Jose Luis Vallejo will be giving a lecture next week at the ia&l (Institut für Architectur und Landschaft) from the Graz University of Technology. He will also take part in the “Urban Legends” workshop as a guest:

More info:

ia&l website: ial.tugraz.at
A recording of the lecture will be available at e-presence server TU Graz

One of the most important challenges over the 13 years of history of Ecosistema Urbano has been to communicate what we do in a readable and attractive way. However, in everyday work, the priority has always been the urgent, immediate projects, so we kept postponing the time for making a structured presentation of our professional activity online.

This “EU portfolio” task has been present in all of our task management meetings, always at the end of the “to do list”. But that’s over!

The Ecosistema Urbano Portfolio: What we do

We have finally put ourselves to the task with dedication and we are pleased to present our portfolio: a selection of our works and proposals, showing pictures, diagrams, plans, related links to publications, etc … A selection that, while not yet complete, is organized by categories, tags and years, making navigation more effective.

From now on, from our home page www.ecosistemaurbano.com or from the header of this blog,  you can access www.ecosistemaurbano.com/portfolio. And this is more or less what you will find:

We carried an internal research on portfolio sites we liked, and as a result we have gone for a responsive layout, an adaptable grid structure showing all the projects at once, plus a sidebar menu, where you can find the main information about our firm as well as 3 different navigation systems:

- A general classification of projects by types
- A more specific classification according to themes
- A yearly index

We have chosen this simple web structure with the aim of keeping it updated (which, so far, we are managing to do!), and of course the website is a “work in progress” itself. This way, we didn’t have to wait til all the contents were uploaded to make it public. We have uploaded so far 20 of our most relevant works, but we plan to add more in the months to come, so that you can get an overall impression of “what we do”.

We invite you to check some of the presentation sections on the sidebar menu, that have been recently updated:

- About us is a complete presentation of Ecosistema Urbano, who we are and what we do.

- On Articles + Papers you can read some of our written contributions to international architecture magazines and other publications.

- Under the label Publications you can see where our projects have been published so far and have access to previews of some of these publications.

- You can also take a look to the Lectures + Exhibitions and Education + Workshops sections for more information (including related links to most of them).

Linkable, downloadable

We find the typical architect’s portfolio websites, usually made in Flash (a legacy from the ’90s, but still very common),  quite frustrating. They don’t allow you to link to a specific project, and forget about downloading an image! With such limitations the message of those websites is a clear “keep your hands off my stuff”… and we do want you to get your hands on our staff!

So we have made sure you will be able to easily link to any project, year, tag or category (or even a specific image), to view the images in a good resolution, and to download them.

Reconnecting our online presence

When designing the poftfolio page we noticed something else: On top of all our websites (about, portfolio, blog, video channel), we were missing a way to link and navigate between them.

Now we have tried to address this issue by creating a common header syle for all the sites, which includes a menu with links and a changing color that matches the ones displayed in our main page:  ecosistemaurbano.com.

We hope you enjoy it! And please, feel free to make any comments on it, we will appreciate your feedback. Thank you!

The water footprint of an individual, community or business is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community or produced by the business.

The water footprint consists of three components: the blue, green and grey water footprint. The blue water footprint is the volume of freshwater evaporated from the global blue water resources (surface water and ground water) to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community. The green water footprint is the volume of water evaporated from the global green water resources (rainwater stored in the soil as soil moisture). The grey water footprint is the volume of polluted water that associates with the production of all goods and services for the individual or community. The latter can be estimated as the volume of water that is required to dilute pollutants to such an extent that the quality of the water remains at or above agreed water quality standards.

The past century has brought a lot of changes, like the explosion of human population, the creation of an expansive global economy and the increasing technological development. All of them have put unprecedented pressures on water. More specifically, our growing appetite for water-intensive food and manufactured good, the construction of large dams for hydro-electricity and irrigation, and the massive discharge of industrial waste into limited freshwater sources, have made water an increasingly limited and expensive resource.

Despite this obvious fact, people use large amounts of water: drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, and almost every other physical product. This water can be named as virtual water.

The virtual water content of a product (a commodity, good or service) is the volume of freshwater used to produce the product, measured at the place where the product was actually produced.

It refers to the sum of the water use in the various steps of the production chain. The virtual-water content of a product can also be defined as the volume of water that would have been required to produce the product at the place where the product is consumed (consumption-site definition).

Image made by Virtual water | facebook.com/virtualwater

Here are some examples of water footprints of daily products , calculated by Unesco-IHE Institute for water education, Netherland

Image made by Hoekstra and Chapagain 2008

These numbers are kind of shocking! Aren’t they?

So, let’s try to calculate our daily footprint and investigate the solutions to reduce the numbers as much as we can!

Image made by GOOD and Fogelson-Lubliner

Water footprints can be hard to calculate, depending on how far up the chain of production you go, since everything you eat and buy used some water to produce. With our latest Transparency, I give you some examples of how much water is used in some of your daily activities, so that you can begin calculate your footprint and try to reduce your gallons.

To help put things in perspective, think about this: your standard trash barrel holds 32 gallons and a mid-sized passenger car-if pumped full of water has room for a little more than 800 gallons. So, the difference in the amount of water it takes to produce a pound of chicken and a pound of beef is enough to fill almost two whole cars.

Which result have you got?

Let’s compare it with the water footprint calculation of one friend of mine, Croatian architect Ana Bilan that did some research in that field.

According to her calculations she was able to reduce her water footprint more than twice, which sounds really impressive!  So it was a matter of changing her habits, decreasing the direct water footprint and also the types of food she eats and products she uses to get a better result with indirect water Footprint.

Image made by Ana Bilan | research about MY WATER FOOTPRINT | for IED Torino Master SUS

If you become really interested in knowing how much water you personally use per day, you can follow this link and make a simple calculation:

Water footprint calculator (adults)

And you can also involve your kids into the idea of water preservation!

Water footprint calculator (kids)

Here are some facts to convince you to be a water guardian:

• The average American lifestyle is kept afloat by nearly 2,000 gallons of H2O a day—twice the global average;
• 46% of people on the earth do not have water piped to their homes;
• Women in developing countries walk an average of 3.7 miles to get water;
• In 15 years, 1.8 billion people will live in regions of sever water scarcity…

And remember – Every Drop Counts!

Speaker: Jose Luis Vallejo, Ecosistema Urbano | Introduction by Eugenio Pandolfini
Date/time: Tuesday April 9, 2013 at 7:00pm
Place: Palazzo dei Cerchi | Lecture Hall | Vicolo dei Cerchi 1 | Florence | Italy
Organizer: Kent State University | Florence Program College of Architecture and Environmental Design
Lectures are free and open to the public (seats are limited)

The people behind More Than Green have organized a great summer course on July 15-26, 2013 in the mediterranean city of Alicante (Spain), where we will also be taking part together with PLAYstudio, Transsolar and Urban Think Tank.

Sustainability is not just an environmental issue but, and above all, a social, cultural and economic one. This course about URBAN DESIGN and SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE proposes a complex incursion within the subject of sustainability understood not only as a problem but as an opportunity to meet new approaches to the city in a creative, innovative, playful and unprejudiced way.

Contents + Objectives

Improve your design skills: based on an open criticism of the “only green” approach for the construction of our future sustainable cities, this course offers a much wider, complex and playful perspective at the same time. Students will combine the design of a team project –about an specific case‐ with the supervision of guest experts and their master classes.

Build a knowledge frame –examples of good practices told by guest experts‐ where students take consciousness of the importance of broadening their understanding of sustainability according to the new world policies.

Create a typical multicultural situation of an international course where students coming from different places exchange their various backgrounds and modes of undertaking the sustainable urban project. The diversity of the faculties contributes to enrich this situation.

Methodology + Course Structure

Master classes, teamwork and project reviews within the context of four different ways of understanding sustainability: ENVIRONMENTALLY, SOCIALLY, ECONOMICALLY and CULTURALLY.

Faculty

DIRECTOR: José Luis Oliver Ramírez  (University of Alicante) + TRANSSOLAR: Matthias Schuler (Harvard GSD) + URBAN-THINK TANK: Alfredo Brillembourg (ETH Zurich) + ECOSISTEMA URBANO: Belinda Tato y Jose Luis Vallejo (Harvard GSD) + PLAYstudio: Iván Capdevila y Vicente Iborra (University of Alicante)

Alicante + Free time

It’s summer, you’re by the coast… who would dare to keep you away from having fun?  Within the course structure, it is programmed a considerable amount of free time so the students can visit other cities or some interesting spots on the surroundings, enjoy the sun and the beach, or take part in different summer activities organized by the University of Alicante.

Acommodation

The University of Alicante offers you a wide range of facilities and affordable accommodation in several lovely locations from the historic city centre to the university campus surroundings.

You can download the brochure here: MTG International Summer Course  - PDF
For a more information on fees, acommodation, organization, etc. check the official website: summercourse.morethangreen.es

Shortly about myself, I’m from Denmark. I have just started on my last year of my master at the architecture in Copenhagen, after having spent five months with Ecosistema.

Before going into the final stages of my education, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity of making an internship, being introduced to different ideas and ways of working and at the same to a different culture by moving to Spain for five months.

Ecosistema is very good at working in a socially responsible way and with those layers of architecture that are related to the process and networks. They take into account the humans involved, and at the same time make their dreams and ideas turn into very nice buildings. They master all the layers of architecture today and they have fun at the same time. Their way of thinking supplements my knowledge from the school in Copenhagen very well.

During my stay I was working with ecosistema on the competition about the new city centre of Kiruna. It was a very complicated issue which combined with the other things we have been working on have given me a lot to take with me back to my school and think about.

To me architecture is an opportunity to get into a wide range of knowledge and putting it to use. Hopefully giving something back, which will be helpful, inspiring and relevant.

Before coming I had only heard good things about Ecosistema. It’s all true and I feel privileged to have been able to make my Internship here. So thank you for this time, I wish you the best for the future.

Short profile:

Occupation: Student at The Royal Danish Acadamy of Fine Arts. School of Architecture.
Interests: Architecture and lots of other stuff
City/country: Copenhagen, Denmark
Online profiles: facebook.com/christianjhess

Architecture and Planning may seem to be of little relevance to Conflict Resolution. However, territorial conflicts occur in space, and so are their solutions. It is time architects, planners and policy makers approach disputed territories together to plan viable, peaceful futures for disputed areas.

This workshop invites you to join an exploration of how design can aid envisioning peace in conflicted territories. We will explore the possible meaning of Resolution Planning – originally a concept and practice developed by “SAYA/Design for Change” (sayarch.com) . Together we will try to give broaden this term, and find new ways to encourage policy makers to think as architects, and to encourage architects to think as policy makers.

The 5 day solution-oriented workshop will focus on Jerusalem as a case study for other contested cities such as Belfast and Nicosia. We will plan, think and design at various scales, and propose innovative ideas for peace. Several sites will serve as case studies (one will encourage a landscape intervention, another an urban design strategy, and a third will call for a more general policy oriented vision for the future Jerusalem seam-line). The workshop is planned to be followed by a publication.

Goals and Outcome:
The goal of the workshop is to develop spatial-based concepts to aid peace. We also plan to gather the various proposals into a publication which will include both the theoretical framework and examples of various tools for planning peace.
Above all, we wish for this effort to truly aid overcoming the stalemate in the peace process, which we believe it is crucial to future of both Israeli and Palestinian. We therefore wish this event to be as interesting, meaningful and involving as possible, in order for its fruits and visions of peacemaking to be of highest impact.

Among the contents and results of the workshop we highlight here an introduction to resolution planning and a lecture by Karen on the topic:

More info:

Results: Gallery of the workshop | Same in slideshow mode
Homepage: designing-peace.com
Related website: ispeacepossible.com