Open Source Ecology is developing and testing the Global Village Construction Set, a set of tools to build replicable, open source, modern, off-grid resilient communities. By weaving open source permacultural and technological cycles together, we intend to provide basic human needs while being good stewards of the land, using resources sustainably, and pursuing right livelihood.

With the gift of openly shared information, we can produce industrial products locally using open source design and digital fabrication. This frees us from the need to participate in the wasteful resource flows of the larger economy by letting us produce our own materials and components for the technologies we use. We see small, independent, land-based economies as means to transform societies, address pressing world issues, and evolve to freedom.

via Open Source Ecology – Open Source Ecology.

There’s a funny TED Talk video called “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” about how to make a good – and a bad – TED Talk. One way to go bad is to talk about architecture. We may be safe in generalizing from TED to the general culture: architecture makes most people grow faint and causes their eyes to roll.

Which is weird, because in and around architecture is where we engage with other people the most. Buildings great and small are pretty much exclusively where we conduct the four F’s — the two familiar ones, fight or flight, plus the two even more familiar ones that everybody forgets to put on the F-list: freeze (or space out) and fuck. Architecture is where we live all the fundamentals of, well, life. From coffee to water cooler to toilet to bed, we really, really need architecture to help house us.

Architectural history and agendas ought to be taught in grade school. We ought to be taught to find beauty in a joist, or a good coat of insulation, for the simple reason that thinking about buildings and their interactions with people, other buildings and the rest of the world — in other words, thinking about the ecology of construction — is a good thing, like reading and writing and music and math. And if we knew more about how things went together, the costs involved (both economic and environmental), we might make smarter choices about the places we build to live and work in.

It’s possible architecture and construction were taught in ancient times, as part of the normal school that goes into growing an adult(ish) human. Birds learn it, bees learn it – humans can learn architecture, too. Indeed, the root of our word “poetry” is an ancient Greek one meaning the sometimes all-too-familiar action “to make” and, by association, the agent practicing the action, the “maker.” But then, in the olden days, pigs knew how to make brick houses and wolves knew how to blow them down.

So much we’ve lost. Now our concern is getting the kids to soccer in the minivan which, when you stop and examine the interior, is a lot like a house in some ways.

In any case, we’ve gained a nice nugget of building wisdom and folly in Great Expectations & Kochuu, two fine and fascinating films by Jesper Wachtmeister.

Great Expectations, especially, is a fantastic introduction to the weird edges of architecture – or, as the film’s subtitle has it, it’s a “journey through the history of visionary architecture.”

It begins with the architecture of Rudolph Steiner, the Austrian founder of Anthroposophy, the Waldorf Schools and biodynamic farming. But Steiner was also an architect of incredible vision and imagination. In Dornach, Switzerland, there still stands a collection of homes built in the style of his Goetheanum, a building that pioneered the use of cast concrete in order to achieve an organic profile full of flowing lines and unexpected curves.

In sharp contrast to Steiner, the mystical scientist was the Swiss architect and urban planner, Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier was a strict functionalist who dedicated himself to providing better living conditions for people dwelling in crowded cities. He’s been criticized for creating “soulless monoliths.” Indeed, his work inspired the city planners responsible for those urban train wrecks of the 1940s and later, suburban tract housing and low-income inner city “projects.” With its philosophy of one-size-fits-all regardless of site and environment, the suburban tract home led the way to a general and widespread decline in the quality of American home building and tremendous waste of energy: most of the energy used by Americans goes to heat and cool their shoddy, leaky homes.

There’s great use of archival footage in Great Expectations, as with a shot of a huge troop ship heading toward the camera and every square inch of the ship is covered with G.I.s returning from Europe after World War II. Therein lies the origins of the cheap, suburban, single-family home: millions of soldiers needed places to live.

The great sprawl began in Levittown, Pennsylvania, where, thanks to a production-line method of construction, a new home was finished every 16 minutes. The homes looked all the same, and when the men went to work, the self-contained town was emptied of cars and populated only by women – all about the same age – and their children. When the men came home from work, one interviewee tells us, they sometimes didn’t remember precisely where their particular home was and so ended up sitting at the kitchen table of another man’s home, waiting to be served dinner until he looked up and, like in the Talking Heads song, said “You are not my beautiful wife.”

Going deeper into functionalism, we visit the capital of Brazil, Brasília. Brasília was planned and developed in 1956. Lúcio Costa was the principal urban planner and Oscar Niemeyer the principal architect. One resident of the purpose-built city says that living there is like living in a “giant office.” Like Washington, D.C., and Canberra, the capital of Australia, there is something desolate and inhuman about the wide, pedestrian-unfriendly streets and the sheer faces of the concrete office buildings.

The film then flips a one-eighty, switching from the functional to the whimsical. Consider Pete Cook’s zeppelin-borne cities descending on a rural village in order to provide residents with a brief urban experience. Cook says them some of his projects may look hi-tech, but the reality is that his budgets have never allowed such extravagance. Instead, he uses creativity and “crap tech.”

Moshe Safdie designed a village that was built on the water’s edge in Montreal for the 1967 World’s Fair. He had just discovered Legos, and his high-density apartment complex looks like it. This charming and humane complex is cleverly designed so that every apartment has a garden. Although Safdie’s intent is clearly along the lines of Le Corbusier’s, his designs are nothing like the monoliths that so influence urban planners in the mid-century.

Like Safdie, who dodged symmetry and the overuse of right angles, Antti Lovag designs round-surfaced homes, asking, Where in nature do we see straight lines? So, too, with Peter Vetsch, whose beautiful sprayed-concrete homes are partially covered with earth, thus drastically reducing heating and cooling costs.

Vetsch says innovation is inspired by disaster. If he’s right, the next few decades should be truly inspiring.

Two of my favorite moments in the film are visits to Florida and New Mexico. In the jungles of Florida, we meet Jacques Fresco and his partner in design, Roxanne Meadows. Fresco wants to move us toward a sustainable, resource-based economy. His utopian vision is truly off the hook but nonetheless charming. If, he says, we could increase productivity enough, we’d be rid of crime and greed because goods would be so plentiful that money would become meaningless. By Fresco’s calculations, fewer than 7,000 workers are needed to run a global utopia. But for this to work, we have to do it “nature’s way, not Fresco’s way.”

Then there’s a visionary with his feet on the ground: Paolo Soleri, the architect behind the community north of Phoenix, Arizona, called Acrosanti. Soleri coined the term “arcology,” meaning architecture guided by ecological principals. Surely influenced by the Barcelona Modernistas such as Antoni Gaudi, Soleri’s buildings are graceful curves that work with site and sun to become part of the landscape. Unlike the Venus Project, which is mostly models on a drawing table, Acrosanti is a living village famous for its intensely creative crafts people, a work in progress that welcomes tourists and kindred spirits.

This DVD has another beautiful film as well, Kochuu, which explores what might be called Japanese-Scandinavian fusion in architecture. Focused especially on teahouses, temples and churches, this wonderfully photographed film is perhaps best described with a line spoken by one of the architects interviewed: “what the eye does not see is richer than what it does.” Which is perhaps a contradictory way to describe an essentially visual medium but, as another architect in the film says, Westerners “lack Zen, our religion is too nervous.” We are advised, therefore, to contemplate the approaches to buildings, as well as the set and setting, the purposes and the moods of their environmental sites.

Buildings are, after all, arcologies, even if we don’t design them with their surrounding environment in mind. Nature bats last: count on that, and a building and its surroundings are a “kochuu”: they are worlds “in-the-jar.”

These films are highly recommended for anyone beginning to contemplate the four walls around them (and, too, for anyone who is asking, Why four?) or for anyone looking to communicate the urgent need for critical thinking about architecture.

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD, © 2010 Brian Charles Clark

Solar tiles from SolTech

One of clean technology’s greatest challenges is the common perception that it is an eyesore – from wind turbine-hating NIMBY‘s to solar-quashing building codes, there’s a multitude of superficial fronts mounting against good green design. One smart solution that’s sure to curtail complaints from noisy neighbors is this set of gorgeous glass solar-thermal roof tiles designed by SolTech. The sturdy, modular shingles utilize a simple system to store energy from the sun to heat your home, and they’re quite beautiful to boot.

via SolTech’s Gorgeous Glass Tiles Heat Your Home With Solar Energy | Kohler.

the nation’s building stock plays a bigger role in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions than many Americans might realize — accounting for as much as 40 percent of primary energy use, 70 percent of electricity consumption and nearly 40 percent of carbon-dioxide emissions.

Why? Well, one reason, according to Laura Briggs, a professor of architecture, interior design and lighting at Parsons the New School for Design, is that for most of the 20th century, the architecture and design world has remained quite separate from engineering.

“The main hurdle to seeing more energy-efficient building is a lack of knowledge,” she said in an interview last summer. “We’ve done a really bad job as educators in linking building sciences with architectural aesthetics.”

via When Green Building Is Not Green Enough – NYTimes.com.

In a short, funny, data-packed talk at TED U, Catherine Mohr walks through all the geeky decisions she made when building a green new house — looking at real energy numbers, not hype. What choices matter most? Not the ones you think.

via TED Blog: Building green: Catherine Mohr on TED.com.

Now, Nathan and his team of architects are ready to share their passion with a wider audience via the internet and their new company blog.

“A blog is a great resource for new information and ideas, and we want to share our knowledge about sustainable, green architecture,” Good said. “It allows us to provide more detail about the green homes and building projects we’re working on, as well as point-out how design is part of the green equation. Hopefully this will help others learn more about design and building green.”

On the blog, visitors will find postings on green building techniques, innovative design projects, earth-friendly materials and energy-saving innovations. Even some of Nathan’s sketches from his personal journal, which he’s been keeping since his architectural studies at Cal Poly University in San Luis Obispo, will be part of the discussion.

To read more, visit the blog at http://www.nathangoodarchitects.com/blog.

I think of the Pacific Northwest as being at the forefront of thinking in terms of environmental design in the US. And the Northwest is relatively close–interestingly close–in climate to the UK. We’re pretty close in terms of energy commitments. What we have in the UK that’s different is a much stronger regulatory framework.

via An Interview with Peter Clegg | Rethink Energy and Design.

Architect, author and educator, Peter Clegg, is a senior partner with the London based firm Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios. Peter visited the Northwest in late 2009 for Cascadia’s  Transformational Lecture series sponsored by BetterBricks, where he caught up with us to discuss the current challenges and opportunities within sustainable architecture.  The following is a brief excerpt of the conversation.  Read the full interview here.

The fifth conference is scheduled for Feb. 2 – 4 in Rome.

The Design Conference is a presenter’s conference, comprised of numerous parallel sessions.
The Conference organising committee is inviting proposals to present 30-minute papers, or
60-minute workshops or 90-minute colloquium sessions. These may be:

• Academic or research papers, or
• Presentations describing educational initiatives.

Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal

Conference participants may submit papers to the Design Journal, before the Conference and up until one month after the Conference. Papers submitted for publication will be fully refereed. The publication decision is based on the referees’ reports.

For those unable to attend the Conference in person, a virtual registration will provide participants access to the electronic version of the Journal, as well as the option to submit papers to the Design Journal.

For more information about the Journal please visit the Publish Your Paper page.

via Is renewable power “eco-bling”? Report raises question – Green House – USATODAY.com.

See further: Paul McFedries’ Word Spy, the “word lover’s guide to new words.”