Fire-Walking New York City

From: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/fire-walking-new-york-city.html


The New York-based group Common Room will soon be publishing and displaying in their space a series of walks around the city, walks that, in their words, "demonstrate, at four different spatial scales, the agency of combustion in shaping the city’s architecture, infrastructure and imaginary [sic]."

Devised and authored by Adam Bobbette, the tours will include sites and experiences such as walking "the perimeter of the great fire of 1835," exploring the "former sites of fire towers in Manhattan," and more:

Additionally, the tours recount the history of the fireproof building, the epistemological relationships between panoramas, hot air balloons and fire towers, the changing shape of water in the city, and the hyperreality of prevention. Together, these tours reveal another city nested within New York City, a city in plain view but rarely considered; this city is constituted by and through the management and care for its own inherent fragility, this city is named Combustible City.

I'm reminded of a recent book on my wishlist for the summer: Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World by Greg Bankoff, which describes itself as "the first truly global study of urban conflagration." Bankoff "shows how fire has shaped cities throughout the modern world, from Europe to the imperial colonies, major trade entrepôts, and non-European capitals, right up to such present-day megacities as Lagos and Jakarta. Urban fire may hinder commerce or even spur it; it may break down or reinforce barriers of race, class, and ethnicity; it may serve as a pretext for state violence or provide an opportunity for displays of state benevolence. As this volume demonstrates, the many and varied attempts to master, marginalize, or manipulate fire can turn a natural and human hazard into a highly useful social and political tool."

Bobbette's fire walks of New York City will be on display at Common Room from July 16-August 16, and I believe more information will be available soon on their website.

(Previously on BLDGBLOG: The Fires. Thanks to Carlos Solis for the tip!)

Kroon Hall

from: http://www.architectmagazine.com/sustainability/kroon-hall.aspx



 

Green design is an attractive alternative these days. But given the eco-friendly mission of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., building green was not an option. It was an imperative.
In planning their new $33.5 million building, school administrators not only sought to create a healthy place to study and work, they also wanted to bridge the gap between nature and people, deep in the heart of the city. That goal was met with aplomb by Hopkins Architects, of London, whose Kroon Hall—designed to consume half the energy of an equivalent academic building and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 62 percent—is targeted to achieve LEED Platinum.
A blend of optimal performance and good design, the new home to faculty offices and an environmental resource center cuts a contemporary image while fitting comfortably among the venerable landmarks of Yale. “The challenge was to convert a backyard into a nice place,” says Hopkins director Michael Taylor. A gas-fired power plant, parking lot, and assorted dumpsters were removed from the site, replaced by the new academic center and two courtyards that knit the campus together. “That’s a big win,” Taylor adds.
Working with executive architect Centerbrook Architects and Planners and sustainability consultant Atelier Ten, Hopkins created a 58,000-square-foot facility whose tall, narrow shape and east-west orientation reinforce the active and passive strategies used to heat and cool it. The lowest floor is set into a hillside, with only its south side exposed, providing thermal insulation and increasing the amount of natural light that enters the building from adjacent courtyards. A south-facing colonnade encourages activity to spill outside.
Thick walls of Briar Hill sandstone on the north and south façades have operable, high-performance windows set deep within precast concrete surrounds to shade from summer sun. Raised above the walls is a barnlike roof supported by arched frames of laminated Douglas fir. The roofline, lined in red oak (half of which comes from Yale’s own forests), creates a third-floor loft that houses an auditorium, two classrooms, a café, and a large common room.
As part of the design process, the team evaluated some 25 different sustainable measures to determine which were most cost- and energy-efficient. A 100-kilowatt photovoltaic array on the rooftop proved most desirable. It supplies 25 percent of the building’s electrical need. (The remaining electricity will be purchased from renewable sources, allowing the building to meet its goal of carbon neutrality.) In addition, four solar panels embedded in the southern façades help provide the building with hot water. Heating and cooling is provided by ground-source heat pumps that draw water from four 1,500-foot-deep wells near the building.
Integral to the building’s design is a displacement ventilation system that moves air through a plenum and into occupied spaces through diffusers in the raised floors. Low-velocity fans in the basement keep the air circulating almost imperceptibly. Fresh air is fed into the building through this system in summer and winter. But in spring and fall the mechanical systems are shut down, and occupants (prompted by color-coded lights) open the windows for ventilation.
A rainwater harvesting system channels water from the roof and grounds to a garden in the south courtyard, where aquatic plants filter out sediment and contaminants. The graywater is then used for landscape irrigation or pumped back into Kroon Hall for flushing toilets. In tandem with low-flow fixtures, the system is expected to save more than 500,000 gallons of potable city water per year.
Just four years ago, Yale President Richard Levin pledged to achieve a 43 percent reduction in Yale’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. With the completion of Kroon Hall, the most sustainable building on campus, the university has taken concrete steps to achieve that goal.

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Denver Central Platte Campus

 from greensource.construction.com

 

 

 

Denver Central Platte Campus

RNL Design

Denver, Colorado

For the Greater Green: A public works campus in the Mile High City raises the bar for civic design with a series of distinctive buildings.

By Asad Syrkett

July 2012

Though it is set against the high drama of the Rocky Mountains, the city of Denver is remarkably flat. But along Interstate 25, a stretch of highway that runs north to south through the Mile High City, a series of facilities in a public works complex cuts a jagged form of man-made peaks. This is the Denver Central Platte Campus (DCP), a seven-building, 18-acre facility that serves as command central for the city's civic services. The campus—which includes a vehicle garage, a fuel-and-wash facility, and a massive salt dome, among other structures—totals nearly 112,000 square feet. If this doesn't sound like the usual arena for design-minded sustainable construction, that's because it isn't: Of Denver's 20 LEED-certified buildings owned by public agencies, DCP's LEED Gold fleet maintenance building and Gary Price Operations Center are the only municipal facilities that made the list.
Doing something different with a generally lackluster building type was exactly what Tom Wuertz and Dick Shiffer, design principal and senior principal at RNL, respectively, had in mind. "We wanted the architecture to scream sustainability," Wuertz quipped during a recent tour. So, to make the best use of their prominent, highway-side site, RNL topped the 29,000-square-foot operations center with a sawtooth roof you'd be hard pressed to miss while driving down the interstate. Panes of translucent polycarbonate on the roof's north-facing sides provide ample interior daylight, while the south-facing slopes of each "tooth" accommodate photovoltaic (PV) panels. This innovative thinking helped the team win the commission in a competition hosted by Denver's city government.

The atypical roof form and RNL's commitment to aesthetics weren't without technical complications: RNL's design called for general contractor Pinkard Construction to reposition the corrugated metal panels on the operations center's facade so that the panels would be on a diagonal, rather than in the more traditional vertical orientation. "We did some pretty extensive constructability reviews," says Tony Burke, senior project manager at Pinkard. He cites waterproofing the roof as a particular challenge. "It ended up requiring some dismantling and reassembly to make sure things fit tightly." RNL took a similar tack with the 40,000-square-foot vehicle maintenance facility: It also features diagonally corrugated panels on its peaked rear facade, but PV panels have yet to be installed due to budget constraints.
Inside, the steel-frame operations center is high-ceilinged and light-filled, with offices, men's and women's locker rooms, and a trio of open storage spaces that house various equipment and materials: large street sweepers, piles of metal, and reams of foam, among other items. The building also holds a flexible multipurpose area called a muster room, in which workers frequently gather for debriefings and other, less formal meetings. RNL specified custom cut low-e glass to fit to fit the irregularly sloped window casings.
At the fleet maintenance building, RNL's primary concern was to provide easy-to-use work areas. Large winches and other machinery for vehicle maintenance occupy open bays, while RNL carved out separate areas for welding, tire repair, and various operations essential for the city's convoy of trucks and sweepers. Buildings like these usually hog energy, because "a lot of outside air needs to be brought in for ventilation and vehicle exhaust needs to be pushed out, all while balancing cooling and heating," explains Ken Urbanek, associate principal at MKK Consulting Engineers. To help mitigate these problems, MKK specified radiant flooring, as well as an HVAC system that "uses heat-recovery systems to reuse energy from the exhaust air stream" from vehicles, and avoided refrigerant in favor of evaporative cooling systems, which "work really well in our semiarid climate," Urbanek explains.
Environmental issues informed exterior spaces, too: Heavy-metal contaminants like arsenic and lead lurked in the layers of sediment beneath the campus, remnants of previous public works buildings on the site. To prevent these pollutants from seeping into the nearby South Platte River—which, along with a public bike path, runs parallel to the operations center—RNL capped the site with a 12-inch layer of clay and covered it with an aggregate of pebbles and crushed, recycled glass from Colorado beer factories. "When we first placed the glass, you could walk across it and still the smell the beer," says Shiffer, with a laugh.
Wuertz and Shiffer hope DCP will help retool thinking about how public works facilities are built and designed. Municipal projects can—and should—be held to the same standards as other building types when it comes to sensitivity to place, scale, and environmental impact, Wuertz argues. "We didn't separate DCP from the highway, the bike path, the river," he says. "We thought 'This has to be a good design. We need to be good neighbors.'"

Farmstead Next to the Chapel

TGIF!
Today's YEOW will be on Farmstead Next to the Chapel by architects, bergmeisterwolf.

Enjoy~!




"Next to the chapel, farmstead b, sterzing
The site is situated in a little village, above Sterzing, on a height of 1.400 m above sea-level. Out of a farmhouse with an old oven (made of stone) which were both fit for demolition a new holiday residence of the Brunner family should arise.
Together with the historical chapel an ensemble on the mountain should come into existence.
It was important for us to integrate a place to live, a sauna, a garage and a henhouse into the landscape. All new buildings were inserted into the landscape without changing the topography. They should be separated according to their function, form and material and still create a unity because of their positioning.
We worked with the found, the discovered – the landscape as well as the remains of the old farmhouse like the stone wall and the traditional materials as for example the shingles from the chapel.
The starting point was the old stone wall of the farmhouse for us. After a long search we finally found workers (stone artists) who were able to rebuild it according to old architecture without mortar. The structure was covered with shingles following the roof also on the soffit, they were exposed to wind and weather already 1 and a half year before in order to achieve a relatively uniform weathering , a silvery tone.
Simple materials, like the concrete ceiling which was roughly structured with laths, glass elements, as well as steel and wood characterize the interior. As a basic principle old materials were reused and combined with new ones.

 
At the same time, a sauna box belongs to the ensemble which is stuck in the territory. The simple element was supplied with earth-coloured plaster.
The roof is intensively covered with greenery. The jutting out and pending terrace is roofed but at the same time also open and offers a wonderful view over the valley.
On the other side there is the garage, an almost black cube in the landscape, covered with greenery, simple with small cut-outs and larch-wood laths.
 A game between architecture, landscape and art should come to life." -bergmeisterwolf




for more literature, go here: http://www.dezeen.com/2012/07/08/farmstead-next-to-the-chapel-by-bergmeister-wolf/

Happy Friday the 13th!

For today's YEOW, I thought it be nice to go take a look at Couch Cushion Architecture; A Critical Analysis by BUILD LLC.
It really brings me back fond memories of my childhood when I used couch cushions to make my own space...:)
Enjoy!
-H

Before we were influenced by Mies van der Rohe or Frank Lloyd Wright, before we had seen the visual delights of Ronchamp, Pompidou Center and the Bauhaus school in Weimar, we were driven by a greater force of design inspiration. More primal and immediate than any of the previously mentioned examples, it was couch cushion architecture that established the basic building blocks of our design logic. Unrepresented and ignored for too long in the architectural industry, today’s post pays respect to the wonders of couch cushion architecture. We’ve rounded up a (mostly) admirable collection of projects, taken from a randomly conducted search on the internet. Join us as we take a critical analysis of the architecture, methods and design philosophies of living room furniture re-appropriation.


[Copyright Jennifer Larson]
A clear derivative of the Miesian box, this handsome project is “informalized” with the use of colorful, freeform roof panels. Taking further direction from the Archigram movement, the project explores architecture as body wrap and propels couch cushion architecture to new and exciting territory. Grade: A

At first glance the composition appears unintentional and the construction shoddy. But further investigation reveals a clear delineation between indoor/outdoor space with a design focus on protection through the use of barrier. Planes are shifted off the orthogonal to accommodate function; as a side effect it relieves inhabitants from a harsh Euclidian geometry. Grade B

Benefiting from the life work of structural engineer Heinz Isler, this lightweight roof shell structure creates a graceful span while fully sheltering the interiors. Massive counter-weights keep the structure taught while an entire façade remains open to the exterior. Grade: B

The crisp, clean, white planes, drawing clear influences from Richard Meier, are balanced with a splash of color offered by the roof membrane. The disciplined interiors offer relief to the eyes with a subtle yet intentional blue tone. Grade B+

A brilliant synergy between the weighted foundation and the light tensile structure, this project impressed us with its attenuation of structure and bright interior spaces. The courtyard and formal entry are also well thought-out and provide a clear means of way-finding. Grade A+


FOR MORE COOL PHOTOS OF COUCH CUSHIONS, GO HERE:

http://blog.buildllc.com/2010/04/couch-cushion-architecture-a-critical-analysis/

Windows .50

 

Barn House Eelde by Kwint Architects

Kwint Architects has designed Barn House Eelde.

This private home features 1,052 square feet of living space and is located in the countryside south of Eelde in the Netherlands.

To see more goto:
http://www.homedsgn.com/2012/06/19/barn-house-eelde-by-kwint-architects/eelde-11/