Planter Pocket Facade

An interesting project from Osaka, Japan featuring a variation on vertical green with a Hundertwasserian flair. There is a certain transparency in the system, and I was amazed that the project has been in place since the early 1990s. (via Inhabitat)


:: image via Inhabitat

From Inhabitat: "Italian-born architect and artist, Gaetano Pesce designed and built the plant-clad Organic Building in Japan. The exterior of the building is an eye-catching vertical garden that takes its conceptual cues from bamboo. ... Completed in 1993, the Organic Building has since been named a civic landmark by the City of Osaka, which has undertaken its maintenance in perpetuity. The exterior is covered with steel-encased concrete panels glazed with a red finish that feature rather cute extruding pockets. Inside these containers are fiberglass planters that contain more than 80 types of indigenous plants and trees selected in collaboration with Osaka horticulturists, and they are all irrigated via a computer-controlled hydrating system of mechanical pipes."

:: image via Inhabitat

Reforesting Cities

A great post on Urban Omnibus investigates the potential of implementation of urban reforestation blended into existing buildings in our urban areas. From author Vanessa Keith, author of the article: "Retrofitting our urban building stock to address climate change need not be limited exclusively to increasing their energy efficiency. If “one of the primary causes of global environmental change is tropical deforestation” (Geist & Lambin, 143), then we should approach the adaptation of our buildings as an exercise in reforestation."


:: image via Urban Omnibus

While the ideas of terrestrial re-forestation have been discussed often in urban areas, the proposals attempt to incorporated this into existing building stock is a unique way of augmenting this. The post goes through a range of typologies of interventions including white roofs, greenscreens, green roofs, windbelts, and a range of blue-roof strategies (see Veg.itecture for more exploration of this).


:: image via Urban Omnibus

So, pulling it all together, starts to looks like a eco-district scale project typology, with a range of building and terrestrial opportunities exploited: "Large scale urban farming which takes place indoors and on large expanses of roof, greenscreens to let plants to climb the vertical surfaces of the city, trees which are now able to grow on the city roofscape. Roof ponds and artificial waterfalls for cooling and electrical generation. Solar and wind devices which form sculptural elements in the city, performing a function as well as having an aesthetic. Ports for plug-in electric vehicles which gather energy from photovoltaics. Solar panels incorporated into street poles, and vertical wind turbines which form a rhythm in the streetscape. Bicycle lanes, room for walking and the incorporation of still more trees."


:: image via Urban Omnibus

The concept of building retrofit has gained much attention, both as a economic necessity as building slows down, but also as shown in the article, the usable surface area of the city isn't just composed of the left-over terrestrial parcels, but a network of building faces, as cited in: " A recent New York Times article quantifies the amount of available roofspace in the city alone as 944 million square feet, 11.5% of the total building area the city holds."

Ignoring this resource will miss a significant opportunity to incorporate more area in our attempts to reforest cities, and also expand our toolkit beyond street tree canopy and dense planting in open spaces.

FOOD inc.

The beauty of being taken down by illness is the opportunity to lay on the couch and catch up with some movies that have been in the queue. One such film was FOOD inc., a documentary that provided a concise summary of the content of Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma - two books (both now films) that, amongst others, literally spawned dozens of books and other films about our nations food industry.



A clip from the website: "... filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults."

Finally, here's the trailer for the film... perhaps it was being overly medicated, or groggy, but this film really moved me and is worth checking out (for those of you on Netflix, you can stream it online if you just can't wait for that next red envelope).

More on Plant VOCs

A follow-up email from Susan McCoy at Garden Media Group offered some follow-up information on the my previous post related to Plants and VOCs (Sept. 6, 2009). My take on it was at least on the right track, unlike some others - but I figure the press release (and upcoming report) is a good opportunity to get some background from the actual scientific experts :



Here's the text from the letter from September 22nd, 2009:

"To Whom It May Concern,
There have been a number of recent discussions resulting from information taken out of context from an American Society of Horticultural Science press release concerning research conducted on plant volatiles in our laboratory at the University of Georgia.

The release indicated that indoor plants have been found to release volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Unfortunately the results were subsequently misrepresented on an internet site, giving the impression that it is undesirable to have plants in our homes and offices.

This could not be further from the truth. All living things give off VOCs; one of the simplest is
CO2 that we emit when breathing. Therefore, solely equating VOCs with “harmful” is totally inaccurate. The fragrance of a rose or the aroma of apple pie are each made up of volatile organic compounds.

The assumption that has incorrectly been made is that all VOCs are equal and are harmful.
Mankind has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years breathing VOCs from plants, nearly all of which are harmless at the concentrations encountered in nature. Unfortunately over the last 150 years there has been a logarithmic increase in the number of synthetic chemicals from other sources to which we are now exposed. A number of these are extremely harmful and in some cases, lethal. These undesirable volatiles represent a serious health problem that is responsible for more than 1.6 million deaths per year and 2.7% of the global burden of disease (WHO, 2002).

Critical questions with regard to VOCs include: What chemicals and what are their
concentrations? In the website account, much was made of a minute amount of volatiles derived from pesticides applied to the plants. In reality, these pesticide-derived volatiles emitted from the Peace lily represented less that four hundredth of one percent (0.038%) of the volatiles given off by the plant. Finding minute amounts of chemicals indicates the extremely high level of sensitivity of the analytical techniques but does not imply a potentially harmful situation.

Our research has shown that while plants give-off a small amount of harmless VOCs, they also
remove significant amounts of toxic VOCs from the air. The net effect is overwhelmingly positive. Plants in homes and offices are not only aesthetically pleasing, they can also increase the quality of the air we breathe and thereby the health of the inhabitants. As we continue to research and learn more about the potential of plants to remove harmful volatile compounds we should generate knowledge that will enhance our ability to create exceptionally healthy indoor environments.

Sincerely,
Stanley J. Kays, Professor
University of Georgia

More info and contact for Professor Kays can be found here and I will try to get my hands on the report and see if there are any nuggets of info out there. And thanks Susan for the heads up on this!

Plants + VOCs

A recent, somewhat hyperbolic title from Treehugger, "Bad Green: Some Indoor Plants Release Volatile Organic Compounds" provides a snippet from some recent research that mention, gasp, that plants, particularly indoor ones, release volatile organic compounds (VOCs). It's a strange conceptual notion indeed, as there has been much research and information on the ability of indoor plants to improve air quality - including removal of VOCs and reduction of sick-building syndrome. So should we chuck the plant on the desk, and more broadly stop any notion of incorporating plants into buildings in significant ways? Probably not.


:: Killer Peace Lily - image via Treehugger

Some explanation "But at least four popular varieties of house plants emit their own VOCs, according to the University of Georgia's Department of Horticulture. Scientists there studied plants in glass jars and found 23 VOCs in the Peace Lily, 16 in the Areca Palm, 13 in the Weeping Fig and 12 in the Snake Plant. Sources included pesticides used in production of the plants, micro-organisms living in the soil and the plastic pots the plants called home, researchers say. The emission rates were higher during the day than at night, and several of the VOCs detected are known to harm animals."

It's not necessarily big news that plants give off VOCs... as plants are organically based and release compounds that are volatile (i.e. they vaporize readily into the air) through the normal process of metabolism. In fact one of the more readily occurring VOCs in nature is methane, which is produced in large quantities in wetlands. While not necessarily toxic, it is a player in global warming, so we should probably indict this as well while we're at it.

The difference between naturally occurring VOCs and synthetics are . Also a review of the study results identified that the primary VOCs from indoor plants were terpenoids, which are a somewhat innocuous form that provides a number of uses - and are particularly descriptive in having strong aromas. For instance the smell of such items as cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and eucalyptus is caused by the terpenoids present in these plants. Without these our sensory world would be much more bleak.


:: terpenoids look scary in molecular form - image via Wikipedia

Conversely a number of VOCs we are commonly bombarded with indoors, particularly in new construction, are related to paints, adhesives, solvents, cleaning agents, caulks, wood products, carpets and sealants, and their lovely sounding components of toluene, styrene, xylene and ethylbenzene. As it's easy to tell from a fresh walk down the halls of a new (even sometimes low-VOC green) building, as chemicals off-gas from these materials and invade our smell centers in negative ways, something foul is going on. And, as mentioned in the report, it is likely the major issues with VOCs and indoor plants come from off-gassing of worse compounds from the man-made plastic pots, and pesticides used in growing of the plants... as well as microorganisms in soils and growing media.

This is another compelling reason for a holistic transformation of the landscape and nursery industry to include the whole picture and not just assume that plants are good or bad. While this doesn't say that there isn't something to this idea of VOCs from plants (it's natural) - let's not jump to quick and overwrought conclusions about the perils of house plants without a bit of context and further exploration. I think the precautionary principal is fine, but to eliminate indoor vegetation without some more focused study on impacts is pretty poor form, particularly when many materials used in building and landscape construction are known to be bad, yet still are industry standard.

I'm willing to be that when the overall accounting is done, exterior plants and wetlands probably have a net benefit to our environment, and indoor plants will win out in the search for better indoor air quality. Just a hunch.

More Fake Trees

And They're Pretty Handy if we are Attacked by Giant Interstellar Swarms of Flies:


:: image via Inhabitat

Via Inhabitat: "A report published last Thursday from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME) suggested that a forest of 100,000 artificial “trees” could be “planted” near depleted oil and gas reserves to trap carbon in a filter and bury it underground. The carbon suckers look more like fly swatters than actual arbors, but researchers say that once fully developed, the “trees” could remove thousands of times more carbon than a real tree."

Oddly enough, these even make our typical interstate highways look better. Then again flyswatters, although removing lots of carbon, don't have the multiple benefits of real vegetation.


:: image via Inhabitat

Urban Ag-gregations

Nothing is more hot this year than the idea of urban agriculture in it's many forms. Perhaps due to the economic downturn or maybe just a natural extension of our new found urban ecologic sensibility that includes urban agriculture at the highest levels - there is not shortage of the wonderful and the questionable in the realm of city-based food production.


:: image via The Infrastructurist

The interesting and inevitable direction of any trend is the spawning of products to aid in the adoption of gardening. Some notable ones include the idea of services - such as Seed to Plate (below), or the plethora of land sharing or backyard farming options.


:: image via Treehugger

There are also some tools for simple gardening that made me chuckle, such as the Roll out Vegetable Patch which is a "... corrugated cardboard mat ... sowed with four types of vegetable seeds and organic fertilizer all ready to be rolled out - all you need to do is add water and soil."


:: image via Inhabitat

And for the uber-lazy or totally clueless, why not just get a garden in a box sent via post from Rocket Gardens. Perhaps going to the store and picking up some seed packets is just too difficult for some. I jest (somewhat) - because any method of getting people to garden more - particularly kids, is a good thing. But how about teaching them about it in reality - not just reinforcing commodization of our food items by having them show up in a box.


:: image via Treehugger

This education and adoption leads to such interventions as window boxes which continue gaining ground in dense areas, a number of more refined (but somewhat elegantly simple) solutions pop up as well, such as Earth Boxes. (more here)


:: image via Inside Urban Green

Urban gleaning isn't a new idea, but seems to have re-emerged as a viable pursuit. As GOOD magazine puts it - food grows on trees, so we may want to take advantage of what's there in a more formal way. And in a new twist the idea of tapping urban trees for maple syrup - one I haven't seen before.


:: image via cbcnews

Finally, the idea of seed bombing is both subversive and getting more commercialized - and has also created a number of iterations - such as this great post on 'Johnny Apple Sandal' via BLDGBLOG. Also, check out the video by Guerilla Gardening guru Richard Reynolds for mixing up your own verdant morsels via the Guardian.


:: image via ecolocalizer

Thoroughly Modern Landscape

I'm a big fan of modern architecture, as well a the simplicity of modern landscape design. But, I thought the days of artful boxes placed atop generic landscaped fields with little to offer in the way of beauty, poetry, or function was long over as people understood the relationship between building and site in new ways.


:: Emu Bay House by Max Pritchard - image via Arch Daily

Guess not.

DailyLand: Rapid Palace

Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
by Visiondivision

Okay, I'm a sucker for interesting landscape graphics... and these are pretty cool. Some definitely questions about the viability of this for security and safety... but pffft... how can you argue with the graphic magical realism of these images.






:: images via Arch Daily

DailyLand: Pinar del Perruquet Park

Pinar del Perruquet Park
Tarragona, Spain 2008
Artek Arquitectura






:: images via Vulgare

Plant Power

We often discuss the types of ways vegetation can be of benefit to humans - for instance phytoremediation. A few posts that loosely collect into a narrative regarding some unique opportunities to engage plants in our social and environmental structures in inventive ways. The benefits are myriad and wonderful. Read on.

Crime Prevention
Via Treehugger: "Suginami, a district of Tokyo, Japan experienced over 1,700 break-ins in 2002. By 2008 this had dropped by about 80%, down to a mere 390 thefts. This dramatic change is attributed, in part, to Operation Flower, according to a Reuters report."


:: image via Treehugger

"The project, one element of a larger crime prevention scheme, came about after a neighbourhood watch team discovered that flower-lined streets had fewer burglaries. Kiyotaka Ohyagi, a Suginami City official, said “By planting flowers facing the street, more people will be keeping an eye out while taking care of the flowers or watering them." Flower seeds were planted on side streets and in front of residents homes. The idea being that locals would take interest in tending the growth of their flowers and spend more time being observant of their surroundings. Thieves were apparently put off by such alert residents."

Forest Fire Prevention
Via Pruned, the opportunity to utilize series of sensors on trees for 'Arborveillance' provides some interesting opportunities, for one to "Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power a maintenance-free, mesh-networked sensing system to predict and detect forest wildfires."




:: images via Pruned

Read the rest of the post for more opportunities to use this technology for homeland security, communication, entertainment, and more.

Air Pollution Prevention
Via Treehugger, a plan to decentralize air pollution monitoring using the existing infrastructure of street trees: "What if we could have air pollution monitors on every street of every city without having to install any costly new high-tech equipment? This is exactly what Barbara Maher her team at the University of Lancaster in the UK have discovered by studying the leaves of urban trees"


:: image via Treehugger

Carbon Sequestration
One we've seen often, but a good graph showing how much trees contribute in the realm of landscape materials (via Treehugger). "According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates, in 2006 urban trees accounted for nearly all (90 percent) of the carbon sequestration attributed to the combination of urban tree growing, plus land-filled yard trimmings and food scraps." Read a related story about Climate Change using nitrogen fertilization here.


:: image via Treehugger

Vector Control
In this case, we're talking Malaria. A post from Treehugger entitled 'Computer Model Shows How Landscape Architecture Can Fight Malaria' explains how complex computer modeling (and on-the-ground implementation) of landscape manipulation can influence breeding areas for mosquitos: "The computer model analyzes the impacts of different methods for controlling the spread of malaria, and they have found that carefully considering environmental factors can be an important strategy for controlling the disease. Eliminating low spots where pools of water form during the rainy season, or applying locally grown plants that limit the growth of mosquitoes can have significant impact on the spread of the disease." Read more via MIT News.


:: image via Treehugger

Water Conservation
Treehugger reports on a scheme to have high-tech sensors attached to plants to monitor and request water when needed. Ok, perhaps not a specifically useful one in the case of say... a house plant, but the ramifications for 'smart' plants and crops on a scale that can operate and adjust irrigation to customize watering in the most sustainable manner is intriguing.


:: image via Treehugger

Another reason to make sure we value and protect this amazing resource...

Meadow Spotted Runing Amok in NYC: Film @ 11

I'm a big fan of the Onion, so loved the semi-hyperbolic headlines reporting this, okay, I'll say it, 'cute' installation NYC showing a snippet of meadow captured for the viewing: "Coupling urban restoration and indigenous plants, Julie Farris and Sarah Wayland-Smith, both landscape designers, were commissioned by the Public Art Fund to design and construct ‘A Clearing in the Streets,’ a 15-foot wide, plywood structure containing the beginnings of a meadow. The temporary installation, meant to invite passers-by to appreciate and watch the “re-insertion” of nature back into the city, offers a glimpse into NYC’s native landscape."




:: images via Inhabitat

Oh, false alarm... the meadow has been pounded into submission by New Yorkers stampeding to actual manufactured nature atop the High Line. Crisis averted. Nothing to see here. Move along...




:: images via Inhabitat

DailyLand: Crack Garden

Crack Garden CMG Landscape Architecture

> See and read more at Pruned and Inhabitat

> 2009 ASLA Honor Award Winner - Residential Design

:: image via Pruned

:: image via Inhabitat

Text excerpt from ASLA: "The Crack Garden is an exploration of the identity of site and the clarity of intervention. Pre-existing places have an inherent identity that is based on their history, materiality, and activities. The design is conceived as an intervention that functions as a lens, altering perception of a place rather than completely remaking it. The intervention can reveal the physical and material qualities of the place, and/or become a catalyst to incite new program activities. In the case of The Crack Garden, completely remaking the garden was highly unlikely because of the tiny budget. By fully embracing a strategy of design as intervention, the garden relies on its previous identity as much as it does on the changes that were imposed. "

Biophilic v. Technophilic Solutions

As part of an ongoing mapping project of green building and sites being conducted through a group of local architectural and environmental groups, a small side-committee of Oregon ASLA members is looking at dissecting the idea of sustainable sites. To this end, we are using the Sustainable Sites Initiative (as well as some other systems) as guidelines to provide a metric for which sites get on the map. More on that project soon as it fleshes out, but a recent discussion uncovered an interesting conceptual polarity of biophilic solutions vs. technophilic solutions in our quest for sustainability (thanks Anneliese for describing this idea in these great terms, it definitely stuck with me).


:: Victoria amazonicus - image via PlantWerkz

This distinction is particularly important, both in how we approach problems and how we think about the solutions. Are these simply machinic analogs using the operations that nature provides us frame in our human ingeniuity? Or, are they more natural biomimicry-based evolutions of thought that utilizes natures innate processes to achieve our ends in a simpler and cheaper way. Are we thinking of function without consequences, are are we looking at things holistically in terms of both their contribution to humanity, and their ecological value as well?


:: Stagnant canal - image via Vulgare


:: Duckweed, bad... for biofuel, good? - image via Treehugger


:: Machinic system of the 'Floating Garden' - image via The Design Blog

The bigger question is how to we look beyond the function, to include something that include cultural, habitat, and other multi-functional landscape benefits - a range of ecosystem services. One recent post by Pruned (with a fancy new look) featuring the excellent Sidwell Friends School in Washington DC - which features one of the best integrated design solutions between building and site that offers biophilic and educational benefits - along with just enough technology to make it work. It's a living & functioning landscape that doesn't forget that it's a landscape and not a machine. Read the entire case study at Pruned, it's a great summation of a great project.


:: image via Pruned

Trevi sums up the project in typically hyper-efficient prose: "At Sidwell, we get a hint of an alternative system for stormwater management: hyperlocal, lo-fi, modular (i.e., implementations at multiple sites would be needed to bring about an appreciable effect on urban hydrology), soft and comparatively cheap."

Another recent post from Pruned (along with a shout-out to my new Veg.itecture blog) connected to the blog 'Water in the Sustainable Environment' by one of the Sidwell consultants, Natural Systems International.




:: images via Pruned

This project reminded me of one of the great presenters at the Soak It Up conference last April, Dave Maciolek, Principal Engineer from Worrell Water Technologies - who does great work in the biophilic amenity of living machines. A recent project on Treehugger featured another of their great project. Some info: "In the EcoCentre, home to the Romano Law Group which calls its green office space the Living Building, the “aquatecture” uses environmental features like an 8,000 gallon cistern to collect rainwater on a green roof and 150-square-foot fountain in the lobby that’s a “turbo-charged” wastewater treatment system, transforming grey water and saving the structure 200,000 gallons of water annually."


:: image via Treehugger

Another resource that I heard about recently was Whole Water Systems, a company working with 'decentralized, sustainable water treatment' and bridging the bio- and techno- with living systems as well. Here's a link to one of their recent presentations at the Living Futures 'un'conference here in Portland showing off some of their work in the field. I'm just starting the visuals and hope to be working with them on a project that should be emerging soon, so more to come on this.

Tree Art Revisited

I did a series of posts back a year or so related to tree art - as I find these explorations terribly interesting to provoke understanding or look at different ways on perhaps one of the ubiquitous and overlooked workers in our urban landscapes. Here's a selection of some newer additions to this eco-artform.


:: Mosstika by Edina Todiki - image via Inhabitat


:: Under the Tree of Life (artist unknown) - image via WAN


:: What is a tree? (artist unknown) - image via People and Place

:: Rolling Woods (Bo Melin) - image via Vulgare

The last one I had to dig a little to get into. At first I thought it was one of those technophilic explanatory pieces that simulated the ecosystem services from a tree in an abstracted mechanistic form. A bit more digging expanded the idea, and it's a pretty cool one, worth a bit of dialogue. Via Treehugger, the 'Idea of a Tree' from Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler for a "...a machine that "starts producing when the sun rises and stops when the sun settles down. After sunset, the finished object can be ‘harvested’."

:: image via Treehugger

This minimalist contraption deserves a full explanation - as it is quite fascinating in idea and simplicity. " tree is a product of its specific time and place. It reacts and develops according to its surrounding and constantly records various environmental impacts in its growth process. Each single tree tells its own story of development. The goal of 'the idea of a tree'- project was to bring the recording qualities of a tree and its dependence on natural cycles into products. It slowly grows the object, by pulling threads through a colouring device, a glue basin and finally winding them around a mould. The length/height of the resulting object depends on the sun/hours of the day. The thickness of the layer and the colour is depending on the amount of sun-energy. (more sun = thicker layer and paler colour; less sun=thinner layer and darker colour)."

:: images via Treehugger

Some info on the outcomes: "The 'bench tioat' is one outcome of the 'the idea of a tree' project, which uses solar energy to translate the luminosity of the sun into one object a day. The bench is a souvenir of its day and place of creation. The thickness of the layer and its colour intesity refer directly to the sun. Dark and thin parts result from little sun, bright and thick areas result from lots of sun."

:: images via Treehugger