Exporting Sustainability

A shameless plug for a fantastic upcoming workshop/summit this summer. If you want to travel and learn from the lessons of the Portland region, get some credit, and interact with other professionals around sustainability - this is not one to miss. Oh, and you get to hang out with me, too... :)

Sustainability in the Urban Built Environment
To: Early-Invitation Thought Leaders
Re: Leadership Summit: Sustainability in the Urban Built Environment

Cities like yours across the country and around the world are recognizing the sustainability imperative. This spells opportunity for professionals with the skills, experience, and genuine commitment to get results. At the same time, current sustainability approaches have not adequately addressed the dramatic challenges communities and professionals will face in the near future.

Starting this summer, experts from business, universities, government and non-governmental organizations will meet to face these challenges. This unique program – part summit, and part educational retreat – will bring together architects, developers, engineers, construction managers, public officials and planners, lawyers, researchers, professors, and environmental experts. Joining them will be top graduate students who will add fresh perspectives and provocative questions to the forum. Attendance is limited to 20 leading professionals, and 20 top students.

Portland has earned a reputation of leadership in sustainability, but behind the curtain stands a living laboratory of successes, failures, and on-going experiments. In this rich environment, each day of the program will be packed with challenging, interactive learning. Over half of this curriculum and interaction will take place in the field.

:: Learn from innovators in four sectors: business, government, academia, and not-for-profit.
:: See new sustainable design principles at work in a revealing mix of commercial, industrial, residential, and infrastructure projects.
:: Join other leaders in dynamic case-study discussions of these examples and their application to your own opportunities.

What you will bring home:
:: The latest approaches to improving sustainability in the urban built environment.
:: Methods to make the case for sustainability in a range of different projects.
:: Direct input on situations you are facing in your community or projects. (The last day will feature a multi-disciplined team of experts assembled to address your challenges.)
:: Powerful tools and models, with strategies to apply them to your projects.
:: Connections with a network of fellow thought-leaders, including the presenters and program participants, facilitated by on-going online resources.

Portland, Oregon
July 21 - 24, 2008

$3,900 per professional. $12,000 per qualified city team of 3-5 participants.*
Lunch and local travel expenses are included. Hotel discounts have been arranged.
For more information, visit SummerSustainabilitySeries.org.


Presented by
The Oregon Business Council and the Oregon University System, in affiliation with Gerding Edlen Development.

* Qualified city teams include 3-5 professionals from three key categories: 1-2 public sector participants (elected official, city planner, development officer, etc.); 1-2 developers/investors; 1-2 designers (architect, engineer, etc.); up to two others (construction, transit, natural resources, public health, academia, NGO’s, etc.)

Museum of Nature

I've seen these a few times in the past, but recently these images of Ilkka Halso's Museum of Nature struck me with a new sort of resonance - specifically in relationship to our architecture/landscape interactions. Inhabitat just featured these again recently: "Using images of landscapes and 3D digital manipulation, this photographic collection captures a future vision of nature as a rare display. Challenging the audience’s interaction with the natural environment as endangered artifact, Halso manages to truly visualize a future we so desperately do not want to see become a reality."


:: Museo I - image via Ilkka Halso


:: Kitkajoki - image via Ilkka Halso

It is interesting to see how these veg.itectural photo-manipulated images described the nature/culture question, similar a number of essays in a recent review (and somewhat reminiscent of the cover photograph) from the Harvard Design Reader. Or as summarized in Inhabitat: "However, we also think that these thought-provoking portents could stand-alone in any urban environment to remind us how truly precious our natural world is becoming."


:: Vuoristorata - image via Ilkka Halso

The above image is one of my favorites, and perhaps most plausible... a surrealist amusement park ride amongst the wetlands - the only inputs to impact the natural balance is the occassional deposit of partially digested cotton candy and caramel corn making it's way from the swirling human blender above. A couple of more architectural examples include the following images of an elegant theater, as well as a patched together tensile structure amidst yellowing poplars.


:: Teatteri I - image via Ilkka Halso


:: Museo II - image via Ilkka Halso

Perhaps the power of these images is how much they feel like we want to design. They seamlessly, through the aid of pictorial representation and digital tools, to patch up all of the blemishes of reality that exist. It reminds me of a number of the digital project images, evoking perfection of the design - artful integration of vegetation and building. While tend towards the real, this almost become elements of architectural representation versus photographic art. And it's amazing often how much our reality seems to differ, but sometimes get's close, to this level of perfection.

Career Shifts...

Things in June have been quiet around here while I seriously contemplate a career shift to acting, as a way of increasing my credibility and potential to access high-end 'green' projects... :) And, there have been a few presentations of our habitats entry as well - one for a great local group called ccurbangreen.

Or perhaps I have taken the lead of BLDGBLOG, + parroted by Pruned - to begin posting shorter tidbits and items without Titles (or in my case, taking it to the next level and posting significant amounts without titles and content), just to confound my RSS reader with hundreds of multiple, duplicate postings... it's hard to keep up with the latest new thing on the blog-world.

Seriously, a killer bout of the flu, a birthday and anniversary, and some nice weather for outdoor landscaping and gardening projects have put a summer siesta on posting... Look for more content of substantial nature, related to urban agriculture, veg.itecture, and ecological planning - real soon... so for now, I leave you with a few photos that were both random and pretty - but somehow all related.


:: RMB City - image via Kosmograd


:: Blobwall - image via Arcspace


:: Guandu - image via Inhabitat