The farm’s founders envision it to be a place where “people come regularly to meet and connect with each other. Friends exchange food, recipes, stories and knowledge about ways we can all live in greater harmony with our surroundings. They are surrounded by an abundant and rich forest of food that encourages connection and understanding of the vital life systems that support human kind.”

So far, they’re doing a good job — the farm offers classes, workshops, work parties, and site tours for anyone interested. Future workshops include bee keeping, composting, greenhouse propagation, SF-specific plant selection, and garden design / edible landscaping.

Unfortunately the farm won’t be around forever — it’s part of an interim use agreement with the City’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development. After two to five years, the city will move ahead with development plans for the space. Still, it’s exciting to see San Francisco allow residents to turn temporarily abandoned lots into community-oriented spaces.

After all, here we are in the 21st century, a millennium ahead of us for testing and witnessing just how far the lines between science fact and science fiction will blur.

At the ground level in little ole Aotearoa we all have reason to despair at a lack of focus on our urban futures and the design of those urban futures. We don’t do “urban” as well as we need to.

A suggestion for Auckland’s Queens Wharf

Abstract from Urban Logic’s Article in the Idealog Magazine

Delaying the doing is a fine art. The tools are many and varied. Take time for a lavish display of consultation; commission a report or, even better, commission a scoping study for a possible report. Form a working party, a subcomitteee, perhaps a Commission (that’ll be productive). Wait while facts are found, legislation is passed, funds are freed or an election is held. If that doesn’t work, urban planners everywhere have another option: hold a design competition. Invite the world to enter. Now you have years before anything needs to be done.

Read the full article here at Idealog.co.nz

Barge Beach Budapest is composed of a wooden deck that sits atop three recycled barges that at one time carried shipments of coal and stone up and down the river. The 2,100 square-meter platform comes complete with a 16-meter pool surrounded by lounge chairs, outdoor showers, a café and bar, as well as sand pits and a paddling pool for kids.

The migrating recreational pier was designed by Barbara Szöllőssy and Zsolt Pyka of Urban Landscape Group to be a place where citizen’s could enjoy public pool facilities while connecting with their surrounding environment. According to the designers, “Mayor Gabor Demszky has praised the project as “a solution to the ‘decades old’ problem of Budapest citizens being cut off from the Danube by the two busy highways that run along its embankments.”

Yes, we need them to design better buildings, streets and public spaces. But what we may need most from them has little to do with the act of design itself. That’s because we need a massive change in the very way buildings and places are planned, regulated and seen by the public. We urgently need people to re-imagine their cities in very directly political ways, and no one else is as prepared for that job as the talented few who’ve been trained to understand form and space and place.

When Ed Mazria first started getting vocal about buildings and climate change in 2003, his message became a rallying cry that professional groups, politicians, designers and journalists could stand behind: If we want to fight emissions, we must fundamentally change the building sector, the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Mazria and his non-profit research organization, Architecture 2030, posed the famous 2030 Challenge: make all new buildings carbon neutral by the year 2030.

The tools and knowledge we needed to build carbon-neutral buildings already existed in 2003. Mazria called on architects and developers to use those innovative design strategies, building practices and on-site renewable power (as well as a small amount of purchased renewable energy and/or certified offsets, if needed), in order to achieve a net fossil fuel-based/GHG-emitting energy usage of zero.

People everywhere jumped on board. The American Institute of Architects, the leading professional association in its industry, adopted the Challenge on behalf of its now 85,000 members. In November 2006, the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a resolution adopting the 2030 Challenge. And so on.

But such adoptions have been largely aspirational, with little enforcement. Now we’re nine months from Architecture 2030’s first incremental goal: by 2010, the Challenge expected all new buildings and major renovations to meet a 60 percent fossil fuel reduction standard, with an equal number of buildings retrofitted to the same standard as those built new.

Look around. We’re not going to be celebrating in 2010. Green buildings are breaking into mainstream culture – in fact, a film about Boston’s first LEED project is now touring indie and environmental film festivals. But green buildings are still a novelty to nearly everyone, still the stuff of awards ceremonies.

Awards are good motivation, but a handful of award-winners at the head of the movement won’t be enough to reinvent the industry in a generation. As Worldchanging ally Dan Bertolet of design firm GGLO wrote Monday on his urban planning blog, HugeAssCity:

Like most in the endless parade of green lectures and meetings in Seattle, the AIA event this Tuesday will be overflowing with big-brained folks who possess piles of knowledge, skills, and desire to make green development happen. But the vast a majority never get the opportunity to implement all their great ideas in real projects. And that is our integral predicament: we know what to do, but we’re not doing it. Green building is not a design problem or an engineering problem, it is a people problem — institutional, political, economic, cultural.

Part of the solution will be to get regulators — and voters — on board. Outdated zoning codes can stop designers from incorporating new technologies. One story making the rounds has a team of city employees in a Washington town designing a theoretical dream green development, and then seeing how well it met local code — they found, so the story goes, more than 50 rules that would prevent the project from moving forward before they stopped counting.

“Our land use code, and the building codes to some extent, are an accretion of 75 years of reactions against things, as opposed to a vision for how we want to live,” says architect and former Seattle City Council President Peter Steinbrueck. “Those sets of problems don’t apply anymore. So now what we need to do is rethink all that, and that’s a really hard thing. We need to go to performance-based codes, and form-based codes, that recognize the place and its uniqueness and character and authenticity, and quality of life, and the values of compact, walkable communities. Our codes work against that right now. And people are still very fearful. If they remove parking requirements or allow retail with the housing project, or allow a slightly taller housing project, people freak out.”

Policy change, particularly energy policy, also has potential to open new doors with lenders. As Richard Conniff wrote for Yale360, the final stretch can be the most discouraging for designers who would reach the farthest. “There’s actually a sweet spot, said Bill Browning, a partner in the sustainable design firm Terrapin Bright Green, where going aggressively green gets to be cheaper than a more modest approach…But that sweet spot fades away, Browning added, as you get beyond an 80 percent improvement in energy efficiency.” The costs of equipping a building with all of the technology to generate its own renewable power is still the deal-breaker for most developers behind these would-be neutral projects.

“The technologies that allow you to produce energy onsite are still not competitive with fossil fuel,” says Robert Peña, associate professor of architecture at the University of Washington. “That would change overnight if we had some kind of carbon tax and some predictable sense that energy isn’t going to be as cheap as it is now. The world is the way it is because we’ve had breathtakingly cheap energy for so long. And we know that’s not going to be the case in the future, but markets need clear signals. It’s an incredibly risk-averse profession, from the design profession to the construction profession, because the margins are relatively small and the risks are relatively large.”

The solution begins with education. Later this month, AIA Seattle will launch its AIA + 2030 Professional Series, a 40-hour continuing education program that will address strategies like integrated design, passive lighting/heating/cooling, and even staff training and post-occupancy performance monitoring, to help designers reach a 50 percent reduction in fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the first course in the nation specifically addressing the 2030 Challenge goals. If it is successful in Seattle, the program may roll out in other states or nationwide.

But architects must educate others as well as themselves. Steinbrueck believes strongly that architects must lead at the policymaking level, and with good reason. In his years on the Seattle City Council, he helped raise standards for green building with legislation including Seattle’s Sustainable Building Policy, passed in 2000, which requires all new City-funded projects and renovations involving more than 5,000 square feet of occupied space to achieve LEED Silver accreditation or higher. LEED standards were still largely untested at the time, but in retrospect, Steinbrueck says that the policy has had a significant positive impact on Seattle’s building program.

(Many expected Steinbrueck would challenge Seattle’s incumbent Mayor Greg Nickels in 2009, but he has chosen to sit back from politics this year and instead will join Harvard University as a Loeb Fellow to conduct independent research on U.S. best practices for sustainability. When we talked, however, he hinted that he is considering a run for national office in the future.)

Policy could also encourage architects to veer into new territory when appropriate, rather than adhere to checklists for certifications such as LEED or Built Green. The standards have unquestionably raised the bar for green building since their introduction, and the USGBC works diligently to keep pushing the envelope further (you can help them by commenting on the new LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system in this forum, which opened today). But because LEED standards are based on a set of known strategies, they can become an anchor that encourages a baseline, instead of a propeller driving new innovation toward the goal of carbon neutrality.

And because many LEED points address issues separate from energy efficiency, simply building to accreditation standards won’t ensure we do the job. New dynamic policies can help spur innovation where certifications and building codes fall short. In a recent Worldchanging Interview, Amory Lovins described green building codes as “obsolete before the ink is dry,” and suggested feebates as a means of rewarding energy efficiency and encouraging designers and developers to continue pushing the standards higher.

Source:Julia Levitt, World Changing

Despite what you might think, this is not a temporal installation. The image of the LTL 1000 banknote is brought onto this 10-story building using special enamel paint. During the process the paint turns into a ceramic print that lasts forever. Jonas Plenta, marketing manager of Urmas, the company behind the project, insists that the new structure is not simply a mighty monument to the power of money.

“At around the same time we were assessing some of the design projects for a new office building in 2005, Lithuania was one of two new EU member states applying to join the euro zone. We happened to come across a very elegant banknote dating from 1926, and decided to use it as our overall theme.”

The exterior consists of 4,500 different pieces of glass with enamel designs, which are being slotted together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The glass was made in the Netherlands and shipped over, and it can, Plenta assures, withstand even the most extreme Lithuanian weather.

The chief Lithuanian architect is Rimas Adomaitis of RA Studija, a young and relatively unknown but promising talent who enjoys experimenting with forms and new technologies. He adds that this particular banknote came out between the two devastating world wars during a period that Lithuania was independant. It is a virtuous image.

It was obvious that the highly modern appearance of the building would clash with the much older architecture of the city center. This is one reason why Urmas instead chose a location in the northern suburbs, close to the Vilnius-Kaunas-Klaipeda highway.

Appropriately enough, two main players in the Lithuanian banking market, SEB and Snoras Bankas, were among the first takers for tenancy. How amazing is that! With these tenants the façade suddenly has become representational. It is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. So far, Office Center 1000 is 85 percent full, with space now available only on the more expensive upper floors. The 10th floor, in fact, is an excellent location for an office; on a fine day, you can just make out the Baroque spires of Pazaislis.

and uptown from 3rd Avenue and 7th Street...

What’s going on?

Imagine a person standing at a street corner. The projection begins with a three-dimensional representation of the immediate environment. Close buildings are represented normally, and the viewer himself is shown in the third person, exactly where she stands.

As the model bends from sideways to top-down in a smooth join, more distant parts of the city are revealed in plan view. The projection connects the viewer’s local environment to remote destinations normally out of sight.

projections looking downtown from 3rd Avenue and 35th Street...

How?

Jack Schulze explains…

“First we take an electronic Manhattan. It’s a patch-work of various commercial sources, where we’ve repaired walls that aren’t drawn right and roofs that don’t fit. About a tenth of the city is re-built by hand, then textured.

“The projection seen here is a combination of city manipulations in modelling software, and choosing the best lens for the simulated camera. The nearby buildings obstruct the view if you get that wrong, or the distant ones stop working as a conventional map. There’s fine tuning and instinct. Let’s not demo the power of 3D applications, but make a map which is both useful and optically awesome to look at.

“Annotations come after the render. You’ll see that roads have to contour around buildings that would otherwise hide them. The design key is what’s handiest for a person standing in this exact spot, looking at this exact poster.”

Why?

Because the ability to be in a city and to see through it is a superpower, and it’s how maps should work.

The luminous power of the installation is powered by the weather and passing humans– either of which can make a series of bulbs flicker or power out– but otherwise the bulbs give off a steady glow, come sunset. Planted in the field are a total of 1,301 ready-made fluorescent bulbs. Artist Box came up with the idea for the installation after a conversation with a friend who played with such bulbs under power lines as a kid and found that the tubes lit up like light sabres.

The effect is other-worldly, almost post-apocalyptic. It also leaves one wondering: what kind of effect could the power to light 1,301 bulbs have on my body? Which is the point: Box created the installation as Artist-in-Residence at the University of Bristol’s Physics department, where he worked together with Henshaw. Maybe the fields cause leukemia; or maybe they don’t, but these men are working to shed light on the possible effects that radiation might have on humans.

Source Inhabitat

As the chart above illustrates, the things people are most concerned with when it comes to global warming (climate change, as we prefer to say) are as far removed from the individual as possible—including “Future Generations of People” and “Plant and Animal Species.” Practically speaking, this helps explain why we’ve been so slow to act on agressive climate change legislation, and why we’re so easily distracted from the topic as soon as anything (like a collapsing economy) comes up.

Stillwater Dwellings has a special interchangeable series called sd-i. They describe the process of designing a home just like playing with legos. After reviewing the materials and process, it is — in fact — that easy and just as fun. If you’ve ever built a new kitchen from Ikea cabinets, this is way easier. Their method is an A-B-C step process . Step A – choose your living module from one of six options. Step B – add a connector module that is designed with a universal connector, so they all fit together. Step C – choose your bedroom modules(s), with options for extra offices, mudrooms, bedrooms and garages. If you want two floors, you can stack the modules. You can even pick your interior finish from three options – Fundamental, Natural and Contemporary.

Each home will feature a butterfly roof line, light shelves, plate steel entry canopies and efficient layouts that emphasize both indoor and outdoor living. Eco-friendly indoor materials include FSC-certified wood, bamboo, marmoleum, recycled glass, Trex decking, low-VOC paints and more. The homes also have high-efficiency lighting, high-performance insulation, passive cooling design, Energy Star appliances, and high-efficiency water fixtures. Homes are built in a controlled factory to minimize waste and maximize quality.

The designers of Stillwater Dwellings wanted to focus on a number of things with their homes. They wanted quality, contemporary prefab homes that weren’t expensive. These homes will run from $130-199 per sq ft, which is fairly reasonable, and they seem to be very open and upfront about all the costs associated with building a Stillwater home.

Ants never overtake. Not ever. Instead they form into platoons in which all the ants move at the same speed. Increase the density of ant traffic and the platoons simply join together to form larger groups. This is how the velocity remains the same while the density increases.

Alexander John and colleagues at the University of Cologne in Germany have discovered lessons from ant traffic that can be incorporated in traffic planning. This is just one of the applications gleaned from biomimicry.

Ant Traffic

In exploring their environment, ants create huge trail systems like motorway networks. Many researchers have remarked that we may have much to learn from the way ant traffic flows along these trails which seem to be free of the jams that plague our roads. After all, it’s quite possible that evolution has somehow optimised ant traffic.

But most studies so far have concentrated on two way traffic in which head on encounters between ants dominate the dynamics. We looked at one such study of bidirectional ant traffic not so long ago.

But what of one way traffic? Physicists and motorists alike have long puzzled over the tremendous complexity of behaviour that emerges in one way traffic flow. Who hasn’t been stuck in a jam with no apparent cause and that suddenly evaporates for no obvious reason?

Physicists have long known that these effects are closely linked to the density of traffic. Below some traffic density threshold, the flow is always smooth; but creep above this limit and all kinds of traffic chaos ensues.

Now Alexander John at the University of Cologne in Germany and few mates have studied the traffic flow along trails made by Leptogenys processionalis, a more or less average species of ant.

And what they found is quite extraordinary: the average speed of the ants remains constant, regardless of the density of the traffic. There is no transition to a nonlinear flow, at least not in the conditions that this group studied.

Let’s put that in perspective. Ant traffic flow is like rush hour traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike travelling bumper-to bumper at the 55 mph.

So what’s the secret? John and his mates aren’t entirely sure but they’ve found a pretty good clue: ants never overtake. Not ever. Instead they form into platoons in which all the ants move at the same speed. Increase the density of ant traffic and the platoons simply join together to form larger groups. This is how the velocity remains the same while the density increases. That makes ant traffic significantly different from other types of traffic in which congestion occurs, such as road traffic and internet packet traffic.

That’s neat but how have ants hit on this congestion-free solution? Almost certainly through the process of evolution which may well have selected for ants that use the most efficient transport systems.

There’s a lesson for traffic planners there, somewhere.