The number of slum dwellers increase by the combined size of Belgium and The Netherlands each year – 35 million people – yet architects are unable to give an adequate response to the problem of slums, as an article in The New York Times explains. The United Nations estimates that only 5 percent of the building work under way in the world’s expanding cities is actually planned, and as much as 70 percent of all Asian cities is unplanned.
Part of the problem, as it is argued, is the allocation of architects. Seventy percent of all architects come from the developed world, whilst 70 percent of the work to be done is in the developing word. The entire continent of Africa has 35,000 trained architects, of whom 25,000 are in Egypt. Italy alone has three times this number.
Another aspect is the curriculum of architectural courses; the tools and methods that are being taught. “Much of the urban growth of the 21st century is taking place in the developing world, but many of the theories of how cities function remain rooted in the developed world,” Ananya Roy , a professor in planning at the University of California, Berkeley, argues. She certainly has a point. The conventional mechanisms in architectural design prove to be terribly inadequate in relation to the city’s complexity in general, and the problem of the slums in particular.
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Posted in Blog.
Tagged with albert-lazlo barabasi, architect, architecture, china, complexity, craig venter, emergence, favela, lanworth, lars reutersward, manuel castells, michael batty, modeling, national geographic, new york times, philip ball, rem koolhaas, reverse engineering, rocinha, sao paulo, slum, swarm, swarm urbanism, Teresa Caldeira, UCL CASA, united nations, urbanism, wired.
By Maurits
– February 22, 2009
Cities are networks. The roads are links and the buildings are nodes. Some buildings are more important than others. Some for their cultural value, giving us a sense of identity. Some for the type of work that is being done in the building. In network terminology, these buildings are hubs.
Expanding networks that contain hubs, like cities are, are called scale-free networks. Research by Albert-Lazlo Barabasi and others has proven that this type of network is extremely resilient to failure. If any node is taken out, other nodes will take over. For example, if a building is declared uninhabitable, the residents will move out and relocate to other buildings.
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Tagged with albert-lazlo barabasi, architecture, complexity, infrastructure, london, networks, urbanism.
By Maurits
– December 17, 2009
In one of my earlier posts I described how an article in the New York Times suggested that physical networks of various scales and sizes, ranging from cells to cities to galaxies, may be subject to a universal principle.
What we did not know then, but what we do know now, is that these patterns can be explained as the NYT suggested, using the latest discoveries in Network Science. I am currently reading the excellent and surprisingly understandable book ‘Linked’ by leading scientist in this field Albert-Lazlo Barabasi, which explains how this works in terms of physics.
Thinking of a network, you may think of the US road system, which has been beautifully illustrated by Ben Fry with an image showing 26 million individual road segments, and nothing else, forming the outlines of the United States. You can see how the roads form a mesh that is more or less, dependent on the population density in a particular area, equally distributed. These types of networks are called random networks, where every node in the network, i.e. every city, has roughly the same number of links to the interstate highways. It is a network that is poorly connected though, as you will have to travel over all intermediate links if you want to go from one node to the other.
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Tagged with albert-lazlo barabasi, architecture, complexity, NASA, networks, new york times, physics.
By Maurits
– December 15, 2009
Bill McDonough, father of the Cradle to Cradle (C2C) design approach, is said to have the ambition to become ‘The Bill Gates of Sustainability’. McDonough refers of course to the founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men. McDonough’s sustainable C2C design approach promotes design that goes beyond the life time of the product itself.
Bill Gates’ Microsoft has become big, rich and powerful by fiercely defending its brain trust, often crushing competitors on the go. McDonough has opted for the same approach, as the Dutch have experienced. The Netherlands is one of the few countries where C2C has been adopted enthusiastically. Its government has announced that all public projects ought to be C2C by 2012. Consequently many kinds of service providers have started to call themselves C2C practitioners. McDonough’s lawyers responded by sending them letters, effectively telling them that C2C is a proprietary brand, so hands off. Quite sobering for long time C2C supporters like myself.
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Posted in Blog.
Tagged with architecture, bill gates, bill mcdonough, c2c, cradle to cradle, design, microsoft, open source.
By Maurits
– October 13, 2009
The way buildings are designed in The Netherlands and the United Kingdom is quite different. In the UK, common belief says that if you design by the book, your building will be OK. In Holland it is more important how a building interacts with its environment, on every possible level, whatever that may imply.
In the UK design is more of a science, whereas in Holland it is more of an art. The main reason for this difference, I think, is education. English universities cover every aspect of design. The curriculum includes organizational aspects, which is why there is more emphasis on methodology. In Holland, these aspects are covered in the Architectural Engineering courses. Architectural education is focused on design and design only, which is why the approach is more conceptual.
The difference is particularly visible in relation to sustainability.
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Posted in Blog.
Tagged with architecture, breeam, c2c, cradle to cradle, design, holland, the netherlands, uk, united kingdom.
By Maurits
– September 9, 2009
A camel is a horse designed by a committee, they say. Large design teams stand for compromises and mediocre results. Common wisdom says we’d better leave it to a small team of professionals.
Even though, there are examples that prove different. Mass collaborative projects like software applications Linux and Apache are of superior quality and run a great deal of the Internet today. And Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is maintained by volunteers, is said to be as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Though these kinds of projects are usually associated with democracy, the real secret to their success is relentless control. New features are only added to the kernel of Linux if its founder, Linus Torvalds, agrees. In fact, his nickname is The Benevolent Dictator of Planet Linux. And Wikipedia has a sophisticated system of peer review in place.
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Posted in Blog.
Tagged with apache, architecture, collaboration, design, encyclopedia britannica, linus torvalds, linux, wikipedia.
By Maurits
– August 19, 2009
It is obvious that without the elevator, Manhattan would not have been possible. Until the invention of Elisha Otis in 1854, staircases for office buildings would be acceptable to a maximum of 5 or 6 floors, in contrast to for example the 102 floors of the Empire State Building that are possible now.
Less obviously, but arguably more importantly, Manhattan thanks its existence to the telephone. Thanks to Bell’s invention in 1876, Chrysler could have its headquarters in Manhattan whilst having its production facilities in Detroit. The phone gave rise to a new dense and highly concentrated urban fabric of which Manhattan is the best example.
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Posted in Blog.
Tagged with al gore, apple, architecture, chrysler building, corporate hq, elisha otis, google, graham bell, hewlett packard, home office, manhattan, manuel castells, suburbia.
By Maurits
– August 16, 2009
The global population is growing rapidly and the way we have organized things now, we won’t be able to feed everybody. We will need extra farmland the size of Brazil and as we already use all land that is suitable for farming, this will be a problem.
More people will mean more cars, which will make food more expensive. Modern farming requires a lot of heavy machinery that uses a lot of oil. And as food is often produced on big farms far away, rapid transport is necessary to get it to your local supermarket before it gets spoiled. This also requires a lot of oil. So if the price of oil rises because of an increased demand, food will get more expensive as well. Even if we switch to biofuel there might be a problem. Crops for fuel are more profitable than crops for food, so the latter will gradually be replaced by the former. This will make food scarcer and pricier.
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Posted in Blog.
Tagged with anna politkovskaya, Atelier SOA, bio fuel, c2c, cradle to cradle, dickson despommier, dust bowl, food, foodprint, green roof, hugh bennett, masanobu fukuoka, michael braungart, movimento sem terras, oil, russia, scarcity, urban farming, vertical farming, victory garden, william mcdonough.
By Maurits
– May 26, 2009
Four Examples of Vertical Farming
Vertical Farming aims to reduce the foodprint (ecological and carbon footprints of agriculture). Four examples.
Centre for Urban Agriculture
Footprint 2900 sq m / 0.72 acres, height 23 stories, 318 apartments, 4050 sq m / 1 acre of arable land in greenhouses and rooftop gardens and a café for organic food.
The design by Seattle based office Mithun for the Centre for Urban Agriculture is entirely driven by self sufficiency. It is said that the grains, vegetables and chickens that the farm produces should be able to feed 450 people annually, which equals the population of the building.
The building is independent from city water and provides its own drinking water. Grey water and rain are collected via the building’s 2900 sq m / 31.000 sq ft rooftop rainwater collection area. It gets filtered and purified by the biomembrane plants in the greenhouses.
The energy is generated by 3200 sq m / 34.000 sq ft of photovoltaic cells, regulated over the seasons by storage as hydrogen gas in underground tanks. This matches 100 percent of the building’s energy consumption.
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Tagged with Atelier SOA, chris jacobs, dickson despommier, evapotranspiration, food, foodprint, hydroponics, mithun, seattle, urban farming, vertical farming.
By Maurits
– May 14, 2009
Urban Think Tank (U-TT) is an architectural firm with branch offices in Caracas and New York. Inspired by the ultra dense planning as seen in New York City, U-TT developed a prototype for a vertical gym for the slums of Caracas, which encounter the same issues of space scarcity, albeit on a smaller scale, as downtown Manhattan.
The gym is designed to contain basketball courts, a dance studio, a weight lifting room, a running track, a rock climbing wall, and an open air playing field for football. To date one gym has been realized in the slum of Barrio La Cruz. Another gym, which will also contain a swimming pool, is being planned with Metro Los Teques and Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company, as its clients.
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Posted in Blog.
Tagged with acupuntura urbana, bilbao, bilbao effect, Caracas, curitiba, frank gehry, guggenheim, jaime lerner, new york, teddy cruz, urban acupuncture, Urban Think Tank.
By Maurits
– April 9, 2009
Forget Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The 3 keywords for sustainable design are Lifespan, Locality and Liability. Inspired by Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, here’s my Incomplete Manifesto for Sustainability.
