Elephant and Castle Ecopod

On Monday, November 27, the Ecopod officially opened to the public. Powered entirely by solar energhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gify, the Ecopod displays, in bright luminous hues, digital film media and other information at night.
The Ecopod is properly named, being constructed from a recycled shipping container (which seems to be the source for many products springing up lately) and is powered with a renewable source of energy.


Right now its promoting the insertion of London's new Crosstown Tram.

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Lazor Office: FlatPak House

The FlatPak house, designed by Lazor Office, is a prefabricated system of components that creates houses that are both aesthetically pleasing and mass customizable. The price of the house, which ranges based upon the options the consumer chooses for his or her house, includes FlatPak kitchen cabinets, a KitchenAid appliance group, FlatPak bath fixtures and vanity package, clothing storage unit, exterior and interior lighting system, in-floor heating, air-to-air ventilation system, and the FlatPak patio.


The beauty of the Lazor prefabricated housing system comes in its ability to satisfy the customer's need and specific site requirements through a mass customization process. The FlatPak operates through a series of manufactured components that form a single unit in a seemingly endless number of configurations. The consumer has the ability to choose concrete wall color and cladding materials, interior wall surface, flooring materials, and one of two bath package options. The lighting system and the kitchen appliances come standard with the house. After the foundation system is assembled, the prefabricated components are placed on the foundation and the wall panels are assembled.

the IKEA boklok prefab series

BoKlok - meaning "Live Smart" in Swedish - is furniture manufacturer IKEA's flatpack construction prefabricated housing series, begun in 1998. Currently, BoKlok is available in Sweden, Finland, UK, Denmark, and Norway. The typical demographic that own a BoKlok house is first-time homeowners whose salaries range from 12, 500 to 30,000 GBP. The homes are customizable in their interior spaces and finishes, but the layouts are typically the same, primarily differing from each other through the number of bedrooms contained within the BoKlok unit (one- or two-bedroom).

The following is technical data for BoKlok construction, taken from BoKlok's website:


Ground floor
Moisture-resistant chipboard on treated softwood battens accommodating service installations on structural floor (incorporating thermal insulation). Variable from site to site.

External walls
140mm timber frame, fully insulated, finished internally with plasterboard and externally with high performance cladding material (variable from site to site).

Internal and party walls
Timber-framed with acoustic insulation to meet Building Regulation requirements.

Intermediate floors
High performance, insulated cassette floor consisting of steel web, engineered joists supporting a floating, sound-insulating floor and finished with plasterboard ceilings.

Access stairs, decks and balconies
Galvanised steel structure supporting timber decks with metal balustrades and timber handrails plus plant shelves. All generously sized to form an extension to internal living spaces.

Roof
Mono pitched roof finished externally with high-performance, single ply membrane with standing seam profiles. Internally - plasterboard ceilings; roof space insulated with 300mm mineral fibre quilt.

Windows
High performance, Scandinavian, top-hung, reversible timber windows (for internal cleaning) with factory-fitted double glazed units and factory decorated.

Windows meet Secured By Design standards. Internal window sills are solid limestone.

Front Doors
High performance, Scandinavian, composite door set consisting of timber-faced, fully insulated door blade incorporating aluminium security plate to both sides; factory double glazed and decorated; incorporating three-point multi-locking mechanisms and a wheelchair-accessible, storm-proof threshold. All to Secured By Design standards.

Internal Doors
Birch-veneered, flush door blades.

Internal finishes
Walls are emulsioned and woodwork is silk-painted throughout. Kitchen wall tiling is provided between worktop and wall units; bathroom tiling is to 1800mm height around bath/shower. Bathroom floors are finished in reconstituted rubber/ lino; otherwise floors throughout are finished in high-performance hardwood laminated strip flooring.

chaos takes many forms.

Now that we have an idea of what the geopolitical setup of New Orleans is (see my previous post), the next few posts will discuss some of the key components of a faltering city: economic recession (unemployment), low-scoring public education, and crime, which will be addressed in this post.

There is a lot of discussion about the alarming murder rate in NOLA since Katrina - and the violent crime numbers seem to be ever rising. There were nine murders in the first eight days of the year. According to MSNBC, 46 states have seen their violent crime rates drop in the past two years; New Orleans has seen its rise.

This is not the worst of it: New Orleans hit its crime peak in 1994; in 1995, a university experiment had police fire 700 blank rounds into a neighborhood in one afternoon, and there was not a single gunshot reported. The problem, as is often true, is rooted in money. Inexperienced prosecutors, understaffed police stations and reluctant, fearful witnesses were dubbed the reasons for this criminal outbreak.

Now, with even less money the situation seems to be worse. However, theft has been the real problem since Katrina; not murder. Looters swept the greater majority of flooded businesses in NOLA in the six months after Katrina. The homicide rate is still extremely low compared to the 1990s.



photo courtesy of tomgpalmer.com

The fact of the matter, as has been determined, is that a city that had already fallen was just knocked down further; recovery will be a long and hard and expensive process.

In the next few posts, I'll discuss a few of the other reasons cities begin to crumble, and place the NOLA (pre-Katrina) senario into the ideas of the Shrinking Cities project.

sources:
Nicole Gelinas: Will New Orleans Recover? (www.cityjournal.org)
Associated Press: New Orleans Murder Rate on the Rise Again (MSNBC)
Denny Burk: Katrina Didn't Do It (DennyBurk.com)

design for all

We are all familiar with Target stores. A hip Target commercial on television or an advertisement in a magazine is quickly recognized... the white dog with the red target eye, the red gift boxes around christmas time, etc. There are even SuperTarget stores! The stores sell basically anything you could want, from clothing to home decor.

But what makes Target different from other supercenters? Target is making design affordable. The store carries products designed by:

Isaac Mizrahi
He is a designer of women's fashion. Target features his tailored suits and dresses for women. His clothes are trendy and accompanied by shoes and handbags of his design as well.

Thomas O'Brien Vintage Modern
I have a fabulous sheer seersucker shower curtain from this collection! The designs for bathrooms are clean and bold. The patterns bring a rich feel to affordable decor.

Amy Coe
Amy Coe has designed a collection of coordinating bedding and bedroom decoration for the newest eyes. She couples fun colors with intriguing designs for the entire room and its furnishings.

Victoria Hagan
She has designed a collection of home furnishings called Perfect Peices She tells the average shopper, "Start a collection of interesting objects to add to the personality of your room." Her decorations vary in design from antique to modern, allowing anyone to chose very different pieces that will compliment the same space.

Mossimo
Mossimo Giannulli offers women's fashion including tops, bottoms, handbags, shoes, bathing suits available at Target that are flattering and fashionable. His designs are inspired by south California beach. You can buy fun-in-the-sun gear from here for half the price you would spend at a department store. Mossimo also designs clothing for men and children.

Target's perogative appeals to people who want to be innovative successfully within their means. The products offered in Target are a collection of design made affordable. Target also has a collection called the global bazaar... They offer products from all over the world, available to anyone through Target stores. The international items are sold online and in the store at a reasonable price. Who wouldn't want an end table from India?

disJointed: the parish system

New Orleans, both pre- and post-Katrina, has been fragmented on a number of levels, primarily due to the parish system in its metropolitan area. Each parish acted independently to become prepared for any disaster, then to become prepared for Katrina, and now to rebuild. Post-Katrina, this is causing people to move to different parishes. For example, the St. Tammany and Jefferson Parishes are more in control of the rebuilding process than the Orleans parish, and people are leaving the Orleans parish. Orleans is the central downtown parish, and it is becoming impoverished because its entire tax base is relocating.

The parish system of division is based off of the Catholic church and the strong Catholic background of the population has kept it alive. The beginnings of the settlement of Louisiana and the rest of the Mississippi Valley after the Louisiana purchase were led by missionary priests, seeking to leave the eastern seaboard where Catholicism was not necessarily acceptable, and hoping to estabish Catholic settlements. Shortly after the Mobile parish was founded, a pioneer named Bienville took fifty men with him to Tchoutchouma, an abandoned Indian village, and erected buildings, laying out the city according to chief engineer of the colony de La Tour. The first church, dedicated to St. Louis, stands in what is now the St. Louis Parish. The city was named New Orleans after the Duc d'Orleans, and thus started its urban growth.


St. Louis Cathedral (courtesy ww.AllPosters.com)

The parishes controlled all aspects of Louisiana policy. It wasn't until 1844 that new parishes were established in New Orleans, and caused a degree of separation in New Orleans. The St. Louis parish lost members of its parish, and therefore lost much of its tax base. This level of competition within the city still lives today.

While citizens of each parish no longer pay taxes to the churches, each parish still essentially governs itself in the manner of a county, but the state has little control over the tax money and therefore the rebuilding process.


a map of the parish system as it exists today
(courtesy of David Huskins, Institute for Health and Social Policy)

Holly Grove, the neighborhood in which the ddbNOLA will take place, is located in the Orleans Parish.

Sources:
Maret, Isabelle. "Washed Away by Hurricane Katrina?" Journal of Architectural Education, volume 60, issue 1.
New Advent: the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Tobi Schneidler's "Responsive Fields"

Responsive Fields is a device created by architect and designer Tobi Schneidler that tracks and records hand motions as a mechanism that controls the operation of virtual "agents" that exist within the device's embedded screen. This device uses the recorded movements in order to create a dialogue between the digital interface and the full-scale prototype generated through the interface, viewed by Schneidler as a living process.

Schneidler's thoughts regarding parametric design become rather interesting within the realm of debate about parametrically designed / algorithmic architecture: "The craft [cutting edge architectural practice] was to form buildings out of data feeds somehow collected on the urban site. CAD as a tool has been retrained to become an autonomic design machine, code-named: Parametric Design. The user, the experience and the interaction with the build environment were largely dropping out of the debate."

Schneidler's other projects, as discussed through Gizmodo Gallery, demonstrate the huge potential of parametric design as it relates to mass customization. Parametric design contains the ability to connect the user's needs/wants very specifically to the end product through the idea of mass customization, creating a very interesting dynamic between the two. By linking the user directly to the digital interface, the legitimacy of this dynamic grows even further.

making customization affordable

When it comes to decorating a home, consumers are looking for something different: something that says "This is my home." But not only do people want new, innovative, and unique, people want to create their own space. This is a growing trend that has boomed from home television networks such as TLC and HGTV. After watching Trading Spaces and Clean Sweep, even I think I could redesign my own home and do in within a budget. People demand choices, so these programs show how to customize your home, while being stylish and creative, all within a limited price-range.




For example, the learning channel provides do-it-yourself tips online from Jeff Beneke, who has written more than 12 books on home improvement. The "project files" give viewers step-by-step instructions on how to customize their homes based on the designs featured in Trading Spaces including : traditional plastering techniques, padded headboards, breakfast counters, wall and ceiling plywood treatments, circular storage units, freestanding room dividers, decorative painted ceiling treatments, etc. It also has tips for : building a fireplace mantle, refinishing kitchen cabinets, painting a brick fireplace, upholstering walls with fabric, and painting the carpet, or not. In addition to the detailed instructions, Beneke includes a shopping list of needed and suggested items for each project. TLC is showing America that anyone can customize and update their own homes and do it inexpensively.

readily available resources

As a part of sustainable research, I began looking at materials that were more readily available to reduce costs, and what better material to look for than earth? The project below, designed by Christopher Chris PTY LTD Architecture, consists of many different colors and materials varying in texture that all collide in a rammed earth wall. The wall serves as a unifying element as well as major stability.

Earth ramming is an effective method because the method of construction can vary in complexity, depending on the form; but it allows the homeowner the possibility of constructing it him/herself. Earth architecture has been an effective form of

archiecture for many years, dating back to early Yemen periods. Architecture students at MIT are experimenting with earth ramming methods to test the soils in New England seeing how they stand up to climate conditions over time.

The earthen wall has one primary advantage over concrete -- environmental sustainability, according to Dahmen and Ochsendorf, who say that a conservative estimate attributes 7 percent of CO2 emissions worldwide to the production of cement, the primary ingredient in concrete. By contrast, preparation of a rammed earth mixture produces very little CO2 and uses no toxic chemicals. And, they point out, a building made of rammed earth creates no disposal hazard when demolished.

tsunami safe(r) housing

In the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster of December 2004, most governments in the affected countries have announced policies to resettle the population away from the coastline. For instance, on January 17, 2005, the Sri Lanka Public Security Ministry announced the relocation of its coastal communities, estimated at 800,000. Building restrictions have been proposed, prohibiting construction within 100m (in the Southwest) or 200m (in the Northeast) from the sea.

Such policies, however, come at a high social, cultural, environmental and economic cost. The aim of this project is to investigate the development of technological strategies that could guarantee future safety at lower cost. In particular, the focus is on digital and building technologies. Structural guidelines extracted from the analysis of surviving structures and the implementation of an early warning system using cell phones could provide a more effective solution to relocation - promoting a less hasty, more sensible recovery of the disaster-torn areas.

While the cell phone component of this project is still in the research phase, the housing part is currently being implemented by the Prajnopaya Foundation (they are involved in the construction of over 1000 houses in Sri Lanka). Prototypes of a 400 sq. ft. house and a 1000 sq. ft. civic center have been developed. According to a simulation by Buro Happold engineers (London), the final low-tech-construction, high-tech-design structures should be over five times more resistant than the existing ones in the case of an incoming tsunami (see pdf report for additional details).

This project is coordinated by the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative between the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, in collaboration with the Harvard Design School Tsunami Design Initiative group, which presented their proposal at USAID in Washington, DC in April 2005. It is a collective effort that involves experts from many countries and uses innovative design to improve the socio-economic recovery of affected communities. from trunami safe(r) house

see this link for a breakdown of the deign

high demand for AFFORDABLE housing

Affordable housing is in high demand in the city of New Orleans. People want to re-build homes quickly, while affordable, so they can return to their everyday lives. But the post-Katrina situation is looking grim. Thankfully, help is coming from all regions of the United States. The University of Virginia teamed up with Habitat for Humanity on the preHAB project.



A total of 18 students from the School of Architecture and the School of Engineering and Applied Science collaborated on the prefabricated home design. They were also able to work with the house hands-on when it was constructed in Gautier, Mississippi. The design was sensitive to solar technology, multi-use spaces, natural lighting, hurricane studies, and materials. The students built the "environmentally responsive panelized house kit" in Mississippi, where it was tested. The home is one of seven preHAB houses to be assembled in communities in New Orleans.

urban Shrinkage

"The new doubts, surprisingly, are largely not based on the widespread damage caused by the flood. Rather, crippling problems that existed long before Hurricane Katrina are mostly being blamed for the city’s failure to thrive." (from the New York Times)


beautiful image from the NYT

It seems that in order to understand post-Katrina New Orleans, we must understand pre-Katrina New Orleans. Widely unknown to most of the American population, NOLA was failing as a city long before the hurricane wiped it out. This is all the more reason to rebuild it better - and all the more reason to find a better solution than the neighborhoods of FEMA trailers. According to this article in the NYT, in 1960 there were 627,525 people living in metropolitan NOLA. Pre-Katrina NOLA is estimated to have housed only 444,000.


a FEMA ghetto in NOLA (courtesy GettyImages)

The last credible population survey (conducted last November) estimated the population to be at 191,000.

What were the problems causing the population of NOLA to disperse over the past 45 years before the storm? The Shrinking City research project seeks to examine the phenomenon of these fast reductions in populations. The project studies four cities and tries to find the main factor to cause their shrinkages: Detroit (suburbanization), Manchester/Liverpool (deindustrialization), Ivanovo, Russia (post-socialism), and Leipzig (a combination of these causes).

With focus on pre-Katrina NOLA, the next few posts will attempt to answer this question: Why were people leaving New Orleans?

post-Katrina NOLA: the damage assessment

Is New Orleans a catastrophic wasteland, or a blank canvas for innovation and improvement?

Throughout the semester I will be focusing research on devastating conditions surrounding post-Katrina New Orleans and its potential to grow and develop. I will be examining case studies of cities that have been rebuilt after disaster, whether it be human disaster (such as war) or natural disaster (earthquakes, tsunamis, or hurricanes).

According to the Urban Institute, New Orleans had already fallen victim to a failing infrastructure when Katrina simply seemed to "finish things off." An important consideration that governments and organizations who are attempting to rebuild the culture-rich city is that it must be rebuilt better than it was before in order to survive and flourish.

To start things off, let's get an overview of some basic statistics surrounding New Orleans to date:

• As of August, 2006 there were 100 metro area hotels and motels in operation with 27,000 rooms in inventory. Prior to Katrina, There were 265 hotels with an inventory of 38,338.
• As of August, 2006, out of 81,000 local businesses in 10 parishes, 42,168 were currently open and another 20,268 have partially resumed operations.
• Pre-Katrina there were 20 general acute care hospitals in operation in the metro area. Currently there are 12.
• Nearly 228,000 homes and apartments were flooded in the metropolitan area.
• FEMA estimated 450,000 to 600,000 families were displaced outside of the city as of January, 2006. The U.S. Census Bureau has been unable to tally the population as far as how much of it has returned to NOLA, but they are working on a system now.
  

Here is an interesting image comparing a NOLA highway interchange pre- and post-Katrina, images courtesy of globalSecurity.org.



sources
New Orleans Mayor's office
New Orleans Times Picayune
GlobalSecurity.org
The Urban Institute