the land is, however, but about the character of what we’re building. Would you rather be in this picture, or at a mall?
The choice is clear: spending time in a city that’s a World Heritage Site is a memory you’ll retain for a lifetime, whereas a trip to the mall will be forgotten by the weekend.
What are some of the other “blink tests” we can do on cities versus malls? One really obvious one is that you can do almost anything you want in the city, while you can only shop at the mall. One of the Sawgrass Mills outparcels is a subdivision and another is the Bank Atlantic Center, which is the home of the Florida Panthers, but nobody ever walks between them and the mall. Want to go home? You’ve gotta drive. Want to go to work? You’ve gotta drive. Want to play ball? You’ve gotta drive.
Here’s another test: What are the chances the shopping mall will be there in a hundred years? Malls, as we know, are usually thrown up with the cheapest construction, with no intention that they’ll last very long. How sustainable is it to be littering our landscapes with throwaway buildings? I blogged some time ago about Cancer of the City, and will have more to say about it shortly, some of which involves throwaway buildings and throwaway places.
Meanwhile, Havana has been there for almost 500 years, and it’s easy to imagine it being there centuries into the future... provided that the next regime brings some financial prosperity. Castro’s revolution has impoverished Cuba so badly that most buildings have had no maintenance in the half-century since the revolution. But imagine what a shopping mall would look like in 50 years with no maintenance! Actually, it might be in a state of total collapse in less time than that if it were not maintained.
It’s no accident that great and sustainable cities tend to be more compact than shopping malls and office parks. Compactness contributes both to sustainability and to potential greatness by bringing things closer together. A building in a parking lot isn’t a place... it’s only a building. And landscapes composed of buildings in parking lots connected by networks of highways are neither destined for greatness, nor for being here for a very long time.
~Steve Mouzon

How Green is Grass?

Sun, 7 Mar 2010 10:52:54 -0500

Grass is not nearly so sustainable as you might think, for numerous reasons. This is a big problem, because grass occupies the largest area of countless American landscapes. The word “grass” has been synonymous with “green” for ages because of its color. But let’s take a look at its sustainability:
Grass is the one part of the landscape that requires maintenance every single week from spring to late fall. This maintenance requires a lot of time... either your time, or a lawn service you hire. But unlike trimming a hedge, which can be done manually, mowing grass also requires fuel. Most people use gasoline mowers, but even if you use an electric mower, the electricity is usually generated by converting some sort of fuel (coal or nuclear fuel, for example) to electricity.
But it isn’t just the mowing that’s a problem. Scraggly lawns are embarrassing to most people, while a lawn that is lush and green is usually a big source of pride to its owners. As a result, countless millions of dollars are spent each year on synthetic fertilizers to feed the grass, poisons that kill its pests, and other chemicals that cure its ills. A “well-maintained lawn,” therefore, usually causes more poisons and other chemicals to be spread across your property than anything else on your property.
That’s not the end of it, either. Grass looks great when it’s nice and clean, but it has the lowest tolerance of anything in a landscape except maybe concrete for imperfection. If leaves fall in a planting bed, nobody notices. They first become part of the mulch of the shrubs and trees in the bed, then eventually decompose to feed those shrubs and trees. But leaves (or other debris) falling on a lawn are intolerable today. Once, when our tolerance of imperfection was higher, we would simply rake the leaves in the fall, and that was that.
Today, it’s not so simple. Because everything has to look perfect all the time (almost to the point of looking plastic) we have to crank up the leaf-blower to blast all the little imperfections off the lawn. Everyone in the neighborhood knows when we fire it up because unlike the equally loud lawnmower, which usually runs at a single speed for long stretches, the leaf-blower is constantly being throttled up or down. So while you can eventually ignore the mower because of its monotone roar, the leaf-blower’s throttling means that it can’t be forgotten, making it “the nuisance heard ‘round the block.”
But the fact that leaf-blowers annoy all of your neighbors is not their worst characteristic... there’s more: Because 99% of the gas blowers are powered with 2-stroke engines, they emit tremendous quantities of greenhouse gases. As a matter of fact, they’re so bad that if you wanted to dump as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as an average gas-powered leaf blower, you’d need to drive a Hummer 100 miles! Put another way, the only way the Hummer could dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at the rate of a leaf blower would be to drive 100 miles per hour! When I first heard this several years ago, I couldn’t believe it, but I’ve checked multiple reliable sources, with very similar results. Rather than me posting a couple of them and asking you to believe it, just Google for yourself and you’ll see.
There are other issues, too. This paper from the California Environmental Protection Agency outlines several more of the problems, including health problem. Bottom line: be nice to yourself, your neighbors, and your planet; don’t use a leaf blower. Shouldn’t you spend your time outdoors listening to a fountain, to the songbirds, or to your children?
But let’s get back to grass... why use it? Grass is clearly useful for some things. If you’re looking for a play surface, for example, nothing is better because you can run on it a lot without damaging it, and can fall on it without hurting yourself (most of the time.) Countless people therefore say “I need a yard where my kids can play ball.” But the fact is, most yards are far too small to play a game of just about anything. The proverbial “baseball through the kitchen window” is testament to that. For full-scale games of soccer, football, or baseball, you need something the size of a neighborhood park, not a backyard.
So if you don’t put grass in your yard, what do you do instead? It’s somewhat more expensive in the beginning, but designing your property as a series of garden rooms is a great alternative. I did that with SmartDwelling I. Outdoor rooms that entice you to come outdoors acclimate you to the local environment and help you to live in season. There’s almost nothing you can do that has a bigger impact, because living in season means you can leave your heat pump off for long stretches, and the most efficient machine is one that is off.
I’ll blog soon about the particulars of building garden rooms instead of empty yards... there’s a wealth of really cool stuff you can do. The bottom line is that you can create a landscape full of outdoor living spaces, surrounded by lush landscape rather than just an empty lawn. Which sounds more enticing?
~Steve Mouzon

the Long Tail of Housing Demand

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:00:58 -0500

Builders made the same strategic blunder countless times leading up to the Meltdown: they focused on the sweet spot of the market. Today, the market is deluged with strikingly similar Sweet Spot Houses all over America. This may cause the housing recovery to take years longer than necessary, because banks won’t lend again and builders can’t build again until most of this huge oversupply of homogeneous houses is sold.
Chris Anderson’s excellent book The Long Tail describes the discovery of a powerful phenomenon of our aggregated age: The curve of available products begins with the “big head” of blockbusters and superstars on the left, but then drops off “sickeningly.” See how the curve seems to go quickly to zero? Before Amazon, everything after the big drop-off was invisible because no bricks-and-mortar store could afford to carry stuff with sales so low. Amazon was the first to aggregate these low sellers (books, to begin with) online, and what they discovered was that the sales curve extends further out to the right than anyone previously imagined. If companies are able to provide a nimble way of searching so that you can short-cut to the niche you want, the “long tail” of the sales curve extends almost forever. In many markets, there may actually be more sales in the long tail than in the short head of super-sellers and greatest hits, just as more light reaches your eye on a clear night from the billions of stars too faint to see than from the thousand or so that are actually bright enough to see.
New home construction pre-Meltdown had an extremely big head and essentially no tail at all because very little of the product fell outside of the sweet spot in most markets (3 bedrooms, 2-1/2 baths, 2,000 to 3,000 square feet... you know the drill.) Most variations involved the addition of bedrooms, baths, square footage, and extra living spaces, but even the mansions were still almost always the same house type: single-family detached, sitting near the middle of the lot. There were townhouses and condos as the housing supply curve dropped down, too, but even though they were not detached, their bedroom and bath counts were likely close to the norm.
And the crazy thing was that the so-called sweet spot wasn’t necessarily even the sweet spot of the market, but rather the sweet spot of previous sales. Running a business this way is closely akin to driving by looking in the rear-view mirror, where you can clearly see what you’ve just run over, but not what you’re about to hit.
There’s another half of the long tail equation that isn’t being discussed much. Anderson deals primarily with the long tail of supply, but that long tail would not exist except for the long tail of demand. It’s especially instructive to look at the long tail of housing demand, because it’s demand that’s been hideously under-served since even before World War II.
Consider this: people may have a home-owning life of sixty years or more, from their early to mid-twenties to their early to mid-eighties. The period of time that children are at home (assuming the heads of household ever have children) is roughly 30% of that time. So for 70% or so of your home-owning life, you’re saddled with a house larger than what you need. And it isn’t just size, either. The types are so similar that it seems we’ve forgotten how much housing once varied.
Take a walk through great old neighborhoods like the French Quarter of New Orleans, and you’ll find housing types we haven’t built in a hundred years: corner court mansion units, garden court flats, mews units on their own mews courts plus B-street mews units, carriage house units, double cottages, sideyard houses, corner court houses, townhouses & double townhouses, rear court houses, studio flats (real ones, not the ones that just use that name meaninglessly,) workshop lofts, and the live-work units that were the staples of Main Streets all across America. And that’s just some of the house types you’ll find in the French Quarter, which is just one neighborhood of one American city. Each old city has its own wealth of home types. Look at Beacon Hill in Boston, for example. Or Charleston. Or Alexandria.
The home types were so varied because the people were so varied... but today, the American population is more varied than ever before, even while our housing choices have become more bland. Nielsen Claritas has identified 66 market segments in their PRIZM system. Zimmerman/Volk Associates, long recognized as the foremost forward-looking market analysts of the New Urbanism, has identified a similar number of household types: everything from the New Bohemians to the Rustic Elders. None of these segments constitutes more than just a few percent of the market.
The Sweet Spot House that the builders once drooled over actually meets the needs of probably 20% of the market by serving several segments well: Full-Nest Exurbanites, New Town Families, Heartland Families, etc. But the other 80%? They’re poorly served, but the builders don’t feel like they can build for them because their segments might only be 1% to 3% of any given market. But that’s a dark illusion... the builders would be much better off serving these markets. Here’s why:
Let’s say that you’re a Young Digerati, and that a garden court flat would be perfect for you. Typically containing only one bedroom but just off Main Street, garden court flats are often a short walk from a B&B where guests can stay when they’re in town. It’s also a short walk from most of your other necessities of life, which suits you perfectly. Problem is, nobody is building them... nor have they built them in the past hundred years.
Now let’s say that you’re living in a city of 250,000 people, and that Young Digeratis are only 2% of the population of the city. That means there are 5,000 of you. Because Americans move roughly every seven years or so, that means that in any given year in your town, there are about 700 of you that are looking for a new house. What do you think a builder’s chance of success would be building 30 or 40 of these units that perfectly suit Young Digeratis, versus building the same old Sweet Spot House and competing with every other builder in town? The principles of supply and demand tell us that when there are 40 units that 700 people want, the clever builder who builds the garden court flats would have a Young Digerati bidding war on his hands.
Everyone would be better off. The Young Digerati population would love it. The builder would do strikingly better than ever before. And the town would be a more interesting place. It’s time for the building industry to wake up and start satisfying the long tail of the housing market.
~Steve Mouzon

Original Green Book is Finished

Mon, 8 Feb 2010 12:47:25 -0500

18 months after work on the book began, the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability] is complete! Since last posting to this blog on January 22, well over 100 new pages have been written. Here’s how it’s laid out:
The first chapter, “What’s the Problem?” is a Top 10 list of the things we’re doing to be green, but which are not winning strategies. Each has a secret (or with some, not-so-secret) flaw that prevents it from achieving real sustainability.
The second chapter, “What Can We Do?” is also a Top 10 listing of the most important principles that should underlie real sustainability. Several of the mechanisms described here are nowhere to be found in most current green discussions, but they should be. I serialized these first two chapters on this blog, beginning precisely one year ago today... wow, I didn’t realize that until just now! Because of many comments posted on this blog, and also much off-list email discussions, many parts of these chapters have been refined, so what’s contained in the book will be improved from what you read here.
The third chapter, “What’s the Plan?” outlines the Original Green, which begins with sustainable places, in which we can then build sustainable buildings. Sustainable places are nourishable, accessible, serviceable, and secure. Sustainable buildings are lovable, durable, flexible, and frugal.
Everything until this point deals with big-picture stuff that needs to be done by regions, by cultures, and by nations. The fourth chapter, however, gets personal. “What Can I Do?” is a Top 10 list of the things that each of us can do individually to help become more green. It begins with things we can do easily, and moves up to the life-changing things that make the greatest impact.
The book closes with a Resources chapter that includes websites, blogs, Apps, and books that support Original Green principles. After the index and glossary, it closes with a page on the New Urban Guild’s Project:SmartDwelling.
My editor is coming down from New York this weekend, and I anticipate we’ll spend several days on her edits. Once we’re finished, it will be ready to go to press. The target release date is March 15... stay tuned!
~Steve Mouzon

How the Simpler Way Works

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:28:49 -0500

We discussed the Simpler Way recently in this post; now, let’s take a closer look at how it works. The engine of the Simpler Way is the Classical-Vernacular Spectrum. The most classical building in an American state is often the state’s supreme court building or the state capitol. The most vernacular building in the state is a very simple barn. Everything else is located somewhere in between.
The classical end of the Classical-Vernacular Spectrum is the most refined architecture, and is very broad, spreading across entire continents. Europe, North America, and South America all share Western Classicism as their classical ideal. The most refined architecture of Asia, on the other hand, is a very different thing. But for the purposes of this discussion, let’s look at the Classical-Vernacular Spectrums of Europe and the Americas.
While many cultures of these continents have long shared the same classical ideal for their most refined architecture, the vernacular end of the spectrum is widely varied, as illustrated in the diagram above. The six places shown each once had strong living traditions of place-making and building-making based on regional conditions, climate, and culture.
the Regional Conditions
Regional conditions include things like topography: is it a mountainous region, a coastal plain, or a prairie region? The most sustainable ways of building are different in each. What are the most readily available building materials in the region? This matters more as we try to find closer sources of materials with which to build. And what natural risks does the region face? People living in places frequented by hurricanes need to build in a certain way in order to have a good chance of surviving them, while people living in earthquake zones have different concerns to have the best chances of survival. Some regions face conditions so severe that you can’t build strongly enough to endure them, such as tornadoes or volcanic eruptions. In those places, your only choice is to simply rebuild. But most other conditions are survivable if the architecture is smart enough.
the Regional Climate
The region’s climate is the most obvious source of sustainability patterns. Places that are hot and humid need far different architecture from places that are cold and dark, or places that are hot and dry. Some regional green patterns have to do with ways of either welcoming the warmth of the sun in cooler places (or in cooler times of the year in temperate places) or excluding its heat in hotter places (or hotter times of the year in temperate places, of course.) Other regional green patterns deal with moisture: In dry places, they collect water for many uses. In wet places, the bigger concern is getting water of torrential rains away from the building so the building doesn’t deteriorate and so the water doesn’t damage the surrounding landscape. Humidity is another source of green patterns. In dry places, rooms often cluster around enclosed courtyards to protect them against the wind, so that fountains and pools can create a more moist micro-climate than the surrounding bone-dry landscape. The architecture of humid regions finds ways of letting air flow freely through to lessen unhealthy growth of mold and mildew. Daylight is also a concern; places frequented by bright sunshine need shady environments where people can work, while places that are frequently cloudy and dark use many methods of enticing light into the buildings. The wind is another source of green patterns, because a cooling summer breeze is very welcome, whereas a cold winter wind is something to be deflected away. And in some places such as mountainous regions, the wind can be so strong most of the time that homes and workplaces always need to be shielded.
the Regional Culture
The human culture of the region can influence places and buildings in a number of ways. Some are as simple as color preferences, which help determine whether buildings are loved or viewed as odd foreign objects. Think of how strange a brightly-colored Guatemala courtyard house would look sitting side-by side on the street with the stone houses of a Cotswold village in England, for example. Other regional cultural influences can have a more basic effect. Regional skill sets are a classic example. Some still remain even today. For example, masonry buildings finished in stucco are still fairly affordable in Miami because that’s the way people build there. Even Habitat for Humanity builds that way, because their volunteers know how. But in the mid-South, stucco on masonry is very expensive because few people know how to do it. Once, nearly all the parts of a building depended on regional skill sets, and that may happen again as the Offshoring Reversal moves forward.
the Classical Convergence and Sustainability
So the regional conditions, climate, and culture create regional vernacular traditions as varied as the regions, but the Classical-Vernacular Spectrum of each region converges on the classical ideal as we move up the spectrum. What’s useful about that?
There’s at least one highly useful thing about this, from a green building perspective: Most places in the US didn’t have time to develop a robust Original Green living tradition between the arrival of European settlers and the beginning of the Thermostat Age. Native Americans had strong living traditions in most places, but those were discarded by the European settlers, illustrating why the regional culture is an essential part of the equation above.
The American places shown in the diagram above are some of the exceptions because they were settled so early. But for the others, how do we go about figuring out what the regional vernacular would have been had it had time to develop?
This is far more of an art than a science, but one way is to look at some of the best classical work in the region. Because good classical work must be done by a trained and thoughtful hand, there’s a good chance that if we look closely, we can see ways that the building diverges a bit from the classical ideal. Does it have more porches than what might be expected? How do its windows diverge in size, proportion, or count? What materials are used in its construction? Every place that the building diverges from the classical ideal is a potential hint at what the non-existent regional vernacular should possibly look like. And when we get to the vernacular end of the Classical-Vernacular Spectrum of the region, we’ll find the greenest architecture of the place.
the Questions
Here are two likely questions about this discussion: are we saying that highly classical architecture isn’t so green? And if the Native American architecture was so green, why not look to it for inspiration?
The Native American traditions of most regions are so organic that our culture, at least for today, would veto them. How many people do you know who would live in a teepee? Or a lodge built of sticks and branches? Architecture of the desert southwest is an exception, as it borrows much from Native American traditions.
As for the greenness of highly classical buildings, let’s consider this: clearly, they’re not so attuned to the regional climate, but highly classical buildings are usually built strongest of all, able to withstand the harshest conditions. For example, most of the highly classical buildings of the Gulf Coast were built of stone, and were untouched by Hurricane Katrina, even though lesser buildings all around them were demolished. And architecture at the top of the Spectrum is often the highest expression of the culture of that place, so while they respond less to the regional climate, they come through in spades in response to the regional culture and often the regional conditions.
Consider these aspects of responding to regional climate: highly refined public buildings such as cathedrals or courts aren’t places that you live, but rather places where you go for a limited time, then return home. Plus, you don’t get undressed there to bathe, change clothes, or to go to bed. Before the Thermostat Age, people would simply bundle up if they were going there in winter. In a Long Emergency of reduced energy sources, they could potentially do so again. Another type of highly classical building is the mansion of extremely wealthy people. No matter what the cost of energy is, the wealthiest people will always be able to power their homes. But there simply aren’t enough of these mansions in most places to make a blip on the energy consumption of the region, so as long as the people inhabiting them are OK with their utility bills, we don’t need to worry about them, either.
*******
This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is the last part of #7 in the top 10 things we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

Sharing Wisdom

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:11:52 -0500

The Sharing of Wisdom and the Involvement of Everyone are so interrelated that we could have lumped them into a single item, but they’re so important that it made more sense to tell two stories rather than one so as to cover them more thoroughly. Here’s how they fit together: The Sharing of Wisdom is essential if we hope to involve everyone in a sustainable future... and if we don’t involve everyone, we likely won’t have a sustainable future. Let’s look first at the most common ways that wisdom is already shared. Next, we’ll think about how we can do it better.
The three most common current ways of spreading wisdom, from the broadest to the highest, are public education’s way, higher education’s way, and the specialists’ way. Each has strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, those weaknesses prevent each of these ways from solving the problems of sustainability on their own. Fortunately, there’s a fourth and far more capable way that has been around since the dawn of time; we simply need to learn how to tap into it.
Public Education’s Way
Public education in most countries spreads wisdom very broadly, but not so high. It begins formally with pre-school, although parents almost always engage in some form of home-based learning before children enter their formal education. Often, it’s as simple as story-telling or reading with their children. Next comes elementary and then middle school. Formal public education in most places ends with the high school diploma.
Public education after graduation is mostly self-directed. Once, it consisted primarily of visits to the public library or to the bookstore. Today, the Internet has firmly replaced both of these as the primary resource for self-directed learning.
Public education in developed countries intends to reach all children, so it is very broad, normally having the force of law behind it to ensure that all children attend school. And while you can theoretically learn almost anything on the Internet, the fact is that people who have only a public education most often use their education for basic social and economic competencies. In other words, a public education by itself is much more likely to be used to balance a checkbook or text a message to a friend than to find a cure for cancer... or to find a solution to the mysteries of real sustainability.
Higher Education’s Way
Higher education begins with undergraduate education. It can continue with graduate degrees, and occasionally culminates in a doctorate degree.
Higher education (undergraduate in particular) can be characterized as years of listening to lectures, working through innumerable problems appropriate to your field of study, showing your work to your professors, getting graded on your work, and eventually getting a degree for all your efforts. Higher education intends to elevate students to levels of wisdom far above those which they usually obtain from public education. But it’s not very broad. If you doubt that, count the number of people in almost any crowd, then ask how many of them have at least one PhD. Normally, it’s a very small percentage.
the Specialists’ Way
A specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about only one thing. Some disagree, saying that the ultimate specialist is someone who knows absolutely everything about nothing at all. Let’s use the first, less offensive definition, and use it to look at how specialists spread wisdom.
Specialists handle a great deal of information on their chosen specialty. This information is usually more complex than information shared by the general public. In other words, specialists are less likely to discuss things like dogs, cats, and fish with their fellow-specialists, and are more likely to discuss things like Hexadecacarbonylhexarhodium, the Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineers, or the Positron Emission Tomography Scanner.
Each of these terms is shared only by the specialists that deal with it, and each term has a long story behind it. Learning everything about the Positron Emission Tomography Scanner might take years, for example. Because of this, specialists have what amounts to their own private language of technical jargon, each term of which is embedded with lots of meaning that goes unspoken most of the time. These private languages aren’t the result of some nefarious scheme, either; they’re the necessary by-product of specializing in something.
If you tried to read any of the three terms above out loud, you know that they’re each quite a mouthful. The specialists noticed that, too. So in order to save time, they often use acronyms or codes to shorten them. So Hexadecacarbonylhexarhodium becomes Rh6CO16, Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineers becomes RED HORSE, and the Positron Emission Tomography Scanner becomes the PET. Any slight chance that someone outside a particular specialty might understand specialist jargon goes to zero when the jargon turns into acronyms.
This moves the chances of the specialists’ knowledge spreading outside their specialty from “slim” to “none.” So what are we left with? We have one system (public education) that spreads low-level information like reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic, broadly. At the other end, we have a system that spreads extremely high-level information, but only to a tiny group of specialists, and to make matters worse, it protects that information with an indecipherable secret language known only to members of the specialty. In the middle, we have a system that spreads mid-level information to a middling degree.
The problem should be clear when we consider the fact that while many of the best minds around the world have been working for years to try to figure out how to live sustainably today, they haven’t figured it out yet. So it’s reasonable to assume that once they do, it’s likely to be some extremely high-level wisdom. But if we’re going to achieve sustainability, that information needs to spread broadly. Clearly, none of the primary methods we’re currently using are up to the task. We need a system capable of the best of all our systems.
Nature’s Way
It turns out that there is such a system. And it has been around for a long time. It’s nature’s way. Consider this: the most complex wisdom humans have ever encountered is the human genetic code. Scientists around the world worked for many years just to document the entire human genome, and they’re just now beginning the long process of unlocking what it all means. In all likelihood, the task of unlocking it will still be going on a century from now.
But stop and think for a moment about how that genetic material spreads. Take humans, for example. As we know, the process begins when two humans are attracted to each other. They mate. They breed. (Not necessarily in that order.) And the genetic material is passed on.
But almost none of the people replicating genetic material are human genome scientists. Nearly all of them, in fact, are completely unschooled in genetics, and most have only on-the-job training in the replication of genetic material. How is this possible?
Nature’s way involves a really nifty trick: nature takes the great wisdom of the genetic code and embeds it in beauty. This lowers the bar unimaginably, so that people only have to consider one another attractive; they don’t even need a passing knowledge of genetics in order to pass on some genes.
Looking at the young woman in this picture having lunch with a friend on the streets of Paris, one might conclude that she has a good chance of passing on her genetic material if she so chooses because she has enough beauty to attract a choice of mates. But if you told her that, she might respond “Yes, but there’s so much more to me than just my appearance,” and she’d be right. Life is that way, too. There’s so much more to life than just the process of passing it on. Architecture can work in a somewhat similar way. Here’s how:
Someone might work for years to work out the best possible eave for their region. They might do sun angle or wind speed calculations, and take all sorts of other things into consideration. But if they hope to spread the design of that eave by asking people to work out the same calculations (like higher education asks us to work the problems of our field of study) then it’s impossible that the eave would spread. If, however, the designer embeds the wisdom they’ve spent years to discover into beauty so that people love that eave, then it can spread all over the region. It helps if the people have a passing knowledge that the design is good for sun and wind, but all the really have to know is “we love this.”
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #2 in the top 10 things we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

the Localized Operations

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:57:38 -0500

Sustainability is all but impossible if we have to condition the world, but it becomes easier and easier as we’re able to condition smaller pieces of it. Look carefully at the image below. Can you see the tractor-trailer rig on the bridge in the distance? The cab is barely visible, and the driver is microscopic. But Waffle House has the unenviable task of attracting that driver (and fellow-travelers on the bridge) to come for breakfast. So what do they have to do? Let’s take a look:
The first thing they are forced to do is to erect the 200 foot tall sign that probably costs $200,000, because travelers at highway speeds will only be on the bridge for a few seconds, and if Waffle House doesn’t entice them to exit by then, they’ve lost their business. Next, because their entire customer base arrives by motor vehicle, they must pave every square yard of their site not occupied by their building for parking to accommodate their customers’ cars (the semis must park on the street.) So is there any shadow of doubt why poor Waffle House has such ugly buildings? Of course not! They’ve completely blown their budget on the sign and the parking lot!
Contrast that with this shop on Nantucket. The man in this picture (who happens to be renowned New Urbanist Mike Watkins) arrived on foot to this storefront, and is standing less than ten feet from the sign, which was probably procured for something much closer to $200 than $200,000. Because this store doesn’t have to operate at a wide extent to attract customers, they’re able to spend their money on other things... like being able to afford high rent in a nice building on Nantucket. Which place would you rather be?
This issue, however, goes far beyond desirable places. Everywhere we look, there are problems that can easily be solved if we’re able to do it small, but that become very difficult if we have to do the same thing larger. Consider this extreme example: What if we were able to create clothing that made people comfortable in all but the most ridiculous environments? So if the Boise office is 35°F, no problem... I’m toasty in my enviro-suit. Or if it’s 98°F in Orlando, no problem again... I’m completely cool. Conditioning the person rather than the entire building means the cost should be much less. The example is extreme, but it illustrates the point that as the area we have to condition gets smaller, less energy is required.
We operated on this basis for almost all of history. Three Dog Night was a ‘60’s rock band, but long before that, it was a strategy for staying warm... and alive. A one-dog night was pretty cold, where you let one dog into your bed to sleep on your feet and keep them warm. A two-dog night was colder, and a three-dog night was the coldest night. The canopy bed (like the alcove bed in Katrina Cottage VIII) worked in a similar way... close the curtains, and your body heat (and that of your bed-mate) would keep you toasty even when it was absolutely frigid throughout the rest of the house.
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #3 in the top 10 items we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

the Expanded Comfort Range

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:33:10 -0500

The human comfort range has shrunk to its smallest size in human history over the past half-century. Our ancestors had a comfort range of probably 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Near 90 degrees, they might cool themselves with a hand-held fan. Near 60 degrees, they would put on an extra layer of clothes. Today, however, there are Thermostat Wars all over the US over 2 degrees. Don’t laugh... you likely have participated in some of them at some point yourself. And Jimmy Carter lost his re-election campaign in part because he famously asked Americans to wear sweaters and cut the thermostat down in winter to help with the energy crisis of that day. The sweater therefore became the only article of clothing to ever play a role in ending an American presidency.
Ask any mechanical engineer to describe the impact of a 30 degree comfort range versus a 2 degree comfort range. She will tell you that a 2 degree comfort range requires the conditioning equipment to run basically all the time, because outdoor temperatures are almost never within that 2 degree range. And if the equipment is going to be running almost all the time, why even have windows that are operable? So they seal up the buildings where you can’t ever open a window to catch a breeze.
A 30 degree range, on the other hand, means that there are several months per year when the air outside is within the comfort range at least part of the day. So if the building is designed cleverly enough, it can condition itself for most of the year in many places, requiring mechanical conditioning only in more extreme weather.
How do we expand the human comfort range again, getting it back close to where it has been for almost all of recorded human history? Carter’s approach of telling us what we ought to do is no more likely to work now than it did then, as discussed earlier in “the Fate of Ought-To”. People rarely do what they ought to do, and resent being told what they ought to do. But they often do what they want to do. So what’s the most effective way of assuring that people want to expand their comfort range?
The best known way is to entice them to go outdoors. As people spend more time outdoors, they become more acclimated to the local environment and need less full-body conditioning when they return indoors.
My own experience provides a good example. I moved to Miami in the fall of 2003. My home on Miami Beach is just a few blocks from my office, so I walk. Within a ten minute walk of my office, I can get to dozens of restaurants, several grocery stores, a hardware store, a drug store, my bank, my doctor, my accountant, and lots more. And it isn’t like walking alongside the highway, either... they are highly interesting walks through beautiful places.
Because I walked everywhere, cranking the car only a couple times per week, I quickly became so acclimated to the local environment during that first fall and winter, which is almost always mild in Miami. As springtime turned into summer, I noticed something strange: so long as I was in the shade and could feel a breeze, I was never uncomfortable. That is still true today, almost seven years after moving here: I have never been uncomfortable in Miami so long as there’s a breeze in the shade. And this is a place where the basketball team is named “the Heat.”
The difference between running the mechanical conditioning equipment all the time and cutting it off several months of the year is so big that it dwarfs any equipment efficiency increases we could hope for in the near future. So which is better: spending lots of money for slightly more efficient equipment that will have a small positive effect on energy use, or spending to create great outdoor public and private realms that will have a large positive effect on energy use, with the added bonus that people get great pleasure out of them?
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #4 in the top 10 items we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

the Source of Stuff

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:12:03 -0500

This one seems so elementary that you might think it’s an item we don’t even need to talk about. The further something has to travel while it’s being made and sold, the more energy it usually consumes. And common sense tells us that we should be saving energy, not using more energy to make the same stuff. So the most sustainable source of stuff should therefore be nearby, right?
Our recent track record, however, says that we have other priorities. Try this test: Turn your head and look around the room. Most of the things you’re looking at have traveled thousands of miles to get to you, from the places where the resources were extracted from the earth to the places where the parts were made to the factory where the whole thing was assembled to the warehouse where it was stored to the shop where you bought it. Common sense tells us that being green is a pipe dream if nearly everything we touch has thousands of Embodied Miles. Some complex things like cars may actually have more Embodied Miles than it takes to go all the way around the world.
I read recently, for example, about a particular make and model of car that happened to be from Japan. Or at least the corporate offices were located in Japan. The resources were extracted in mines around the world. Many of the parts were made in Japan, but then the parts were shipped to a factory in the United States for assembly. Finally, some of those cars were shipped back to Japan and other Asian nations to be sold.
In recent years, Everyday Low Prices have been the most important things in commerce. We’ve voted with our wallets, and Everyday Low Prices are more important to us than the countless small hometown businesses we’ve lost because they weren’t quite so cheap. Everyday Low Prices are more important to us than the millions of jobs that got offshored because we wouldn’t work for so much less. Nobody wants to waste money when they’re buying toilet paper, even if we’re wasting towns and wasting our fellow-citizens’ jobs to do it. But because we don’t want to waste money, this may just be one of the only items in this chapter that takes care of itself. Here’s why: As fuel costs rise, as they must certainly do as tens of millions more cars get on the road every year in China and India alone, and as oil supplies dwindle, it’s obvious that the cost of shipping stuff around the world to get to us simply can’t be sustained.
What does a sustainable future look like? Sustainable things are things which we can keep going in a healthy way long into an uncertain future. There are many things we don’t know about an uncertain future, especially including what the cost of transportation will be, so the only certain sources of stuff in an uncertain future will be those that are nearby. And it’s not just the cost of transportation. The world has painfully seen recently how wars can start over resources like oil.
One thing we must do if we want to keep things going in a healthy way is to quit throwing so much stuff away. The Story of Stuff tells an incisive tale of the consequences of our consuming ways in recent decades. The Story of Stuff deals mainly with consumer goods, but we throw other things away, too... like buildings. Including factories... remember the term “Rust Belt”?
But that’s not all... if we want to keep things going in a healthy way, then our sources needs to be close enough that we can keep an eye on them. Making things in distant lands means that we can’t see the horrible conditions people (including children) must endure in the sweatshops, but that’s only the beginning. Making things overseas also means that we can’t see how bad the environment is being trashed to make our stuff until the effects go global.
How close is close enough? That depends mainly on two things: the weight of the item versus its value and the complexity of the item that’s being made. The heavier stuff is, the closer the source should be to where it’s used because heavier stuff requires more energy to ship than lighter stuff. Long before the gasoline engine, people shipped spices from one continent to another because the spices were so light enough and valuable enough that a chain of camels could deliver a lot of value on each trip to the traders that owned them. Bricks, on the other hand, were often made from clay dug up in the back yard. That may be a bit extreme today, but you get the picture.
The complexity of the item matters because its possible to have a cabinet shop on every corner of a town center, but it’s not possible to do the same with a car factory because while the cost of setting up and equipping a simple cabinet shop might be less than the cost of a car, the cost of a car factory is hundreds of millions of dollars. The more complex things must be made more centrally and shipped further in order to eventually pay back their investment... just not as far as we’ve been shipping them in recent years.
It’s not yet apparent how far is too far, but the best rule is: the closer the better. The best policy would be to live within the same region as most of our sources of stuff. Kind of like living within our means.
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #5 in the top 10 items we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

China Car Sales Overtake US

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:02:53 -0500

The BBC and other sources are reporting this morning that car sales in China surpassed the US for the first time in 2009. But it’s not simply the fact that they did so, but how they did so: China’s car sales surged a staggering 53% over the previous year, to 13.6 million vehicles. And common sense tells us that there’s no end in sight. Here’s why: As discussed last year in the 2-1/2 Billion People post, the American middle-class suburban lifestyle is now no longer the world’s biggest ecological problem. Now, the biggest problem is the export of the enticing image of that lifestyle to 2-1/2 billion people in China and India who have previously lived very low-impact agrarian lifestyles. And now, they want the things they see us having.
Nearly two years ago, USA Today reported on the export of American suburbia to China. And today’s reports are only the tip of the iceberg. Think about it for a minute: There’s basically one car per person in the US, counting the people who don’t drive, because many of us have more than one car. It’s that way because it’s what you need to live in suburbia. It’s not possible to live the American middle-class suburban lifestyle without a car, because you have to drive everywhere in suburbia. So if China and India adopt our lifestyle then it’s reasonable to assume that they’ll need a lot of cars, too.
How many? Let’s take a really conservative approach for a moment and assume that they’re a lot smarter than us, and figure out how to achieve our lifestyle with 60% fewer cars. In other words, 4 cars per 10 people rather than our 10 cars for 10 people. Even then, they’ll need a billion cars that don’t even exist today for those 2-1/2 billion people. How long will that take? If sales keep increasing at the rate they did from 2008 to 2009, then the billion new cars will be on the road by 2018.
This is a problem for so many mammoth reasons that it’s hard to know where to start, so let’s start with the simplest and least debatable one: the demand side of the Law of Supply & Demand. If you take the US’s roughly 300 million cars and add the billion cars to it, you’re quadrupling the number of cars competing for gas. The Law of Supply & Demand says that as demand goes up, prices go up, assuming that supply is stable. How much? That’s hard to say, but this much is certain: if the demand quadruples with a steady supply, the price doesn’t just quadruple; it has the potential of going much higher because it turns into a bidding war when it’s the economic survival question of: “How am I going to get to work?”
The other side of the Supply & Demand equation isn’t looking so good, either. Peak Oil is an idea that was first proposed in 1956 by M. King Hubbert, a Shell geoscientist. In a nutshell, Peal Oil is the point in time when the world reaches its maximum oil production and begins to decline. Peak Oil in the United States occurred in 1970. Today, the US produces roughly half the oil that it did then. Peak Oil has been hotly-debated in recent times, but now, the reality is beginning to set in: the most optimistic estimates are that worldwide Peak Oil will occur around 2020. Many believe that Peak Oil is occurring right now.
What happens when you combine a quadrupling of demand with a dwindling supply? Things could get downright scary, as Jim Kunstler described in The Long Emergency. Jim’s a friend of mine, and I respect him highly. His books from several years ago read like history now, because he successfully predicted so many things, from details of the Meltdown to smaller stuff like the Somali pirates. But I’m an optimist, and I believe that we can come out OK... if we get our house in order now.
What will it take to do that? Immediately stop building additional suburbia... well, OK, the Meltdown took care of that. But as population grows, we’ll eventually have to build at a larger scale again, and we need to make sure that the places we build and re-build are those that don’t require a car for basic economic survival: places that are accessible by a range of transportation choices, especially including the self-propelled choices of walking and biking. And we need to build and re-build places that are serviceable, where people can get the basic services of life within walking distance, and where making a living where you’re living is a choice for a lot more of us than it is today. In short, we need to be building and re-building Original Green places again.
~Steve Mouzon

the Many Uses

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 07:59:43 -0500

[All images in this post are from Katrina Cottage VIII]
If we hope to stem the tide of consumption, then we need to learn how to design and build things that have many uses again. In other words, double- or triple-duty is just the starting point. Today, we’ve not only lost this ability, but now, we have extras of everything instead.
It begins at the scale of the neighborhood. Because there’s no neighborhood coffee shop within walking distance, some homes now have a “cafe” in the kitchen, with a cute little awning over the espresso machine. Because there’s no neighborhood cinema, people feel that they need a home theatre. Because there are no parks within a couple blocks, people need big back yards for the kids.
But it’s not all the neighborhood’s fault. Secondary bedrooms in many homes sold just before the Meltdown had better-appointed third and fourth bedrooms than master suites a generation before. If we were to believe the floor plans, then it was the birthright of every American child to have a walk-in closet and compartmentalized private bath by the time they moved out of the nursery.
All these things would be fine if we had unlimited money to buy stuff with and unlimited energy to run that stuff with. But that’s not the case, either on a global scale or on a personal scale, as we have all discovered to varying degrees of pain since the Meltdown.
Double-duty (or more) is not a new idea. Ask your grandparents. The “waste not, want not” ethic was central to nearly every culture around the world less than a century ago. Read Benjamin Franklin and it’s clear that America was founded by people who valued frugality instead of celebrating consumption.
I’ve had a recent close encounter with the need for extreme double-duty. I met with Andrés Duany on the Saturday after Hurricane Katrina and we laid out the foundation principles of what would soon come to be known as the Katrina Cottages. The idea was to help people gain a foothold on their property again by building tiny cottages that were appropriate to the architectural needs of the region, excellent in design, and deliverable by all major construction methods: site-built, panelized, modular, and manufactured.
I put out a call to the New Urban Guild for Katrina Cottage designs. Andrés, his partner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and the Congress for the New Urbanism orchestrated the largest planning event in human history (the Mississippi Renewal Forum) on the Gulf Coast just six weeks after the hurricane, with nearly 200 planners, architects, and other professionals participating.
But even before that event, nearly two dozen Katrina Cottages had been designed by Erika Albright, Bill Allison, Bill Dennis, Victor Deupi, Frank Greene, Gary Justiss, Alex Latham, Matt Lister, Tom Low, Eric Moser, Dan Osborne, Julie Sanford, Laura Welsh, and myself. All work was done for free, of course. During the Forum, several more Katrina Cottages were designed, including the little yellow one by Marianne Cusato that has since received a great deal of press. Since the Forum, still others have been designed by an expanding circle of architects and designers.
One of the biggest lessons we learned is that you can’t just shrink a house and expect people to like it. If you take away size, you’ve gotta give something else in return. Ask someone to move into a cottage half the size of their current house, and they’ll likely turn you down. But if the cottage lives twice as big as its footage, then that’s a different story.
This is an idea I call the Smaller & Smarter Cottage, and it has other benefits, too. In order to be Smaller & Smarter, the cottage has to be able to store a lot more stuff per foot than the bigger house, but the entire floor plan can’t be just one big closet; everything has to be rethought. We even carve into the walls themselves, leaving no cubic inch unused. Why shouldn’t interior walls be used for shelving, rather than just wasted? The side-benefit to this is the fact that the storage methods (such as shelving walls) that are visible can be quite attractive, and contribute mightily to the cottage’s charm.
There was another problem, too: the first generation of Katrina Cottages didn’t expand very well. This is because in a tiny cottage, the exterior walls quickly get taken up with things that are difficult to move, like kitchen cabinets, bathrooms, and closets. So we developed a new type of Katrina Cottage: the Kernel Cottage. Kernel Cottage I is the plan on the left below. To the right, you can see one of the many ways it can expand.
The second generation of Katrina are called “kernel cottages” because, like a seed, they are designed to grow easily in many directions. People can buy a smaller cottage today than they’ll need in the future if the path to expansion is obvious. Before home mortgages, everyone built this way. Thomas Jefferson lived in one of the little garden pavilions on the back side of Monticello for several years while he was building the main house. If Jefferson could do it, why can’t we?
Interestingly, one of the things people enjoy most about the character of pre-mortgage houses is the story they tell in the incremental way they have grown from one generation to the next. But it wasn’t designed that way from the beginning, as we might suppose today. Rather, it’s the character that emerged from many hands working over time.
Beyond the obvious savings in building materials, there’s a huge, three-pronged sustainability bonus that comes from building much smaller to begin with, then adding on later: First, because the square footage is a lot less, it costs much less to condition. Second, because rooms in tiny cottages are likely to have windows on both sides, they cross-ventilate wonderfully in summer, and also daylight beautifully. This saves even more in conditioning expense. Finally, if the designer really does their job and the cottage lives much larger than its footage, people might just discover that they don’t need to add such a big addition when it comes time to expand.
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #6 in the top 10 items we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

LEED for Homes Awards - or - How To Shoot Yourself in the Foot

Fri, 8 Jan 2010 12:13:36 -0500

Residential Architect just did an article on the LEED for Homes Awards, and I’ve gotta confess that when I first saw some of these, I checked the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April Fool’s Day. The very first Original Green blog post detailed how we lost the first green revolution thirty years ago. If these awards are any indication, we’re in danger of losing this one, too. The Engineering vs. Design post further describes the danger. Simply put, people will only tolerate sustainability for so long if its artifacts aren’t lovable. How many people would look at the house above and say “I love this”?
But it isn’t just the thoroughly regrettable design of this house that’s problematic. It also apparently is located somewhere in sprawl for two reasons: the lot appears large, and the front-loaded double garage make it obvious that it’s located in an auto-dominated place. If you have to drive everywhere, then the carbon footprint of the building is meaningless. This is a classic example of one of the problems of the Carbon Focus: looking at the carbon footprint of the building, rather than the carbon footprint of the inhabitation of the building. Most of these award-winners have these problems... and others, too. Let’s have a look:
I’ll begin and end with two that have the most promise, with the others in between. This project, Rosewood Hills, appears to be making some attempts to be walkable... at least there’s a sidewalk. And the houses make some attempt to be lovable. And it not only has retail shops and parks in the neighborhood, according to the website, but is an infill project located within walking distance of a number of nearby services and attractions.
This should all be applauded... kudos to LEED for selecting this one. But it’s not without problems, judging from the photos. The porches are far too narrow to be useful, and the lower level porch is too low, especially without a frontage fence. This isn’t about aesthetics; it’s about what works. We now know how to design porches and fences so people will sit on the porches and visit with their neighbors walking by. The porches shown here, because they ignore these things, have become expensive decoration rather than very useful outdoor living rooms. And it’s not just the fact that sittable porches are an important part of the social glue that transforms co-inhabitants of a place into neighbors... there’s also a huge underlying benefit of outdoor rooms and gardens that most people don’t realize: when you spend enough time outdoors, you get more acclimated to the local environment and need less full-body conditioning when you return indoors... so the heat pump doesn’t have to run as much. (See Item 3 on Garden Rooms.)
Also, what in the world is it doing with dark asphalt roofs? The project is located in Columbia, South Carolina, where it’s hot much of the year. Reflective metal roofs reflect a high percentage of the sun’s heat away from the house, so they’re a great passive cooling device. Also, they last far longer than asphalt shingles which, by the way, are made from fossil fuels and are not recycled.
This one is simply trying to jam too much ugliness onto the face of the building. They bulldoze buildings in a couple decades for being less ugly than this. How unsustainable is it to continue building things that are so quickly discarded? This is called a “snout house” because the protruding garage pointing squarely at the street often resembles a pig’s snout. Snout houses are almost always built in unwalkable (and therefore unsustainable) places.
This one appears to have the biggest budget of all the houses in the story... and technically, it’s not a snout house because the porch sticks out further than the double garage. But look at that street frontage: totally blank! Not one window. Eyes on the street, particularly at street level, are one of the most important factors in making a neighborhood safe. Unsafe places are unsustainable places, because people won’t stay.
One other thing... see the metal fence? In real life, you have to get your car into the garage, so over half of the fence couldn’t be there if this wasn’t a model home used for sales. And over half of the landscaping wouldn’t be there, either... it would be replaced with a double-wide driveway. Sidewalks crossed frequently by double-wide driveways are unsafe and unpleasant places to walk, so it’s a fairly sure bet that houses like this are built in unwalkable (and therefore unsustainable) places.
Nice photo... the fading sunset behind huge expanses of windows glowing out onto the snowy evening. What’s wrong with this picture? The smartest windows I’m aware of are from a company called Serious Materials. They’re several times more efficient than most windows: their best window has an R-value of 11. But the thinnest batt of fiberglass wall insulation you can buy is R-11, so by the time you add the sheathing and wall finishes, that means that the cheapest wall it’s legal to build is a better insulator than the very best window. So large expanses of glass are almost always a bad idea, except in the most unique climates. So how did this house win an award? It likely had to do some other very clever things to make up for the heat loss. Clever is good. But why not get the common-sense stuff right to begin with, so you’re not forced to be so clever?
Part of the cleverness in this case can be seen tacked on the roof: two huge L-shaped banks of photovoltaic solar collectors with what appears to be a smaller hot-water collector high in the middle. And I’ve gotta hand it to them for at least making the collectors parallel with the roof so they don’t stand out so much. But it’s not good enough because they’re still ugly blotches on the roof. Solar collectors were torn off by the millions in the decade after the end of the last Green Revolution when people said “I don’t care if that hideous thing is saving me money; get it off my roof!” Collectors should either be incorporated into the roof design, or the building should be designed in such a way that they disappear entirely.
Modernism has a terrible track record for lovability. If you doubt this, drive around any American town and find out what fraction of 1% of the houses are Modernist. But this one is fairly benign... style is not the main problem here. Rather, it’s the fact that this house nearly turns its back on the street. Only one tiny window really faces the street... the one beside the garage door. The rest are nearly hidden behind a tall concrete wall protecting the entry court from the sidewalk... and from any chance of getting acquainted with the would-be neighbors. Clearly, this house contributes nothing to the walkability of the subdivision. If other houses follow suit, it’s highly unlikely to become a sustainable place.
Here’s the last one, which is promising on several counts. It’s a 42-unit apartment building with lots of PV solar panels on the roof. It’s located in California, so the architecture seems to fit the regional character fairly well, from what we can tell in this photo. And the creation of the courtyard in the middle is promising; it could end up being one of those outdoor rooms mentioned earlier that entices people outdoors so they become more acclimated to the local environment.
High-density housing can contribute to making a sustainable place... when it’s connected. But as you can see here, this appears to be plopped in the middle of a parking lot. It’s obviously not attached to a Main Street. That means everyone has to drive to get anywhere... and surely we’ve learned by now that a place can’t be sustainable if it makes you drive everywhere... or have we?
Here’s the bottom line: an award program should award projects that are exemplary on many counts, and that get the basics right. The LEED rating system is made up of prerequisite requirements and credits. If you don’t get the prerequisites right, then your project is out... you have no shot at getting any credits. The same standard should be applied to an awards program for green houses: get the basics right first. And the basics include building in a sustainable place, which is a place that is nourishable, accessible, serviceable, and securable. The basics also include building in a way that is lovable, durable, flexible, and frugal. And the frugality should begin with the natural things, then using mechanical things to bridge the gap. If the basics (prerequisites) aren’t right, then things like the number of PV solar panels on the roof don’t matter nearly so much.
~Steve Mouzon

the Simpler Way

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 16:26:49 -0500

Humanity has, for almost all of recorded history, had an excellent way to build simply and control costs, but we discarded this method in most places roughly a century ago. Today, we seem bent on getting the look we want, even if it means we have to build with plastic wrap and duct tape. What was that simpler way, and why does it matter to sustainability?
The simpler way is something known in some architectural circles as the Classical/Vernacular Spectrum. The most classical building in a state or province might be the state capitol or the state supreme court building. The most vernacular building is a very simple barn. Everything else is somewhere in between these two ends of the Classical/Vernacular Spectrum.
the Image Problem
Most of us living today have spent our entire lives in the era of “ticky-tacky houses,” so it’s hard to even imagine how the simpler way worked. Let’s first consider how today’s method works: Developments most likely begin in the offices of the marketing strategist, who comes up with an image of the place. Maybe they call it Fox Run, and infuse the marketing package with naturalistic pictures. But of course, what Fox Run really means is “the place where the foxes will never run again.” Or maybe it’s a more refined image, like Georgian Estates, with pictures of fine brick buildings from the days of King George III. The specific image is unimportant... the point is that a place today starts with an image. Here’s why that’s a problem:
the Image Paradox
As the quality of the marketing strategist’s work gets better and better, the chances of the developer being able to execute the image gets worse and worse. Here’s why: If the image in the marketing package is vague (think the architectural equivalent of comfort food instead of fine French cuisine,) then it’s easier to build in a way that occasionally comes close to fulfilling the marketer’s promise. But if the image is powerful, then it evokes strong connections with images of ideal places in our minds. Because the image in our mind is strong, we know without doubt when the developer has failed to build to the image.
Portofino, shown here, has been used as a development image countless times, yet there is still only one Portofino. The better the image created by the marketing consultant, the more miserable the failure of the developer when the place doesn’t measure up.
And it isn’t just that they fail, it’s how they fail that is so regrettable. Because the development image rarely squares up with the best and most sustainable ways of building in a place, the developer is reduced to using the region’s normal construction methods to build the building shell, then slathering architectural “image goo” all over it. In most cases, the image goo is cheap plastic, foam, or other stuff that is all too often a sad and hideous fake of the material it is intended to represent. Buildings made in this way are far too easy to discard at some point in the not-too-distant future. Clearly, throwaway buildings are unsustainable.
the Classical/Vernacular Spectrum
The Classical/Vernacular Spectrum works in an entirely different way. First, it is based upon the best ways of building in a particular region. This makes image goo unnecessary because you don’t have to fake anything. Next, it is infinitely adjustable based on the needs of each building. Need something more affordable? Fine... just dial it down the Spectrum a bit. Need something more refined? Just dial it up. And it’s highly explainable to everyone from homeowners to builders to framers to masons, so that everyone understands why we build this way in this place. It’s not just about something as fleeting as architectural fashion; rather, it’s much more durable, and is characterized simply as “this is how we build here.” It’s not a style; it’s what works best, for this people and for this place.
Sustainability versus Construction Cost
Sustainability is about much more than Gizmo Green, but unless you’re building in a place where natural methods can do the whole job of conditioning a building, then more efficient machines are essential. And better machines are almost always more expensive machines. Within a fixed construction budget, something’s gotta give. In tough economic times such as the ones during which this book is being written, people usually choose the long, slow bleeding of monthly utility bills over up-front costs for energy equipment that would dramatically reduce or even eliminate the utility bills.
In order to buy the energy equipment, we must find savings elsewhere in the budget in most cases. The Classical/ Vernacular Spectrum is the most powerful cost-control device in the history of human construction. As a matter of fact, it has created more affordable housing than any other method ever devised. It’s high time to employ it once again... and put away the architectural image goo once and for all.
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #7 in the top 10 items we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

the Green Country to the Green City

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:22:19 -0500

American environmentalism makes a fundamental error when it defines the ideal condition as pristine wilderness, untouched by human hands. European environmentalists don’t make this error, because there’s no pristine wilderness left to protect in Europe. This American error makes almost all human actions a degradation of the ideal, and something to be avoided. This view places humans apart from nature, and the logical conclusion is that the best thing for the earth would be for the humans to die so that the whole world could go back to wilderness.
Some extreme city-lovers make an equally erroneous mistake in the opposite direction. They correctly observe that many metrics of environmental impact are better for city-dwellers than for those in the suburbs because urbanites don’t have to drive nearly so much. But then they take that observation and use it to argue that the city is the ideal condition, and that humans shouldn’t live elsewhere. Interestingly, the city-lovers’ view is similar to the American environmentalists’ view in this respect: by saying that we should all live in the city, it also implies that we should stay away from the wilderness and therefore not spoil it.
Both of these views are incorrect for two reasons: because each view tries to make a single setting the ideal to the exclusion of all others, and because each view misrepresents the proper relationship of humans and nature. We’ll address the single-setting problem in a moment, but let’s first look at the relationship of humans to nature. This book firmly takes that position that humans should be seen as being part of nature, not apart from nature. How can this be?
the Relationship of Humans and Nature
Let’s start by comparing a natural place and a man-made place. Look closely at this image. What do you see? This appears to be a completely natural scene, with no evidence of human intervention. What are the components of this scene? We can see green things that are living. We can also see dead wood that was once alive, but no longer is. And we can see rocks that have never been alive. And we can assume that various creatures probably scurry, slither, or crawl across this scene from time to time, even though none of them appear to be here at this moment.
Now look at this image. What do you see? This is clearly a place that has been built by humans. What are the components of this scene? We can see green things that are living. We can also see things that were once alive, but no longer are, like the wood in the shutters, windows, and doors. And we can also see brick, stone, and metal that has never lived. And we can assume that various creatures (mostly humans, but probably dogs, cats, birds, and other creatures) run or walk across this scene from time to time. Matter of fact, if you look closely, you’ll see that one fellow is in the picture now, walking along the sidewalk under the gallery.
So it’s clear that both the natural place and the man-made place have some of the same categories of materials. Their arrangement, however, is completely different. The natural scene is arranged by forces of nature, while the man-made scene is arranged by human hands for the shelter, comfort, and convenience of the humans that live there.
But we’re not the only creatures that make homes for ourselves. Birds build nests. Bees build hives. Beavers build lodges on ponds they’ve created by damming streams. Rabbits build underground warrens, as do many other burrowing creatures. Bears find and inhabit caves. Spiders build webs. Ants build anthills. Many creatures build or find their own particular type of home. The homes that humans build are more elaborate, to be sure, but we are by no means the only creatures that modify the natural world to shelter and protect ourselves.
Some creatures are exceptionally clever because rather than building their own homes, they entice other creatures to build homes for them. This is a picture of my puppy Sally. She was only three months old when this picture was taken, but she’s such a sweetheart that I bought this bed for her. And that’s not even half the story, because really, my whole house and garden is hers, too. Really clever.
Nature, then, is shaped not only by natural forces like gravity, wind, water, and sunshine, but also by all the creatures that make their homes there... including humans. But humans have built many horrific landscapes in recent years. It’s an impossible stretch to say that a coal power plant or an auto junkyard is a part of nature, isn’t it?
What standard can we use to distinguish between places like this hamlet, that can reasonably be seen as being a natural part of the landscape, and places like a boarded-up suburban strip mall, which nobody would ever consider to be a part of nature?
How about using the standard of sustain-ability:“keeping things going in a healthy way long into an uncertain future.” A “healthy way” means that we should leave it better than we found it, but it’s better yet not to leave it at all, like this hamlet that has likely been inhabited for centuries.
A sustainable place is a place where you want to stay, not a place that you want to leave. So many places built in recent decades are so bad that we discard them as quickly as possible, littering the landscape with cast-off places that are far worse than the places they replaced.
It’s clear that the error of the American environmentalists’ view of nature stems from our recent track record of building horrific places and quickly discarding them. That truly does spoil the environment. Interestingly, there has not been pristine wilderness in Europe for a very long time, so environmentalists there are much more likely to see humans as a part of nature rather than apart from nature like their American counterparts.
the Problem of Single Settings
The other problem identified earlier is the problem of establishing a single ideal environmental setting whether it’s wilderness or city, and then trying to make everything fit into that setting. People don’t live in only one type of settlement (the city, for example) We need to know how to build the city sustainably, and also its suburbs. We need to know how to build towns sustainably. We need to know how to build villages sustainably. And we need to know how to build hamlets sustainably, too.
It isn’t just the cities, suburbs, towns, villages, and hamlets that need to be sustainable. All of the parts of those cities, suburbs, towns, villages, and hamlets need to be built in a sustainable way, too.
the Transect
The best tool available today for building all of the parts of cities, towns, villages, and hamlets in a sustainable way is a set of ideas known as the Transect. It was originally developed a century ago as a management tool for the natural environment. The Natural Transect illustrated above shows a series of adjoining habitats. Each has its own set of conditions, and it’s own set of plants and animals that thrive there. For example, sea oats thrive on the dune, but would die in the ocean.
In the late 1990s, New Urbanist planner Andrés Duany realized that the Transect could also be applied to human habitat. The Transect of the human habitat begins at t1, which is most rural, and runs to t6, which is most urban. Specific Transect zones are:
t1 Natural: This zone is untouched nature, or a park designed with no apparent human hand. Nobody lives here except the forest ranger. t1 could be dangerous; something might bite you, or even eat you.
t2 Rural: This zone is largely agricultural; it is made up mainly of farms, orchards, and meadows. The human hand can be seen here, but only very lightly, like a fence across the land, or a country road disappearing in the distance.
t3 Sub-Urban: This zone is found primarily near the edges of neighborhoods, where the houses are spread more thinly. Large swaths of t3 are the main ingredient of many suburbs, which often suffer from having too much t3.
t4 General Urban: This zone makes up much of the fabric of good in-town neighborhoods. Trees line the streets, which are flanked with fences with porches behind them. Townhouses and occasional corner stores can be found in t4.
t5 Urban Center: Think of t5 as Main Street, with bustling sidewalks fronted by shops and restaurants with apartments above. Buildings sit tight to each other in t5, with offices, townhouses and apartment buildings on less busy streets.
t6 Urban Core: This zone exists in larger cities, but not towns or villages. This is where the buildings are the largest, the lights are the brightest, and things are happening until late at night.
Each Transect zone provides certain unique attributes and has certain needs. For example, we’ll see later that if we want to build sustainable places, then most of the people need to be able to make a living where they’re living. There are plenty of places to make a living in t5, but not in the less urban zones. It’s clear, then, that sustainable places need to have some t5 in nearly every neighborhood, or at least in the adjacent neighborhood. But t5 has several special needs. For example, if there’s not enough traffic (whether pedestrians, bikers, or cars) then it will starve because the businesses won’t have enough customers. Once we know the important attributes and needs of each zone, the Transect allows us to very intelligently calibrate the sustainability of a place.
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #8 in the top 10 items we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

the Green Top 10 for 2010

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:02:32 -0500

2010 is shaping up to be a momentous year on several counts, especially for issues having to do with sustainability. Here are the top 10 things that appear likely to develop, from an Original Green perspective:
the Offshoring Reversal
Offshoring of manufacturing has had a long run, beginning in earnest a few decades ago. But as fuel becomes remarkably more expensive (see #2,) expect this trend to begin to weaken. We’ll likely only see faint beginnings of the reversal in 2010, but look for it to pick up steam through the decade. And it will eventually play a major role in our ability to live sustainably. Here’s why: Turn your head and look around the room. Most of the things you’re looking at have traveled thousands of miles to get to you, from the point where the resources were extracted to where the parts were made to where the whole thing was assembled to where it was warehoused to the store where you bought it. Common sense tells us that being green is a pipe dream if nearly everything we touch has thousands of Embodied Miles. Jim Kunstler’s World Made by Hand and Christopher Steiner’s $20 Per Gallon each tell excellent stories that support the reality of the Offshoring Reversal.
the Sustainability of Preservation
For several years, there has been a growing realization in some circles of the green building world that something is seriously wrong when you can get almost as many LEED credits by installing a bike rack as by preserving an entire building, and this inequity has set the preservationists against the green building industry. But until now, we haven’t had the tools to do anything about it. Now, however, a number of people are working on ways to factor in the true value of preservation, both within the US Green Building Council and elsewhere, because how can we say that we’re being green if we keep throwing buildings away? Look for several of these tools to surface in 2010 from a variety of sources.
Gizmo Green Gets Exposed
Gizmo Green is the idea that all we need to be green is better equipment and better materials. There are two problems: First, Gizmo Green can’t really make us sustainable because efficiency alone isn’t enough. But if it could make us green, there’s still the fact that better equipment and better materials cost more money. That’s OK when times are good and budgets are fat, but 2010 isn’t shaping up to be a fat-budget year, and the first thing to get cut out of a construction budget is usually the expensive stuff, because people almost always choose the long, slow bleeding of monthly utility bills over up-front costs. So what works? Natural green measures, like passive heating & cooling, daylighting, etc. You know, the stuff that has always worked, since long before the Thermostat Age.
the Meltdown Vacuum
There’s a silver lining to the catastrophic effects of the Meltdown on industries and professions surrounding construction: The vast machine of developers, bankers, planners, architects, builders, and real estate agents has largely been immobilized, leaving a vacuum of building design and construction leadership, and 2010 isn’t looking much better. Pre-Meltdown, this machine paved huge swaths of the country with a carpet of suburbia, but everyone who’s still operating now is doing so at a much smaller scale. On the other hand, shelter shows such as those on HGTV have never been stronger, with regular people learning more and more about the design and construction of their own homes and shops. These two trends will combine to create a much more grassroots construction industry than we’ve seen in at least a couple generations... and that’s great for sustainability because a more grassroots construction industry is far easier to infuse with the simple wisdom of how best to build green for a region’s conditions, climate, and culture. And it’s already beginning. The New Urban Guild’s Project:SmartDwelling, for example, sets out to do exactly these things for each region of the US, as illustrated by SmartDwelling I which was published recently in the Wall Street Journal.
the Return of the Garden
The trend of food coming from further and further away will begin to reverse in 2010, as the realization spreads that local food isn’t just fresher, healthier, and better-tasting, but it’s also far more sustainable to ship food only a few miles as opposed to today’s 1,500 Mile Caesar Salad. But this won’t be your grandmother’s garden. Rather, it’ll be full-blown Agricultural Urbanism, with everything from good-neighbor Employing Farms that can nestle tightly around cities, towns, and villages, all the way down to window gardens. DPZ, arguably the biggest rock stars of planning today, is one of a number of notables working this out. And there are already neighborhoods where these ideas are being tested, such as Serenbe in Georgia, which is fairly mature, and which I described here. Sky in the Florida panhandle and Southlands near Vancouver are in the planning stage, while Schooner Bay in the Bahamas and the Town of Hampstead in Alabama are in the early phases of construction.
the Re-Coding of the City
I’ll warn you up front... this one is a little bit boring. It has none of the drama of the Meltdown Vacuum, nor any of the sexiness of the Return of the Garden. But it’s an essential step in building sustainable places. Sprawl not only flings suburbs all over the map, but it lays them out in such a manner that whether you want to get to the city, or whether you just want to go to the store, the office, or to school, you’ve gotta drive. And if you have to drive everywhere, sustainability is impossible. But sprawl didn’t just happen. It was planned. By devices known as Euclidean zoning ordinances. Every city has one. Until now. DPZ (yeah, them again) has worked for years to develop an alternative zoning code that reverses sprawl; it’s known as the SmartCode, and it’s based on an idea known as the Rural-Urban Transect. The Smart Growth Manual illustrates what kind of places the SmartCode produces. Their colleagues have developed similar codes, and lots of firms are geared up to implement them. And now, the cities want them. 2010 looks like it might be the year that’s the tipping point with cities choosing this very smart way to reverse the tide of sprawl and make green cities possible. Here are lists of places where SmartCodes have been adopted, are in progress, and places with other form-based codes.
the Return of Durability
It sounds crazy, but the tough post-Meltdown economy of 2010 looks like it will finally make us buy stuff that’s better and more durable, and that just might turn the tide on a throwaway century during which pretty much nothing was designed to last. Here’s why: when cash is flowing, we can afford to throw stuff away, but when times are tight, we can’t. So although it’s more expensive to begin with, it’ll be much less costly in the long run. The Story of Stuff does a great job of showing why high consumption is unsustainable. So what’s the alternative? Using things that last for generations, rather than stuff meant to last only for a few months, weeks, or maybe even a single use. Things like reusable shopping bags are part of the story, but look for 2010 to be the year that we begin to realize that everything must be more durable... including our buildings themselves.
the Emergence of the Live-Work
The US was originally built largely by people who lived near the shop. Everyone from the President (the West Wing is part of the White House, remember?) to shopkeepers, woodworkers, blacksmiths, and even farmers, all lived very close to where they worked until trains and then cars made it possible to commute. Today, three trends are converging: Countless people have been laid off post-Meltdown, and the scarcity of jobs has many of them striking out on their own. The Internet makes working from home more feasible than at any other point in our lifetimes. And a cadre of planners and architects known as New Urbanists have been working for years to figure out how to get workplaces back into our neighborhoods so we don’t have to drive everywhere. The Live-Work Unit, designed so you can live and work on the same piece of land, is where these trends converge. Now, you can finally “make a living where you’re living.” Look for the Live-Work Unit to be a household term by the end of 2010.
the Big Convergence
Three world-changing trends that need no introduction are converging right now, and 2010 looks like the year when most people realize we’ve got to think differently about “business as usual.” They are the Meltdown, Peak Oil, and Climate Change. The Meltdown has seared our consciousness like no economic event since the Great Depression. Peak Oil was once hotly debated, but now the evidence is mounting that we’re running out. And Climate Change is still debated, but not ignored. Any one of these three should be a warning that we need to change, but all three emerging at once make it clear that we have some serious adapting to do. There’s a lot of hand-wringing over all this, but I believe that if we take these things seriously in 2010 and adapt in an intelligent way, it could lead to the next Golden Age... something that would have been impossible in our previous sprawling, over-consuming, debt-ridden condition.
the New City
How might we live in this next Golden Age? Our cities, towns, villages, and hamlets should be nourishable, because if you can’t eat there, you can’t live there, and accessible so you can get around in a number of ways, especially including walking and biking, which the price of gas can’t touch. They should be serviceable so you can get the basic services of life within walking distance, and the people serving you those services can afford to live nearby, too, and securable from undue fear. These things make a place sustainable. Once we’ve done that, then we need to build sustainable buildings, which are first of all lovable, because if they can’t be loved, they won’t last. If they’re lovable, then they should also be durable so they’ll endure, and flexible so they can be used for many things over the centuries. And they must be frugal, beginning with things that work naturally. What does this look like? It looks a whole lot like the New Urbanism, a movement which has been working for decades to figure these things out. A growing number of experts agree that the New Urbanism will be the most important green trend of 2010. I think they’re right... it’s about time!
~Steve Mouzon

the Diversified Extent

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:12:13 -0500

We are equally mistaken to believe that all things sustainable are universal as to believe that all things sustainable are local. Sustainability is more often a function of the region, but that’s not always true, either. We must have some strategies that work all over the world, while we need the nimbleness of other strategies developed for a particular place. What follows is a framework for how these strategies can interact with each other to form a sustainable whole:
the Six Realms of Patterns
A pattern is simply something that happens again and again. Towns and buildings are made of languages of many patterns, from the ways that eaves are built in a particular place, to the region’s most favorite ways of building a square. This book organizes patterns into six Realms, from the smallest extent (the work of one person) to the largest (the universal.) Each Realm has important and unique sustainability implications.
First Realm ~ the Personal Patterns
Every great idea begins with the single person who first conceives it. If it’s an idea about a better way of building a building or a town, and if the person is convinced the idea is good enough, then they attempt to build it. If successful, they build it again. Because anything that is repeated again and again becomes a pattern, and because it is associated with the person who conceived the idea, it is a Personal Pattern. Anyone familiar with architecture should have no doubt that the image above is from a Frank Gehry building. Those are his patterns. Without the First Realm, we could not advance. But there is a problem with the Personal Patterns of the First Realm: they have no life of their own. This is because the patterns die with their originator, since nobody else is designing or building that way.
Second Realm ~ the Local Particulars
Sometimes, a Personal Pattern will resonate with others who see it, and they say “I want that on my (house, shop, or town, according to the scale of the pattern.)”
And so they repeat it nearby, and it becomes a local pattern. Once a pattern spreads beyond its originator, a curious thing happens: it takes on a life of its own and can persist for decades, centuries, or occasionally millennia after its originator is dead and maybe even forgotten. In this way, it can be considered to be a living thing. This is where Living Traditions begin; we will discuss them in more detail later. So while great ideas must begin in the first realm, they must also graduate to the second realm to have any chance of delivering sustainability.
Third Realm ~ the Regional Dialect
Often, local patterns of the Second Realm catch the eye of travelers who are residents of the same region. If the pattern is well-tuned to the regional conditions, climate, and culture, then they are likely to say “we love this... and we want to adopt it into our family of regional traditions.” The process of adoption of patterns into the Third Realm illustrates the fact that a Living Tradition is not made up of historical artifacts as some would suppose, but rather, of things that are worthy of love. Historical artifacts no longer commonly produced are the products of traditions that were once alive, but are now dead.
Fourth Realm ~ the National Language
Occasionally, patterns are so resonant that they are adopted by an entire nation. While Third Realm patterns can be considered to make up the Regional Dialect of architecture and place-making, Fourth Realm patterns make up the National Language of architecture and place-making. These languages are not the same as spoken languages, but there are certain striking similarities that are very helpful in understanding them. For example, individual patterns can be thought of as words. And just as there are words in many languages for “apple,” with variations of regional dialects, so too are there patterns in many architectural languages for “eave,” complete with countless Third Realm variations of the Regional Dialects.
Because Fourth Realm patterns are broader than any particular region’s conditions, climate, or culture, they are most likely to express national aspirations or self-image, and contain within them traces of the history of the culture. Put another way, they often hold the memory of the culture.
Fifth Realm ~ the Continental Heritage
The Fifth Realm is the highest level of refinement to which anyone can elevate any pattern. Because of this, the Fifth Realm is the home of most of the patterns of each continent’s classical tradition. In the case of Western Classicism, these patterns actually spread from Europe and now form the primary classical traditions of Europe, North America, and South America.
The myth of origins of the Corinthian order, related by Vitruvius, illustrates the rare instance where a single trained hand, in one brilliant stroke, can elevate a simple vernacular expression all the way to the Fifth Realm. Vitruvius tells of the sculptor Callimachus walking through the outskirts of Corinth about 2,500 years ago, where he happened across a tomb of a young girl. Her nurse had taken a few of the precious things of her life and put them in a basket, then put a roofing tile over the basket to shield them from the rain. Over time, acanthus plants sprouted at the base of the basket, their leaves curling out as they grew up to meet the tile. Callimachus, the story goes, was so moved that he refined the nurse’s simple expression into the Corinthian capital, which has persisted across the millennia.
Sixth Realm ~ the Universal
Just like a smile or a laugh need no explanation to any human on earth, the allure of hot coals of fire on a cool evening, the soothing breath of a cool ocean breeze in the tropics, or the assurance of an obviously durably-built beam need no expounding, either... they simply feel right... to any human. We know it’s what we need.
What are Sixth Realm patterns? First of all, they are the patterns that do not change. Some call this the Eternal Realm because of their permanence. They are things like the habitational comforts hardwired into all humans, our resonance with the natural laws of gravity and thermodynamics, and our resonance with rational proportions like 1:1, 4:3, and 3:2, and irrational proportions like the square root of 2 and the Golden Mean. Most people cannot explain proper proportions; rather, they have a simple comfort that all is right.
the Six Realms and Sustainability
So maybe this Six Realm stuff might be entertaining, but what does it have to do with sustainability? The answer might not be immediately obvious, but each Realm produces certain attributes that we can’t get along without. Here’s what they are:
the Green of the First Realm
The First Realm is where invention occurs. We cannot live sustainably without invention, because conditions on earth change, and what will we do if we don’t yet have an answer to a new condition? Some feel like we should simply go back to the 15th century, because people lived sustainably back then.
But we’re not 15th century people anymore, so that clearly would not work. We must have a 21st century sustainability solution, because we can’t simply forget everything we’ve learned since medieval times. So invention is essential. And it’s essential (as we’ll see later) that millions of people participate in the invention. Only then can we have real sustainability: when everyone is thinking about how to live better, creating a bubbling stew of innovation by millions of minds.
the Green of the Second Realm
Where do we go from there? The Second Realm is the testing ground of all that First Realm innovation, because patterns graduate to the Second Realm only when other people find them resonant or worthwhile. First Realm patterns only need an inventor; Second Realm patterns require a community to test the ideas.
The Second Realm is essential to sustainability because without this filter, there would simply be too many ideas; it would be information overload. We would choke on too many green possibilities.
the Green of the Third Realm
The Third Realm is where most of the patterns of sustainability occur, but some make the mistake of believing that they all occur here. They do not. Third Realm patterns respond to regional conditions, climate, and culture. Some Second Realm patterns are only appropriate to the locality where they were developed, but many have a broader application.
A great example is the Charleston Single House, known everywhere except Charleston as the Charleston Sideyard. It is a house that turns its short face to the street, and its long face to a side garden. The front streets in Charleston run generally north to south because of the shape of the peninsula the city is built upon. Because most lots are slender and deep rather than wide and shallow, this means that the short street face of the lot usually faces East or West.
The long South face usually has long verandahs to shade the wall in summer when the sun is high in the sky, but let in the low winter sun.
The North face has few if any windows, so as to not intrude upon the goings-on in your neighbor’s side garden. This practice is known as “North Side Manners” in Charleston, meaning that if you have any manners, your house won’t violate the privacy of your neighbor’s garden.
The prevailing Southwest summer breezes cool the verandahs, while the cold northwest winter wind is shielded by the mass of the house, extending the usable season of the verandah.
This pattern developed in Charleston, but has spread in recent decades all over the South because conditions are not so different in other parts of the region. Much like a healthy species will spread to adjacent compatible habitat, a Second Realm pattern that is applicable beyond the confines of the locality of the locality where it developed will spread to the region, becoming a Third Realm pattern and carrying its green intelligence with it.
the Green of the Fourth Realm
The sustainability of the Fourth Realm is hardest to understand. This is because Fourth Realm patterns don’t yet span continents like patterns do in the Fifth Realm, nor do they have the obvious green benefits of many Third Realm patterns. So does this Realm really have anything to do with sustainability? Yes. Here’s two ways that Fourth Realm patterns can help make a nation sustainable:
Efficiency occurs when people don’t have to stop and think about what they’re doing. Fourth Realm patterns tell people how to use the town. They don’t have to read the signs because they can literally read the town, if it’s full of Fourth Realm patterns.
But the greenest aspect of Fourth Realm patterns is the fact that they carry with them the hopes, aspirations, and national identity of a culture. What does this have to do with sustainability? Today, all except the most hopeless and impoverished cultures must aspire to be green. Why is this?
Many green advocates don’t want to publicize this, but the best indicator of a green lifestyle is extreme poverty. If you’re barely scraping out an existence on a tiny piece of land, then you’re probably not generating a lot of garbage, or having other big impacts on the planet. But for the rest of us, it’s not so easy being green. We have to want to... with great vigor. That’s where the Fourth Realm patterns come in. If our Fourth Realm patterns express our aspirations to be green, then we actually have a chance. As we’ll see later, sustainability only happens when everyone is involved; it’s not something that a few specialists can deliver. So deciding to be green individually isn’t enough; we must also decide to be green as a nation. And Fourth Realm patterns can help create that national self-image.
the Green of the Fifth Realm
Fifth Realm patterns change less frequently than all the others in the preceding realms. Many of these patterns have persisted for more than two thousand years. How is it possible for a pattern to contribute to sustainability if it doesn’t change?
This question leads to a dilemma I call the Novelty Paradox: Sustainability requires things that can be kept going in a healthy way long into an uncertain future. Keeping something going for centuries implies that it doesn’t change very much. But we can’t be sustainable if we’re not adaptable. And adaptation requires new things. Herein lies the Novelty Paradox: How can we, at the same time, keep something going for centuries and also adapt to new conditions?
Fifth Realm patterns clearly accomplish the former; Western Classicism has existed for more than 2,500 years. But Fifth Realm patterns, if understood as a language rather than a completed novel or textbook, can also be used to say things that have never been said before, whereas a novel or textbook is fixed in time the instant the ink dries. This, I believe, is the key to unlocking the Novelty Paradox: a process can do it; a product is completely impotent to do so.
This means that if Classicism (or more broadly, the most refined expressions of each continent) are understood as inalterable canons, fixed in time, then they are completely incapable of having any beneficial impact on the problem of sustainability because they cannot change. If, however, they are understood as languages that can say innumerable things, then they instantly morph from fixed-in-stone portraits of antiquity to highly-adaptable tools that should be central to sustainability, because they last so long.
the Green of the Sixth Realm
The Sixth Realm is the second-largest home of the patterns of sustainability, just behind the Third Realm. The Sixth Realm is where our humanity is most evident because this is where we are all like one another. What human doesn’t gravitate to a crackling fire on a winter evening, or to the cooling murmur of a fountain of water on a scorching late-summer afternoon? These things aren’t particular to any culture; rather, they’re the things our species does when confronted with these conditions. These are things that we call “human habitational comforts.”
And who doesn’t gravitate to forms that reflect our own human form in some way? What’s the first thing you do when you look at a photograph that includes you? You look at yourself, of course! We’re hard-wired to look for things that reflect us... and this includes things that reflect the shape of the human body. Architects may pooh-pooh symmetry, for example, but almost everyone else sees in it a reflection of the basic horizontal arrangement of the human face and body. We also resonate with forms that are arranged vertically like we are, with a top (head, or capital) a body (shaft) and bottom (base, or feet.) The most-loved buildings are almost always arranged in this way, from the shape of the entire building all the way down to the smallest detail, such as the baseboards.
These things are extremely important to sustainability because they allow us to stack the deck in our favor by designing places and buildings humans are hard-wired to love. If we understand architecture as nothing more than fashion and style, then it’s not possible to even anticipate the next fashion cycle, so sustainable buildings are impossible. But the Sixth Realm patterns empower us to design places and buildings that, even in an unimaginable future several centuries from now, people will still be predisposed to resonate with and sustain further and further into the future.
~Steve Mouzon
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #9 in the top 10 items we can do.

the Things that Work

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:46:53 -0500

Our sustainability standards should be completely pragmatic. In other words, “do these things work?” Pragmatism is the standard of nature: If it works, it lives. If it doesn’t, it disappears from the face of the earth.
The cows and the cranes in the image above are one of the countless cooperative relationships in nature where two or more species help each other as they go about their daily lives. Life as we know it arguably would not exist without these relationships. Their standard is very simple: “I’ll accomplish something good for you if you’ll accomplish something good for me.”
This should be our question when examining something that is being put forth as being green: “What good thing does it accomplish?” Far too often, however, sustainability becomes a religion of sorts, where decisions are based more on faith than on the things that work. And the faith that is required is faith in a “green expert,” faith in a company, or faith in an interest group of some sort. Have they earned our faith?
~Steve Mouzon
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #10 in the top 10 items we can do.

Original Green Places - South Main

Mon, 7 Dec 2009 15:18:17 -0500

This is the first in a series of posts featuring places that exhibit characteristics of the Original Green... this one takes a look at South Main in Buena Vista, Colorado. South Main is intriguing on several counts... let’s look at them all. But first, a bit of background: South Main was founded by the brother-and-sister team of Jed Selby and Katie Urban, who also happen to be world-class kayakers. The urban plan was designed by the acclaimed New Urbanist planning firm of Dover-Kohl of Miami. Here’s Dover-Kohl’s rendering of what South Main will look like at completion. Now let’s look at the Original Green principles South Main embodies: Original Green places are Nourishable, Accessible, Serviceable, and Securable. Original Green buildings are Lovable, Durable, Flexible, and Frugal.
Nourishable Places
South Main is sandwiched between Buena Vista’s downtown and the Arkansas River, as you can see in the early aerial construction photo above that I took in 2006. Because it’s conceived as an extension of the urban core of the town, there’s no large-scale agriculture within the boundaries of South Main. But that doesn’t mean that South Main can’t contribute to its own nourishability. See the patch of green just above the river? That’s the beginning of the Town Square, where regular farmers’ markets can deliver local food to the citizens. And lots of food can be grown on each individual home lot, as SmartDwelling I illustrates... see the Kitchen Garden & Green Walls posts. Here’s an article by Katie’s husband Dustin (also a world-class kayaker) about gardening at South Main. And the tomatoes above? They aren’t some stock photo... they’re from Katie & Dustin’s garden!
Accessible Places
South Main, like nearly all New Urbanist places, provides a choice of ways of getting around (not just driving) especially including the self-propelled ways: walking and biking. But South Main goes a step further. The upper right corner of the aerial photo the center of Buena Vista, only a half-mile from South Main’s Town Square. This means that South Main isn’t just accessible on foot or bike to its own residents, but also to the citizens of most of Buena Vista. Because South Main is completely open to all, it also means that everyone can walk, bike, or drive through South Main to the River Park being built on the river.
Serviceable Places
Buena Vista has a strikingly high percentage of live/work units in its plan. As a matter of fact, Jed Selby said emphatically on many occasions that “I want every lot in South Main to be a place where someone can work if they want to.” Truly, South Main is becoming a place where you can “make a living where you’re living,” as the Original Green has long advocated. And South Main is serious about this, with several live/work units among some of the first buildings constructed. But Jed & Katie are very sophisticated about this; it isn’t just one-size-fits-all. Rather, they understand that as the character of the street changes from the Town Square to Main Street to side streets and quiet streets in the back side of the neighborhood, the types of live/work units must change to fit the street character. So a classic Live-Above would work best on the Town Square, while an office over the garage might be more appropriate in quieter places.
Securable Places
South Main illustrates the other half of the meaning of “Securable.” Today, Buena Vista is a sleepy little town where fear for your own safety, that of your family, or the safety of your belongings is far from people’s minds. But because South Main is built with buildings pulled tight to build-to lines rather than sprawled in haphazard fashion, it would be easy in some fearful future (that we hope will never occur) to connect the buildings with frontage walls in order to secure each block. Cities around the world have been built in this fashion for centuries.
The main point of this post is to look at how South Main is creating a sustainable place. But South Main is also doing several things to help people build sustainable buildings, too... here are a few of those items:
Lovable Buildings
South Main has, from the beginning, intended that its architecture be lovable. I had the pleasure of consulting with South Main in the early years (and occasionally since then,) and can attest to this firsthand. One of the first things Kenny Craft and I did was to catalog a wide range of Colorado high-country architecture to find out what had been valued the longest and loved the most. Two of the towns (Salida and Leadville) were so comprehensively good that I catalogued every good building for the Catalog of the Most-Loved Places. Look for those volumes to be posted shortly. Since then, South Main has implemented a strong principle-based Town Architect review process, with Kenny acting as Town Architect.
Durable Buildings
South Main is located in Colorado’s “Banana Belt,” a central valley two miles above sea level that is spared the coldest weather. But because of its altitude, the sunlight is more intense... especially because rainy days are so infrequent. Buildings built in normal American suburban fashion don’t last very long here without serious maintenance. South Main, as a result, has spent years looking at the best materials and methods for their building exteriors that will make them the most durable, because how can you call something “sustainable” if it doesn’t last?
Flexible Buildings
Because of Jed’s insistence that all buildings in South Main be able to be places where you can work if you want to, the design team has looked more intensely than most places at ways that buildings can switch from a house to a shop and back again... either completely, or only some of the rooms. To do this, it’s necessary to focus on being a good building, not just being a good house or a good shop. For example, there is a design for a tiny 523 square foot house just off Main Street at the corner of a side street and an alley that perches over a single-car garage facing the alley. But as South Main grows and thrives, the boarding between the structural piers can be removed and the garage will transform into a tiny shop. How do I know this? It’s my place... I feel strongly enough about what they’re doing at South Main that I’ve bought a lot there, and hope to build in the near future.
Frugal Buildings
South Main has been committed from the beginning to building extremely frugal buildings. Here are their founding principles. You’ll notice that sustainability in general and green building in particular are 2/3 of the total. But while they meet several state and national green building standards, their understanding of sustainability is far more than Gizmo Green. Just as we’ve advocated here from the beginning, they start by conditioning buildings naturally as much as possible, then using mechanical conditioning just to bridge the gap... an increasing amount of which will be solar-powered. And because frugality isn’t just about energy, but is about being frugal with all our resources, they looked closely at the resources they had on-site and found that South Main is built on an alluvial plain filled with rocks laid down as the river changed its course over the centuries, just below the topsoil. So rather than burning gas to cart them off to a landfill somewhere, they’ve used countless of them in many ways, from the great boulders of the terrace wall of the town square to foundation walls of buildings.
So those are some of the things South Main is doing... do you know of other places that are doing as much to be an Original Green Place? If so, please let me know and I’d like to do a story sometime about them, too... thanks!
~Steve Mouzon

Hydroponics - Miracle or Threat?

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:49:54 -0500

Hydroponics, which is a set of practices of growing plants without soil (unlike the image above) are being trumpeted as an emerging technology that will save us all, allowing human population to grow far beyond the world’s carrying capacity. But is there a dark underbelly to hydroponics?
I attended an excellent session at the recent Greenbuild in Phoenix on Urban Food Systems. Anyone familiar with the Original Green knows that sustainable places must first of all be Nourishable Places, because if you can’t eat there, you can’t live there, and as energy costs rise, we’ll be less able to ship food long distances. So, even it weren’t healthier and didn’t taste better, the need to re-learn how to raise our food nearby should still be a high priority for economic and food security reasons.
Take a look at the world population chart in the Everything Bubble, and it’s pretty easy to see that there will soon come a time when the ways we’ve raised food in the past simply won’t feed everyone. We’ve got to eventually achieve population stability, but between now and then, what do we do?
The Urban Food Systems session, moderated by Eden Brukman of the International Living Building Institute, put a number of provocative and highly useful ideas on the table. Critter Thompson of Mithun laid out a great presentation of the big-picture challenges we’re facing, and an overview of several solutions, and Andy Fisher of the Community Food Security Coalition presented a compelling case for Food Security. I was fine with everything until they got to Chris Jacobs’ segment, which described the Vertical Farm movement, which is based largely on hydroponics. Chris, of United Future is a really nice guy... probably the most charming guy in the room most of the time, but I couldn’t help but get the feeling that we’d heard this pitch before: Technology will save us all!
One of the benefits of hydroponics is its ability to be practiced indoors, away from the weather, bathed in the endless glow of the electric grow-lights. Because of this, floor upon floor of hydroponic farmland can be stacked up into agricultural towers. All we need to do is pump in a lot of water laced with NPK fertilizer and... oh, wait, we found out a few years ago that there are a few other “minor nutrients” we need to add to the brew... and each plant will produce unbelievable quantities of vegetables totally impossible using natural gardening methods. Yep, technology will save us all!
Or will it? Wasn’t electricity going to be “too cheap to meter” after we converted to nuclear power plants? Wasn’t baby formula supposed to be better for infants because the scientists had learned exactly what they needed? And wouldn’t it prevent the need for the hopelessly outmoded and vulgar practice of breast-feeding? How about all the other highly-processed “food-like substances” that have been replacing real food for years? Aren’t they technologically superior?
Something funny happened along the way, however... we have begun to discover that life is a lot more complex than our reductivist thinking led us to believe. There’s far more to breast milk, for example, than just the stuff they put in baby formula. And there’s a lot more in the soil than just the NPK formulation of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. The complex interactions of all of the nutrients, microbes, and creatures in and around the soil, from earthworms below to chickens above, are likely to nourish the plants in synergistic ways we can’t even imagine yet.
Are the results bigger? No, hydroponics definitely are more efficient than raising food naturally. But are they better? That’s a far different question, and one that science can’t answer authoritatively yet. But what we have found is that reductivist thinking predictably does one thing very well: it misses most of the big picture, and has repeatedly gotten us into trouble that it usually takes years to discover.
Hydroponic advocates would have us believe, for example, that the only two choices are to keep growing things normally and face massive world starvation in a few decades, or convert to industrial food tower factories. There’s actually another way:
The current industrial food system may be very man-hour efficient (if you just count the tractor driver) but it’s quite inefficient per acre. Depending on the growing season and climatic conditions, American agribusiness needs 1-3 acres of land to provide all of the food from all of the food groups for one person for one year. Bio-intensive agriculture, on the other hand, is just the opposite. It requires more man-hours, but not that many more, if you count the industrial food chain’s truck drivers, fertilizer and poison factory workers, processing plant workers, and the massive number of corporate white-collar employees it takes to make it all run.
Bio-intensive agriculture has several trump cards. It’s been proven to leave water and soil cleaner and healthier, whereas agribusiness leaves it a muddy, toxin-laden mess. It conserves the soil, rather than allowing it to wash away. On top of all this, it’s highly acre-efficient. Michael Ableman is a highly respected farmer and author (in that order) who was a fellow consultant with me on DPZ’s Southlands project in the Vancouver vicinity last year. Even with Vancouver’s short growing season, Michael was confident that Southland’s farms could feed at least 20 people per acre. That’s at least 20 times as efficient as industrial farming! And because it doesn’t need the industrial poisoning systems like crop-dusting, nor does it have industrial-scale nuisances like 1,000 hogs in a CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation,) it acts as “good-neighbor agriculture,” able to snuggle right up to a town or city. Because of this, we were able to use 1/3 of the Southlands site for a new community, 1/3 of the site for parks, lakes, and playing fields, and 1/3 for agriculture, and the portion used for agriculture would feed the people it was feeding already plus the new inhabitants of the community. Silver bullets are normally a myth, but switching from industrial to bio-intensive agriculture literally allows us to have our cake and eat it, too!
With this being the case, we don’t need to be forced into engineered hydroponic food... just switch to the common-sense middle ground of bio-intensive farming, which gives us substantially more time to figure out how to live sustainably on our planet.
~Steve Mouzon

the Curse of the Craftsman

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:37:23 -0500

I spent a fascinating week recently in New Orleans working with The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment (PFBE) which is spearheading a craft apprentice training program in cooperation with the Preservation Resource Centre, Delgado Community College, Operation Comeback, the Louisiana Carpenters Union, their Regional Council Apprenticeship and Training Center, and other partners. Participants in the program (pictured above) were hand-selected from New Orleans’ carpenters, millworkers, metalworkers, plasterers, and masons. Ben Bolgar of the Prince’s Foundation asked me to make a few comments on Saturday before I left. The following, as best as I can recall, summarizes what I left them with:
“These have been very noteworthy days for me, as are all the days I’ve ever spent working with the Prince’s Foundation. It’s obvious in what you’ve said while presenting your work just now that you’re all very excited about what you’re been doing this week. That’s wonderful. And you sound as if you’re inspired to become craftsmen rather than just workers. Excellent carpenters and fine millworkers instead of wood-butchers. Great masons, not brick-throwers. Outstanding metalworkers as opposed to metal-bangers. And superb plasterers instead of mud-sloppers. I’ve told you about the craftsmen around Seaside, Florida, who are now regional celebrities, for whom people will come from 500 miles to try to get them to do their work. But I’d be doing a disservice if I left without telling you about the dark underbelly of craftsmanship: the Craftsman’s Curse.
But before I do, let me tell you about one lunch hour that changed my life. I was in architecture school at the time, and we had a program called “Lunchline” where students would brown-bag lunch and gather around one of the original speaker phones (a big wooden contraption with protruding electronics) and have a conversation with a prominent architect. I was in my last year of school at the time, and the architect that day was Michael Graves. Late in the conversation, a freshman asked a typical freshman question: “Mr. Graves, what’s the secret of success in architecture?” I was afraid Graves would blow him off or make a fool of him, but, always the gentleman, he did not. Instead, he took him seriously, and responded in four words that changed my life: “Extraordinary singleness of purpose.” Had he said “great natural talent,” “wealthy parents,” “political connections,” or even “good looks,” I’d have been out of luck, because I had none of those. But “extraordinary singleness of purpose”... I could decide to have that!!! Every American has that choice! And today, you have that choice. Excellence is something anyone can choose to do. But let me tell you what it’s going to cost you:
It’s Saturday afternoon. What happens if you decide today to dedicate yourself to becoming a craftsman? What changes on Monday morning? Here’s what:
In the eyes of your customers, nothing changes. Everybody says they believe in high quality and good customer service. Ever hear anybody say “we build sloppy crap really cheap?” I didn’t think so. So what is your commitment to quality worth to your customers? Nothing at all. You’re no different from the brick-throwers, wood-butchers, metal-bangers, and mud-sloppers in their eyes.
But what changes for you? Because you’re committed to an extraordinary quality of work, everything changes. It’s going to take you longer to do the same amount of work, especially at the beginning, when you’re just beginning to learn. And so you’ll be making less money per hour than the brick-throwers, the wood-butchers, the metal-bangers, and the mud-sloppers. And this will continue for years. And it will seem like nobody cares... because you’re still an unknown.
Every single day, everything about your life and everyone dear to you will be pulling on you, screaming at you to give up your crazy commitment to excellence. How can you be so committed to this when it consumes you so and makes you less money than those who don’t care? You owe it to your family and your friends, they’ll say, to give up this craziness and just make a normal living.
But do you know what the real tragedy is? It’s those who are committed for a few years, and then give up. Because do you know what happens then? When you give up before the Tipping Point, then it’s like pumping one of those old hand-operated water pumps: if you quit before the water gets flowing, it all drains back to the bottom, and you’re no better off than those who don’t care. Matter of fact, you’re worse off, because the years you’ve spent pursuing excellence are now all for nothing. This, then, is the Craftsman’s Curse: you work, usually for years, in passionate pursuit of excellence, with no obvious benefits in sight. And if you let it go, then you’re worse off than those who never cared to begin with.
But what about the Tipping Point? Have you ever tried to tip a 55-gallon drum full of water? It’s tremendous work to even get it off the ground... it takes everything you’ve got. But then, after a lot of straining and groaning, it suddenly gets easier and easier... just before the moment that it tips and goes everywhere. That’s the point where you become a regional celebrity, and an overnight success... many years in the making.
And guess what happens then? The wood-butchers are still butchering wood. That’s the best they’ll ever be. The brick-throwers are still throwing bricks. That’s the best they’ll ever be. The metal-bangers are still banging metal. That’s the best they’ll ever be. And the mud-sloppers are still slopping mud. That’s the best they’ll ever be. But you’re different. You’re way different. People are now seeking you out from miles around, because they now know what you’ve known for years: you can build things that few other mortals can build. Your name spreads broadly... wider than you ever dreamed possible. And for every remaining day of your life, you’ll be way different, and people will respect you because of it like they’d never respect you had you not cared for all those invisible years.
It’s obvious you guys have heart. A lot of heart. And you can’t do this without having a lot of heart. Extraordinary singleness of purpose requires a lot of heart... because otherwise, you’ll get beaten down and give up, somewhere in the middle, before you get to the Tipping Point. We could all fail to get there. But none of us have to fail to get there. It could happen to all of us, but it doesn’t have to happen to any of us. Every single one of us can choose to get to the Tipping Point someday.”
~Steve Mouzon

the PFBE in NOLA

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:22:13 -0400

I had the great pleasure last week of working on a fascinating project that I believe may benefit New Orleans for a lifetime. The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment (PFBE) is spearheading a craft apprentice training program in cooperation with the Preservation Resource Centre, Delgado Community College, Operation Comeback, the Louisiana Carpenters Union, their Regional Council Apprenticeship and Training Center, and other partners.
Participants in the program were hand-selected from New Orleans’ carpenters, millworkers, metalworkers, plasterers, and masons. Malcolm Harding, with me in the photo above, is a millworker. I’ll be blogging more about Malcolm and each of his colleagues over the next few weeks.
Ben Bolgar heads up the program for the Prince’s Foundation alongside Edith Platten. The three week introductory session is still ongoing, with Ray Gindroz in town this week and others next week. The program will then continue with eight months of in-the-field restoration work in New Orleans.
Ben and I had hatched the idea for my part of the program late one night at CNU17 in Denver this past summer. Regular readers of this blog are well aware of the importance it places on the creation of new living traditions. Prince Charles is the world’s most notable advocate for the idea of living traditions, and is also a staunch supporter of craft in construction. We decided that night that we should pool our living tradition ideas and experience and try something new.
We laid out last week’s basic framework, but then changed it each morning and through each day, literally figuring it out as we went along. We decided that one of the most deadening things we could do would be to teach the apprentices a bunch of rules of historical styles. So instead, we focused on three things:
It was essential to begin by re-learning how to see. We introduced them to the idea of patterns, which are simply things that happen again and again in a particular place. Things that repeated over and over before the days of the big developers and the volume builders often had very good reasons for doing so that the people understood. But today, things are repeated most often because they simply represent the most efficient way for the builder and developer to make more money... nothing more. And so we set out in small teams across the streets of the Bywater neighborhood, looking for things that happen again and again. We spent the morning photographing. Each team presented their photos for analysis all through the afternoon.
My friend Ann Daigle, who is from Louisiana, was attending the sessions as an observer. I told her on the morning of the first day that I would be delighted if the apprentices found one new pattern. After all, I’ve taken probably tens of thousands of photos of the architecture of this city over many years, and have even written a pattern book detailing the architecture, so I thought I understood it fairly well. Imagine my astonishment when they found several on the very first day! Clearly, this seemed to be headed the right direction.
The next step was to try to make sense of what they had seen. So the second day, we identified some of the more important patterns. We then re-mixed the teams to keep a fresh flow of ideas and set out to identify and photograph as many examples of the patterns as possible. We made it back to the union hall mid-afternoon and spent the rest of the day sorting the images into simple-median-refined categories.
Friday morning was spent looking at each team’s analysis, and then figuring out why those patterns kept occurring. Because it isn’t enough just to observe patterns. Rather, it’s essential to know why we do this, because if there’s no reason, then we need to discard the pattern and come up with something new.
There’s one interesting angle to this: Our “we do this because...” doesn’t necessarily have to be the same as our ancestors’ “we do this because...” The same pattern can be useful for varying things over time. If we have a reason for doing it, then our reason makes the pattern our own.
There’s much more... far too much for one blog post... so expect to see news repeatedly over the upcoming weeks concerning the program and the people making it happen.
~Steve Mouzon

the WalMart Sustainability Index

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:20:12 -0400

GreenBiz.com ran a story today entitled WalMart Sustainability Index Means Big Business. @greenforyou Twittered about it, and that got me thinking... At face value, it would seem that WalMart's newfound insistence that its suppliers lower their carbon footprint and "ensure ethical production" would be a good thing, right? How could it ever be bad to be more efficient?
Read the 15 questions on WalMart's Sustainability Product Index questionnaire and you'll see that most of them are completely toothless. But that isn't the point of this post. Here’s the point:
WalMart is essentially doing a tune-up on an engine that is doing more harm than good, from a sustainability standpoint. They’re saying “how can we do the same old thing more sustainably?” But the same old thing pretty much defines the unsustainable. How so? It’s all a matter of scale:
* A sustainable place is an Accessible Place, where you have a choice of how to get around (especially including the self-propelled choices of walking and biking,) and are not forced to drive everywhere. What does Wal-Mart do for walkability? Well, have you ever seen anyone walk to a WalMart? Part of the reason is because WalMarts, especially the new SuperCenters, are so large that they have to have a massive sea of parking out front. It’s a known fact that people don’t like walking any further than they have to through a sea of parking. So the physical size and design of WalMarts essentially prevent walkability in their vicinity.
* A Sustainable place is also a Serviceable Place, where you can get the basic daily services of life within walking distance in your neighborhood. But no WalMart could possibly survive with the business they would get from the 600-2,500 residents of a typical neighborhood. The only place they could possibly survive would be in Manhattan, and last time I checked, Manhattan doesn’t seem to be WalMart’s sweet spot. Here’s another angle: WalMart is well known for killing the local merchants, who are the very businesses that people are much more likely to walk to. So WalMart has a hideously bad effect on Serviceable Places.
* A Sustainable place is also a Securable Place, but how often do drug deals go down back behind a big box? Again, it’s not because the big box retailers like WalMart don’t care, but simply because the physical size and design of big box retail creates bleak, abandoned places out back that nobody wants to be, where illegal activities can easily take place.
So WalMart, due solely to its physical size and design, can have a crippling effect on the sustainability of a place. What about the sustainability of their buildings?
* A sustainable building must first of all be a Lovable Building. If it cannot be loved, it will not last. Has any human on earth (outside the Walton family and other shareholders) ever claimed to love a WalMart building? Case closed.
* A sustainable building must next be a Durable Building, because if it doesn’t last, then its carbon footprint doesn’t matter once its pieces have been carted off to the landfill. But WalMarts are notorious for being bulldozed in only 15-20 years. Again, case closed.
* Sustainable buildings must be Flexible Buildings, so that they can be used for many things over the centuries. But WalMart buildings will never get the chance to be flexible because they’re so famously unlovable. In fairness, they are sometimes converted to muffler shops and pawnshops to extend their lives a decade or two as the neighborhoods around them decay because of the toxic effect of the unlovable and dilapidated big boxes. But who believes that any current WalMart has any chance of standing a century from now?
* This brings us to the last foundation of sustainable buildings, which is that they must be Frugal Buildings. Here, WalMart is doing a few things right. They’re changing their light bulbs for ones that are more efficient. That’s good. Cue applause. But they’re missing much bigger opportunities to be frugal simply because the physical size of the buildings is so large. For example, daylighting and cross-ventilation are two powerful methods for making a more frugal building. But when the nearest exterior wall is a couple hundred feet away, then it’s almost meaningless.
Here’s the bottom line: It’s not because WalMart executives, managers, and employees are bad people. Not at all. it’s simply an unavoidable effect of the physical size of the stores. WalMart simply can’t help it, once they let the stores get this large... they simply cannot help it.
For a view of the opposite extreme, which is the micro-shop, and the scale implications of micro versus mega, check out this blog post on Mike & Patty’s in Boston. It’s an extreme example, but sometimes extremes illustrate principles better than the ordinary.
~ Steve Mouzon

the Everything Bubble

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:31:57 -0400

This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mystery of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is the chapter’s introduction.
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Our problems go far beyond anything that could be considered “daunting.” As a matter of fact, it is questionable whether humanity has yet faced a challenge to its future that compares to the scale of what lies ahead, except in the disaster and alien movies. Look at any major chart of world conditions over the span of recorded human history, whether it be human population, energy usage, resource usage, atmospheric carbon dioxide, etc., and you will see immediately that there is an unprecedented skyrocketing of the chart in the past 200 to 300 years.
Reasonable people would have to conclude that we cannot continue on our present course without massive consequences... believing otherwise would give your friends cause for questioning your sanity. One definition of insanity is to believe that we can keep doing what we’ve been doing and somehow get different results.
Zig Ziglar’s take on the truth behind the Insanity Principle is “if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’re going to keep getting what you’ve been getting.” And these charts show clearly what we’ve been getting.
But the Insanity Principle doesn’t really cover the uncharted territory we’re in now. I’d like to propose the Inverse Insanity Principle, which states that “another sign of insanity is to believe that you can do dramatically different things and somehow get the same result as before you did those dramatically different things.”
These ideas aren’t really new, however. A Jewish philosopher lumped both the Insanity Principle and the Inverse Insanity Principle into a single phrase nearly 2,000 years ago when he observed that “you reap what you sow.”
“Bubble thinking” isn’t new, either. Bubble thinking during the recent housing bubble that burst in 2008 and the dot com bubble that burst in 2000 serve as warnings against the irrational exuberance that would comfort us that “everything’s OK...” when we’re in completely uncharted waters, creating unprecedented causes that have unknown effects.
Those are not the only bubbles we have seen... not by any stretch. Before them, there was the Asian financial bubble that burst in 1997, the Japanese asset bubble that burst in the 1980s, the Florida speculative building bubble that burst in 1926, the Railway Mania bubble of the 1840s, the Mississippi Company bubble of the 1720s, and the Tulip Mania bubble that burst in 1637, just to name a few. Bubbles are not new, but they all have something in common: they always seem to end in catastrophic fashion for the masses who are seduced by them.
These bubbles are characterized by the sharp spike in a single category of commodity, such as tulips, Florida real estate, or dot com stocks. But we now face a bubble like no other.
The Everything Bubble is unique because every chart of major global conditions is spiking or otherwise behaving as it has never done before in recorded human history. See the charts above? We could draw a dozen more that look very much like them.
What does this mean? At the very least, it points to the fact that humanity is entering an unprecedented era. It is not unreasonable to expect the coming era to have consequences of Biblical proportions; how can we look at the charts and rationally believe otherwise? Is there anything other than “bubble thinking” that would make us hope that everything’s OK, and that, in the words of Jim Kunstler, we can “sleepwalk into the future”?
~ Steve Mouzon

Advances in Nourishable Places at the TBEC in Baltimore

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:18:30 -0400

Creating place that are Nourishable is essential to creating places that are sustainable. When people first heard this idea in the early days of the Original Green, many thought it sounded completely crazy. “I can eat whatever I want wherever I want,” was a common reply.
It was once completely obvious that “if you can’t eat there, you can’t live there.” But for several decades, the industrial food chain relegated the idea of eating locally to the quaint (some said lunatic) fringes of modern life, especially after World War II. But thanks to the relentless efforts of pioneers like J.I. and Robert Rodale, Alice Waters, John Jeavons, and others, a tiny but growing percentage of US citizens began taking back their food-making from the industrial food chain. More recently, other notables such as Michael Pollan and Michael Ableman have taken up the cause, as have organizations like Local Harvest and Slow Food, an international organization with chapters in nearly two dozen countries and “convivia” in hundreds of cities.
All of these people and organizations advocate for local food for a number of benefits, including better nourishment and tastier food. And they are exactly right. But the idea that the ability to look out onto the fields and onto the waters from which much of your food comes is actually an integral part of sustainability hasn’t had so much airtime until recently.
Now, however, that idea is gathering steam. A number of issues are in play. For example, the weakening of the British Pound was the culprit in the spring 2009 spike in food costs. Why? Because so much British food needs a passport to arrive at the dinner table, and is therefore susceptible to currency strength. Food security becomes more questionable the further the food must travel, and the more it must be processed.
Jim Kunstler spends a significant amount of energy raising the agricultural alarm. Andrés Duany has made Agricultural Urbanism a major initiative at DPZ (and one that I’m delighted to be helping with,) and the idea is gaining steam within the broader New Urbanism movement... which brings us to the reason for this post: I’ll be speaking Friday morning at the Traditional Building Exhibition & Conference in Baltimore, which runs from October 21-24.
My session, which borrows DPZ’s Agricultural Urbanism title, will deal with all the ways that we can make places nourishable, with Good-Neighbor Agriculture that can snug right up to the edges of a neighborhood, and also what some of the current limitations are. I’ll be drawing on the current work of a number of people; much of this may be things you haven’t heard of before. Like “melon cradles,” for example... unless you’re a regular blog reader here, that’s probably an unfamiliar term. They’re part of the Green Walls of SmartDwelling I. The New Urban Guild’s Project:SmartDwelling integrates agriculture throughout architecture in a way that hopes to be beautiful, not merely productive. This session will take you through these methods in detail. And, with the speed at which these ideas are developing, it will likely include ideas that develop in the weeks between now and the session. Come to Baltimore and help us advance Nourishable Places!
~ Steve Mouzon

Advances in Lovable Buildings at the TBEC in Baltimore

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 05:54:56 -0400

Anyone who follows the Original Green knows that one of the central principles of sustainable buildings is that “if it can’t be loved, it won’t last.” But can we describe what makes a lovable building so precisely that we can produce them repeatedly?
It’s a little tougher than it sounds. The architects and designers of the New Urban Guild, for example, regularly produce lovable buildings, as do many others. But can you somehow write a formula that makes their artistry repeatable? Because if we can’t, then the only thing that can be done is to say “hire these guys.” And there aren’t nearly enough people out there who know how to design lovable buildings. We need to find a way to spread the ability to create buildings that are lovable if we hope to build sustainably.
It’s not an impossible dream. The Porches, Walkability, and Sustainability blog post shows how something that was once considered to be an art form can now be described with charts and graphs. But can we do something similar with lovability?
Come and find out for yourself. I’ll be speaking at the Traditional Building Exhibition & Conference in Baltimore, which runs from October 21-24. I’ll be participating with Michael Mehaffy and others in the Building Sustainably, Profitably and Beautifully session that is being put on by INTBAU-USA. My part of the session will attempt to answer this question of how to build lovable buildings repeatably.
For a head-start on the session, here’s what we know already: There are some characteristics of lovable buildings that are universal, but not all characteristics of lovable buildings are universal. In other words, there is no single style of building that people love so much in every corner of the globe that they build it before all others. If there were, then Chinese architecture would look just like American architecture, etc. But American architecture doesn’t even all look like itself. That which is loved the most in Boston would look really weird in the deserts of New Mexico. So there is no Internationally Lovable Style.
So what are the universal characteristics of lovable buildings? Here’s one: people look for things that reflect them. So they look for objects (including buildings) that have a top (head, or capital) a middle (body, or shaft) and a bottom (feet, or base.) Things that are decapitated or baseless don’t resonate as much.
What are the non-universal characteristics of lovable buildings? Well, that varies from place to place, so we’d have to be talking about a particular place, like the Gulf Coast, or about New England, or the deserts of the Southwest. But while these non-universal characteristics vary from place to place, they do have certain commonalities. Please come to Baltimore, and we can discuss what they are!
~ Steve Mouzon

Why Dwell Needs the Sprawl Repair Kit to Win Re-Burbia

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:20:05 -0400

Dwell and inhabit.com really need for the Sprawl Repair Kit to win Reburbia. And the rest of us do, too. Why? There are several reasons:
The Sprawl Repair Kit goes to the heart of what Reburbia is supposed to be about: re-designing suburbia in a sustainable way. The T-Tree (the other chief vote-getter, with which the Sprawl Repair Kit is running neck-and-neck) amazingly ignores the program entirely! It appears to be located in a field somewhere, like the discredited idea of “towers in the park” proposed by Le Corbusier when he wanted to bulldoze central Paris. Where is the context? How does it re-design suburbia? It’s shocking that this project was even included in the finalists, given its wanton disregard for the aims of Reburbia to begin with.
The Sprawl Repair Kit is based on things that work, and with which we can start making a difference today. The T-Tree is based on things that have been proven not to work. In addition to the cribbing of Corbusier, it’s a thinly-disguised rip-off of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat project in Montreal. You’ve likely noticed that Habitats have not been popping up in your neighborhood recently. How are we going to create sustainability with things that people don’t want? We won’t, of course. And this is only the beginning of the things that don’t work about T-Tree. Its sustainability is about as superficial as the cartoon leaf cutouts that are its windows. But beyond the fact that its architecture is unlovable by the non-architect, it doesn’t work in many other ways, either:
* Because it’s not connected to adjacent urbanism, you’ll have to drive everywhere, so by definition, the place will be completely unsustainable like the worst of sprawl. But where are the cars? Conveniently eliminated from the renderings. So this won’t even be towers in a park... it’ll be towers in a parking lot.
* It completely ignores its orientation, with equal windows and other surfaces facing North, South, East, and West. People, this is frugality 101! Orientation matters! Any first-year architecture student proposing such a thing should fail their design studio!
* How about thermal storage? These things look like thin-walled tin cans, with no obvious way to store heat. What kind of fools do they take us for, calling this “sustainable”?
I could go on for hours about all the ways T-Tree is unsustainable, but you get the idea. But there’s another reason Dwell needs for the Sprawl Repair Kit to win: Whether or not you always agree with them about design, it’s clear that the editors of Dwell try to act responsibly and proactively in helping to build a better world. But the magazine repeatedly gets criticized for being all about style, chronicling nothing more than the fashion cycles of kinder, gentler Modernism. So here’s Dwell’s problem with T-Tree: if it wins, then it gives great force to its critics, who charge (unfairly, IMO) that the editors value style but not substance, and flash and dash but not things that work.
The Sprawl Repair Kit, on the other hand, would be the best possible winner for Dwell because it delivers a highly useful set of sprawl repair tools to the editors. This, after all, was what Reburbia was all about, wasn’t it? So please give Dwell a hand, and vote for the Sprawl Repair Kit! Voting ends at midnight! Tell your friends!
~ Steve Mouzon

Re-Burbia and the Sprawl Repair Kit

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:57:47 -0400

Dwell and inhabit.com are co-sponsoring what they call Reburbia, which is a competition to redesign the suburbs in a more sustainable fashion. Their 20 finalists are now posted for voting, which ends at midnight on Monday.
Many of the results are shocking... for a variety of reasons. There’s the suburban airship that would actually make sprawl worse, the egg-beaters over the freeway that work better the more we drive, and the tower of boxes that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the suburbs at all. The majority of the solutions are based firmly on the Gizmo Green hope that our gadgets will save us. Matter of fact, several of these entries are such poster children for Gizmo Green that they sparked an idea: look for a monthly post on this blog in the future entitled Gizmo Green Goofiness of the Month. Others, such as the Providence Journal’s David Brussat, have weighed in with similar reactions.
But embedded within the entries is one that is shocking for another reason: it uses common sense, and actually works! It’s the Urban Sprawl Repair Kit by Galina Tahchieva. Galina’s proposal is a toolbox of incremental steps for turning suburban sprawl into urban fabric. And it’s stuff that we can do right now.
Why repair sprawl? Sprawl, because it requires you to drive everywhere, will begin to become uninhabitable as gas becomes more expensive. Actually, it’s already happening. Last summer, people were already discovering that they couldn’t afford to live where they were living, and had gas prices not eased quickly, they would have had hard choices to make. And with a billion new cars coming online in the next few years in China and India as we approach worldwide Peak Oil, there’s not much doubt where gas prices are going in the longterm.
So what do we do? Extremists argue that we should simply abandon sprawl and let it rot. Try telling that to the people that live there. To the extremists, the more than 100 million Americans that inhabit sprawl are just statistics, but to the sprawl-dwellers, it’s the place where they’ve made their life’s two largest investments: their house, and the financing of that house. So proposals that hope to just sweep them aside don’t have a snowball’s chance of success.
Galina’s proposal, in contrast, actually takes sprawl and makes it better, and more sustainable. How is this possible? Anytime you mix uses where there was only a single use (housing, retail, office, etc.) before, you increase the chances that someone can walk to something rather than driving. Anytime you increase the quality of the pedestrian experience, you also increase those chances. Galina’s Sprawl Repair Kit provides tools for these things and much more.
And in doing so, it stands out clearly against the background of proposals that sacrifice usefulness to be “visionary.” But true visionaries aren’t those who just concoct useless stuff, but rather those who imagine solutions that work... but that nobody else has proposed yet. Check out the Urban Sprawl Repair Kit and see if you don’t agree that it’s the true visionary proposal amongst the finalists. And please vote for it (click the word “votes” in the red arrow to the right) if you agree.
~ Steve Mouzon

Miami 21

Wed, 5 Aug 2009 05:41:41 -0400

The Miami City Commission will consider Miami 21 on Thursday at 2 PM at Miami City Hall. If approved, this will be a major step forward in the building of sustainable places. Miami 21, at its core, is a robust SmartCode, and is designed to create walkable, mixed-use, compact places over time from existing urban fabric. It is intended to replace the old use-based zoning code, which, like countless other use-based (Euclidian) codes around the country, has been identified as a prime culprit in the creation of sprawl. This story in the Miami Herald shows what has happened in a formerly decrepit stretch of Biscayne Boulevard to which Miami 21 standards were applied as a demonstration project. The transformation is striking... read about it.
Miami 21 is being calibrated by DPZ, the chief authors of the SmartCode. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (the PZ of DPZ and Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Miami) has shepherded the project since its inception. DPZ’s work has created a new industry of firms calibrating SmartCodes for municipalities all across the country who want to repair and build their cities in more sustainable fashion, and firms providing other SmartCode services.
But Miami 21 is not without controversy. Chief amongst the detractors are architects, who deride Miami 21 because they think it will take away their design freedom. Apparently, they want their buildings to be able to zig, zag, and wiggle any way they choose without regard to the fabric of the city their buildings are helping to create. But we’ve seen nearly a century of this approach, and the results have been disastrous. Buildings that shout “look at me” as they twist and writhe with no concern for the street might provide notoriety for their architect, but they seldom do much for the neighborhood. These buildings are often like people who have had far too much to drink at a block party; screaming, calling attention to themselves, and contorted in all sorts of unimaginable ways, but not being a good neighbor.
Buildings are sometimes seen as a chance at immortality, because buildings sometimes last far longer than their creators. But buildings built more recently tend to be demolished sooner as we have forgotten how to build in a lovable way. So the reason for designing screaming buildings in the first place may well be an illusion... as well as any hope at sustainability, because the carbon footprint of a building is meaningless once its parts have been carted off to the landfill because it could not be loved.
So if you’re in Miami Thursday, please be at City Hall at 2. It’s time to take a big step forward in the building of sustainable places.
~ Steve Mouzon

the Fate of Ought-To

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:25:59 -0400

Google “sustainability.” It won’t take you very long to find lengthy lists of things we ought to do. These lists are all but useless. Why is this?
Real sustainability is something that can only be accomplished when everyone is involved, because we must all make changes. Sustainability is not something that the manufacturers will do for us; it’s something that begins with things we do for ourselves. Others can help, but they cannot do it for us, because the job is simply too huge.
Why do people make changes in their lives? Theoretically, there are three major reasons for people to make big changes: because they have to, because they ought to, or because they want to.
The “have to” reason is a place we don’t want to go because it means that there isn’t any other choice. During the summer of 2008 when gas briefly spiked to $5/gallon in most parts of the US, many people realized that they simply couldn’t afford to live where they were living. Had gas stayed that high, they would have been forced to make hard choices that would have been very traumatic for most of them. So “have to” works, but it’s normally quite painful.
The “ought to” reason is used to frame most of the sustainability solutions intended for the population at large. You ought to recycle. You ought to drive less. You ought to adjust your thermostat. Unfortunately, people almost never do what they ought to do. “Ought to” sounds like a good reason for someone else to do something, but not a good reason for me to do something. So “ought to” simply doesn’t work with most people. In other words, even though we can’t achieve sustainability without everyone doing things differently, the main tool that is being used to persuade people (“you ought to”) simply doesn’t work on enough people to make a real difference.
That leaves us with the “want to” reason, which is largely unexplored. How does it work? People want to do something because they love to do it or because they’re convinced it will benefit them in some way. In other words, because either their emotion or their intellect is telling them to do so. Wanting to do something is highly effective because it’s positive. Rather than avoiding pain like you do with a “have to” reason, you’re doing something because of the pleasure or other benefit it brings. “Want to” reasons are the foundations of the Living Tradition, which is the operating system of the only proven delivery system for real sustainability: the Original Green.
~ Steve Mouzon

Pedestrian Propulsion

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:50:51 -0400

Pedestrian Propulsion is a characteristic of a street that entices you to walk further than you otherwise would on lesser streets... literally propelling you along the way. It’s why you might walk for miles through the streets of Paris on a dreary day, stopping only when the showers come down, and even then under an awning at a little sidewalk cafe where you can continue on your way just as soon as the rain moves off.
The opposite of Pedestrian Propulsion is Pedestrian Obstruction. This is what happens in the parking lot of a “power center,” where the pedestrian experience is so bad that we all get in our cars to drive from the Old Navy to the Best Buy.
New Urbanists talk a lot about the 5-minute walk, which is roughly a quarter-mile. In theory, the average adult will walk rather than drive to their destination if it’s less than 5 minutes away. But as we have seen, Pedestrian Propulsion can dramatically increase this distance on a network of great streets like those found in central London, Rome, Paris, Charleston, Boston, etc. And Pedestrian Obstruction can dramatically shorten it. How far do you really want to walk in a sea of parking? “No further than absolutely necessary,” is likely your answer.
How does this work? Pedestrian Propulsion seems to depend on several factors. Foremost among them is something I call “Pedestrian Entertainment.” Simply put, the more you entertain the eyes of the pedestrians, the further they will walk. Some of this entertainment occurs simply because of geometry. If the sidewalk is closer to the buildings, then your view can change more frequently. But if the buildings are set far back from the sidewalk, then it takes a long time for your view to change appreciably. Imagine walking along a Main Street with storefronts at your elbow. Now imagine walking along a sidewalk in an office park, with the boring office buildings set hundreds of feet off the street. It’s clear why nobody walks in an office park, isn’t it?
The width of the buildings matter, too. You walk by narrower buildings on narrower lots more quickly than wide ones. The interest of the building design is also important. A blank wall is deadly to pedestrian interest, while a storefront full of attractive wares probably enhances Pedestrian Entertainment (and therefore increases Pedestrian Propulsion) as much as anything.
Interestingly, one of the things we find most entertaining is other people. Streets full of people often attract even more, while deserted streets can be spooky. It seems as if the rich get richer and the poor get poorer... pedestrian-rich or pedestrian-poor, that is. But this isn’t really true, because if you create a fabric of streets that entice pedestrians, then there will be plenty to go around. But if it’s an auto-dominated place, then nobody will walk even if there are occasional good blocks. My home is a classic example. Go north of 21st Street on Miami Beach and all you can find are cars. But on South Beach, people are walking everywhere... so much so that South Beach has been dubbed “the 21 Most Exciting Blocks on Planet Earth.”
~ Steve Mouzon

SmartDwelling I - the Invisible Things

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:25:25 -0400

Several elements of SmartDwelling I, published recently in the Wall Street Journal’s Green House of the Future article, are highly visible. Two of the more important ones, however, can”t be seen at all... at least from the ground. See the grey roof just to the left of the Tower of Wind & Water? Those are the hot water solar collectors that provide hot water to the entire house. See the blue roof covering the two-story porch? Those are photovoltaic collectors that provide electricity to SmartDwelling I.
Both sets of collectors are on low-slope roofs, so there’s no way you can see them unless you’re a long way from the house. They also occupy the entire roof... in essence, they are the roof. This means that even if you’re far enough back from the house to see the roof surface, you’re still unlikely to notice anything different.
I tried this approach first on a design for a Green Shed at Southlands, a DPZ project near Vancouver. Southlands is a place where all of the people living there will be able to get all the food they need from food grown on the property. I blogged about the Green Shed here.
Contrast this with normal collectors which are usually designed for the perfect angle of maximum solar efficiency, no matter how hideous that makes them look on the roof. This attitude of getting the engineering exactly right with not a thought for design likely contributed to the demise of the first green revolution that began in the late 1960s and died in the early 1980s. Read this post to find out why.
~ Steve Mouzon

Local Places - Aurea in San Francisco

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:44:10 -0400

This is the first in a series of posts on places committed to going local. Wanda and I celebrated our thirtieth anniversary in San Francisco and the Napa Valley a couple weeks ago. It’s almost embarrassing to admit because hotel restaurants are so often ordinary, but the only place we ate more than once while we were there was Aurea, a little light-fare restaurant in the Stanford Court, which is the hotel where we were staying near the top of Nob Hill.
The first notable thing we discovered about Aurea was their commitment to local food. It’s illegible in this tiny photo, but the thing that looks like a grey border running around the edge of their menu is actually a listing of their dozens of food and wine suppliers from around the region. We ate at some notable places, most of which busied themselves explaining why they had to fly their food in from halfway around the world. Whereas if you went to those exotic places, they would be just as likely to get their food from somewhere else. It reminds me of a trip with my family up the eastern seaboard of the US when I was a kid. Maine lobsters were always highly-desired in the South, but when we finally got to Maine and my dad said something to the waiter about Maine lobsters, the waiter sniffed and said “we get our lobsters from Newfoundland.”
Meanwhile, while the other restaurants were making excuses, Aurea was quietly doing excellent dishes with largely regional ingredients, many of which came from less than a hundred miles around San Francisco. Their herbs traveled the shortest distance of all: from their rooftop herb garden just outside the window.
And then a curious thing happened: we started paying attention to other aspects of the place, and found that not only was the food local and excellent, but the service was exceptional, too.
Accepted wisdom has it that if you’re going to be remarkable in one aspect of your operation, you’ve got to sacrifice somewhere else. But Aurea makes me wonder if exceptional commitment to excellence in one respect elevates your entire operation instead, as I blogged about here. Aurea certainly made believers out of us.
~ Steve Mouzon

SmartDwelling I - The Kitchen Garden

Tue, 9 Jun 2009 19:14:05 -0400

The Kitchen Garden is the one part of SmartDwelling I that a few people look at and say “you can’t be serious!” For them, buying food at the grocery store is simply too ingrained in their version of modern life to ever consider raising any appreciable portion of their own food. And make no mistake about it... the areas devoted to food in SmartDwelling I would likely provide most, if not all, of the food needed by a family of three or four for an entire year, assuming you used the space efficiently.
How is this possible? Doesn’t the American agricultural system require an acre or two of land (depending on where you are and how long the growing season is) to provide food for just one person? And haven’t we always known that the American agricultural system is the most efficient on earth?
Here’s the problem. America’s industrial food system is the most efficient on earth, so long as you’re measuring the man-hour efficiency of the guys on the tractors. One person on a mega-tractor as tall as a two-story house can probably work a thousand acres or more in a single day. Meanwhile, one person growing food in bio-intensive fashion has a hard time tending more than a single acre. But that guy on the mega-tractor is only a tiny part of the supply chain. Getting food to market requires truck drivers to take it to the processing plant, workers in those processing plants that break it down into its food-chain parts (high fructose corn syrup, etc.) more truck drivers to take it to assembly plants where more workers turn it into soda, Chicken McNuggets or whatever, more truck drivers to take it to the distributors who hire even more truck drivers to take it to the grocery stores. Is this starting to sound like more oil than food? It is. According to Michael Pollan, delivering a single calorie of highly-processed food (most of the stuff America eats) requires 70 to 90 calories of gasoline! And this doesn’t even take into account all the people working for the processors and the people working for the food manufacturers... who also must, by the way, buy even more gas to get to work in their corporate office parks. So the efficiency of the guy on the tractor (which can cost a million dollars or more, and must be manufactured by lots of employees at John Deere, etc.) is completely an illusion.
The bio-intensive farmer, on the other hand, while tending only an acre, can take their produce to a nearby farmers’ market or sell it to local restaurants, reducing the food chain to just one person in a truck. And the food chain, rather than stretching across national boundaries, can be as short as 20-30 miles or less.
So while the man-hour efficiency of the industrial food chain is a complete illusion, the acre efficiency of bio-intensive gardening is completely real. Remember that one person working hard to tend one acre? Well, they’re not just feeding one person (or less) on that one acre like the industrial food system would do. Rather, depending on growing season and local conditions, that one acre can easily feed twenty people or more... and that’s without going to some of the extremes (like Green Walls and Melon Cradles) that SmartDwelling I includes. That’s real efficiency... one person feeding twenty people or more... and with only a tiny fraction of the appetite for gasoline that we find in the entire industrial food chain.
So beyond the fact that it’s highly acre-efficient, what’s so cool about the Kitchen Garden in SmartDwelling I? Lots of things. See the pool in the center? That’s a Tilapia Pool. Tilapia thrive in incredibly tight quarters... there can be more tilapia than water in a pool and they’ll do just fine. So you can think of it as a water feature, or as a big protein machine... take your pick. You’ll also notice a few chickens running around. Those are the hens that inhabit the henhouse under the stairs to the apartment/guest room/kids’ room/office/studio/workshop/whatever over the garage. You only need a few hens to eat garden pests, provide a continuous supply of fertilizer... and also a continuous supply of eggs for even more protein.
You’ve probably noticed that the vegetables grow in raised beds. Rather than single rows of plants 2-3 feet apart like industrial tractor farming requires for most crops, raised beds grow vegetables much more compactly. They’re limited only by the reach of the person tending the beds... a three-foot bed allows you to easily work the middle of the bed from any edge without bending over much, if at all.
You likely also noticed the Green Walls all around the garden. Actually, this drawing hides the near Green Wall so you can see the entire garden. but in any case, the entire garden is surrounded with Green Walls, which are highly efficient for reasons I blogged about earlier.
But this isn’t just a place to work. See the two little structures with tools handing on the lattice walls, and seats inside? The one on the right is the Morning Pavilion. That’s where you go and sit and watch the mist rising off the garden in the early mornings, maybe with a cup of coffee... and with the morning sun streaming in over your shoulder. The one on the left is the Evening Pavilion. You can sit there at the end of a day of gardening, admiring your hard-won handiwork, with the evening sun streaming in over your shoulder again, just as it did in the mists of morning.
~ Steve Mouzon

Living In Season

Fri, 5 Jun 2009 08:38:24 -0400

I was reading Michael Pollan’s great new book In Defense of Food yesterday when I came across this: “Eating in season also tends to diversify your diet - because you can’t buy strawberries or broccoli or potatoes twelve months of the year, you’ll find yourself experimenting with other foods...”
That got me thinking... how about living in season? By that, I mean choosing things that we do and how we do them according to the seasons, rather than trying to force everything to be 72 degree, 30% humidity, perfectly lit perfection all the time?
Think of how many of the rituals of human culture originally derived from the rites of the seasons, and from simple delights gleaned from the time of year. Snuggling in front of a crackling fire late into a clear and brittle night in the dead of winter, or do you remember the sleeping porch with fireflies silently patrolling outside the screen in early June, when it’s just a bit too warm to sleep inside? Or how about going for a quick dip late on a dusty August afternoon? Or maybe letting the dog sleep at your feet on a night that the Hunter’s Moon has brought an unseasonable chill? And whatever happened to Spring Cleaning?
We did all of these things when the seasons mattered, and when each day could be new, bringing something just a bit different from the one before it. But not now. We can no longer tolerate uncertainty, it seems, even as the world around us grows radically uncertain. Is it possible that we have built this Great Grey Way of everyday life to somehow insulate ourselves from the globally cataclysmic stuff we read about, see, and hear? I really don’t know.
But what I do know is that our intolerance of days too warm, too cold, too wet, too dry, too bright, or too dark has robbed us of the seasons, and of both the struggles and celebrations they once contained.
Here’s another thing... not only has our environmental intolerance stolen the delight of the seasons, but it may, perversely, have done something far more malicious. Consider this: the hidden cost of the Great Grey Way is the fact that it requires us to mechanically condition our personal cocoons almost all of the time. So we seal the windows, lower the shades, and power up. And so the machines run... and run... and run...
No big deal, right? Just pay the utility bill and everything is OK. Or is it? It turns out that the Great Grey Way is, above all other things, an energy hog. And the hogging of energy is the prime culprit in wars, depletions, exploitations, global climate change, and most of the other things we seem to be trying to insulate ourselves from when we create the Great Grey Way!
Somehow, this cycle must be broken. Sustainability requires it. And the delight of the seasons is still waiting on the other side.
~ Steve Mouzon

SmartGrowth Schools

Tue, 2 Jun 2009 18:10:18 -0400

Here’s another link you really should check out. SmartGrowth Schools is a site that has just been put up by Nathan Norris, a longtime colleague of mine, and a fountain of more great ideas than almost anyone else I know. The SmartGrowth Schools idea operates on the principle of identifying the most important issues relating to school location and design, and then expressing them in common-sense, plain-spoken fashion (sounds familiar?) in what Nathan calls the SmartGrowth Schools Report Card.
The Report Card steps through the various levels of competence the school board could likely be demonstrating, from A to F. For each of the grades from A to F, the explanation is clear and concise. The report card on each of the important issues is backed up with one page of explanation and resources.
“What’s this got to do with sustainability and the Original Green,” you might ask? I’m calling this site to your attention for several reasons. First, most of the patterns are explicitly sustainable. One example is the strong preference for preservation of existing school buildings. Down The Unlovable Carbon Stair-Steps and Preservation vs. LEED are two Original Green posts that back this up. The site’s encouragement of a process that creates “Community Buy-In” can be the beginning of a Living Tradition. The site’s mandate for the “Elimination of Design Constraints” saves many acres of land, tucking the school into a walkable neighborhood. This also can prevent the need for five acres of hot asphalt on which to stack the cars waiting to pick up kids, as parents can park along streets in neighborhood schools. And clearly, mandating that schools should be built in walkable neighborhoods helps in a big way to make the neighborhood an Accessible Place and a Serviceable Place. This is enhanced by the high grades achieved by schools that have shared uses with neighborhood recreation centers, parks, and other facilities. I could go on, but you get the idea. Download the Report Card and see for yourself.
But there’s also a second reason why I’m calling this to your attention: It isn’t just that the content of the site focuses so much on sustainability issues, although it does. It’s also because of the process that it uses. Rather than just focusing like many sites on big-picture stuff (who’s not for better education, after all) it instead breaks down school siting and design issues into a series of individual patterns about which we can all have an intelligent conversation. And because it’s plain-spoken enough, we can also likely agree at the end of the conversation. This is precisely the technique I’ve tried to employ in A Living Tradition [Architecture of the Bahamas] because I believe that such an approach empowers everyone and just might re-start a living tradition, which is the only proven delivery vehicle for real sustainability.
~ Steve Mouzon

SmartDwelling I - Sideyard Sail

Fri, 29 May 2009 18:11:28 -0400

SmartDwelling I, published recently by the Wall Street Journal in their Green House of the Future article has a number of innovations that aren’t so much inventions as they are re-purposing things we’ve known about for a very long time. Green Walls are one such pattern; the Laundry Eave is another.
SmartDwelling I was designed for the Gulf Coast, where there is a nautical heritage, as the early towns and cities were all built with a direct dependence on commerce across the Gulf. So when I started looking for a way to catch breezes coming down the street and redirect a portion of the breeze through the sideyard, a sail was an obvious choice.
The Sideyard Sail can be furled in a storm, of course, in order to protect the sail cloth... and also to avoid sending high storm winds through your side yard. It works by pivoting a boom out over the frontage garden. If there is no frontage garden, then the front garden wall should be made tall enough (this one is) so that the boom is above head height. But that’s OK... that simply assures a private side garden.
Incidentally, the original Sideyard Sail was envisioned for Schooner Bay, a wonderful new town in the Bahamas, on the eastern shore of Abaco. It will be a working fishing village. It has organic farms on its western border, so that you can look out over the fields and over the waters from which much of your food comes. Because of this, Schooner Bay will be one of the first new Nourishing Places to be built in recent times. Schooner Bay will also build upon all other foundations of the Original Green, making it one of the first Original Green places to be built in our time.
The first Original Green place to be designed was Sky, located in the Florida panhandle. It is now in the development approvals process, and should be under construction shortly. Sky is a veritable laboratory of Original Green ideas, breaking new ground in too many ways to count. See The Sky Method (it’s a big file; give it a few to download) for a highly organic and sequential land development method invented for Sky. It promises to bypass the normal development brain damage of millions of dollars of infrastructure investment up front before you can sell a single lot... brain damage that is actually almost impossible since the Meltdown, because banks have basically quit loaning money for new development.
~ Steve Mouzon

Built to Last Video

Fri, 29 May 2009 18:02:53 -0400

Most Original Green blog posts are new material, but occasionally, I’ll post a link or copy text from elsewhere if it’s important enough. This one is. Built to Last is two minutes and fifty-five seconds of the most incisive critique of sprawl I may have ever seen in video (it’s on YouTube,) side-by-side with the antidote to sprawl: New Urbanism.
John Norquist, President and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, said “Built to Last made me laugh out loud.” The film has been picked up in news stories all over, and has also been named the winner of the CNU’s 2009 Video Contest. It will be featured in the opening plenary of CNU17 in Denver in a few weeks. Have a look!
~ Steve Mouzon

Denver - Valley Forge for the New Urbanism

Tue, 26 May 2009 15:49:40 -0400

I firmly believe that Denver will be remembered as the Valley Forge of the New Urbanism... The darkest hour. Our numbers sharply depleted. The few who are there characterized as “the crazy ones.”
The entire construction industry is in shambles, as we all know. Conventional construction began to suffer right after the sub-prime crisis in 2007, but in every place I worked, New Urbanist developments were still clicking along after everything else in those particular markets had shut down. But when the Meltdown occurred last fall and you could no longer get financing, then that shut everything down, including the New Urbanism, because if you can’t borrow, you can’t build. Today, even the New Urbanist architects and planners are laying off employees down to the bare bones. In other words, these are really dark times.
There’s no question that there will be far fewer attendees at the Congress this year. And few of the private-sector New Urbanists who are going can actually afford to go... they’re going based on hope rather than good business sense. I’ll be one of the attendees who fit in that category. But here’s why the hope might be fulfilled beyond any of today’s reasonable expectations:
The New Urbanism has been working for three decades to build a set of ideas perfectly suited to lead us out of this mess, as I detailed in New Urbanism and the Meltdown. And the conventional development system that has stood in the way of the New Urbanism from the beginning is largely being swept away as we watch. So this darkest hour is precisely the thing that had to happen in order to pave the way for the coming victory... the triumph of far better and more sustainable ways of building our future.
So if you want to join the crazy ones in Denver, then do this: come prepared. For what? I’m not entirely sure, because I don’t believe this will be like any Congress that has ever been held until now. The urgency and darkness of the situation won’t permit it. Rather than a proper gathering of polite professionals, this one is more likely to devolve into a veritable swap-fest of ideas and techniques... something more akin (at least in the corridors by day and in the pubs by night) to a black-market wisdom exchange.
Come prepared by bringing your best new stuff, and bring it in forms that are easy to distribute to anyone who’s interested. Even if you haven’t completely worked everything out, bring your best... and someone else just might close the loop for you over dinner late one night.
One more thing... a funny thing often happens at the darkest hour. Those who have banded together to face it often develop a dynamic between them that can’t be achieved any other way. Twenty or thirty years later, all you’ll need to say are “Denver. 2009. I was there.” No other words will be necessary.
~ Steve Mouzon

SmartDwelling I - Laundry Eave

Fri, 22 May 2009 09:35:53 -0400

SmartDwelling I, published recently by the Wall Street Journal in their Green House of the Future article has a number of innovations that aren’t so much inventions as they are re-purposing things we’ve known about for a very long time. Green Walls are one such pattern; the Laundry Eave is another.
If you don’t want to pay to electric-dry your clothes, then there are currently two common choices. The European method is to hang them on pulley-driven clothes lines over the street. Neighbors therefore know if it’s boxers or briefs, and that seems like a little too much information.
The American method is to put up a couple posts with frames on top in the back yard, and string the clotheslines between them. Problem is, as any kid knows who has spent any reasonable amount of time playing in such a back yard, running into such a clothesline while going for a fly ball or a pass can nearly take your head off, because they’ll catch you under your chin, holding your head in place while the rest of your body goes flying underneath. This is such a common phenomenon that it spawned a term in American football: “Getting clotheslined” means getting tackled by a defender who holds his arm out at neck level, just like the clothesline... leaving you to crash bone-jarringly flat of your back a moment later.
The Laundry Eave solves both of these problems. It uses the pulley, like in Europe, so that you can hang clothes out of any window on any floor of the building. But it is placed on the back or side of the building so your undies aren’t hanging out over the street.
The last element is a very deep bracketed eave that hangs over the entire clothesline, so that a shower that comes up while the clothes are drying don’t soak them all over again.
Why might you want to air-dry rather than electric-dry your clothes? The energy savings are obvious. And if you’re brave enough to commit to doing it all the time, then you don’t even need to buy a dryer. That also saves on electrical costs... at the very least, you don’t need the circuit, the wire, and the outlet. But because a clothes dryer is a big electrical load, eliminating the dryer just might make the difference in being able to go down to a smaller service. One other thing on electrical service... if you make your own electricity with photovoltaic panels, then eliminating the dryer may save a really nice chunk of change by requiring fewer photovoltaic panels. And finally, three more reasons that everyone can enjoy... air-dried clothes usually smell fresher than electric-dried ones, they’re not full of static electricity, and the clothes actually last longer!
~ Steve Mouzon