New York Magazine asked some of New York City’s distinguished architects how they would improve the city and save it from climate change. NY Mag reported on their findings.
As Earth’s population continues to grow, so does car traffic and issues related to climate change. It has been estimated about 30% of urban roadway congestion are drivers searching for a place to park. Car culture puts the pressure on cities to build more parking garages, which usually win out over green parks. Meanwhile, climate change continues to challenge cities to handle a great deal of stormwater. The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season is proof of this - as of Monday, 13 named storms have formed in the Atlantic ocean, costing 210 lives and counting.
THIRD NATURE, a Danish architecture firm, designed a solution for the modern-day urban issues of flooding, parking and lacking green spaces with their project, POP-UP. A stacked green space, car park, and water reservoir, from top to bottom respectively, POP-UP uses Archimedes’ principle to store water and create floating space to store cars.
From a pool of over fifty submissions, Resilient by Design have chosen ten winning teams to collaborate with engineers, climate change experts, designers, architects and community members to imagine a better future for The Bay Area in the face of potentially devastating climate change. The winning teams AECOM, BIG, Bionic, TLS, Field Operations, HASSELL, Mithun, Base Landscape, SCAPE and Gensler will spend the next year on a combination of collaborative research projects and site-specific conceptual design solutions.
The government of Norway has announced plans for a $4.4 million USD (37 million NOK) upgrade to the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, after record high temperatures caused the “failsafe” structure to flood earlier this year. While no samples were damaged in that event, the situation sparked concern that the facility would not be able to stand the test of time as originally intended.
Located 130 meters inside a mountain in the Arctic Svalbard archipelago, the vault was constructed as part of a worldwide initiative to protect global biodiversity by preserving the seeds of the world’s important food crops. The structure, which cost $9 million USD to build, was intended to be buried deep into the permafrost to protect against both natural and manmade disasters, but this year’s incident uncovered several design flaws that allowed water to breach the vault’s access tunnel.
James Hansen, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, former NASA scientist, and the planet’s preeminent climatologist, was among the first to sound the alarm on climate change during his 1988 testimony before Congress. Since then, he has continued to shine a light on the problem through lectures, interviews, TED talks, and his blog. He has warned that a mere 2-degree increase in temperature could result in a sea level rise of five to nine meters by the end of the century, flooding coastal cities and rendering them uninhabitable.
Inspired by Hansen, filmmakers Menilmonde have imagined Manhattan underwater. The French duo's previous videos experiment with subtle subversions of the world we experience, and their latest creation, 2°C New York City, is arguably their most powerful to date.
As part of a global, interdisciplinary effort to tackle climate change, architects are devoting resources towards optimizing the energy efficiency of buildings old and new. This effort is more than justified, given that buildings account for almost 40% of UK and US emissions. Although sustainability is now a hallmark of many new architectural schemes, the energy inefficiency of structures from the 18th and 19th centuries still contribute to global carbon emissions on a vast scale.
In order to address the challenge of intelligently retrofitting existing buildings, the Harvard Center for Green Buildings (CGBC) at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, in collaboration with Snøhetta and Skanska Technology, are retrofitting the CGBC’s headquarters in a pre-1940s timber-framed building, aiming to create one of the world’s most ambitious sustainable buildings. HouseZero is driven by uncompromising performance targets, such as 100% natural ventilation, 100% daylight autonomy, and almost zero energy required for heating and cooling. The result will be a prototype for ultra-efficiency, reducing reliance on energy-intensive technology whilst creating a comfortable indoor environment.
Earlier this year, the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard was flooded after record high temperatures over the winter caused some of the permafrost surrounding the vault to melt, reports The Guardian. The building's entrance tunnel was flooded and then froze to create conditions "like a glacier" for those trying to enter. Fortunately, the vault itself was not breached, meaning no harm came to the building's precious contents. However, the incident has raised questions about whether the building will be able to fulfill its purpose in the long term.
Professor Alan Short of the University of Cambridge has published a book advocating for the revival of 19th-century architectural ideas to address the crippling energy use of modern skyscrapers. The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture proposes an end to the architectural fetish for glass, steel, and air conditioning, instead drawing inspiration from forgotten techniques in naturally ventilated buildings of the 1800s. The book is a culmination of 30 years’ research and design by Prof. Short and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge.
_Paolo_Rosselli_DSC_8101.jpg?1489090441 "Professor Short argues that skyscraper design must depart from its current reliance on glass and steel, and begin to harness natural ventilation. Boeri Studio's Bosco Verticale. Image Courtesy of Paolo Rosselli")
Update: Unfortunately this free online viewing was only intended for a limited time and National Geographic has now removed the video. If you didn't catch the documentary in time, you can still watch it on DVD. In place of the full documentary, we have now included the trailer above.
As a group, architects are without question among the most enthusiastic supporters of sustainable initiatives around. It should therefore be welcome news to many architects that National Geographic has released its latest documentary on climate change, Before the Flood, for free on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter—pretty much everywhere.
Presented by Hollywood superstar and recently-appointed UN Climate Ambassador Leonardo DiCaprio, the documentary is perhaps the most ambitious film about climate change since Al Gore's 2006 An Inconvenient Truth. Throughout the course of the 90-minute film, DiCaprio travels the globe to see the damage wrought by the early signs of irreversible climate change, from melting glaciers, to dying coral reefs, to flooding cities. Speaking to world leaders including Barack Obama and The Pope, as well as a whole host of climate scientists, DiCaprio's aim is not so much to convince viewers of the existence of climate change, as with An Inconvenient Truth, but instead to investigate just how far down the wrong path we've traveled, and whether there is any hope for humanity to save itself.
Florida is a state in denial. Miami is in the midst of one of the largest building booms in the region's history. Dense crane canopies pepper the city's skyline as they soar over forthcoming white, gold, and aqua clad "high end" residential and hotel towers. This massive stream of investment dollars is downright paradoxical considering the impending calamity that surrounds Southern Florida: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that the sea level could likely increase almost 35 inches (0.89 meters) by mid-century. If current trends continue, that number is anticipated to rise to up to 80 inches (2.0 meters) by the year 2100, threatening the habitability of the entire metro area.
Given that harrowing scenario, Miami is either refusing to acknowledge the inevitable, or desperately trying to become relevant enough to be saved—not that saving the city is actually feasible. The region sits on extremely porous limestone which pretty much rules out the option of a Netherlands style sea wall. If the Atlantic couldn’t make any horizontal inroads, the rising tide would simply bubble up from below. Miami’s pancake topography doesn’t stand a chance.
This year’s installment of the National Building Museum’s Summer Block Party Series, James Corner Field Operations’ ICEBERGS, is now open to the public. On display until September 5th, ICEBERGS takes the form of a shimmering, underwater world of glacial ice fields located in the museum’s expansive Great Hall to provide the public with an escape from the hot Washington, D.C. summer.
UNDERSTANDING PLACE showcases selections from a seven-year long rich investigation that capture the essence of Dhaka’s extreme wet-dry climate flux in a totally immersive atmospheric experience. Lit by an 8’ tall rear projection screen of audio-video captured footage, a narrated mind-map floor animation, an illuminated wall of colorful photographs, and LED monitor slide-shows of student projects, the visitor is invited to meander through four zones identifying the architectural design process: observation, data collection, analysis, and proposals.
Created by the Union International des Architects (UIA) in 2005, World Architecture Day is celebrated on the first Monday of October with the aim of reminding the world about the collective responsibility of architects in designing our future cities and settlements.
This year, the UIA has selected “Architecture, Building, Climate” as the theme of the day, seeking to highlight the essential role that architecture, design and urbanism have in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. With international climate treaty negotiations set to happen later this year, the “UIA members, working bodies and partners will mobilize on 5 October to promote actions and solutions that apply the enormous power of architecture and urban design in coping with global climate change, one of the greatest challenges of our time.”
Through small actions architects can collectively make a big difference and create significant changes. To celebrate World Architecture Day, we have rounded up a selection of projects that have taken steps towards the challenge of protecting our environment.
