Negative footprint?

I thought this was amazing...from Inhabitat:

The building’s aggressive approach to sustainability enables it to offer the lowest energy consumption per square meter for its class, one of the world’s largest integrated photovoltaic systems and the world’s largest solar thermal driven cooling and dehumidification system. The complex will utilize sustainable materials and feature integrated wind turbines, outdoor air quality monitors. Compared with typical mixed-use buildings of the same size, the Headquarters will consume 70 percent less water.

The kicker? "The Masdar Headquarters building outside of Abu Dhabi is also the first building in history to generate power for its own assembly, using a solar roof pier that will be built first to power the rest of the construction."

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In a mostly unrelated vein... I've been reading about this for a while and I just noticed it's now open, the Svalbard Seed Bank. What an interesting idea.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is established in the permafrost in the mountains of Svalbard, is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections from around the globe. Many of these collections from developing countries are in developing countries. If seeds are lost, e.g. as a result of natural disasters, war or simply a lack of resources, the seed collections may be reestablished using seeds from Svalbard.

Within hours of the conclusion of the official opening ceremony of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Vault was already in business. Some 268,000 seed samples containing more than 100 million individual seeds that represent the agriculture of 220 countries have already been catalogued, coded and moved into the Vault.. These seeds were sent to Svalbard from 20 different research institutes and national gene collections.

Quickies

I certainly would rather be writing in here than transferring online BioChem powerpoints to bullet-pointed Word files but school calls.

I did, however, want to share two quick things: a source and an article from that source. Since the article is, once again, outside my usual transportation scope, I wanted to provide an explanation. First, the site:

INHABITAT

The site is a feed and can be added to your reader program (if you have no idea what I'm talking about but would like to, comment and I'll help you out).

In their words:

Inhabitat.com is a weblog devoted to the future of design, tracking the innovations in technology, practices and materials that are pushing architecture and home design towards a smarter and more sustainable future.

Design to save us all. Making sustainability part of "the cool" is, simply, the only way to get it to catch. Make the coolest thing the most sustainable (or vice versa) and it happens, just like that.

I've always found minimalist construction and design the most beautiful. Aesthetics to me have more to do with working with what you have rather than brute force. For example: a domicile constructed into a hillside is far more beautiful than one that was built on the flat grave site of the same hill.

In the same vein, remodeling old structures and outfitting the inside with modern design elements appeals to me A LOT. There is a building here in San Diego that gutted an old, unused church to make huge loft condos.

So, it makes sense that this structure is, in my eyes, undeniably gorgeous:





Read the article for more information but contemplate this little nugget of happiness...

The embodied energy in existing materials has been diluted through an extension of the structure’s viability. Through reuse and adaptation the cost of demolition, trucking and land filling debris, the manufacturing, transport and installation of new structural materials has been eliminated. The result is a quiet lesson in “stealth green” - reuse brings both ecological and cultural advantages.

By not wrecking this building to create another, the whole renovation paid for itself. Let that sink it...

Back to the powerpoint

What if?

What if we all made ourselves well-equipped? What if we all carried a cup and a plate and silverware with us? What if it wasn't a given that you would be provided with unnecessarily disposable products? Would it be horrible?

I wonder what would we be different if our resources were a tenth... a thousandth of what it is now. What if gas was $10 a gallon? $100? What would it look like?

If anything, it is entertaining to imagine a world with the scientific knowledge it has now but not the resources to continue it. We would know aerodynamics and combustion statistics and biofuel manufacturing information but we would all be on bikes. We would be experts at material sciences and polymers and styrofoam but we'd all have our designated cups that we brought to the regional coffee pot.

For some reason I really like the idea of grass-roots living next to intricate technology. Maybe it's the sci-fi director in me or something...

A bit out of my typical scope...

... but AMAZING and from my hometown.



This, if I may be so bold, is a small step towards my idea of utopia. In my utopia, cities still exist and prosper but they co-exist, intertwined, with natural processes. Small EVs everywhere, lots of quiet, clean public transportation, and flora coating everything. In this mindset, I present to you the "Off-Grid Vertical Farm," a small slice of my own personal heaven.

Fully self-sufficient building: in energy and water.
-> 31,000 sq ft rooftop water rainwater collection
-> Recycling of gray water (including an ability to handle some of the surrounding area's waste water up to "20 times its own discharge potential")
-> 34,000+ sq ft of solar PV cells with hydrogen gas backup

Agricultural features include
->Fields for growing veggies and grains, greenhouses, rooftop gardens and even a chicken farm.
->Local produced food is critical for changing energy patterns as "40 percent of an individual's ecological footprint is generated by the embodied energy in food."

318 apartments (studio, 1 & 2 bedroom units)

Restaurant & Cafe (The "Greenhouse" using building grown food.

"Off-grid" means you are fully energy self-sufficient. This building creates its own energy through the solar cells attached to it.

Keep in mind that, while it is doubtful you will see this erected in downtown Seattle (pleasepleaseplease), this is not pie-in-the-sky Jetsons stuff, this is real. This building can be built right now. There are no technological barriers, the materials are not from another planet, and it would not cost the US defense budget to construct. Besides the obvious aesthetic benefits, the plants would do well in a high-CO2 environment like the center of a city. Environmental concerns addressed through solar cells, CO2 processing and water collection, living space addressed by real estate incorporated into the structure, economic benefits bolstered by job created in the farm and retail space... what is not to like?

More info here.