Category: Biomimicry
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Daily Drawdown 5: Buildings & Cities
This is the fifth in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. Beyond looking at a specific strategy, in this post I wanted to focus on a specific sector that compiles what seems most relevant to landscape architecture – Buildings and Cities. This…
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Daily Drawdown 2: Refrigerant Management
This is the second in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. Yes, I’m here today to talk about Refrigerant Management. I do this for a couple of reasons. First, it is important in terms of Drawdown, as this is, by far, the…
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The Shape of Water
An amazing resource posted on ASLA’s The Dirt (here) focuses on Design Guidelines for Urban Wetlands, specifically what shapes are optimal for performance. Using simulations and physical testing to investigate hydraulic performance the team from the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) at MIT. Led by Heidi Nepf, Alan Berger and Celina Balderas Guzman along with a team…
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Living Nature
I seem to be attracted to compelling pavilion installations this month, as this interesting proposal (via Archinect)for a project ‘Living Nature’ by Carlo Ratti Associati definitely caught my eye with it’s interesting take on climate and seasons. A short description from the CRA site: “International design and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati has unveiled “Living Nature. La Natura…
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Got Moss?
A cool vegitectural proposal from Sam Biroscak in collaboration with Gina Dyches, Stephanie Borchers, Annick Lang, and Anneli Rice is “Mossgrove is a proposal for an architectural pavilion to be built in Times Square during NYCxDESIGN from May 12-20, 2018. It highlights the possibilities of two under-appreciated urban elements: scaffolding and moss. Individually, scaffolding and moss…
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Smart Trees
Way back in undergraduate studies, I developed a project for a pedestrian street mall in Vancouver, British Columbia. The conceptual framework of car-free zones in cities was a contentious one at the time with some notable failures but the idea of removing cars from urban zones was a key driver of my design. This has…
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Be Like a Tree
Quick snapshot of an interesting immersive technology project Tree from MIT Media Lab, which blends technology and nature to provide a unique experience: “Tree is a virtual experience that transforms you into a rainforest tree. With your arms as branches and body as the trunk, you experience the tree’s growth from a seedling into its…
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Austere Gardens
I received a little gem of a book from Oro Editions entitled Austere Gardens: Thoughts on Landscape, Restraint, & Attending. Written by Marc Treib, the book (at a slim and image-heavy 100 pages) is a meditation of a sort. Having been immersed in some much heavier reading recently, I sat down and absorbed (reveled in?)…
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Treescrapers
A recent post from CityLab delves into an on-going. Entitled ‘Are ‘Treescrapers the Future of Dense Urban Living?’, explores the concept beyond the fantastical and thinks about this type of work in terms of reality and the more pragamatic elements. Weird Dune references about Passive House designers (?) aside, having some critical evaluation the points…
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Bioclimatic Design
Good article in the USGBC+ magazine related to Bioclimatic Design and some projects that focus on the integration of vernacular strategies (and forms) to increase responsiveness to the local environment in which they are built. This is nothing new for many designers, and builds upon centuries of knowledge, but I’m mostly interested in how it…