Sustainable Architecture: Eco Design and Landscaping, Urbanism

SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE:

Vernacular Architecture

(natural building and eco design);

and Environmental Design

(green architecture, sustainable landscape and urban design, and regional resource conservation)

Sustainable pole house, integrated with the landscape, Kauai, Hawaii / "City within a City" Venice, 2000 Robert Hotten

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pedagogy and poetics

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Robert Hotten, MLA Architect

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1. sustainable architecture introduction

Sustainable Architecture: Vernacular Architecture (natural building and eco design) and Environmental Design (green architecture, landscape, and urban design) Introduction/Disclaimer This is an archive of information about sustainable architecture: effective low cost houses, ecological planning, design, integrated architecture and landscaping for tropical, sub-tropical or temperate climates. Most of these resources are available at libraries or as government publications, etc. Sustainable Development Theory Introduction The sustainable approach to site planning and design goes beyond combining and comparing site inventories. A sustainable process attempts to determine the relationships between site factors and how those factors will adapt to change. Understanding these relationships also clarifies how development impacts from one area of the site will affect other areas. An evaluation of potential development impacts requires that a predevelopment baseline or environmental model be produced. This model will describe the essential functions and interrelationships of the individual site factors and will establish acceptable limits of change during and after construction. Selected environmental monitoring and testing will be done during construction. The entire build-out of the development will be phased to allow time between construction projects to monitor environmental impacts and adjust the baseline model. The major steps in a sustainable approach to site planning and design are as follows: Ą Model the ecosystem to establish an environmental understanding Ą Assess social-economic context Ą Establish acceptable limits of change Ą Design facility within social and environmental thresholds Ą Monitor site factors throughout construction Ą Reevaluate design solutions between development phases Go Back to the Sustainable Architecture Home Page

2. sustainable urban design introduction

Sustainable Urban Design: Introduction Urban Studies 2XL The City is Flat: Yet expands faster and faster forever ABSTRACT 2XL: The City is Flat: Yet expands faster and faster forever. Like in the theory of the flat Universe, the City continues expanding faster and faster forever. The City is flat. What if it were that simple? And, then, what if the city continues expanding faster and faster forever? If this analogy is correct, then most theories of the city are wrong. The city as "tree," "network," "landscape," etc., all make overcomplicated and, more importantly, limiting assumptions in an attempt to define a metanarrative rule and model urbanism. The inflammable interfaces and machinic agency contained in the process-oriented collaborative agency will allow expansion of urban thought into the eternal, infinite, and virtual. Further, threshold, formlessness, hyperfigures, and social formation of general assaults on beauty, the sublime, and the glim become commonplace. DISCUSSION THE CITY IS FLAT Metric dimension Flatland, Situationist (Psychogeographic Map of Paris), Primal Allegory of Landscape, Agrophilia, Generic City Villette, Parc de la Villette is a particularly rich material subject. "...there are two sections of Parc de la Villette that, in retrospect do strike me as cinematic: the basins in front of the Cite des Sciences et de l'Industrie and Alexanders Chermetoff's Jardin d'energie. Both are sunk below the body of the park and both have an unusually powerful sense of place, one very hard and one very soft. A neo- Freudian structuralist might read them as male and female polarities, as disembodied entities seeking each other's presence. One could go further, identifying the Geode as a phallic tip and the tracery of the bamboos in the Jardin d'energie as pubic hair. A cylindrical void set amonsgt the bamboos has rippling water on its walls and emits soft groans from concealed speakers. According to this reading, the surface level of the park symbolizes the baffling matrix in which we live our lives. Each of us may believe that the world contains our perfect partner; only a few of us are lucky enough to make contact. But wandering through the matrix without discovering the voids, one feels only confusion. Another parallel can be drawn with a video game that lacks a strat or finish. One's "life" is spent amidst endlessly shifting scenes, always modulating around similar themes. Line clashes with point, point with surface, surface with line, and so on for ever. Shifting scenes are characteristic of the algorithms that produce computer games. Tschumi's lines, points and surfaces are algorithmic. This explains the analogy, at least for one reading, and may have been one of the designer's aims." (Turner) YET EXPANDS FASTER AND FASTER FOREVER Topological and Ametric dimension Memories Dreams Desires, KRCF 2XL THE CITY IS FLAT: YET EXPANDS FASTER AND FASTER FOREVER The Glim The city expands alongshore in a reflective relation to the water and the inherent infinity of the glim. Beauty and the sublime are manifested in itsuniversal orientation and configuration. Concatenation. Open Sky, Space, Thirdspace, Universe, 3xl Garden City, Terminal Architecture, Hypertext, Labyrinth, Landscape Formlessness Something imperceptible, unstable, fluid and formless, as in an activity. The Tuilleries Garden, by the fountain on a summer day, with thousands of people, walking, sleeping, reading, and fulfilling all manner of fantasies, is formlessness. Thirdspace Thirdspace too can be described as a creative recombination and extension, one that builds on a Firstspace perspective that is focused on the "real" material world and a Secondspace perspective that interprets this reality through "imagined" representations of spatiality. With this brief and. I hope, helpful and inviting introduction, we re ready to begin our journeys to a multiplicity of real-and-imaginary places. (Soja) Form and the Flux How is it that we can become preconceptually aware of an impetus to act? When we become aware of an impetus to act we are aware of a symbol; a desire to recollect. When we recollect we become aware of a proir symbol that is a state of desire pointing forward as a state of anticipation. It is a symbol of what is to come. Each symbol is a "form"; a sort of preobject to awareness with boundaries; forestructures. How do forms arise before awareness and what is their nature? How is it possible to be aware of form and what is awareness? What is prior to form, what is "flux"? Asking these questions amounts to asking about meaning against the scene of form and the flux. (Carspecken) CONCLUSION This is a new way of looking at urbanism that is both simpler, and thus allows a more universal understanding, and at the same time unlimited as a topology of networks, agency, events, and subjectivity. TYPOLOGIES Flat City: Los Angeles Expansive City: Paris, San Francisco, Venice, Sydney Film: Matrix, Dark City, Existenz, Being Malkovich, Lost Highway Landscapes: Coastlines, Guggenheim Bilbao Museo, Piazza San Marco, Tuilleries, Cafe Marly

3. sustainable doctrine introduction

Sustainable Doctrine Introduction Sustainable Architecture and Urbansim: Course Description * Course Home * Syllabus * Calendar * Projects EARTH: Myth and Reality A representation of the respective areas of the earth's surface in descending area: ocean 69%; desert 8%; forest 8%; grassland and pasture 8%; fresh water and ice 3%; agriculture 3%; urban 1%. Areas in a state of degrading metamorphosis are indicated with an X. Each square represents 2% of the earth's surface, or 10,000,000 square kilometres, in round figures. Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism - 12 Things You Can Do To Build Effective Low Cost Houses and Cities © 2000 Robert Hotten Pedagogical objectives To deliver a foundation Section I. History, theory Section II. Ecology, materials, and construction Poetic objectives To conduct an architectural and urban design studio Section III. Environmental design methods and studios Staff Instructor: Prof Robert Hotten Level Graduate Course meeting times 8-January-2004 -- 10-March-2004 Course Schedule Lesson 1 -- 10 Jan Lesson 2 -- 17 Jan Lesson 3 -- 21 Jan Lesson 4 -- 21 Jan Course description Sustainable Architecture Introduction Part I. Sustainable theory Sustainable design requires, as Derrida and others suggest, the end of history. That is the end of a certain concept of history. In the future of an unfinished universe, higher levels of organization (consciousness for example) may irrigate the field with unimagined possibilities. This then is the post-structuralist challenge for the art of eco design. Part I. Concepts of sustainability The first concept of sustainability is to exemplify principles of conservation, that is, synergy with nature The second concept of sustainability is bioregionalism, or the concept that all life is on a community basis- that future shelter technology must function within bioregional patterns and scales. The third concept of sustainability is ethical, weighing the paradox of our illusion of affluence against the injustice of environmental degradation. Part III. Vernacular and environmental design methods and studios Sustainable Architecture Introduction "Imagine...the day when we will walk a site and simply absorb it. Next we check our computer for the data files about the "vertical layers." On the monitor's screen we sketch a perspective of what we want a site to look like, transformed to its new use. Then the computer lets us walk through our creation so that we can modify it as we go. When we are finally pleased with this "horizontal view" we will request a two-dimensional computer drawing from which someone else can build what we have envisioned." (Wells 1997). Architecture and building practices today are high cost, fatalistic solutions, that keep us trapped in what is typically done. This is simply because designers, suppliers, and builders, as well as tax, insurance and real estate brokers and banks, i.e., everyone, makes more profit when houses, infrastructures, processes, and components cost more. Alternative ideas and methods exist to design and build effective low cost houses, landscapes and cities. What follows is a typically sustainable building process that involves these steps: * Visualization of goals * Environmental assessment * Checklist of environmental design goals * Design synthesis of aesthetic goals There are six historical principles (vernacular trends) to improve the energy efficiency and thereby effectiveness and useability of dwellings. They are: 1) siting and vernacular design; 2) shade; 3) ventilation; 4) earth shelter, 5) thermal inertia; and 6) air lock entrances. To this list can be added six new techniques of environmental design (technologies, methods of effectiveness, and design synthesis): 7) scale (footprint), insulation, design of future alternatives; 8) on site water collection and waste disposal; 9) solar water heating panels; 10) photovoltaic electricity generation; 11) recycling and use of local materials; and 12) on site growth of food, fuel and building materials. These twelve principles can be combined, as suitable, into synthesized solutions for various locations, users and climates that meet cultural needs with available materials under local conditions. The following begins to describe these methods and technologies and is an outline of twelve things one can do towards the end of poetic and self-sufficient buildings. Conclusion Effective low cost and sustainable building design works well with an integration of historic principles and new technologies and methods. These are some of the benefits: * Conservation of natural and building resources * Increased building durability * Increased user comfort and satisfaction * Energy and material savings * Elimination of waste and pollution * Savings from recycling. Contact Robert D. Hotten, MLA, Architect (laumana@aloha.net) B. Arch, M. Arch, MLA, AIA (Former), NZILA (Former Chair, Auckland), NZIA, Registered Architect: California - #C-12081, Hawaii - #A-6540, New Zealand - #6240. Copyright 1995-2003 Robert D. Hotten, All Rights Reserved Go Back to the Sustainable Architecture Home Page

pedagogy pedagogy

(sustainable theory)

interstitials interstitials (interconnecting

notions and hypotheses)

site map site map

1. sustainable architecture sustainable

architecture, introduction

a. pedagogy part 1: sustainable architecture:

effective low cost houses / part 2: ecological

landscaping

b. poetics part 3: integrated architecture and

landscape / part 4: the contemporary beach house