the Original Green Blog

the Chael-Dover Cottage - What the Original Green Looks Like

Thu, 5 May 2011 09:39:54 -0400

The Chael-Dover Cottage shows how interesting things get when theory turns into practice... and when “how they once built green” turns into “how I can build green today.” You can find so many Original Green ideas applied here that I quit counting after awhile.
Maricé Chael is an architect and a principal of Chael Cooper. She’s also a member of the New Urban Guild. Her husband, Victor Dover, is a principal of the New Urbanist planning firm Dover-Kohl, and a longtime sustainability leader on many fronts, including being at the forefront of the effort to create LEED-ND. It’s unlikely that anything on this blog or in the Original Green book had any influence over the design of their cottage because Maricé and Victor have known these things long before the book or the blog were published, but that’s immaterial. What matters is how well their cottage illustrates Original Green ideas.
And it isn’t just one idea at a time, either... everywhere you turn, this cottage is doing several things at once. Every room has at least two uses, for example. The image at the top of this post is a classic example we sorely need today: lovability and nourishability in the same plot of ground. Here’s the test this garden passes: is your edible garden lovable enough that you furnish it with benches and chairs, so that you can sit and look at it? Most vegetable gardens are treated as utility plots, meant to be productive but not attractive. But Maricé is planting a primarily edible landscape in her front yard that’s long on romance... even the compost station tucked away in a corner has a rustic charm about it.
The cottage itself isn’t new. The historic marker by the front window shows it was built in the 1920s. Because reuse is far better than recycling, Maricé and Victor kept the original cottage, modifying it only as needed, and added a 17’ addition to the rear. Far too many “green” buildings today are completely new buildings, sitting on the demolition of an earlier building.
The roof was in serious need of replacement, so Maricé opted for synthetic slate made of recycled materials (including diaper liners... thrown away after one use in their first life, but used for many years in their second life.)
What’s missing on the roof? Right... where are the solar panels? It turns out that they aren’t missing... they’re just really well hidden. Pretty much the only place you can see them is from the master bath window on the second level. It’s a great example of making things invisible if they can’t be made lovable, as SmartDwelling I illustrated.
Going inside, it’s hard to miss all the reused things, from furniture (including this piece) to doors to windows like the one in the gable to flooring to fixtures. And it’s really cool to hear the stories Maricé and Victor tell about where each piece came from. “Building materials with stories to tell”... that’s so much more interesting than “I got it at Lowe’s” (or wherever.)
This transom is one of those reused components. It’s also a really great idea we’ve forgotten about in recent years. It’s a ventilating transom (see the chains on each side, and also the latch at the top?) It has two purposes: it passes light from one room to the next while preserving visual privacy, and it also allows for ventilation with visual privacy as well. For buildings more than one room deep, they’re the best way yet developed of getting both.
I mentioned earlier that every room has at least two uses. The living room is also the office, for example. McMansions have redundancy... four or five places to eat, for example. Original Green houses, on the other hand, have rooms and elements that have many uses. Even the top landing of the stairwell shown here doubles as a study. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
Here’s another way of getting more uses out of things: Maricé has carved into walls all over the cottage, using the space for storage. Why waste hollow places in the wall? She didn’t. You can’t do that on exterior walls because of the necessity of insulation, but every other wall in a house should be considered fair game. It’s amazing how much stuff you can store if you think this way.
Here’s another one, just for fun... this one is in the kitchen, set into the wall joining the original cottage to the new addition. And speaking of fun, it’s clear that while these sorts of details are frugal with space, storing more in less, they also contribute mightily to the delight of visiting or living here. In other words, they start out being frugal and end up being lovable.
One more thing about the interior before we step back outside... if you’re seriously interested in being frugal with space, then you need to discard a lot of space planning conventions. See this chair in a reading nook in the library/dining room? There’s nowhere near 80” of ceiling height there. Matter of fact, I can’t even walk into the nook without hitting my head on the storage above. But why do I need to walk into the nook? I don’t. Anyone sitting on the chair naturally bends to sit in such a way that you don’t come anywhere near hitting your head. But if you followed normal space planning rules, you would have entirely missed out on the extra storage.
Let’s have a quick look around the rest of the outdoor rooms before leaving. A lap pool is tucked snugly into the rear garden room, which is surrounded by a wall of green... some of it edible... and all of it made up of native or well-adapted species that don’t need artificial irrigation.
When you plant this way, it’s possible to collect all the irrigation water you need, as Maricé has done, and to distribute it more efficiently than just spraying all over. Rain chains carry the water from gutters down to a rain barrel at each corner of the cottage. Kentucky Bourbon, by law, must be aged in new white oak barrels. After one use, they are discarded. But they make great rain barrels, as you can clearly see.
The pool has a great story as well: a lot of rock had to be excavated to make room for the pool. Normal practice would have been to burn gas to haul it off to the landfill. Instead, Victor took a local fellow who was “pretty unsteady on his bicycle because of substance issues” and worked with him to build a stone frontage wall with the rock from the pool. The guy learned the skill well, and now builds frontage walls for others in the neighborhood, earning enough money to bring a bit of stability to his life. Like so many other things about this cottage, that’s such a great story of healing and reusing the things we have... don’t you think?

~Steve Mouzon

PS: GreenBuildingAdvisor.com did a great story on the Chael-Dover Cottage with lots of technical details... please check it out It’s excellent information.
PPS: Click on any of the images above for high-res versions on my zenfolio site.

the EPA and the Ultimate Betrayal

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 10:54:19 -0400

The greatest betrayal in human history happened almost 2,000 years ago last night. While nothing we can do would ever sink to the depths of Judas’ act of betrayal, he nonetheless set a standard that others have occasionally and ingloriously followed in the centuries since: betrayal of the very thing you supposedly loved, cherished, or were sworn to protect, such as parents that molest their own children, teachers who abuse their students, preachers who misuse those who have come to them for counsel and comfort, and police who commit crimes. Most recently, the Environmental Protection Agency has joined the infamous ranks of those who betray what they were sworn to protect. Ironically, this is all coming to light in the days leading up to Earth Day.
What is the EPA’s nefarious act? Their very reason for existence is to protect the environment, as their name clearly professes. Yet their St. Louis Kansas City* office has done the unthinkable: they are shamelessly abandoning their offices in a compact, mixed-use, and walkable location downtown, and moving miles out into the suburbs to a place that is completely unwalkable and auto-dependent. Others have written capably about the particulars of this move, including Kaid Benfield so I won’t repeat their points... please read them to satisfy yourself... Kaid’s rant is a must-read.
Let’s instead consider the larger issue of why they did it. Are St. Louis’ Kansas City’s* EPA staffers so dark-hearted as to be equal to child molesters, corrupt clergy, and dirty cops? Of course not. Most of the staffers there probably view their jobs with a high degree of idealism. But if we give them the benefit of the doubt on their intentions, then how do we explain their actions? How is it that they don’t understand that suburban sprawl is America’s greatest environmental nightmare... by far?
As we have discussed, sprawl is cancer of the city. Sprawl creates places that are completely inaccessible by anything other than cars. Matter of fact, it’s so bad that every time you change an activity you have to drive. At home, and going to work? Gotta drive. At school and going shopping? Gotta drive. At work and going to eat? Gotta drive. And over the past 40 years, our increases in driving have far outstripped industry’s ability (even with government insistence) to make more efficient cars. Hybrids only serve to salve our conscience if we keep driving more.
Sprawl creates places where you can’t possibly shop for your daily necessities within your own neighborhood, because zoning codes prohibit shops there. Sprawl also fosters the creation of gated subdivisions, which are the worst possible thing you can do if you want to build a securable place. So three of the four foundations of sustainable places (accessible places, serviceable places, and securable places) are essentially made impossible by sprawl.
How could the EPA, of all people, possibly not get it? There are two closely-related reasons, in my opinion. Gizmo Green is the proposition that with better equipment and better materials, we can achieve sustainability. But it simply isn’t so because increases in our consumption consistently outstrip industry’s ability to increase efficiency. Simply put, if our behavior doesn’t change, our machines can’t save us. Sustainability isn’t something you get by going shopping. It’s something you get by thinking (and then acting) differently. So the second closely-related reason is that sustainability isn’t something “they” do... it’s something we do.
Unfortunately, the EPA has been so focused on Gizmo Green solutions for so many years that their St. Louis Kansas City* office appears to be completely oblivious to the fact that Gizmo Green is only a small part of the solution. They’ve done great work attacking the causes of pollution from industrial sources. They now regulate many types of activities with the intent of reducing environmental impact. But the lion’s share of what they do is based on cleaning up the gizmos on the supply side... it’s no wonder they’re wearing Gizmo Green Glasses!
The bottom line is that today, on Earth Day 2011, it’s high time to begin taking a more holistic view of sustainability that goes far beyond our tools, and focuses on everything else about us as well... including the sprawl we inhabit and the auto-dominated lifestyle it forces upon us.
But this shouldn’t be a one-day confession of shortcomings... as a matter of fact, I wondered publicly last year whether Earth Day might be a symptom of our disease? We can’t beat our collective breasts and then go and do the same thing again. The only way to make the change last is to make it enticing. We seldom do the things we ought to do, but frequently do the things we want to do. Sustainability must be something we’re enticed to do, not something we’re compelled to do.
What should EPA St. Louis Kansas City* do? They should lead the way by first changing their plans to abandon a more sustainable place in favor of sprawl. Then, they should broadcast the story of why they changed their minds and were enticed to stay in a place that is more sustainable. It won’t solve everything, but it will show some leadership in something we’re sorely missing today: the story of the things we want to do that make us more sustainable.

~Steve Mouzon

* I’m really embarrassed about this error, but would rather own up to it by showing the changes rather than just cleaning it up as if it never happened. No idea how I got it in my mind this was happening in St. Louis... I’ve been there many times, and to Kansas City as well. In any case, Kansas City is where the larger embarrassment is occurring.

Andrés Duany Guest Post - the Uncut Metropolis Article

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:43:07 -0400

Metropolis published a heavily-edited version of this article in their April 2011 issue, omitting nearly all individual credits. The following is the full original article:

The Avant Garde Establishment (AGE) has developed the habit of defining the New Urbanism through misinformation, intentional and otherwise. Debate has been reduced to tiresome corrections of fact by the New Urbanists. Now Metropolis provides an opportunity to establish the actual record. Because this record was achieved by many people, I will take care to list them. The first mistake is to view the New Urbanism as a rustic version of starchitecture.
The New Urbanism is an informal movement of ideas, techniques, projects and people. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is an institution chartered 18 years ago with budget, board and staff. During the decade of the 1980s the New Urbanism coalesced around certain independent initiatives: the Pedestrian Pocket studies of Doug Kelbaugh and Peter Calthorpe; the rationalism of Maurice Culot and the Krier brothers, the anti-modernist polemics of Colin Rowe and the Texas Rangers, the empirical observations of Jane Jacobs, Oscar Newman and William Whyte; the humane systematics of Chris Alexander, the typological studies of Stefanos Polyzoides; the socially astute public housing of Ray Gindroz and Dan Solomon; the uniquely American viewpoints of Vincent Scully; and the gradual emergence of Seaside as a presence resistant to being ignored. The unifying impetus was CIAM's degeneration into zoned suburban sprawl.
The CNU was organized in 1993 by Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Stefanos Polyzoides, Elizabeth Moule, Peter Calthorpe, Daniel Solomon and Peter Katz. Among the original swarm were Dhiru Thadani, Robert Davis, Judy Corbett, Mark Weiss, Matt Bell, Bob Stern, Jaque Robertson, Jonathan Barnett, Mike Watkins, John Torti, Vince Graham, Robert Davis, Paul Murrain, Alex Krieger, Shelley Poticha, John Massengale, Robert Orr, Pat Pinnell, Jaime Correa, Victor Dover, Joe Kohl, and Neal Payton. The Prince of Wales, with Hank Dittmar, Robert Adam and Ben Bolgar, mounted the comprehensive British campaign; Maurice Culot and Joanna Alimanestianu with Harald Kegler and Audun Engh, nurtured a loose continental network; Peter Richards, Chip Kaufman and Wendy Morris staked out the robust Australian CNU. There are Canadian, Cuban, Scottish, Emirati, Israeli, Italian and Guatemalan outposts as well. Michael Mehaffy fell into the influential roving ambassadorship from ChrisAlexanderland. Most of these original New Urbanists belong to the rather serious generation of 1950--the one following the (Postmodernist) generation of 1935.
The CNU is built on the chassis of CIAM, which was identified as the last design movement to have successfully changed the course of urbanism. This emulation of success, even of an opponent, was an early instance of the non-ideological pragmatism that underlies New Urbanist strategy. From CIAM came the concept of a movement rather than the individual position-taking of the generation of 1935. Also from CIAM came the congresses that develop principles for an open membership coalesced only by agreement with the resulting Charter. There are currently about 2,300 dues-paying members, with some 1,500 attending the annual congresses (CNU 19 will be held in Madison this June).
The New Urbanism is projected by expert publications. These are not vetted; they are integrated only by the logic of the Charter. The skill of our authors has been a boon. In addition to the organizers’, there are important books by Jeff Speck, Jean Francois LeJeune, Philip Bess, Henry Cisneros, James Kunstler, David Brain, Doug Kelbaugh, Javier Cenicacelaya, Robert Alminana, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Witold Rybzcysnki, Eric jacobsen, John Dutton, Philip Langdon and Emily Talen. Diane Dorney, Gabriele Tagliaventi, and Robert Steuteville are the editors of the indispensible periodicals. Some books are very popular--for example, Suburban Nation (Y2000) has SOLD about 100,000 copies, more than all but A Pattern Language and The Death and Life of the Great American Cities. As a result of these publications, the ceaseless lectures, the codes and the charrettes, the New Urbanism dominates the professional planning discourse--albeit "only in flyover country" as Professor Charles Waldheim has taken care to explain.
As the Charter shows, the New Urbanism projects at all scales; but its primary mission has been the reform of suburban sprawl, which has long been the most debilitating and the most neglected of America's crises. This is not to say that New Urbanists have avoided the inner city. DPZ, for example, has prepared effective urban plans for eight major urban cores, and Moule-Polyzoides has done at least as many, including downtown Los Angeles. After all, the best way to discourage sprawl is to foster cities that people are loath to leave. Indeed, the head of the CNU is John Norquist, ex-mayor of Milwaukee and author of the most seasoned of the municipal primers, The Wealth of Cities. According to New Urban News, about half of the projects have been infill, not counting the scores of codes adopted to guide municipalities.
And yet few among the Establishment care to know that. The otherwise omniscient Ken Frampton was recently heard to say, "The New Urbanists ... are they still around?" This professor's disinterest is as expected at Colombia." They make porches for white people in the South" is Rodolfo Machado's joshing version--which the highly programmed GSD students believe more easily than the fact that New Urbanists wrote HUD's HOPE VI standards and are thereby associated with 110,000 units of affordable housing--virtually the entire supply of the last 15 years, and with a good portion directly designed by CNU members. Then a mere scratch beyond those little porches would reveal that firms like Peter Calthorpe's and John Fregonese's are responsible for most of the regional planning west of the Alleghenies--which is to say most of the regional planning in this country … and it may take as much effort to avoid knowing who prepared the reconstruction plan for Port-au-Prince.
While the New Urbanism's mission is focused, its array of techniques is open-ended. Some superb know-how has been rescued from the dustier shelves of libraries, but the real achievement has been the creativity applied to encountered situations. Innovation is not what comes first to mind from the visuals, and some New Urbanists will agree when the "nostalgic" architectural manifestation is criticized. But to dismiss all of New Urbanism because of the look of the buildings is a stupid mistake that has left the field of urban design uncontested. There is no Avant Garde alternative to the ultra-precise market research of Todd Zimmerman and Laurie Vogt; or to the surrogate governing protocols developed by attorneys Doris Goldstein and Dan Slone; there are no cunning retail hybrids like those devised by Bob Gibbs and Seth Harry. (Consider Professor Margaret Crawford's shock--SHOCK!--when discovering that mall designers manipulate their customers. How did Berkeley ever find such a shopping virgin in California?) The Establishment has nothing like the new manual of the Institute of Traffic Engineers, rammed into existence by Rick Chellman, Rick Hall, Paul Crabtree, Norm Garrick and Peter Swift; nor have they developers like Robert Davis, Vince Graham Greg Whittaker, Bob Graham, Robert Chapman, Steve Maun, Buff Chace, Joe Alfandre, Peter Rummell and Bill Gietema, who blew off the scary proscriptions of the United Lemmings Institute (aka the ULI). Where are the code wizards like Daniel Parolek, Carol Wyant, Jeff Bounds, Geoff Ferrell, Jennifer Hurley, Laura Hall, Susan Henderson, Ann Daigle, Chad Emerson, Nathan Norris, and especially Sandy Sorlien? One version, the SmartCode, is modular freeware, designed to infiltrate the 31,000 American municipalities. But then, the avant-garde considers codes a bothersome impediment, not the most powerful tool of urban design. That only the Establishment’s court jester (Michael Sorkin—who else?) has shown any interest in codes reveals the fundamental lack of seriousness.
How did the New Urbanists manage to nail down so much? Perhaps because we tend to deploy CIAM-vintage effective protocols rather than the expressive protocols of "critical theory." But also because we are not relativists--suburban sprawl is bad news. Professor Robert Beauregard ruefully credits this certainty for our power. Granted, the notion of suburbia is occasionally noted by the Avant Garde (perhaps from the window of the train to New Haven), but it is seldom engaged beyond a sketch and a jot. Other than the historic excursions by Robert Venturi and Scott Brown to the exotica of Las Vegas and Levittown, and the brave berm theories of the Landscape Urbanists--the field is now controlled by New Urbanists.
Reforming suburbia is not a matter of styling "unprecedented typologies." Suburban sprawl is nothing less than the principal cause of climate change. The car-dependent lifestyle of the American middle class (and now its export version) is the major cause of atmospheric and hydrological degradation--and of social and economic problems that are even more immediately debilitating. As the car keys are taken from the clutches of the aging boomers, as the national pauperization relinquishes the care of the centenary infrastructure, before the disappearance of cheap energy--the drifting wreck of suburbia will require salvage work. That is the great design challenge of the 21st Century. It is more important than massaging Asian and Muslim self-esteem, more ethical than the bestowal of surplus design on shantytowns, and more cost effective than glass-skinned greenwashing. The important work is close to home, humble and urgent. The books on suburban repair by Galina Tachieva, Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson are fixing to become the Towards A New Architecture of the new century--minus the charming testosterone.
But now--impossible to avoid—we must engage what matters most to the Establishment: STYLE! As the Charter states on this matter: "Individual architectural projects should be seamlessly linked to their surroundings. This issue transcends style." That agnostic statement should be the end of it, except that the Establishment just cannot forgive our reluctance to carry the burden of modernist architecture to the middle class, which is finally listening to someone. Why are we uncommitted to imposing style preferences? Because a familiar architecture is the camouflage that eases the passage of what are actually some very progressive agendas of ours (read the Charter). As eventually happened with CIAM, architecture becomes a tool toward an urban end, not the end in itself. Besides, over time New Urbanist building has become quite good. If critical eyes had not been so coarsened by the gesticulations of avant-garde architecture they might discern the subtle achievement represented by those buildings with pitched roofs. From the thousands of New Urbanist architectural commissions have arisen superb practices. Some are as good as architects have ever been--and the exposure to such comparison requires courage, not like the chickenshit stance of Eisenman-buildings-are-always-best-in-class-because-Eisenman-writes-his-rules (insert the name of your favorite vanguardista). Quantity is important, too, and these architects are now organized around traditional pattern books and guilds (Ray Gindroz, Marianne Cusato, Steve Mouzon and Geoffrey Mouen are catalysts) that deliver quality with the economy and efficiency commensurate with modernity's true challenge, Guideon's "problem of large numbers." Plain Old Good Architecture (the basis of the University of Miami curriculum, incidentally) has taken territory from talents so tuned to the exceptional that they are flummoxed by background cultural signals. Between connecting to a normative Middle America or connecting to an avant-garde that is defined by its distance from the normal--what strategic choice could New Urbanism have made?
In fact the American middle class is just one of the "power grids" that propels the New Urbanism. Christopher Alexander at the outset advised "We all know what the appliance is … what we must now do is design the plugs that connect it to the existing power grids." Note the plural. New Urbanism has identified power grids as the middle class and the developers who provide for them, the planning professionals with their manuals and codes, the elected officials with their policies and procedures, and the popular media with its maw for controversy and colorful images.
In four phases, the New Urbanists have connected to power grids that are now simultaneously available to propel implementation. The first came out of the market-driven success of Seaside. It turned out that many people wanted walkable lifestyles and that it was possible to market such communities profitably. This brought the developers on board. The second plug emerged as NIMBYism arose from the failed promise of suburbia. Instead of lives surrounded by nature and enjoying freedom of movement, the opposite was delivered. The New Urbanist charrettes evolved as protocol to convince the frustrated and the infuriated that our plans were part of the solution rather than part of the problem. The result was a hybrid of bottom-up and top-down planning, as the Charter and the charrette conjoin principle and process. Emily Talen has argued that this consummation may finally stabilize the historic pendulum of American planning. The ability to gain support for transit, as well as to mitigate spatially induced economic, environmental, and social problems, has plugged the charrette into the highest policy levels. Federal infrastructure grants will likely be filtered through the metastatic public processes being developed by Peter Calthorpe for California, with other states no doubt to follow. Bill Lennertz effectively played the St. Paul role in spreading the charrette as a gospel of local democracy.
The third phase was the research on sedentary lifestyles: obesity and the attendant pathologies. This compelling plug was expertly connected to the urban pattern by Joanna Lombard and the University of Miami Medical School. The health connection intensified the ethical imperative of New Urbanism, but not more so than the fourth plug. This one, to the environmental movement, is based on Professor William Cronon's insight that conceiving of humans as "within nature" enables environmentalists to project the urban as well as protect the rural. The recent LEED-ND initiative has hardwired the New Urbanism to this environmental agenda. Led by Kaid Benfield, among those who concocted this rigorous standard were Susan Mudd, Victor Dover, Bruce Donnelly, and Doug Farr. Marred only by certain primeval superstitions about stormwater management that will require ongoing reference to Tom Low's Light Imprint Manual, LEED-ND is already infiltrating municipalities as a shadow planning code.
What plugs have failed? Despite the technical success of LEED-ND, New Urbanism has not connected properly to environmental populism--which is not yet assimilated by “our” middle class. This is probably due to a failure to deploy visual biophilia. It is not enough that the urban pattern mitigate climate change by being compact, connected, complex, and convivial; apparently it is necessary that it look green explicitly. This stylistic void has been exploited--predictably--by the Avant Garde’s NEW darling, Landscape Urbanism. This is a very interesting movement led by the generation of 1965. Evidently they have studied closely the New Urbanism. In a classic reprise of the CNU swerve around CIAM, and closely following Professor Harold Bloom's thesis, LU is now explicitly challenging our dominance with a swerve based on Team Ten. Landscape Urbanism is currently being analyzed by our NextGen (of 1980) and a new New Urbanism is to be expected.
The other failure has been connecting with the academic power grid. Of the 154 American architecture programs, all but four inculcate negative vibes toward the New Urbanism; it is probably the only agenda they share. The architecture schools--ornery, confused, distracted and relatively powerless--were easy enough to leave unplugged. And the disinterest was reciprocated. Academia’s penchant for speculation is not fulfilled by our stolidly verifiable world; the New Urbanists could never mimic the hand wringing and dithering that Professor Sert bequeathed to Urban Design. Now, this has finally become a serious distraction, as the culling away of class after class of energetic and idealistic youngsters hobbles our ability to deal with the “problem of large numbers.”
But there is now perhaps a way to plug in. The Academy’s recent absorption of Landscape Urbanism has created a completely new ethos of clarity and positivism--one that can be engaged by New Urbanism. We can assume that whatever is effective will be embraced (a mortal embrace for Landscape Urbanism, perhaps). We have no ideological prerequisites; only the test of American pragmatism: "Whatever works well in the long run." This characteristic of New Urbanism seems to exasperate our best-informed critic, Professor Alex Krieger--who accuses us of being "impossible to debate as they instantly assimilate all good ideas."
And, why not?

~Andrés Duany

Telling the Truth - In Advance

Mon, 4 Apr 2011 10:04:16 -0400

Who would’ve thought that story-telling might become an important planning tool for cities looking to revitalize themselves after the Meltdown? It might happen in New Orleans... here’s how:
Names in the Story
Southerners, especially those from the Crescent City, are often master story-tellers. Many of them will tell you that they can weave a more compelling tale when places and buildings in that tale have nifty names... “Dead Man’s Curve” rather than “highway 431, a couple miles out of town. “High Rustler” instead of “the efficiency unit in Robert Orr’s house.” “Printer’s Alley” rather than “the alley between 3rd and 4th Avenues.” Tara was by no means the first southern house to be named, nor the last.
A Time for Healing
I was just on a design charrette in New Orleans run by the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment (Prince Charles’ organization) and sponsored by the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans.
Ben Bolgar of the Prince’s Foundation set the course for this latest charrette when he said “We’ve been building for many years. But maybe now is a time for healing the city rather than building the city.” So this charrette began with a desire to find seeds that we could plant small... especially important now as there isn’t yet funding for constructing anything we designed.
The seedbeds were the Faubourg Marigny, New Marigny (or St. Roch, if you prefer) to the north, Bywater to the east, and the St. Claude neighborhood to its north. Moving away from the river, the disrepair deepened in concert with Katrina’s flood levels.
Less Than a Shoestring
I struggled with Ben’s directive... how exactly do you “heal the city” without funding? I’m a designer, so design and construction are the tools I know best. Without them, how could I help? But on the afternoon of the last day, it hit me:
Our study area contained place after nameless place with the beginnings of coolness. Sometimes, it was because of the people moving there, like the rag-tag band of artists opening a few galleries on a certain stretch of St. Claude. Other times, it was because of the physical configuration of the place, like the funky little double triangle where you can find Flora’s, Mimi’s, and Schiro’s.
Gallery Row
So why not name each of these places? The galleries on St. Claude could be Gallery Row. What aspiring new artists wouldn’t want to be located on Gallery Row? Every town has its Five Points, but the funky little double triangle actually has seven streets coming out of it, so it should be Seven Points.
Most of the names qualify as “telling the truth in advance,” because the places aren’t nearly so cool... yet. But with a name that conveys a clear intent for the future of the place, it’s far more likely that people will buy into that future.
Places Worth Naming
There’s another aspect as well: the more important something is in your life, the more likely you are to name it. Children invariably get named within the first couple days of life; pets get named quickly as well. So naming a place doesn’t just predict the future condition of the place, it seals that prediction with the importance of all things named.
Convinced it was a good idea but frantic because the final presentation was now only hours away, I scrounged around and found an extra base map and a couple markers, and hastily put the scheme on paper. The more I looked for latent coolness in fresh memories of miles of walks through the neighborhoods, the more a network of cool places began to emerge out of the page. Now the trick was connecting them.
Pointing the Way
There were enough cool places that they could all be connected with straight paths... no need to go three blocks, take a left, then the second right...” Instead, if you’re at Seven Points, it’s five blocks straight down Royal to Washington Square (the only one of the places that already had a name.) So it should be simple enough to have European “pointing signs” like this one (except with fewer signs, of course) that point the way to the next cool spots when you’re at the edge of one. Maybe there’s also something cast occasionally into the sidewalk, like the mythical breadcrumbs along the path... but I’m not sure it’s necessary since no turns are required.
A Bigger Story
Each of the cool places will, I believe, eventually be well-known on its own merits, and with its own lore and embedded memories. But there’s a bigger story as well: someone clever in the visitor’s bureau will certainly pick up on the network: a “necklace of cool places,” if you will, and will tell that story as well.
“Don’t just come down to Coffee Corner, or to the Restoration Blocks, or Art on the Tracks, or Craftsman’s Corner,” they might say. “Instead, make a couple days (and nights) of it while you’re in New Orleans and discover all of these little treasures for yourself!” Makes sense, doesn’t it?

~Steve Mouzon

PS: I have no idea precisely why, but design charrettes conducted by the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment tend to be great breeding grounds for new ideas. This post describes two charrettes in Rose Town, a neighborhood of Kingston, Jamaica. The first saw the development of the Wet Appliance, which takes slum-dwellers from sleeping on the ground all the way to a masonry house over time. Six little children transformed the second charrette into a story I’ll tell for the rest of my life. I’ve worked with the Foundation in New Orleans as well, dating back to 2009.

Costs of Sprawl - Part 1

Tue, 8 Mar 2011 12:26:40 -0500

Sprawl is threatening to bankrupt us in more ways than we might realize. Let’s have a look at several of them:
Direct Costs
The US imported 4,289,772,000 barrels of oil in 2010, which at today’s price of $105/barrel is almost half a trillion dollars. Fully one third of our imports come from nations deemed dangerous or unstable. With each “uninstall” attempted on Middle Eastern and African dictators, the instability grows.
Much of that money goes to nations that don’t really like us all that well... and some downright hate us. So a portion of the half-trillion dollar annual impoverishment of the US gets into the hands of organizations bent on destroying us. How much harm would Osama bin Laden have been able to do without petroleum dollars? And what is the cost, in lives and dollars, of the wars waged as direct or indirect results of petro-dollars getting into the wrong hands?
Sprawl should shoulder much of the blame for this staggering expense. Study after study have shown that per-capita performance is substantially better in the city than in surrounding sprawl. This is no surprise, since sprawl requires us to drive everywhere.
The half-trillion hemorrhage, unfortunately, is only the beginning. Today, we’ll look at some of sprawl’s toll on city budgets. Later, we’ll continue that discussion and also look at its impact on neighborhoods and individuals.
I lectured yesterday in Santa Fe on some of these issues, and illustrated them with a comparative study of two places. One was a sample of sprawl in the image at the top of this blog post. It was just north of downtown Santa Fe, but it could have been anywhere. Here’s a larger version of the image. It’s a 90 acre slice of sprawl exactly 1/2 mile wide. For comparison purposes, I took the exact same area and laid out a prototypical neighborhood based on New Urbanist principles. Let’s look at the basic metrics of each example:
Sprawl
Housing Units: 114 (all single-family)
Shops & Offices: none
Civic Spaces: none
Civic Buildings: none
Arterial: 13.3 linear feet/unit
Main Street: none
Streets: 101.4 linear feet/unit
On-Street Parking: none
Service Thoroughfares:
Driveways: 108 linear feet/unit
Neighborhood
Housing Units: 814 (includes single-family units from cottages (throughout the plan) to mansions (on the right side of the plan,) townhouses, carriage houses, mews units, and live/work units over Main Street (on the left side of the plan)
Shops & Offices: 99.27 square feet/unit
Civic Spaces: 1 square & 4 playgrounds/pocket parks, total of 2.63 acres
Civic Buildings: 4, flanking the central square
Arterial: none
Main Street: 2.13 linear feet/unit
Streets: 28.03 linear feet/unit
On-Street Parking: 2.02 spaces/unit
Service Thoroughfares:
Driveways: 9 linear feet/unit
Rear Lanes: 10.2 linear feet/unit
Alleys: 4.45 linear feet/unit
Note: if you’re wondering how the total linear footage of alleys and rear lanes can be so low, it’s because there are a significant number of mews units and carriage houses on the same alleys and rear lanes that serve housing units as well.
Since World War II, the US has chosen to build almost everything according to the sprawling pattern. Here are some of the consequences that choice has on city budgets:
Police
The sprawl above allows police to protect 46 housing units per mile of travel. The neighborhood allows police to protect 175 units in that same mile. This has a very real impact on police department budgets. While it might take the same length of time to apprehend a suspect in either setting, police don’t spend most of their time with guns drawn or handcuffs out. Rather, the lion’s share of their time in the field is spent on patrol in most places. Because each police team can protect only 1/4 as many homes per mile in sprawl, you need close to four times as many police in the field to afford the same degree of protection. The city also has to buy, fuel, and maintain four times as many patrol cars to get that same level of protection on patrol.
Fire
Fire protection has similar issues. Fire trucks don’t patrol the streets like police, of course, but the fire ratings that determine the cost of your homeowners’ insurance is based in no small part on a city’s average distance from fire stations to housing units. Larger numbers of units protected per mile of street allows the city to save its citizens many millions of dollars in insurance costs without having to build, staff, and equip nearly so many fire stations. And with some fire trucks topping a half-million dollars apiece, the total cost of a new fire station can be a major item in a city’s budget.
Dollars aren’t the whole story, however. For almost every house in sprawl, there’s only one way in: pull up to the front of the house and fight the fire (or the criminals) from there. Traditional neighborhoods, however, provide the additional benefit of alley or rear lane access, which just might be the difference in life and death in some emergencies.
And this is only the beginning... check back over the next several days for the rest of the story for cities, neighborhoods, and citizens.

~Steve Mouzon

Automobile Poverty - Part 2

Tue, 1 Mar 2011 17:14:36 -0500

A substantial number of Americans will soon be forced to live in poverty conditions because they live in sprawl, and this number will expand as fuel costs continue to rise even more. Here’s why:
Time Costs
Yesterday’s post looked at the direct financial costs of cars in sprawl, but money isn’t the only way cars are impoverishing us. By the time you get to work and back, and then run all those other errands you have to do in your car when you live in sprawl, it’s likely you may be spending two hours or more per day behind the wheel in most places. Just getting to work in the morning can take well over an hour if you live in Kendall but work in Miami, for example... and that’s without a wreck or road construction.
If you ask around, most people will tell you that as short as they are on money, they’re even shorter on time. So what are we doing spending up to two (or more) of our waking hours each day spending quality time with our steering wheels? A space alien landing on earth for the first time might logically conclude that our steering wheels are more important to us than our family and friends.
But you don’t really have any choice in sprawl. At home and wanna go to work? Gotta drive. At work and wanna go to lunch? Gotta drive (can you say “lunch-hour rush-hour”?) Taking the kids to school? Gotta drive. Wanna go shopping? Gotta drive. Wanna go play ball? Gotta drive. You get the picture. It’s a phenomenon I call Compulsory Commuting, and it happens because walking between any of these places would be insane... you likely wouldn’t make it there alive.
But here’s a very serious question: what happens when the price of gas spikes to $20/gallon and you can’t afford to drive to all these places? When that happens in a few years, there likely will be a lot of other people who can’t afford to drive there, either. What are you going to do then? If there aren’t nearly so many cars on the road, it might be a little safer. But have you ever looked at how long it would take to walk between all these places? If you commute an ordinary distance to work and leave on foot after breakfast, good luck getting there by quitting time!
Health Costs
There’s a third form of Automobile Poverty, and this one hits closest to home: it’s the raft of effects that sprawl has on the health of our own bodies. I could go on forever with fact after fact, but many others have already documented the clear effects. I’ll just tell one story:
When I moved to South Beach almost eight years ago, I was a tired old man at 43, as you can see in this picture. I was also badly overweight... probably obese, actually. But when I moved to South Beach, I found something I’d never experienced before: a place where it was actually fun to walk. And so Wanda and I found an office within walking distance of our condo. Next, we found a grocery store within a few blocks of home, and three more within a couple blocks of the office.
We then picked out a bank and a doctor within walking distance. And a great bookstore. And then the Apple Store opened within walking distance. Bottom line is that today, our two primary reasons for driving are to fly or to worship. Other than those, we’re on foot or on a bike. I illustrated all this recently in the Web of Daily Life.
So what happened to the tired old man? I came to South Beach at a portly (to be kind) 245 pounds. Before I’d finished losing, I was down to 185. I occasionally get back up to 205, but then I get busy again and get back down to a healthy weight. This is me now... and the difference between now and then illustrates one of the great advantages of walkable places over sprawl.
I don’t know what the figures are, but there’s no doubt that America spends billions of dollars a year on weight loss, and also on the medical carnage of obesity. Who can afford that least? Those on the brink of poverty, of course. They’re at risk on at least two counts: First, if you’re poor, you’re less likely to be able to afford better food. Instead, you load up on the cheap calories of processed carbs, which increase obesity. And now, as the affluent are rediscovering the coolness of urbanity and moving back into the city, we are beginning to undergo an historic flip that will end up leaving the less well-to-do in the suburbs. That’s right... those least able to eat well will now also be those least able to walk because they’ll be stranded in places that were never designed for walkability. We haven’t even begun to understand how costly and unhealthy suburbia is really going to be.

~Steve Mouzon

Automobile Poverty - Part 1

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:24:15 -0500

A substantial number of Americans will soon be forced to live in poverty conditions because they live in sprawl, and this number will expand as fuel costs continue to rise even more. Here’s why:
Direct Costs
The average cost of owning and maintaining a car (payments or lease, insurance, taxes, repairs, washing, oil, gas, parking, etc.) varies between $7,000 and $10,000 per year, depending on where you live. My auto insurance quadrupled, for example, when I moved to Miami where there are more wrecks. Fortunately, we were able to get rid of our second car because South Beach is so walkable, so that helped a lot. But in most places, that’s not possible.
If you live in sprawl, you are not economically viable without a car because you must drive everywhere. And your kids aren’t socially viable without one, either, so as soon as they turn 16, expect them to be clamoring for their first car. This means that a family of four with everyone 16 or above most likely has 4 cars.
Cars vs. Houses
If you’re frugal and stay near the bottom of the range of total car costs, then that’s still 4 x $7,000 = $28,000 per year for your cars! Today, if you’re able to get a mortgage on a house, converting that $28,000 per year to home mortgage payments would buy you a house worth at least $350,000. So a family of four which owns a $150,000 house in sprawl (it’s hard to find one less expensive than that in the sprawl of most markets) could afford a $500,000 house in a highly walkable place where they need no car, all other things being equal.
From Car-Free to Homeless
Going the other direction, a family of four which owns a $350,000 house in a highly walkable place where they need no cars would suddenly find themselves homeless if they moved into sprawl where everyone needs a car! But at least they could live in those cars, right?
Here’s another way of looking at it: the poverty line is just over $22,000 for a family of four in the 48 contiguous US states. That family of four living in poverty in a highly walkable place would suddenly have to make over twice as much money to maintain their poverty-ridden standard of living if they decided to move out into sprawl. What a burden sprawl really is!
When Gas Goes Up
Here’s one more direct cost to consider: what happens when the cost of gas goes way up? 2-1/2 billion people are now moving into the city in China and India (and many millions are doing the same in other populous countries as well.) Here in the US, we have a little more than one car per person, not counting work trucks and buses. If China and India do 2-1/2 times as well in their need for cars as the US, then there will be over a billion cars on the road in a few years, just in those two countries. I don’t care what you think about Peak Oil... this is economics 101. Pure supply and demand. Even if the supply does remain steady and Peak Oil doesn’t kick in, we’ll have a billion cars competing with our 300 million cars. You do the math.
$20/Gallon
I don’t know how soon gas will get to $10/gallon, or to $20/gallon. What I do know is that going from $5/gallon a couple summers ago to $20/gallon is only a factor of four. I can remember when I was a kid in the early 1970s, just before the first Arab oil embargo, that gas regularly got as low as $0.299/gallon, and during a “gas war,” it could go as low as $0.199, or just under twenty cents per gallon. (Curious how “gas war” has taken on an entirely different meaning now, isn’t it?)
Going from there in the early 1970s to $5/gallon is a factor of 25 times. So if it does what it’s been doing since just before the embargo (25 times higher in 38 years,) it’ll get to $20/gallon (four times higher) in another 6-7 years... and that’s without the Billion Car Effect.
When gas gets that high, how many other people will be forced into Automobile Poverty? Will you be one of them? Sprawl is quickly becoming a burden too great for America to bear.

~Steve Mouzon

Writing My Obituary

Tue, 4 Jan 2011 09:51:22 -0500

I believe the best obituary most of us could hope for is one that cannot be fully written for a thousand years after we’re forgotten. Sadly, countless millions of people give up living long before they’re dead, so that theirs could be written when they’re 20, 30, or 40, even though they’re not buried or their ashes scattered until they’re 80. But that’s a different story for another day...
Why would our obituary best be written a thousand years after we’re forgotten? I suspect that an idea may actually spread more broadly once it’s disconnected from the person who first conceived it, because the idea is then unburdened from that person’s baggage of imperfections.
Who led the ragtag band of Panza Verde to keep Antigua Guatemala alive in defiance of the government order following the devastating earthquake and flood of 1773? They have given us a great city rather than seeing it lost to the jungle by subsisting on avocados for decades. But who convinced them to stay? That name has been lost in time, but maybe that’s OK, because it’s arguably better today to celebrate a great living city rather than names of long-dead people.
But at the beginning, it’s not possible to separate the ideas from the people. How do ideas grow? Insight is the conception of an idea in a person’s mind, based on their life experience to date. The mind, of course, has been seeded with countless ideas from others, and is fertilized by passion and watered with sorrow.
Wisdom of the aged has been revered through most of history because those with longer life experience have had the opportunity to plant more seeds of ideas. But passion wanes for most over time, so this latter harvest of insight often has a sage-like character.
The young, while short on life experience and therefore time for planting, are often bursting with passion and frequently with that youthful sorrow we call “angst.” This early harvest of insight typically has more of a revolutionary flavor.
An insight internalized affects no change. If the insight is powerful enough, and if the person has enough courage, then they may choose to let that insight spawn a cause. A cause is based on a because. Or, “we do this because...” Put another way, the core of a cause is a compelling reason to do something differently. Maybe it’s an injustice to right. Or maybe it’s a better way of building an eave... or anything in between.
But in any case, a cause begins with one person. If that person is persistent enough, rational enough, compelling enough, and inspiring enough, then they may be able to pass the cause on to others, who take it up as their own.
Let’s consider, for contrast, the antithesis of a cause, which is a brand. Countless companies and individuals agonize over their brand. There are workshops and symposia for learning how to brand, and PR people, graphic designers, and the like for helping you develop your brand. And there are legions of lawyers to help you protect your brand.
That’s because brands aren’t meant to spread; they’re meant to be tightly-held and proprietary. It’s what you have that nobody else on earth has, under fear of law. A brand is closed, while a cause is open. I have to pay for a product with your brand, but you’re free to adopt my cause. A brand is propagated by selling; quit selling, and the brand dies. A cause is propagated by telling; you can die, but your cause can live on because of others telling the story.
While brands are always brands, causes can molt into something greater. Causes begin with one person and grow into a group of people who believe in the cause. Once a cause has grown beyond the original hive of like-minded people who nurtured it at the beginning, it may reach a tipping point where broader parts of a culture adopt it, at which point it becomes a movement. At this point, the original insight has the power to affect change on a wide scale... but the molting isn’t finished yet.
If the movement is persistent over a long time, it can become a living tradition, which is the highest standard of ideas that spread. This is because a living tradition’s wide-scale effects are so durable over time. In other words, a living tradition is broad and deep.
An insight turns into a cause when you believe in it. A cause turns into a movement when many believe in it. A movement turns into a living tradition when their children believe in it as well. Only the most compelling ideas of the parents are adopted by the children, as we all know.
Living traditions, as long-time readers of this blog know, are the operating systems of the Original Green, which is the only delivery system of real sustainability that humanity has ever proven over time. Today, many scoff at the idea that traditions could ever live again in architecture and urbanism. To many Modernists, a tradition is a dead thing in a history book that could only serve as handcuffs to creativity. To many traditionalists, those dead traditions in the history books are a grab-bag of prettier styles than what the Modernists are capable of because, after all, architecture is just about style and fashion... or is it?
These two schools each have a point: Dead traditions really are handcuffs, because they can’t change. But those dead historical styles really are more attractive to most people than the soulless architecture most often produced today. But each are missing the bigger point, which is the fact that the real solution is something each of them have never known: a real living tradition.
I said at the beginning that the best most of us can hope for is an obituary that can’t be fully written for a thousand years after we’ve been forgotten. I’d be remiss, however, not to mention the few that deserve better. My work is to help make a better environment. Those that deserve better are the ones whose life’s work is to help people become better. They are the wayfinders, the healers, and the compasses. I wrote about two such people not long ago. While the good that they have done for others has spread so broadly that it likely will never be fully known, it’s also impossible to separate that good from those that have done it, and people like this are much less likely to be quickly forgotten. While I’m trying to do good for the places that surround people, they’re doing good for the people themselves. And for that I am grateful.

~Steve Mouzon

PS: You’ll notice that I haven’t actually written my own obituary. Nor do I, to my knowledge, have any terminal disease. Rather, this post is part of the new Twitter #Letsblogoff phenomenon. Today’s topic is “Write your own obituary.” Obviously, I’ve taken the topic in a bit of a different direction, as I usually do. Here are some of the other participating blogs in today’s #Letsblogoff:

Jamie Burrell @ecofriendlypaint Ecoprotective Products
Denese Bottrell @Denese_Bottrell Thoughtful Content
Bob Borson @bobborson Life of an Architect
Tabitha Ponte @DESIGNSTUDIO26 26 [at] 41
Madame Sunday @ModernSauce Modern Sauce
Becky Shankle @ecomod Eco-Modernism
Jenny Roets @arch_girl JennyRoets
Cindy FrewenWuellner @Urbanverse Urbanverse Posterous
Amy Good @Splintergirl Thoughts of a Splintergirl
Saxon Henry @saxonhenry Roaming by Design
Rufus Dogg @dogwalkblog DogWalkBlog
Jerlyn Thomas @jerlyn Design Lady NYC
Paul Anater @paul_anater Kitchen and Residential Design
Sean Lintow, Sr. @SLSconstruction SLS-Construction.com
Jody Brown @INFILLnc Jody Brown's Blog

I’m @stevemouzon, FWIW.

Original Green Discussion Group

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 12:53:24 -0500

Dr. Matthew Hardy of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment established the Original Green discussion group last week. Judging from the first few days, it promises to be quite lively. Please join us for enlightening discourse that promises to push the Original Green forward in ways we can’t anticipate yet. Here’s the group’s webpage, or you can just email here to join the conversation.
The Prince’s Foundation has long been a great ally of Original Green ideas, and long before that, I’ve been a huge fan of Prince Charles’ work, dating back to the 1980s. I first worked with the Prince’s Foundation in 2005, during the first Rose Town charrette in Kingston, Jamaica. I was a consultant during that charrette, which Prince Charles commissioned to DPZ. The Foundation ran a follow-up charrette in November 2008, and I had the privilege of working on that one as well.
While we explored a good bit of previously uncharted territory in the 2005 charrette, the biggest breakthrough occurred at the end of the 2008 charrette, when a group of little children provided a breathtaking leap forward in the understanding of living traditions. You can read their story in this post.
There were other notable advances as well. The potters are a group of artisans living on the north side of Rose Town trained by the Foundation; they craft useful and fanciful work, but they have problems: Rose Town has been wracked with such violence for decades between one political party on the north side and another political party on the south side that most Kingston residents don’t get anywhere close to the neighborhood. As a result, nobody buys the potters’ wares. I’ll blog soon about a novel proposal to solve this dilemma, and help knit the neighborhood back together again.
The Foundation’s support of Original Green ideas continues in a number of ways: Hank Dittmar, the CEO of the Prince’s Foundation, has included me in presentations to the Congress for the New Urbanism on more than one occasion, for which I am grateful.
Last year, Ben Bolgar included me as one of the faculty in the Foundation’s Building Craft Apprentice training program in New Orleans, which is an outgrowth of the Prince’s visit to the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and mirrors the Foundation’s program in the UK. You can read more about the 2009 program here.
One more thing from last year... on my final day, Ben asked me to say a few things to the students. For a spur-of-the-moment thing, it turned out pretty well, and I later wrote it down as well as I could recall it. I call it the Curse of the Craftsman, and you can read about it here.
Last year’s class worked through the winter on projects assigned by our New Orleans partners. They graduated in March in fine fashion. After touring Britain for several days and visiting the work sites of their apprentice colleagues in the UK, they came back to London for their graduation, which was presided over by Prince Charles.
While in the UK for the graduation, I had the privilege of teaching a Masterclass at the Foundation. I was a faculty member in a symposium there a few years ago, but had never taught a Masterclass until this year. It was quite a treat for me, and I believe the students enjoyed it as well.
This fall, Ben restructured the faculty so there would be fewer of us, on longer engagements. Ben, Edith Platten, Ann Daigle and I took the building program all the way through, with other instructors for geometry, life drawing, and watercolor.
One of the things I do is to take the students on walking tours of the city. I ask them to identify things they see happening again and again. These are patterns. Next, they’re asked to figure out why people repeated these patterns, and if there might be a reason to repeat them again today. If so, then they have to tell a story that is rational. compelling, and inspiring as to why we should repeat each pattern.
One of the students came up to me at the end of the second day and said “I have lived in New Orleans all my life, but I’ve never really seen New Orleans. Thanks for giving me a brand-new city in which to live!” I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but she’s right... really seeing a place opens up so many things.
Dr. Hardy had asked me back for another Masterclass, so while returning from a charrette in Mauritius recently, I extended my stay in London in order to do the class. While preparing for this class, I finalized the “lenses” idea I’d been considering for some time. It resulted in the largest single remake of the presentation that I’d ever done. Look for many more posts exploring the Original Green through various lenses. Better yet, join the discussion group and be a part of the development of the ideas!

~Steve Mouzon

The Wellness Lenses of the Original Green

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 09:06:48 -0500

The ways we build our places and our buildings have effects that range from the notable to the profound upon our wellness. Specifically, this is wellness of body, wellness of mind, and even wellness of spirit. Our places and our buildings aren’t the only things that affect our wellness; many things affecting wellness operate completely outside the realm of the built environment, of course.
It is often helpful to look at an idea through the lens of a different set of ideas. Today’s post lays out the framework of the Lenses of Wellness through which we’ll look at the Original Green a number of times next year. We’ll also look through other sets of lenses, including the Lenses of Value, Meaning, Delight, and Connectedness.
Wellness of Body
Before getting into specific types of wellness of body, let’s consider that while the people watching the race above might be well, the runners running the race are not only well, but also fit. Wellness is the threshold below which we are ill; fitness occurs by getting well above that threshold. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s consider fitness a higher form of wellness.
Wellness of body begins with the things that we put into our bodies. We will look at how Nourishable Places contribute to our wellness of body in this way, and also the ways that the processed foods (or “food-like substances,” according to Michael Pollan) that come to us from around the world can rob us of our wellness.
Wellness of body can also be enhanced or lost by what we do to our bodies. Accessible Places are great places to bike, walk, and run, which enhance wellness. Sprawl, on the other hand, is where you have to drive everywhere, and the resulting sedentary lifestyle is arguably the single largest contributor (just ahead of processed foods) of our obesity epidemic.
Finally, wellness of body can also be impacted by where we put our bodies, such as in harm’s way. Automobile accidents account for tens of thousands of deaths each year, and hundreds of thousands of serious injuries in those who survive.
Wellness of Mind
This image of the entrance to a university represents the fitness of mind, which as noted for the body, is a higher form of wellness. There are at least four attributes of the built environment which contribute to wellness of mind: Community, Balance, Nature, and Love.
A community is a group of people united by an idea, a place, or some combination thereof. Mental wellness has been shown time and again to be enhanced by being part of an identifiable community. The estrangement that comes with lack of community is often a precursor to mental illness. The built environment doesn’t create community, as any ghost town clearly shows, but it can set the stage for community to occur.
Balance is achieved in many ways that have nothing to do with the built environment, but there are ways it can contribute to or detract from our balance. Variety in the places we inhabit and the people that inhabit them with us allow us to experience life more broadly.
Nature lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from community, because non-human forms of nature flourish most heartily when there aren’t so many humans around. But we can’t do without it. We have known for millennia that humans have a great need for connection with the rest of nature that is not human. Places that allow us the occasional immersive experiences in nature without too much difficulty or distance clearly contribute to our wellness of mind.
Let’s be clear about love: the built environment typically does not elicit the ardor of these two young lovers. Love for places and buildings is softer, most often something akin to a gentle resonance rather than a love to die for. But because those with no love in their life are particularly at risk of mental illness, it’s possible that a most-loved place might be just the thing that keeps them above the threshold of wellness.
Wellness of Spirit
I have hesitated for years to speak of wellness of spirit for two reasons: most issues of wellness of spirit are far beyond the scope of influence of the built environment, and also because of the value of time. Value is a function of time in this way: If two things do good at the same rate but one lasts twice as long, the longer-lasting thing is twice as valuable. So anything that lasts forever is incomparably more important than everything that passes away.
Everything in the built environment will someday pass away. If you believe that humans have a spirit that can live on beyond our bodies, then the importance of the spirit is incomparably greater than anything our bodies might build.
Speaking of matters of the spirit alongside matters of the built environment therefore seems like a colossal mismatch. But if the built environment can affect wellness of spirit, then it seems like an essential conversation. Here are some of those influences:
Every system of spirituality I’m aware of requires times of quiet contemplation or meditation. Are we building places of respite where we can truly be alone for a time?
On the other hand, spirituality also requires times of togetherness, or fellowship, with those who share and can help strengthen or restore our spirituality. Unfortunately, the sprawling world we’ve built recently usually fails on both these counts because in most places there are people around us most of the time, but normally in meaningless relationships like waiting on a red light side by side. So it doesn’t usually set the stage for either profound togetherness or profound aloneness. Is this part of the reason so many spiritual communities have struggled in the modern era?
Wellness of spirit increases when we love our neighbors... but the co-inhabitants of countless subdivisions aren’t really neighbors because the places are designed in such a way that people seldom meet and speak with each other. So how can we love our neighbors if we don’t have any?
Wellness of spirit grows when we do good for others less fortunate. Unfortunately, the American development paradigm has become excruciatingly efficient at separating classes of people in a very fine-grained way so that it is now possible to go interminably through one’s daily life in many places in sprawl without ever seeing anyone notably less fortunate. So how are we going to do good for others less fortunate if we never see them? Licking an envelope with a check inside is a very poor substitute even if the needy received more than a tiny fraction of our donations.
Most would agree that wellness of spirit can easily be at odds with natural wealth because the natural things that are visible can so easily crowd out the spiritual things that are invisible. Yet the focus of our built environment in recent decades has been all about getting bigger and getting more. And we’ve mortgaged ourselves within an inch of our financial lives... or beyond, as many have sadly discovered. Which means that we have to spend countless hours working to pay for it all.
So it all comes back to time: spending all our time working break-neck for natural things assures that there’s no time left to build our spiritual wellness. But paradoxically, it’s the spirit which can carry the greatest value... or not... simply because it goes on forever. So maybe it’s time to reconsider the things we’re building and the things we’re buying in light of the things that last the longest, and begin to show a bit more frugality concerning the things we’ll someday have to put away.

~Steve Mouzon

30 Years After Adopting a Mystery

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 03:48:39 -0500

The day after Thanksgiving this year marks the 30-year anniversary of the uncovering of a mystery that changed many things for me, and hopefully has helped others as well. The unlocking of that mystery, I believe, just might play a central role in the delivery of real sustainability because sustainability isn’t something you get by going shopping. Incremental changes in efficiency are dwarfed by changes we could make, for better or for worse, in our behavior. This mystery, I believe, carries the key for unlocking positive behavior change for entire cultures.
The first step has long been a shrouded enigma: how, specifically, do living traditions of places and buildings transmit Original Green wisdom to newcomers, and to the next generation? I was first confronted by this mystery on the day after Thanksgiving, 1980.
I was in the middle of architecture school at the time, but home on break at my parents’ house. My wife Wanda, my sister Susan, her boyfriend at the time, and I decided that we’d eaten too much turkey the day before, and that we needed to go for a walk. But where? I grew up in a sprawling town built almost entirely after World War II, and there were very few places you’d want to walk. So we decided to drive out to Mooresville and walk there. Mooresville is a little planter’s hamlet, built just a stone’s throw from the Tennessee River. It was founded by simple farmers and tradespeople only three decades or so after American independence. The town is a tiny square, only three blocks wide and three blocks deep. We spent several hours walking every street and photographing every building on those nine blocks.
Our professors told us that we were going to be the greatest generation of architects ever because we now had computers, the contractors building our creations had bigger power tools, and the clients buying our creations had increasingly clever mortgages. In other words, we were going to be better because our tools were better. Yet, I came face to face that day with a startling fact: It’s likely that no architect set foot in Mooresville for several decades after its founding, yet those farmers and tradespeople, without computers, power tools, or mortgages, had built a better place than any architect had built from the end of World War II until that day. How could this be? What great wisdom did they possess that allowed simple farmers and tradespeople to build a better place than all the highly trained architects and planners working from World War II until 1980?
I finally came to terms with the fact that once people possess great wisdom like this, those same people can keep using that same wisdom to build in the same way. But that didn’t solve the bigger mystery: how did they come to possess that wisdom in the first place, and how were they able to pass it down to the next generation?
I had no clue, but I didn’t leave the mystery in Mooresville. Instead, I took it home with me; I gave it a place to live, and fed it with questions. Years of travel have revealed that this mystery didn’t belong to Mooresville alone. I’ve found great places like this everywhere I’ve gone, obviously built mostly by the townspeople, but not by Walt Disney’s Imagineers. And most of the medieval quarters of the towns of Europe were built at a time that most people didn’t even read or write.
I began calling this mysterious way of transmitting the wisdom of sustainable places the Transmission Device of Living Traditions and hoped that it would be rediscovered in my lifetime. I feared, however, that it might be something mystical, or otherwise unintelligible to post-industrial people. But now, I believe the Transmission Device has been found.
The discovery occurred on the evening of July 21, 2004, almost 24 years after the mystery of Mooresville. The New Urban Guild held an architectural charrette, designing homes and other buildings for the town of Lost Rabbit, near Jackson, Mississippi. The charrette concluded that day, and after the celebratory dinner, the design team headed to our B&B, the Millsaps-Buie house. Most of us stood around the parlor, finishing discussions started over dinner.
Late into the conversation, someone asked Milton Grenfell, one of the Mississippi natives on the design team, why so many of the houses between Jackson and the Coast had “bell-cast eaves,” which is a curious term for a roof that turns shallower around the edges. Milton said “We do this because moderately steep roofs resist hurricane winds the best, but we need something to break the force of water rushing off the steep roof during our torrential rains...”
I’d been searching for the key to the mystery for many years, but it took a few seconds for Milton’s comment to sink in. “We do this because...” That’s it! That’s the key! If every pattern in a language of architecture is framed by “we do this because...” then it opens up the underlying reasons for the architecture, and everyone is allowed to think again! “We do this because...” is the Transmission Device! Architecture isn’t just some collection of historical styles, but it actually becomes a living thing again!
This breakthrough changed many things for me. Without it, the story of the Original Green would have been impossible to tell, for example. And precisely 25 years to the day after the mystery of Mooresville, I finished A Living Tradition [Gulf Coast Architecture] which is a handbook, or “pattern book” for starting a new living tradition. That book is self-published, and because we print it in-house, it’s very expensive ($150,) but it led to the award-winning A Living Tradition [Architecture of the Bahamas] two years later, which was printed the normal way and therefore widely available.
But I’m not the only one who has been helped by the Transmission Device. Thinking leads to invention to address new needs, and those inventions free architecture to finally evolve again, as it has always done from the dawn of time until architectural evolution faded into the Great Decline that began in the mid-1920s. And the answer to “we do this because...” shouldn’t simply be “it’s faster,” or “it’s cheaper.” Those are the specialists’ answers, focusing only on one thing. Generalists through the ages have taken a more holistic view.
Several curious things happen as a result: first, it isn’t just about architectural style or fashion anymore, but rather about things with deeper meaning: that which works best for this people, and for this place. Living traditions produce architecture that is simply the best set of ways to build for a particular region’s conditions, climate, and culture.
Architecture that allows everyone to think again instead of just following an old set of rules becomes something similar to open-source software because countless people can participate in its development. And it can change the behaviors of an entire culture in positive ways.
There are other benefits: today, many homebuilders persist in building many regrettable details because that’s their normal way of building, even though there are far smarter ways of getting the job done. Until the discovery of the Transmission Device, those of us who were promoting the smarter details could only say “thou shalt do this because I have better taste than you.” It was a demeaning proposition, but it was the best we had. But when those discussions were re-framed to begin with “we do this because...”, everything changed. Once the builders discover why the smarter details are smarter, they’re delighted to build using them instead, and actually become advocates for the smarter ways.
They aren’t the only ones. The townspeople often have vague good feelings about certain things they can’t quite explain. Maybe it’s the way a front porch sits watching the sidewalk, or the way a chimney meets the sky. But in any case, just as soon as someone explains why those elements are the way they are, the townspeople’s “warm fuzzies” are transformed into hot-blooded advocacy for the good stuff and they, too, become champions of the smarter and more sustainable ways of building their towns and their homes.

~Steve Mouzon

This post is part of the new Twitter phenomenon: #Letsblogoff. The home page lists each week’s “idea worth blogging about.” This week, it’s “Thanksgiving’s coming, so what’s it to you?” I obviously took that question in a somewhat different direction, looking at the sustainability implications, as I usually do. Here are some of the other participating blogs in today’s #Letsblogoff:

<It’s early and nobody else has posted yet. I’ll add the names later, as they do.>

I’m @stevemouzon, FWIW.

A Time for Healing

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:31:37 -0400

The years before the Meltdown were a time for building, but that is clearly over now. We’re now in an era where banks are so traumatized that most of them aren’t lending money for new developments no matter what. Future greenfield developments will be few and far between. The wreckage of the housing bubble is all around us, but not always where we can see it easily, as most of it is located out on the suburban fringe in places nobody visits. Some of it is too far gone, possibly including the houses pictured in this post, which have been sitting half-finished for months unprotected in the weather. But there are countless inhabited subdivisions where the houses are finished and inhabited, and where those inhabitants have seen the value of the biggest investments of their lifetimes shredded by the Great Recession. They can’t afford to walk away; what can be done to help them?
I believe that while the previous era was defined in large part by what we built, this new era desperately needs to be defined by what we heal. Simply put, the suburban sprawl we’ve built since World War II is simply too large to discard. And it’s not ours to discard in any case; it belongs to the people that live there.
Sprawl, in its current form, is unsustainable almost everywhere. I remember when I was a kid, and gasoline just before the first Arab oil embargo would occasionally go as low as $0.199 a gallon during what was quaintly termed “gas wars.” Funny how that phrase has taken on a different meaning in recent years, isn’t it? But in any case, gas recently reached $5.00 per gallon in much of the country. That’s a 25x increase in less than 40 years. So it’s no big stretch to imagine a fourfold increase (less than 1/6 as much as what it’s done in those years) to $20 per gallon. And with billions of people now moving from low-impact agrarian lifestyles into the city in China, India, and other nations, $20 per gallon gas may be closer than we think.
If you live in sprawl and have to drive everywhere to do anything, what happens when that day arrives? I’d strongly encourage everyone to test their Web of Daily Life... it’s an easy self-diagnosis we should all do, so that we can start preparing now.
One solution, of course, is to move to a walkable place, which is what I did. But that only works for just so many of us, because we’ll run out of places to live in the walkable places. For most of us, the better solution is to help to heal the places where we live. I believe that the healing of sprawl is going to be the great challenge of this new era.
Many of my colleagues are already working on this problem; some of them for years. I have, too. My Sky Method is a proposal for a new development paradigm that can either start with open land, or with an existing subdivision. Because it makes the current landowners partners in the system, there’s no need for a master developer to have to come in and buy up a lot of houses. Rather, everyone benefits as sprawl is turned into compact, mixed-use, walkable places.
Others are working on the problem, too. For years, it has seemed so vexing as to be possibly insurmountable. I recall Andrés Duany’s keynote at the Congress for the New Urbanism several years ago, which focused on suburban repair. He closed by saying that “New Urbanists have met many challenges over the years, doing many things that were at the first considered either illegal or impossible. But I worry that this problem is too big. I really hope we don’t fail.”
The great thing about seemingly impossible things is that if you think about them long enough, you eventually might figure out how to do something about them. That’s what has happened here.
The first New Urbanist book on the problem was Retrofitting Suburbia by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson. It’s a book of principles and procedures. You really should read it; it was published at the end of 2008. Galina Tachieva’s Sprawl Repair Manual was just published, and is a stunning toolbox of techniques for doing exactly what the book’s name implies. I consider it to be essential to anyone involved in sustainability, urbanism, or architecture today.

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

the Coming Golden Age of Great Necessities

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 21:41:48 -0400

Many are asking today “is there reason to be optimistic?” My own profession of architecture is lying in smoking ruins, as I wrote recently. And the end is not in sight; we’re likely to endure even further decline until the remaining firms have very few people left within them. The thieves of circumstance, it seems, have stolen our futures. But in the middle of all this gloom, I believe there’s a reasonable chance that we might be on the threshold of a new golden age. Here’s why:
One would think that we would build the best places and live the best lives when we have the greatest resources, but that assumption is broken on so many examples we can see with our own eyes. Is it possible that when we have it good, we get it wrong, and when we have it bad, we get it right?
I think that’s often so, and here’s why: as I wrote over a year ago, when times are tough, we can’t afford to be wasteful. Prosperity and wastefulness often go hand-in-hand, as do want and frugality. Usually, these relationships follow the ups and downs of the economy, but nothing really changes structurally. This time, however, the meltdown and the ensuing Great Recession have been so severe that they likely could have caused serious structural changes on their own. But they’re not alone.
We have two other massive change agents at work in what Jim Kunstler and others call the Great Convergence. One is Peak Oil, which appears to be happening just as 2.5 billion Chinese and Indian citizens are moving into the city, where many of them will need cars. And that’s not even counting many millions in Brazil, Bangladesh, and other nations who are in the middle of the same migration. The third leg of the Great Convergence is the environment, and the growing realization among the great majority of the population that climate change is real, and that it is changing the world we once knew... and that we must take measures to stave off far great consequences.
So now, many systems are dying, or being irreparably altered, by all this thunderous change. But most are the very things that had to die in order to usher in the golden age. Follow me on this one, as I attempt to tell four two-century-long stories in a couple minutes each... they’re the stories of how we shop, how we work, what we eat, and where we live. Similar stories could be told about other aspects of our life as well.
Shopping
Before the Industrial Revolution, most things were made by local craftspeople and sold by local merchants. The railroads changed all that by making it easier to sell things further away. This allowed more efficient manufacturers to grow to great size and sell at great distance, putting many local craftspeople out of business. Trucks were introduced later and only amplified the effect.
These early manufacturers, by today’s standards, made fairly simple stuff. A window manufacturer, for example, might use the exact same knives to make the exact same window components as another window manufacturer; they would just do it more efficiently, and therefore win the business. In effect, they were manufacturing commodities.
Clever manufacturers began to realize that “getting commoditized,” or making something that someone else could duplicate was a death knell for all except the single most efficient company in the market, which would then drive the others out of business. And so the battle cry became “proprietize!” In other words, build a proprietary product that you could patent and that nobody else could make. If you did so, nobody could undercut you; your biggest challenge was to convince customers to buy your stuff.
Proprietary products, however, had an unintended consequence. Grocery stores that sold only commodities like black beans, rice, milk, tomatoes, bananas, etc., could be very small. There are several groceries within a couple blocks of my office that are less than 3,000 square feet each. But just as soon as groceries had to stock Cap’n Crunch, Count Chocula, Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, and 60 other proprietary cereals, the stores necessarily ballooned. Today, a 40,000 square foot grocery is considered small in the grocery industry.
Mega-stores have an unintended consequence as well: they must attract customers from many miles around, rather than just a few blocks, because there aren’t enough customers within just a few blocks to keep them in business unless they’re in a very highly-populated urban setting. So when proprietary products proliferate, the neighborhood store becomes impossible. This condition requires sprawl. Let that sink in a moment: proprietary products can’t survive in neighborhood retail; they can only survive in sprawl, because they can’t get on the very limited shelf-space of the neighborhood stores. When New Urbanist retail expert Seth Harry introduced a similar idea years ago, I resisted it, but Seth was right, for similar reasons as these.
Today, the likelihood of much higher gas prices due to the convergence of Peak Oil with the industrialization of the world’s most populous countries means that the core driver of big box retail in suburbia may be ending, and in its place, it’s not unreasonable to think we might see a resurgence of local craftspeople and local shops. But without the Great Convergence, local craftspeople and local shops would be nothing but a romantic memory of our culture in most places.
Working
Work before the Industrial Revolution was almost always done at home or very near home. The idea of having a job and working for wages didn’t even exist in most places beforehand. But with the advent of the factory came the need for many workers. During most of the 19th century, the majority of these workers couldn’t afford to live anywhere other than right around the factory.
The years surrounding 1900 saw two major changes to this arrangement: the first modern planners realized that if the “dark satanic mills” were separated from the rest of the town, the people would live healthier lives. This new mandated distance from home to work now meant that you could no longer walk to work. The rise of powerful labor unions during the same era produced higher-wage workers with greater means available for the cost of getting around, and the automobile’s advances in the early years of the 20th century sealed the deal: we would henceforth commute to work.
But work didn’t sit still. Rather, workplaces began moving around madly, abandoning the central city, especially after World War II, for a raft of reasons. As did the workers, especially beginning in with the civil unrest of the 1960’s. And so work and home grew much further apart. Today, the Compulsory Commuting of many Americans tops two hours per day.
Three things are poised to change this as well: First, the Great Convergence will quickly render many of those commutes unaffordable. Next, the character of work has changed dramatically as most of our factory work has gone off-shore, and there are few factories left. But when the Great Convergence brings jobs back onshore as we become unable to afford to ship stuff all around the world to build a shirt or a shovel, don’t expect it to come back in giant factories. Rather, look for smaller workshops that fit much better into the fabric of a town. Finally, we’ve built some really massive pipes for the internet over the past twenty years. These will allow work to be done from home in quantities we haven’t seen in 200 years. Again, working from home or near home would be only a romantic memory if not for the Great Convergence.
Eating
Once, most food came from very close around, even in major cities. Look at old maps of London, Rome, or Paris, and you’ll see gardens and orchards built tight around the city. Most food was still raised close to home until the advent of refrigerated transport around the end of World War II. Enterprising industrialists realized this meant that the dynamics of industrialization could apply to food as well, and modern agribusiness was born.
Government cooperated heartily. Earl Butz, head of the Department of Agriculture in the mid-1970’s, harangued farmers with “Get big or get out!” The family farm shortly was swept into history, replaced by farms of a thousand acres or more in many places.
Originally, agribusiness was a mostly a regionalized operation, with fields, processing plants, and customers all located within a few hundred miles of each other in most cases. But the epic battles between migrant farm worker unions and agribusiness a few decades ago prompted a massive move to “export the guilt” to other countries, where entire families can work for a few cents a day in some places in Central and South America and most in the US don’t worry about it one bit. The primary plant agriculture left in the US is grains (corn, wheat, oats, etc.) and soybeans because these can be tended and harvested industrially with huge equipment, rather than hand-tended by an army of agricultural workers, like most vegetables require.
But this “food that needs passports” had some unintended consequences as well. Sitting in a refrigerated truck for three weeks before getting to market was more than most fruits and vegetables could take, so we had to genetically engineer them to be able to endure the trip. The price we pay in taste and nutrition is substantial. If you doubt that, slice open a locally-raised heirloom tomato and one from the supermarket and see for yourself.
Today, the Great Convergence is poised to make the entire industrial food chain unworkable, because it depends so heavily on oil. Couple that with the growing local food movement, and it’s entirely possible to imagine much of America living on food raised nearby... a completely unthinkable thing before the Great Convergence.
Living
The history of the American home is bloated in recent years. We’ve doubled the average size of home since World War II, during which time the average household size has nearly been cut in half. But we have so much excess stuff that won’t fit in houses twice as large inhabited by half as many people that we’ve made the mini-storage industry a $17 billion/year business!
Not only have our homes grown twice as large, but they’re also much more poorly constructed than they once were. This is because we’ve discarded the Classical-Vernacular Spectrum as humanity’s longest-running cost control device and insisted on building in certain styles, even if we have to do it with vinyl and duct tape!
Couple this with the fact that because we moved so much, most homebuyers’ sentiments went something like this: “I’ll only be living here 8 years or less; why should I care if the roof doesn’t last more than 15 years?” By taking this attitude, we’ve condemned each American generation to bear the burden of building their own homes. Doubt that? Talk to your friends. If you talk to 100 friends, unless they’re all very young, you’ll likely find more than 100 new homes built or bought between them. This great burden of insubstantial housing doubtless helped bring on the Meltdown.
We cannot afford this insanity any longer. We need to build for centuries, not just for a decade or so. We need to be able to hand things down through generations, not just use things up. We also need to be allowed to build very small at the beginning, and grow our buildings over time. Much of the charm of traditional buildings comes from their incremental growth over generations, and the history it embodies. But our ancestors didn’t do this for charm; they did it out of necessity, as home mortgages didn’t exist at the time, so you built what you could afford, and added on later as you needed.
Fortunately, I firmly believe that if we’re wise, we’ll see the Great Convergence as the motivation we need to build substantially again. Like the ways we shop, work, and eat, this paradigm shift in the ways we build our buildings could not have occurred without the Great Convergence.
the Golden Age
Massive systems were set up to run the world as we know it: FHA, VA, volume builders, Euclidean zoning, agribusiness and the industrial food chain, payroll deductions, the health care system, and all the other structures of the modern workplace, for example. All of these things produce, as their natural end results, strip centers, shopping malls, sprawl, placeless workplaces, ever--increasing consumption of processed food leading to our ever-increasing obesity and ill health, and bloated houses in suburbia that fall apart more quickly all the time.
All of these systems are fueled in varying degrees by things put in jeopardy by the Great Convergence. All of these systems had to fail or become irrelevant before we could reach the threshold of an age when people live more simply, sustainably, and happily with the resources available to them, surrounded with great necessities that make us great, rather than being surrounded with the recent overabundance of things that have made us fat and not so smart. I really hope we have the wisdom to land gently and safely into that golden age, rather than crashing into some unimaginable dark age. It’s up to us... what will we choose?

~Steve Mouzon

This post is part of the new Twitter phenomenon: #Letsblogoff. The home page lists each week’s “idea worth blogging about.” This week, it’s “Is there a reason to be optimistic?” I obviously took that question in a somewhat different direction, looking at the sustainability implications, as I usually do. Here are some of the other participating blogs in today’s #Letsblogoff:

Veronika Miller @modenus Modenus Community
Paul Anater @paul_anater Kitchen and Residential Design
Rufus Dogg @dogwalkblog DogWalkBlog.com
Becky Shankle @ecomod Eco-Modernism
Bob Borson @bobborson Life of an Architect
Bonnie Harris @waxgirl333 Wax Marketing
Nick Lovelady @cupboards Cupboards Kitchen and Bath
Tamara Dalton @tammyjdalton Tamara Dalton Studios
Sean Lintow, Sr. @SLSconstruction SLS-Construction.com
Cindy FrewenWuellner @Urbanverse Urbanverse's Posterous
Madame Sunday @ModernSauce Modern Sauce
Saxon Henry @saxonhenry Roaming by Design
Brian Meeks @ExtremelyAvg Extremely Average
Denese Bottrell @Denese_Bottrell Thoughtful Content
Chamois Green @chamwashere Cham Was Here
Betsy De Maio @egrgirl Egrgirl's Blog
Steve Kleber @stevekleber Marketing Home Products
Allison Bailes III @EnergyVanguard Energy Vanguard Blog
Ami @beackami Multifarious Miscellany

I’m @stevemouzon, FWIW.

What Should Students Do Now?

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 08:32:32 -0400

The profession of architecture lies today in smoking ruins. Most students don’t have a snowball’s chance of getting a job in this environment. What should they do?
Many architecture firms have closed their doors entirely, and many more have been reduced to little more than the partners. And there is no end in sight for anyone taking a realistic view of the carnage. Simply put, 2006 isn’t coming back. We’re in the middle of a major structural shift, and it isn’t immediately clear where things will stabilize.
Fortunately for students and recent graduates, this is the one time in their careers that they can withstand such a jolting upheaval, for reasons I described here. Simply put, this is the one time in your career that you can afford to do something else for a living while building your ideas away from work. Because the meltdown is sweeping away many of the architects of older generations, it is clearing the way for students and recent graduates to become the leaders of the profession much sooner than they would have ever dreamed... if they do certain things.
The first necessary thing, if you haven’t started already, is to begin building your networks. If necessary, build them in advance of knowing exactly what you’re going to do with them. For example, I have a network of over a thousand people on LinkedIn, and I haven’t decided yet how best to use it... but it’s there, waiting for me once I figure it out.
I’ve built a network of over 3,000 people on Facebook, mostly centered on those who have an interest in the Original Green... pointing out the fact that once you do know how you’re hoping to use the network, it’s much easier to grow because you stand for something. There’s an Original Green cause on Facebook that has over 11,000 members from all over the world. Somewhat over a thousand people currently follow me on Twitter. Some of my Useful Stuff blog posts have had upwards of 3,000 readers. And several hundred people regularly read this blog, and not all at once, either. There are new readers all the time for blog posts over a year old. I’m even building a network of sorts around the images on my Zenfolio site. The point is that you shouldn’t build just one network, but several... because you’ll find significantly different circles of people in each.
Networks are of very little use, however, unless you have something useful with which to feed them, because without something useful nudging them in a particular direction, you’re left with nothing but conversational static about completely random and likely non-useful stuff.
You can feed your networks in the beginning with little snippets of useful information, even if they’re gleaned from other sources. But sooner or later, you’re going to need at least one big idea. Why? There’s an external reason and an internal reason: From the outside, it’s the big ideas that attract like-minded people to you. Those who want to know about the Creative Class seek out Richard Florida. Those who want to know about sticky ideas seek out Chip & Dan Heath. Those who want to know what’s wrong with suburban sprawl and how to fix it seek out Andrés Duany and Galina Tahchieva.
The internal reason for a big idea is that everyone needs a taxonomy of their work. “Taxonomy” is a fancy word for putting things in order. Your big idea informs your taxonomy. Lots of things fall in place when you have a big idea with which to organize them.
Does the idea need to be your own? Let’s think about that a moment. It is completely fine to be a student of other people’s ideas, contributing none of your own, and simply using their ideas to organize what you do. Nothing wrong with that. Matter of fact, that’s what most people do.
Some people, however, aren’t satisfied with just hearing about the truth; they want to observe it. Working directly with empirical observations of the way things are, unfiltered by numerous commentators over the years, can be a bit scary because you don’t have the confirmation of all those other wise people who have thought about these things. But if you’re curious enough, then this may often be the path you find yourself on. This is where the thought leaders emerge.
Where do big ideas come from? Start by looking for “insight holes.” These are places in an existing schema where things don’t quite line up... places where your professors’ theories get a bit frayed around the edges. These are places in dire need of an insight... and that insight just might be yours if you’re looking for it. But if you’re not looking, there’s very little chance the insight will be yours. Nothing fuels insight so much as expectation.
Interestingly, you never know whether your insights will support the existing schema or break it. That’s part of the fun of discovery. At the very least, your insights will help explain those troubling little things nibbling around the edges of your mind about how things work. Or they may explain how things work in an entirely different way.
Please note that this can be slow work. The day after Thanksgiving 1980, I visited the tiny hamlet of Mooresville, Alabama and encountered a great mystery which I described in Twenty=Eight Years Later. A brilliant person might have figured it out in short order, but I did the next best thing: I adopted the mystery. I took it home with me, fed it, and took care of it for years.
Late on the evening of July 21, 2004, over 22-1/2 years after first encountering the mystery, the Transmission Device of Living Traditions was rediscovered. The dominoes began to fall very quickly after that evening, and just over a year later, on the day after Thanksgiving 2005, precisely a quarter-century to the day after encountering the mystery at Mooresville, I finished a book (A Living Tradition [Gulf Coast Architecture]) which thoroughly incorporates the discovery, providing a roadmap for making the discovery work. Soon after, A Living Tradition [Architecture of the Bahamas] built another roadmap for another place on the same framework.
Since that time, insight has fallen quickly upon insight, culminating in the ideas of the Original Green. I never would have been able to tell the Original Green story today without adopting that mystery nearly thirty years ago.
There’s another important thing to note here: Adopting the mystery helped me all through the years, because when you adopt a mystery, you’re continuously looking at everything with expectancy, not knowing which tree, which rock, or which street corner the answer might be hiding behind. But in the early years, outward progress was exceptionally slow because I had no network. I was on an architectural island in a small town where my colleagues were far more interested in architecture as an income-producing medium than an idea-producing medium.
Twenty years after the mystery at Mooresville, I began to actively engage with New Urbanists, first at the Seaside Institute, then at the Congress for the New Urbanism and elsewhere. Friends and colleagues sharpen each other’s ideas like they could each never do alone. It was less than five years from the time I started building my New Urbanist network until that July night when the Transmission Device was rediscovered.
So start building your networks now. Had I started building mine in 1980, who knows how soon the Original Green story could have been told, and how much good it could have done in the meantime?
One caveat: both the network-building and the idea-building are slow tasks. Don’t get discouraged. You will get very few follows in the beginning. And the beginnings of idea-building are where you make the slowest progress. Critical mass is more likely to occur in a several months or a few years than in a few days or weeks. But if you don’t get started, you’ll never get there at all. So get going now! And by all means, let’s discuss this... please add a comment and let’s talk about it.

~Steve Mouzon

Note: See Social Media and Living Traditions and the Importance of Blogging for ideas that dovetail closely with these.

the Importance of Blogging

Tue, 5 Oct 2010 06:22:30 -0400

Blogging just might help bring us back from our current highly unsustainable condition. How? Let’s look at how we got there: The history of industrialization is one of increasing scales. As the individual became a smaller and smaller cog in an increasingly massive machine, it became easier and easier to think that nothing any one of us could do would make a difference.
Real change, if it can’t come from us, must therefore come from the machine. Want more efficiency? That’s the job of the machine’s genius-filled engineering department somewhere around the world. Here’s the first problem: efficiency increases “they” can deliver to us can’t keep up with our increase in consumption. This is partly due to skyrocketing population, but it’s compounded by the massive inefficiencies of sprawl.
Here’s another problem: expectation of top-down sustainability solutions from the political arena are sure to be met with failure. Why? Because politics are increasingly crisis-driven, and poll after poll shows that while most people consider sustainability to be an important thing to aspire to, it ranks pretty far down the crisis pecking order. For much of America’s history, politics were driven more by ideals than crisis, but while ideals may carry the day in economically prosperous times, the Meltdown and its aftermath have swung the needle decidedly in the other direction for the foreseeable future.
Industry and government have collaborated in another way to make sustainability all but impossible: the very definition of our economy is based on ever-increasing consumption. A consuming economy is considered sick if it isn’t consuming more than during the previous quarter. What we need is a conserving economy, where things are valued by how long they last. A conserving economy values the act of passing something down. A consuming economy values the act of using something up.
Compound all that with the machine’s effect on us: all that technology has made us fat, as we drive our cars instead of walk, and consume ever-increasing amounts of “food-like substances.” It has made us lazy, because pressing the Easy Button is so... well... easy. It has made us intolerant; we can only tolerate a couple degrees of temperature difference, for example, and therefore the equipment is always on. And it has made us passive, expecting our vast assortment of gizmos to do almost everything for us. It’s important to note that none of the effects above, in my opinion, were part of some nefarious conspiracy to ruin the earth. Rather, each step was the logical and (or so it seemed at the time) sensible response to current conditions of industrialization. So I find it much more useful to look for solutions than bad guys.
What does all this have to do with blogging? Plenty. Because both government and industry are so heavily invested in ever-increasing consumption and therefore can’t provide true sustainability, that means that it’s up to us. What can we do about it? We’ve started already: we’re turning to ourselves. We’re setting the stage for grassroots solutions to come from the blogosphere.
Millions of people now get more of their information from blogs than from network news. Sometimes, the bloggers are trusted sources of original insights and opinions. Other times, the bloggers serve as curators of information from other sources, selecting the most useful stuff for their readers. Most blog posts are some combination of the two. This phenomenon is encouraging in at least two very important ways:
The mere act of seeking out blogs to read rather than sitting on the couch and soaking up the network news is the first step to recovery from our century-long passivity. It means we have to think, rather than just absorb. And thinking, more often than not, leads to action of some sort. The act of blogging has a similar, but even more pronounced effect. If you don’t blog already, you should consider it. The mere act of harvesting the warm fuzzy thoughts in your brain and converting them into a coherent written form is enormously useful, in my experience.
This is also good news because our hope of a sustainable society rests squarely on our own behavior. If our behavior doesn’t change, our machines can’t save us. We need a giant swap-fest of behavior-changing ideas, and blogs are the near-perfect vehicle for this task. We need millions of minds thinking, testing, and sharing green ideas that will spread. Please join the discussion!
I blogged recently about related ideas in Social Media and Living Traditions. Please check it out and let’s discuss those aspects as well.

~Steve Mouzon

This post is part of the new Twitter phenomenon: #Letsblogoff. The home page lists each week’s “idea worth blogging about.” This week, it’s “Are blogs as important as bloggers think they are?” I obviously took that question in a somewhat different direction, looking at the sustainability implications, as I usually do. Here are some of the other participating blogs in today’s #Letsblogoff:

Veronika Miller @modenus Modenus Community
Paul Anater @paul_anater Kitchen and Residential Design
Rufus Dogg @dogwalkblog DogWalkBlog
Becky Shankle @ecomod Eco-Modernism
Bob Borson @bobborson Life of an Architect
Sean Lintow, Sr. @SLSconstruction SLS-Construction.com
Saxon Henry @saxonhenry Roaming by Design
Betsy De Maio @egrgirl Egrgirl's Blog

I’m @stevemouzon, FWIW.

the Mysteries of Lovable Buildings

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:33:34 -0400

If a building cannot be loved, it will not last, and its carbon footprint becomes meaningless once its parts are carted off to the landfill. But how do you define lovability in clear enough terms that it can be repeated by others? More precisely, how do you code for lovability? One glance across the landscape of recently-constructed buildings clearly shows that this must be a vexing problem, because we’ve had so little success with building lovably recently.
Ask most groups of architects, and you’ll quickly conclude that the term “lovable building” is as difficult to define without self-reference as the word “time.” This panel of starchitects concluded recently that beauty was not a concern of theirs. And beauty is only a threshold to lovability, because we’ve all experienced beauty that is cold and aloof, and therefore hard to love.
But we have to start somewhere, if we have any hope of learning how to replicate it broadly. There are three general categories of buildings and objects that can be loved: those which reflect us, those which delight us, and those which put us in harmony with the world around us. We have varying degrees of understanding of each. I’ll be attempting to expand my understanding of the more mysterious ones between now and Thursday, October 21, at 10:30 AM on Navy Pier in Chicago, at which point I’ll tell you what I discovered at the Traditional Building Exhibition & Conference.
Things that Reflect Us
This is one of the more well-understood types of lovability. Clearly, traditional architecture has reflected the shape, proportions, and arrangement of the human body from earliest times. But architecture can reflect us in other ways as well.
Certain building elements have become icons of a region; the classic American example is the Southern front porch. How might elements like this emerge in the future? There’s a developing story on one such element at Schooner Bay... I’ll share the latest with you next month in Chicago.
Things that Delight Us
Some forms of delight are easy, such as the pure sensual delight of this beautiful frontage garden. Others are tougher to get a handle on. How about “memory delight,” which is the solidity of being able to say “I remember what happened, and it happened right here.” Much of today’s construction prevent us from hooking our memories to a particular place because of a few fundamental errors embedded in our construction system. And how about the maternal “sheltering delight” and the paternal “challenging delight”? What can we do to enable them?
Things that Put Us in Harmony

This is the category most shrouded in mystery. Granted, most of us have rediscovered many of the secrets of classical proportioning systems in recent years. And we’ve rediscovered the pleasure of harmony with natural laws, like gravity and thermodynamics. There’s a solid pleasure in a building that looks to be capable of carrying the load. And many of us have grown beyond the adolescent desire to plaster glass all over a building, especially on the western wall in warm climates where the sun would be intolerable except for massive infusions of air conditioning.
But what of the harmony with natural processes? I have a few hints about how this works, but there’s much work that needs to be done here.
The biggest mystery, however, is one that I’m calling “harmony with the region.” Simply put, we might love a little clapboard cottage in Beaufort and a stone farmhouse in Tuscany, but putting that clapboard cottage on a Tuscan hillside would look absolutely ridiculous.
I suspect that much of the mystery of lovable buildings may be embedded somewhere in the harmony with the region. I don’t understand it now, but it’s one of my top priorities, because we really need to figure this out. Please come and join the discussion in Chicago!

~Steve Mouzon

the Failure of Architecture to Learn

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 12:39:34 -0400

Both sides of the “trad-mod” debate make serious blunders that prevent true sustainability. We really must get beyond both sets of errors if we hope to live sustainably someday. Here’s how each of these approaches fail:
How Modernism Prevents Modernity
The classical resurgence of the past two decades has well-documented and bitter complaints against Modernism in all its forms, from architecture to town planning to art to music to pretty much any aspect of life today that you can think of. I join in this complaint to a degree, and for this reason: The “newer is always better” approach has recently carried with it, at least in architecture and many of the arts, a necessity of uniqueness. Superficially, the necessity of uniqueness would seem to be a good thing. It would encourage creativity, right? What’s wrong with that? Here’s what:
When uniqueness is a prerequisite of significance, we’re effectively disallowing creatives from learning from those who came before them. This takes each of them back to the creative Stone Age, because everything about their design must (in theory) come from the fountainhead of their own creativity. By disallowing the acknowledged use of that which came before us, we’re essentially disallowing the transfer of wisdom.
If we can’t build upon the wisdom of those who came before us, then we’ll never achieve sustainability. Why? Because true sustainability depends not only on what others (manufacturers, government, and specialists of all stripes) can do for us, but primarily on each of us thinking and behaving differently ourselves. Any hopes that millions of people might behave differently depends heavily on the ability to spread green wisdom broadly and deeply.
True modernity depends on a progression of ideas over time, where subsequent ideas grow better and better because they build on previous ideas. Requiring everyone to go back to the fountainhead of their own creativity prevents this, no matter how talented the hand that is doing the work. So the cruel irony is that Modernism prevents modernity, and leaves us with little more than eternal (and often juvenile) self-expression.
How Traditionalism Kills Living Traditions
Some traditionalists take the approach that “older is always better.” This may sound like a polar opposite to Modernism’s “newer is always better,” but it paradoxically produces the same result: it renders those traditionalists, just like the Modernists, incapable of learning important things. Sure, they learn the classical canons. But that’s about the extent of it because to these traditionalists, they’re assumed to be closed canons, almost as if they had been handed down from Heaven itself. Actually, a few hardcore traditionalists believe precisely that: they propose that classical architecture is a divine gift directly from God himself.
This view simply doesn’t square up with a broad view of history. A reasonable person would conclude that architecture has always evolved from the dawn of civilization, like a living thing, because the traditions were alive, learning and continually solving the problems of better ways of building in harmony with regional conditions, climate, and culture.
The last of the living architectural traditions died nearly a century ago. The first thing recovered thirty years ago were the styles of some of the last traditions to die: Bungalows, Colonial Revival, Beaux-Arts, Federal, Greek Revival, etc. This recovery culminated in the modern-day pattern book, which prescribed details for building each of these styles. I wasn’t one of the pioneers, but I wrote a number of these pattern books, beginning about a decade ago.
I remember thinking “what I’m doing has no power to bring life back to architecture.” Rather, if people followed my pattern books for 40 years, the architecture produced at the end of those years would be pretty much exactly like that at the beginning. There’s no life to that. Rather, it’s something mechanical, like stamping out objects on an assembly line. And that mechanical reproduction of something that was once alive doesn’t allow us to learn; all we can do is follow the recipe book.
A Modern Tradition
True modernity is the result of a living tradition held by a culture at large, not just a few specialists. Living traditions learn, like other living things. And they change over time. But they don’t change their character radically at the whims of fashion. An elephant doesn’t become a crocodile with the next fashion cycle. Rather, living things (including living traditions) change more slowly, and with good reasons that accompany survival.
This, I believe, is the high ideal of both tradition and modernity: the ability of architecture to learn and adapt towards meaningful bettering of humanity. But both Modernism and traditionalism as they are often known today are corruptions of that ideal, and those corruptions (as corruptions often do) have led people who really ought to know better into often-warring camps. We must be better than that. Sustainability requires it.

~Steve Mouzon

Social Media and Living Traditions

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 09:55:39 -0400

Social media are some of the most vibrant traditions alive today. Is it possible that they are preparing our post-industrial culture for a return to living traditions in architecture and place-making? The Original Green book makes a vigorous call for the return of living traditions in design and construction, arguing that true sustainability won’t be achieved without them. But living traditions died in most places in the early 20th century, and many people feel like they’re impossible today. Social media are telling quite another story.
A decade ago, nobody had heard of blogging, and neither Twitter nor Facebook would be conceived until a few years later. Today, hundreds of millions of people around the world participate each day. There are over 50 million blogs, and they have hundreds of millions of readers. In each of these media, rules of participation have been organized, and while the specific writing of a particular blogger on any given day might be unpredictable, the operation of the blogosphere as a whole is quite foreseeable.
Living traditions in architecture and place-making once worked in very similar fashion. The townspeople were able to build the town because the best ways of building for that people and for that place were well-understood by pretty much everyone.
Over the past 80 years or so, however, we’ve given up our place-making to the experts, from the transportation engineers to the architects to the mechanical engineers to the construction consultants of a thousand stripes. Just listing all the specialists involved in building a town would be longer than this entire post, so I won’t tire you with that.
This parallels our abdication of other basic needs, too. Our food is now produced by a thousand specialists, and its source is so distant that when most kids are asked where food comes from, they look at you like you’re crazy and say “the grocery store, of course.” Our clothes are made halfway around the world by people we’ll never meet. Even our bodies are in the hands of countless specialists. If you’re ever sick enough to go to the hospital, you’re likely to lose count of all the specialists that will bill you over the next few weeks.
What’s wrong with specialists? Doesn’t our modern world depend on them? Wouldn’t we be moving back to medieval times if we dispensed with so much specialism? Social media are opening a window to a very different view.
The “Comment” button has changed our world in profound ways that aren’t fully comprehended yet, I believe. Beforehand, most people swallowed what the specialists dished out, because “the specialist is an expert in that and I’m not.”
But once the Comment button made a conversation possible, we began to discover that other people know useful things about the subject, too. And because they’re speaking in a human voice instead of “expert-speak” or “corporate-speak,” they’re often more credible than the official sources... especially when several of them agree. It’s easy to disregard one or two crazies, but when there’s widespread agreement amongst us, it carries weight.
What does all this have to do with architecture and sustainability? Lots. Living traditions of the built environment thrive when the townspeople know what to build and why to build it that way. Social media provide precisely the vehicle for people to share place-making wisdom in a common-sense, plain-spoken way. Real sustainability won’t happen unless everyone’s involved, because making our equipment more efficient won’t make us sustainable... our behavior has to change, too. Put another way, if our behavior doesn’t change, our machines can’t save us. Social media, I believe, may be just the ticket for spreading the wisdom of sustainability broadly.
Look at what’s happening in other parts of our lives. Childbirth is a great example. A half-century ago, the process had become so specialized that women gave birth sedated to the edge of consciousness... or beyond, and fathers were banned to the waiting room. Today, after decades of struggle with the medical establishment, childbirth takes place in a far friendlier and more human setting in most places. Most people don’t dispense with the perceived safety of the hospital setting entirely, but they have insisted on major changes. So the specialists are still there if they’re needed to do our bidding. But we’ve ceased taking orders from them.
We’ve taken back other parts of our lives as well. People would usually follow the doctor’s orders years ago, and they prescribed a growing raft of medications. Today, more people are taking responsibility for their own health, and many self-medicate with vitamins rather than pharmaceuticals, going to the doctor only in the rare instance that something serious is wrong. The growing local food movement is driven in part because people are tired of the massive industrial food chain, and want to know where their food is coming from. “Know your farmer” is a growing cry from these quarters.
It’s happening in architecture as well. Look at the plethora of shelter shows, for example. Home Depot and Lowe’s thrive because “you can do it; we can help.” Millions of copies of $49 CAD software have been sold. The only thing missing is the wisdom of knowing where to draw those lines. That’s where social media can help... and I believe it will.

~Steve Mouzon

This post is part of the new Twitter phenomenon: #Letsblogoff. The home page lists each week’s “idea worth blogging about.” This week, it’s “Do social sites like Facebook connect the world or isolate people?” I obviously took that question in a different direction, as I usually do. Here are some of the other participating blogs in today’s #Letsblogoff:

Veronika Miller @modenus Modenus Community
Paul Anater @paul_anater Kitchen and Residential Design
Rufus Dogg @dogwalkblog DogWalkBlog
Becky Shankle @ecomod Eco-Modernism
Bob Borson @bobborson Life of an Architect
Nick Lovelady @cupboards Cupboards Kitchen and Bath
Sean Lintow, Sr. @SLSconstruction SLS-Construction.com
Amy Good @Splintergirl Thoughts of a Splinter Girl
Hollie Holcombe @GreenRascal Green Rascal Design
Cheryl Kees Clendenon @InDetailSays Details and Design
Saxon Henry @saxonhenry Roaming by Design
Jane Frederick @JaneFredArch Low Country Architect
Denese Bottrell @Denese_Bottrell Thoughtful Content
Chamois Green @chamwashere Cham Was Here
Ami @beackami Multifarious Miscellany

I’m @stevemouzon, FWIW.

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

the Web of Daily Life

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 07:51:03 -0400

How fragile is your web of daily life? How quickly would a major spike in gas prices disrupt your regular necessities? When gas first reached $5/gallon not long ago, some people with lower-paying jobs who lived further out were already having to choose between groceries and gas. That first spike didn’t last long, but we’d be deceiving ourselves to think that more spikes aren’t on the way.
Today, there are roughly 2-1/2 billion people in China and in India moving from very low-impact agrarian settings into the city. In the US, there’s more than one car per person. If China and India do 2-1/2 times as well as the US in their need for cars, there will still be a billion cars on the road in those two countries alone in the next few years, competing with the rest of us for gas. So there’s no doubt which direction the price of gas is going... the only questions are “how high?” and “how soon?”
We moved seven years ago from a very unwalkable place to Miami Beach, where we can walk to all our daily needs. We probably crank the car twice a week. The image above shows our home and office, which are five blocks apart. It’s a very interesting 8-minute walk. We’re about three blocks from the center of Flamingo Park from both home and office:
The post office is diagonally across the street from our office:
We chose a physician on the beach. It’s about a 15 minute walk from home, so I sometimes ride a bike if I’m in a hurry. But I’ve only needed to go to the doctor for routine checkups because I’ve stayed quite healthy in this walkable place.
Here’s our accountant’s office. We selected him, just like our doctor, because he was the best one within walking distance.
Here’s the walkable bank we selected, just a few blocks from the office.
I normally go to the vitamin store from home... it’s just four blocks south on Meridian, which is a beautiful street lined by great trees that create a canopy of shade.
We shop most often at two grocery stores, although there are three more small groceries within two blocks of the office.
Here’s the hardware store. It’s a long enough walk (close to 20 minutes) that I’ll often take Wanda’s bike, which has three baskets in which to carry my purchases.
Here’s my favorite bookstore: Books & Books is south Florida’s best independent bookstore.
The Apple Store is just a few blocks north of home on Meridian, and a similar distance from the office, assuming you cut across on the delightful little Espanola Way.
These are some of our favorite restaurants, although there are probably a hundred within a ten-minute walk.
Here are the combined paths to all these places. This is our Web of Daily Life. In our case, we don’t even want to drive any of these paths, unless we’re buying something too big to carry, like a computer. So no matter what the price of gas does, we’ll be able to get around to all these necessities self-propelled: either walking or biking.
You should also map out your Web of Daily Life. Then ask yourself “which of these paths would be most easily disrupted?” At $5/gallon? At $10/gallon? At $20/gallon? And then let’s have a conversation about some of the best ways of strengthening your Web of Daily Life.

~Steve Mouzon

Walkable Paradise

Tue, 7 Sep 2010 10:44:04 -0400

Where would you rather be if you could be somewhere else, and how do those places draw you so long across the miles? For me, that would be Key West. Or Paris. Or New Orleans. Or London. Or Charleston. Or Pienza. Or Taos. Or Oxford. Or Beaufort. Or Barcelona. Or... I could go on for hours. What common thread do all these places have? They’re highly walkable because they’re compact enough that everything’s nearby, and they have everything you need within walking distance, so you aren’t just walking for exercise.
But that’s just the standard New Urbanist line. And there are places all over that are compact, mixed-use, and walkable, but that don’t attain greatness... they’re merely good. So what’s the difference?
This post is part of the new Twitter phenomenon: #Letsblogoff. The home page lists each week’s “idea worth blogging about.” This week, it’s “My slice of heaven,” and the idea is to explore our personal paradise.
Seaside
For years, my personal paradise was Seaside, Florida. We lived a half-day’s drive away, and it’s such a great place that it became our regular vacation spot. In bad years, when we couldn’t afford to go to Seaside, we simply didn’t go to the beach. Everything else was so much less.
I remember back before most people had vacationed there, and people would say “yeah, it’s nice. I drove through. Lotsa little clapboard cottages.” And I’d tell them “you haven’t been to Seaside until your car keys have been hanging on the peg for at least three days. Then, you’ve been to Seaside.”
I remember the first (and only) architect I worked for after graduation. He went to Seaside and came back furious, because “I can’t drive my Cadillac 35 miles an hour down the streets.” I remember thinking “I know I won’t be working here much longer!” What he missed entirely was precisely the point of Seaside’s street design... it make the drivers slow down so the place is safer for the kids... or anyone else walking.
Speaking of kids... Seaside is a rare place that’s as eagerly anticipated by the children as the parents. It was the first place we ever let our kids run free, without knowing where they were, because you could be certain that with all those people sitting out on their porches, someone was watching them.
Seaside is also fascinating because it’s arguably one of the most family-friendly places you’re likely to visit on a deep and profound level... meaning that it’s a place where you’re likely to reconnect with family members in a meaningful way instead of just spending a few days as fellow-inhabitants of a cottage, or co-riders on a jet-ski. At the same time, it’s an exquisite venue for romance. Few ordinary places host both of these interests so well.
Key West
We moved to South Beach seven years ago. Seaside is now a distant memory... distant as in over 600 miles away. But we discovered before even moving down here that Key West was one of Seaside’s ancestors, inspiring many of its patterns. Both are at the end of the road: Seaside at the end of US 331, and Key West famously at the end of US 1. Many great places, however, are at the center of a network, with people streaming in from all around. Shared patterns don’t make the towns identical, of course; Key West tips the family/romance balance firmly (and often bawdily) to the side of romance, for example.
Greatness
I often challenge town founders with something I call the Tourist Test, which is this: “Is the place you are building good enough that people will want to spend their vacations there? Many town founders can’t even dream of such a thing... they’re building a neighborhood full of first homes, not vacation homes. But every great city listed at the top of this page is full of first homes. None of them are solely resorts. Yet people willingly give up those precious two weeks each year in order to visit them.
So the Tourist Test sounds like a good aspiration, but what does it really mean? How do we build or rebuild a place in a way that will pass the Tourist Test? What makes places great? To answer this question, let’s consider what makes places ordinary. That which is ordinary is predictable. A great place embeds itself so firmly in our memory precisely because it is overflowing with possibilities of unpredictable and memorable moments.
Those moments most often are filled either with connection or with reflection. In other words, they either take us outside ourselves to connect with others in a meaningful way, or help us look inside ourselves in a meaningful way. None of which ordinarily happens while driving. But all of which just might happen somewhere around the next turn in any of the great places. You just need to be out of your car to have a good chance of experiencing them.
So in the end, the greatness of a place doesn’t derive so much from how lavishly it’s detailed or how elegantly it’s laid out, but rather for how well it acts to set the stage for human greatness. Imagine some act or insight that has changed the world as we know it. Can you say “something like that just might happen here” about the place you live? And is that anticipation that the extraordinary might be just around the corner obvious enough to others that they want to vacation where you live?

~Steve Mouzon

Here are some of the other participating blogs in today’s #Letsblogoff:

Veronika Miller @modenus Modenus.com
Paul Anater @paul_anater kitchenandresidentialdesign.com
Rufus Dogg @dogwalkblog DogWalkBlog
Becky Shankle @ecomod eco-modernism.com
Bob Borson @bobborson lifeofanarchitect.com
Bonnie Harris @waxgirl333 Wax Marketing
Tim Elmore @TimElmore growingleaders.com
Nick Lovelady @cupboards cupboardsonline.com
Tamara Dalton @tammyjdalton tamaradalton.net
Sean Lintow, Sr. @SLSconstruction sls-construction.com
Amy Good @Splintergirl Amy's Blog
Richard Holschuh @concretedetail Concrete Detail
Tim Bogan @TimBogan Windbag International
Hollie Holcombe @GreenRascal Rascal Design
Cindy FrewenWuellner @Urbanverse Urbanverse

I’m @stevemouzon, FWIW.

The Green Academy - Or Not

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:19:36 -0400

Today’s academic experience prepares architecture students to design sustainably in some ways, but leaves them hideously unprepared in others. Let’s look at the hits and misses (and how to fix the misses) through the Original Green lens. This post is part of the new Twitter phenomenon: #Letsblogoff. The home page lists each week’s “idea worth blogging about.” This week, it’s “Are today’s college graduates ready for the working world?” That’s incredibly broad, so this post narrows the question to architecture and sustainability.
Nourishable Places
During early Original Green lectures several years ago, people looked at me like I was crazy when I proposed that nourishability was the first foundation of sustainable places. Today, the idea is gaining firm traction in many quarters. Andrés Duany has become arguably the top thought leader on the issue. I’ve worked as a team member with Andrés’ firm (DPZ) on the three projects that pushed these ideas the furthest forward: Sky, Southlands, and Schooner Bay. Because this set of ideas is evolving so quickly, it’s no surprise that it has not yet been included as part of the curriculum in schools of architecture and planning. But let’s hope that changes quickly.
Accessible Places
Here’s where the divide begins: schools sympathetic to the New Urbanism teach principles for creating places accessible by a range of options, especially including walking and biking. The top tier of New Urbanism-friendly schools includes the University of Miami (where Andrés’ wife and partner, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is Dean,) the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, the University of Notre Dame, and Andrews University. Each of these schools have what could only be described as a full-bore New Urbanist curriculum. There are a growing number of other schools around the world which are sympathetic to the New Urbanism. These, too, teach principles of accessible places.
Many other schools of architecture, however, are either tacitly or openly hostile to the New Urbanism. Many of these schools are afflicted with a malady I call “Freeway Envy.” The symptoms include a strong affinity for movement. Advanced cases of Freeway Envy result in buildings nearly eaten up with ramps, stairs, escalators, elevators, and other means of zooming around, so that one might wonder if anyone ever sits down in these buildings. This infatuation with movement, unfortunately, all too often holds mechanical movement as its highest ideal, so its proponents are far more likely to design car-friendly places than pedestrian-friendly places.
Serviceable Places
Schools with New Urbanist curricula or at least New Urbanist sympathies can usually be depended upon to teach principles that allow graduates to design places where you can get a range of daily services within walking distance. Here, the divide with schools antagonistic to the New Urbanism isn’t so great, but it still exists. Why? Serviceable places are functionally messy places, with everything from houses to apartments to townhouses on the residential side to coffee shops, groceries, hardware stores, pharmacies, offices, and any number of other businesses. Architecture, meanwhile, has for nearly a century had strong affinity for all things clean and simple... and the more serviceable a place becomes, the less clean and simple it is.
Securable Places
Securability goes hand-in-hand with great urbanism on several counts. The closer buildings come to aligning with each other and pulling up to a frontage line, the easier it is to create a securable block against the inevitable times in an uncertain future that are more spooky than today. Here, the divide is clear: schools that teach New Urbanism teach the creation of the street wall. In great urbanism, the first responsibility of a building is to help create urban space. Anti-New Urbanist schools tend to focus on buildings as objects, where each building screams “look at me.” Buildings as objects rarely contribute to a securable place.
Lovable Buildings
This is the big one. Most schools of architecture leave their graduates grotesquely incapable of designing buildings that can be loved. And if buildings can’t be loved, they won’t last. This means the academy is churning out graduates incapable of designing sustainably. The only remedy is years of self-education after graduation.
The problem, however, goes deeper than just the inability to design lovable buildings. Instead, many schools instill a strong prejudice against designing buildings that can be loved. Such design is scorned as “saccharine,” “nostalgia,” “kitsch,” “banal,” and the like. By the end of the second year of architecture school, most students wouldn’t dare consider designing such a building. The problem has gotten so ridiculous that today, there are efforts to “educate” the public on the fact that they need to learn to love ugly buildings.
Which schools do best and worst here? The “best list” shrinks notably here. While it generally follows the New Urbanism divide, there are a number of schools sympathetic to New Urbanism that are decidedly more frigid to the idea of lovable buildings. The issue of lovability appears to be the toughest nut to crack.
Durable Buildings
Serious durability has largely vanished from architecture today. When I was in school, our building technology professor opined that we should “design the building to last at least as long as the mortgage because the owner will be really angry if the building is uninhabitable before it’s paid off.” How ridiculous a standard is that?
It might seem like this is an issue of budgets or expediency. In reality, architecture should shoulder a part of the blame for at least two reasons: An architectural culture that celebrates modernity and newness is generally incompatible with keeping things for a long time. Also, the profession has been moonstruck with all things thin and spindly for most of the past century, Brutalism and a few similar moments excepted. Thin and spindly things obviously have less margin of error to sacrifice to the inevitable corrosion of time before they become unusable.
There is hope, as the issue continues to build traction in sustainability discussions. I’ll be one of the speakers at the University of Notre Dame’s symposium on Durability in Construction in October, for example.
Flexible Buildings
Flexibility isn’t even on the radar screen in most schools of architecture. Instead, the academy is far too often the purveyor of something I call the “Tyranny of the Program.” Great effort is expended in making the architecture fit hand-in-glove with the program.
Unfortunately for this approach, the program is the most overrated thing in architecture. If a building is lovable and durable, it’s likely to be used for something other than its programmed use for 90% or more of its life. We should, therefore, focus on designing a good building rather than a good deli or a good post office because some of the uses the building may one day house haven’t even been imagined yet.
Frugal Buildings
Here’s the one place where the academy does a decent, if partial, job of preparing its graduates for the real world. Some schools now have a high focus on the design of carbon-neutral buildings, or “net-zero” buildings. Problem is, this focus usually doesn’t extend beyond the property line, so it’s actually bogus. It doesn’t matter how many green points your building gets if you have to drive everywhere in order to inhabit it.
Another fault of the academy’s current efforts to make building design more frugal is that it’s usually a perfect example of Gizmo Green, which is the erroneous belief that with better equipment and better materials, we can achieve sustainability. It just isn’t so, and for a number of reasons. Gizmo Green measures are the first to fall at budget-cutting time, whereas natural frugality measures often just rearrange what you’re already building for better effect. And Gizmo Green creates all sorts of propositions that simply don’t pass the smell test.
The Bottom Line
The Original Green lens makes it quite clear that most schools of architecture don’t get a passing grade when it comes to preparing their students to design in a truly sustainable manner. The biggest (but by no means completely accurate) predictor is an institution’s tolerance or embrace of the New Urbanism.
I’m hopeful there will be progress soon. But for all of us that have graduated or will graduate before that happens in our schools, there is a remedy: self-education. There are a number of institutions that are filling many of the gaps. Check them out. Take their classes. Read their books. But most of all, learn how to really see, and how to ask yourself the hard questions, and then not give up on those questions until you’ve someday figured them out.

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there. All of these images were shot on a very cold day at Yale last winter. Here are some of the other participating blogs in today’s #Letsblogoff:

Veronika Miller @modenus Modenus.com
Paul Anater @paul_anater kitchenandresidentialdesign.com
Rufus Dogg @dogwalkblog DogWalkBlog
Becky Shankle @ecomod eco-modernism.com
Bob Borson @bobborson lifeofanarchitect.com
Bonnie Harris @waxgirl333 Wax Marketing
Tim Elmore @TimElmore growingleaders.com
Nick Lovelady @cupboards cupboardsonline.com
Tamara Dalton @tammyjdalton tamaradalton.net
Sean Lintow, Sr. @SLSconstruction sls-construction.com
Amy Good @Splintergirl Amy's Blog
Richard Holschuh @concretedetail Concrete Detail
Tim Bogan @TimBogan Windbag International
Hollie Holcombe @GreenRascal Rascal Design
Cindy FrewenWuellner @Urbanverse Urbanverse

I’m @stevemouzon, FWIW.

the Gizmo Green Conundrum

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:54:55 -0400

Chicago’s new Greenway Self-Park illustrates the problems created by the Gizmo Green approach better than anything I’ve seen recently. Gizmo Green, of course, is the proposition that we can be green just by using better equipment and better materials. It lies at the heart of most discussions on sustainability today.
Gizmo Green fits perfectly into the industrially-fueled Consuming Economy we’ve built over the past 85 years or so, and which I contrasted in this post with the Conserving Economy that true sustainability should be built upon. Gizmo Green is a perfect fit for the Consuming Economy because it’s something that someone else designs, another “someone else” manufactures, and that we buy and consume. So all of the sustainable aspects are things that someone else provides, removing responsibility from us and putting it on someone else... our only responsibility is to be consumers, which is exactly how the Consuming Economy thrives. But consumption lies at the heart of the problem. The removal of our responsibility combined with the necessity of consumption creates the Gizmo Green Conundrum: How can we say we’re sustainable if that sustainability is based on us consuming more stuff and not needing to live differently ourselves?
Let’s get back to Greenway, which is a parking garage in Chicago’s River North. Here’s what its website says that it provides:
* energy-generating wind turbines
* local and sustainable building materials
* a green roof and rainwater cisterns for irrigation
* high-efficiency glass
* recycling programs
* energy-efficient lighting
* programs to encourage the use of energy efficient vehicles
* electric car charging stations
* air quality initiatives
* tips for Greener Living in the lobbies
* Zipcar and I-Go car sharing vehicles
How is it possible not to applaud all this? Well... err... the one point on “high-efficiency glass” seems pointless since it’s an open-air structure, so why do you need efficient glass? But other than that, how can we not applaud Greenway? Using Gizmo Green standards, applause is the only rational thing to do.
But somehow, something doesn’t feel right. A “sustainable parking deck.” Oh, really? But if Gizmo Green is our only lens, then the answer it produces is “Yes, a sustainable parking deck... and it’s a real champ, too.” So give it the LEED rating. But let’s look at it through the Original Green lens and see what it looks like now:
Nourishable Places
It may be a bit of a stretch at first to ask a parking garage to help nourish the people who live in the neighborhood, but hey, the site says the building has a green roof, so why not use that green roof to raise something edible? I know, I know, vegetables are heavier than the inedible stuff normally planted on a green roof, but this is a parking deck, so chances are good they have enough structure to handle the difference.
Accessible Places
Here’s where the serious problems begin. Try as I might, I couldn’t find any good images of the way this parking deck meets the street. Because I haven’t been to Chicago since it was completed, I don’t have any of my own, either. But from what you can tell on the images that are out there, it seems like it’s a parking deck all the way to the ground. That’s a problem on several counts. One is the fact that the closer a blank wall comes to extending a full city block, the closer it gets to killing walkability. Pedestrians are easily bored, and nothing is more boring than a blank wall, except for maybe a parking lot. In this case, we have a blank glass wall with a parking lot behind... so it’s a boredom double whammy.
Here’s the even bigger problem: that which you encourage is that which you’re likely to get more of, whereas that which you discourage is that which you’re likely to get less of. Building parking decks, therefore, encourages driving. Is it better to have parking decks than to have acres and acres of surface parking lots? Of course. Nothing except rampant crime saps the energy of a city like losing block after block to surface parking lots. But is it even better to encourage people to take transit into a city as intense as Chicago? Without a doubt. Because that intensity suffers for every foot of street frontage given over to parking decks.
Serviceable Places

Here’s why the liner really should go all the way up...
Greenway almost completely misses the boat here. Liner shops on the first level would not only enliven the street and solve the boring wall problem above, but would also provide some of the daily services of life to people living nearby. Liner buildings need not be very deep. 18’ is plenty; some liner shops are 12’ deep or less. Ideally, the liner would extend the full height of the building, with loft apartments above, but at the very least, the ground floor should certainly be lined with shops.
Securable Places
No eyes on the street here...
Few things make a place more securable than putting “eyes on the street,” in the words of Jane Jacobs. Greenway’s contribution here is essentially zero, whereas had the deck been lined with shops and loft apartments, many people would be watching the street, contributing to the security of the neighborhood. Liner buildings should be standard on parking decks built anywhere in an urban setting today. They just make sense.
Lovable Buildings
Is there any building so faceless as a parking deck?
OK, I’ll admit it... I’ve been a gizmo fan all my life. And the thought of watching those big wind turbines turning on the corner of the building sounds like fun. But like all gizmos, once the new wears off, the thrill is gone... which is another reason why gizmos, while they are a part of life, should not BE our life.
But is this building lovable? That’s a different question. Humans resonate with forms that reflect them, almost from the moment of birth. But this building is faceless, with a blank glass wall. It’s not brutally ugly, but would anyone consider Greenway to be lovable?
Durable Buildings
If a building can be loved, then it needs to be durable enough to endure long into the future. I haven’t visited the building yet... I’m a speaker at the Traditional Building Exhibition & Conference there in October, so I’ll check it out then. But in general, sheathing a building in glass doesn’t give one a lot of confidence that it’ll still be there several centuries from now. How many other exterior wall materials break so easily?
Flexible Buildings
This is a tough one. If a building is lovable and durable, then it needs to be flexible enough to be used for many things over time because a building that lasts several centuries will likely be used for its programmed use for only a small percentage of its life. But what about a parking deck? What else can you use a parking deck for? Maybe a set for a creepy movie? That’s the most enduring cultural image of a parking deck: a place to get shot, or blown up, or other really bad stuff.
Think about this: what to do with them after cars? Are parking decks destined for the wrecking ball once gas gets too expensive to drive? What else would you use them for? I don’t have an answer here, but it certainly makes me think that parking decks don’t pass the Flexible Building test.
Frugal Buildings
Greenway’s website, Facebook page, and Twitter stream all make a big deal about the building’s energy efficiency. And that’s good. But it’s not like the building is heated or cooled, right? So the energy use issues should be lighting and ventilation.
By day, these should be fairly easy to achieve naturally. Even with a liner building, there are ways to naturally ventilate and daylight the building. Look at any of the old buildings in Chicago (or anywhere, for that matter,) and you’ll see that they’re composed of thin wings so that all parts of the building are near an outside wall. How would you do that with a parking deck? Especially one with liner buildings on the streets? The most obvious solution is an O-shaped building with single bay (double-loaded, of course) of parking surrounding a light court in the middle. Go from floor to floor with a circular ramp, and all the floors can be flat so the building can be easily repurposed for other uses in the future.
That’s just what comes immediately to mind. I’m confident in the creativity of my architect colleagues. I’m certain they will produce many and better solutions... so long as they’re seeing it through the Original Green lens rather than they Gizmo Green lens they’re currently looking through.

~Steve Mouzon

The Luxury of Small

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:59:56 -0400

Americans have endured the Poverty of Large for far too long; it’s time to return to the Luxury of Small. That’s my son Sam above, a newly-graduated chef from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, cooking in the kitchen of our tiny condo on South Beach. It’s a far cry from this house, which is where he and his brother David were raised:
It was four times as large as our condo. It sat on one acre of land which was designed to be a self-sufficient homestead. I described it in some detail in this post on the Trouble with Consumption. We made all sorts of sacrifices to finish the house, and were never able to really finish it out the way we would have liked because the square footage stretched our budget to the limit.
Fast-forward twenty years. Our condo is 747 square feet, as opposed to the 3,000 square feet of the big house. The countertops are soapstone instead of the big house’s cheapest possible white ceramic tile on plywood. The kitchen walls are pleated stainless steel instead of the sheetrock of the big house. I could go on, but you get the idea. Did we suddenly hit the lottery? Not at all. The reason we were able to finish the condo out so much better was because there simply wasn’t that much of it. Because everything was smaller, everything could be better. Small is the new luxury. Without being this much smaller, we’d have never lived in a place this much better.
Sam cooking in the condo...
America’s Urge for Big in recent decades is in many ways responsible for the Meltdown. There were other factors, of course, but consider this: Just before the meltdown, the average American house size had grown to over double what it was at the end of World War II. Yet the average household size had shrunk to almost half what it was at the end of the war. In spite of the fact that half as many people were inhabiting houses twice as large, we still had so much excess stuff that didn’t fit that we’d made the mini-storage industry a $17 billion/year business!
Freshly baked...
Let that sink in a minute. The cost of storing all that over-consumption had grown so large that the mini-storage industry had grown larger than the entire movie industry! And these weren’t the things we needed, either... they were the things we really didn’t need... otherwise, why would they be in storage?
Sam’s handiwork on the dinner table...
All that over-consumption came at a great price. Once, buildings were built for the ages. At the Meltdown, construction quality had become so shoddy that pieces of houses could regularly be found falling off in the driveway in less than ten years! We had become a nation of throw-away buildings and throw-away places. Obviously, we can never become sustainable if we keep throwing stuff away like this.
Nearly everything in the bath is custom, including the soapstone-and-brass custom vanity...
Houses that were too big contributed directly to the throw-away building culture. How? Houses that have to be built as cheaply as possible because they’re being built as large as possible aren’t really worth saving. And so when the too-big maintenance bill on the too-big house hits too soon because it was built too cheaply to last very long, the easy answer is to discard it and start over somewhere else. And so the throw-away cycle continues.
Mirrored walls make the bath seem larger than its actual size...
Do this test: Drive around town randomly. Stop every five minutes and look to your left (or right... it doesn’t matter.) If the building is a house, chances are its age is less than forty years. If it’s a Wal-Mart, on the other hand, chances are its age is less than fifteen years. You’ve probably noticed that people live longer than forty years most of the time. This means that on average, we’re burdening the American public with building more than one house per lifetime, and re-building their retail several times in a lifetime.
We simply must lay down the burden of over-building, because it has become too heavy for America to bear. Let’s unburden ourselves by building smaller, so that we can afford build to last once again. Because we can’t build to last if we build too big. Build big or build well... that’s the choice. We cannot afford not to build well anymore. This has become increasingly obvious recently. I blogged about it a year ago, and many of the lessons we learned fostering the Katrina Cottages movement have led to all sorts of cool ways of building smaller and smarter.
Our outdoor living room...
Here’s one really cool thing you can do to reduce the size of your house: build outdoor rooms. They’re not only much less expensive to build per square foot, but they have a hidden benefit as well that you might not have realized:
If your outdoor rooms are enticing enough that you spend a lot of time outdoors, you become acclimated to the local environment and need less conditioning when you return indoors. Creatures of the A/C might say “I could never do that.” I was once one of you. But then I moved to Miami, where I spend lots of time outdoors walking, and in my garden. I can accurately say that I’ve never been outdoors here in the shade and with a breeze when I’ve ever been uncomfortable. And this is in a town where the basketball team is named the “Heat.” Creatures of the A/C come down here and suffer, sweating profusely all the time. But not me. My garden and my walkable town have taken care of that... I’m Living in Season. Build small and well, and build outdoor rooms... this is where real sustainability begins.

~Steve Mouzon

PS: This blog post was written in response to a new phenomenon on Twitter: the #blogoff. I heard about it from architect Cindy Frewen Wuellner, PhD, FAIA, (@urbanverse on Twitter) who has a really cool blog on Posterous.

The Grand Lie of Urban Forestry

Tue, 3 Aug 2010 12:23:06 -0400

Urban forestry has lots of useful information to offer, but there is a big lie at the heart of the majority of the work of urban forestry which threatens to discredit the entire discipline if anybody will call their hand on it. It’s the Root Zone Myth.
As with any myth, there is some kernel of embedded truth. In the case of the Root Zone Myth, it’s the fact that, left alone in a field, a tree’s roots will spread about as far as its drip line, which is the outer limit of its leaves. So if the tree’s limbs and leaves were 40 feet in diameter, its root system would be, too. Now, the urban foresters are saying that’s not good enough; a tree’s root system actually extends 2-1/2 times as far as the drip line. So for that tree with a 40-foot canopy, the roots actually extend to a 100-foot diameter.
Left alone in a field, this is generally true for many species of trees. But in town, it’s a myth. Nearly every discussion with an urban forester begins with their declaration that we need to protect the drip line, and that no hard surfaces (paving, sidewalks, etc.) can be permitted within the root zone. They say that if you plant trees near paving, the tree will be “stunted,” or “dwarfed.” Do the trees in the image above look serious stunted to you? But look... paving gets to within 3 or 4 feet of their trunks all around them! How can this be? The urban foresters claim that this is impossible, but I took the picture myself in Charleston, and I can vouch for the fact that it is indeed real.
The Root Zone Myth becomes the Grand Lie of Urban Forestry because the urban foresters really should know better, but they keep repeating the Root Zone Myth while totally ignoring the urban context.
How do they get away with this? They start by telling stories of trees that have had intrusions into their root zones, and parts of the trees have died in response. The stories are true. But what they’re not telling you is that these are old established trees. Of course they’ll be stressed and drop some leaves when a significant portion of their roots are destroyed! But the trees in question are the new ones that they want to prevent you from planting along the street, or in the medians of avenues or boulevards. According to many of them, the tree will only grow as large as the unrestricted area for root growth.
I was in an audience last night where an urban forester and his city and county planner colleagues made all of these allegations, and more. On the one hand, they were alleging that tree roots don’t grow under paving. On the other hand, they were complaining that tree roots that grow under sidewalks buck the sidewalks up over the years. You can’t have it both ways, guys!
Let’s look at it this way. If, as they said, tree roots don’t grow under paving, and the tree canopy will only grow as large as the roots, then canopy streets would be impossible, because if the branches won’t go further than the roots and the roots won’t go under the street, then the branches would never grow over the street. But the best canopy street in Miami Beach is Meridian, which is pictured here, and which was only a few blocks from the room in which we were sitting as they made these allegations!
I don’t know precisely where the roots of the trees in this picture are going, but the branches are clearly going far out over the paving. And this is exactly the sort of street that the urban foresters are saying can’t be done. Worse, if they have their way, they won’t allow you to build it this way. Rather, they’re looking for super-wide swales where the trees are far back from the pavement. Do we really want to outlaw these sorts of streets?
Here’s another question: what does any of this have to do with sustainability? In a hot and humid climate, it’s very important to be able to shade the sidewalk as soon as possible so that it’s more comfortable to walk there. Walkability, as this blog has said many times, is essential to sustainability because a place isn’t green if people have to drive everywhere, no matter how many green points you get for the buildings.
Placing trees far back from the sidewalk in oversized swales may delay shade on the sidewalk for several years, transforming what should have been a pleasant walk into concrete that seems hot enough to cook an egg.
The bottom line is that the Grand Lie of Urban Forestry doesn’t just dismiss canopy streets, which are typically the most beautiful streets in town. It also helps to make the neighborhood far less green by inhibiting walking, which is one of the foundations of sustainable places.
To the urban foresters: With all due respect, you guys really need to dispense with the Grand Lie. It’s destroying your credibility with those of us who choose to observe real life conditions, and to think about what we’ve seen. Because what we’ve seen makes shambles of your Grand Lie. Just walk around town. Just about any neighborhood built before World War II will do, because before then, we knew how to build excellent urban streets, and how to plant the street trees. Observe those trees, and how they live in an urban setting. A city is not an open field. You guys could do a lot of good with all the things you know about trees if you’d just get rid of the Grand Lie and apply all of your knowledge to the urban setting.
To really get this started in the right direction, you might consider changing the name of your discipline from “Urban Forestry” to something else. Why? Because there aren’t many forests in the city. That may be the core of your problem: you’re confused about your own identity, and you’re acting more like a forester than an urbanist. Forestry happens in the forest. Urbanism happens in the city. Call yourselves Urban Tree Managers or something... I don’t really care, so long as you let us build great streets and sustainable places again.

~Steve Mouzon

Neighborhood Schools

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:19:47 -0400

Schools should be located in neighborhoods for many reasons, and their positioning is important to the walkability of the entire neighborhood. This is a far cry from the way schools are usually built today. Now, they’re located out on the highway somewhere, and walking to school is impossible because even if the school wasn’t several miles from home, no sane parent would let their kids walk beside the heavy speeding traffic of a typical highway. As a result, our schools have taken on the character of something more like a warehouse, instead of the civic buildings they used to be.
Let’s look at the difference between the way we used to build schools, the normal way we build schools today, and a better way of building schools today. All three schools shown here are elementary schools, and are located in the state of Alabama so that it’s close to an “apples and apples” comparison. Satellite views of the schools are shown at the same scales for equal comparisons. I’ve darkened the land outside the property lines of the school to make the school property obvious.
Here’s the Pine Level Elementary School in Deatsville, Alabama. Hard to tell it’s not a supermarket, isn’t it, with that big parking lot out front. And of course, the parking lot is completely necessary because everyone must drive to get there. Here’s how Pine Level Elementary sits on the land:
It’s a behemoth, sitting on about 22 acres that stretch roughly a quarter-mile down the highway. To put that in perspective, a quarter-mile is the distance that an average American adult will walk. Beyond that, they usually decide to drive instead. So this site is so big that if someone had to go from one end to the other, they just might decide to drive! Forget walking to school, because as you can see, there’s only one house that can even be seen in this view.
One other thing... see those two things that look like racetracks, one to the left of the school and the other below? Those are “stack lanes.” That’s where the cars stack up before school lets out, as the parents wait for their kids. The one to the left consumes over 2 acres, while the one below eats up about 1-1/2 acres of land. These are completely necessary when everyone has to drive to get there, but the land they consume is substantially bigger than the entire campus of a 56-classroom high school design we’ll look at towards the end of this post. Matter of fact, the 56-classroom school is scarcely larger than just the stack lanes to the left of the Pine Level school!
The second school is in the Village of Providence, a traditional neighborhood designed by DPZ. I’ve been involved as a consultant from the very beginning, and serve as Town Architect there.
One of the biggest hurdles we faced at Providence was the school design. As in most states, the state school board has certain minimum land sizes approved for schools. In Alabama, it’s 11 acres for an elementary school, 17 acres for a middle school, and 35 acres for a high school... almost twice as big as the Pine Level school.
In comparison, the entire world-famous town of Pienza, Italy, located in Tuscany, takes up just under 11 acres, and houses over 2,000 people. Think about that a minute... if Pienza wanted to build an elementary school using Alabama standards, they would have to bulldoze the entire town, and it still wouldn’t be quite enough land!
But back to Providence: the local school board was set on doing things the “normal way,” which was no surprise, but that would have resulted in a school similar to Pine Level. Consuming that much land would have eaten up most of the Providence neighborhood adjacent to the school. One of the big sticking points was the stack lanes. I pointed out that the oldest schools in Huntsville had no stack lanes because parents waited on the streets surrounding the school as described in detail below.
There were major objections to the idea of kids walking to school because “that’s not safe today.” But guess what happens at Providence? You guessed it... parents are pretty smart when it comes to the safety of their kids, so the neighborhood parents simply walk to the school when classes are over and walk their kids home. It’s actually quite a social event, with parents visiting all the way over and back. And back when I was a kid and groups of kids walked to school and back without parents, we could get into all sorts of mischief that wouldn’t happen in Providence with parents coming along.
The school board also objected to our call to build a two-story school. I pointed those same schools they had been running the longest, most of which were two stories. They said “people don’t like to climb stairs,” but their own administrative offices were located in the original Huntsville High School, itself a two-story building of which most of the administrators were clearly fond. Eventually, we worked past these hurdles. Here’s how the Providence school sits on its site:
You can see the neighborhood below it that was preserved by using a smaller site. Roughly 80 homes would have been lost using a Pine Level-size site. The Providence school has almost as many students (781) as Pine Level (931,) but look at the difference between the land consumed by each. But this is still too much land. Below is one of those early Huntsville schools (East Clinton.) It has fewer students (204,) but as you can see, it makes the most efficient use of the site of any of the three. The racetrack you see here is for kids, not cars, and there’s only one tiny parking lot at the back, for the teachers.
What have we learned? Here’s an illustration of the ideal way of building a neighborhood school:
This illustration shows the largest two-story high school that can easily be put on a single 320’ square block. A high school is illustrated because it is the worst-case scenario on two counts: some of its students drive, and high school athletic field requirements are larger than those of middle schools or elementary schools. The school should be slid to one edge of the neighborhood for two reasons: First, playing fields can occur within adjacent parklands, making it easier for the neighborhood to use the playing fields after school hours. Also, the school and its playing fields creates a “pedestrian shadow” because if you’re walking somewhere on the other side of the school, you have to walk around the school and its playing fields to get there. Moving the school to the edge of the neighborhood solves both these issues.
Two huge auto-related problems of schools are parking spaces and stack space described above for parents picking up and dropping off their children. When schools are embedded in neighborhoods, students within walking distance can walk. The illustration above assumes an average density of 5 units per acre in the surrounding neighborhood, and assumes that 8% of those households have children of high school age. Of those, half of the students are assumed to be legal drivers. Given these assumptions, and the assumption that the walking distance for students walking to school is the ten-minute walk (American kids will walk about twice as far as their often more sedentary parents,) there are a total of 250 acres within the ten-minute half-radius (the other half is park and playing fields, since the school is assumed to be on the edge of the neighborhood as noted above.) If 2.9% of the population are high school students of driving age and there are 1.8 children in each household that has children, then there could be between 100 and 120 driving-age high school students within walking distance of the school.
If 80% of them walk (once they rediscover that walking to school is a tremendously social thing to do when it’s possible) on any given day, then the student parking lot can be reduced by 80 to 100 spaces. The school parking requirement is therefore reduced to the teachers, staff and a few students. In the illustration above, 107 spaces are provided in diagonal on-street parking around the perimeter of the school, so there’s no need for a parking lot at all. This takes care of the 56 teachers, an assumed 14 administrators and staff, and 37 students and visitors.
Stack space for pick-up has an exceptionally simple solution noted above for schools embedded into the fabric of the neighborhood: Cars are allowed to stack on neighborhood streets. Embedded schools actually need no drop-off lane at all in many cases where parents can drop off children on the school lawn and let them walk to the door. Because parents are sitting in the cars waiting to pick up children, anyone blocking a resident’s driveway can easily move because they are already sitting behind the wheel. And because most high schools end at 3 PM, most residents are still at work and should not need to use their driveways at this time of day.
This building is two stories and surrounds a central courtyard with double-loaded classroom wings. A two-story gymnasium and a single-story lunchroom are located to the rear of the building, which also includes the loading dock. The library is located over a portion of the lunchroom. There are a total of 56 classrooms plus administrative offices.
The many health and other sustainability benefits of walking are thoroughly documented. It’s high time to begin building all parts of our communities in a more walkable way, including our schools. Fortunately, there are a growing number of resources available to help us build neighborhood schools again, rather than highway schools. My colleague Nathan Norris founded the SmartGrowth Schools initiative, which I blogged about here.
Other resources you might want to check out include Pennsylvania’s study on reusing old schools, which are far more likely to be walkable, the New Urban News article on neighborhood schools, and Raleigh, North Carolina’s design guidelines for walkable neighborhood schools. The list is growing... a quick Google search turns up many other such results. Let’s use them, and build neighborhood schools again.

~Steve Mouzon

1 Bryant Park and the LEED Problem

Fri, 2 Jul 2010 11:19:45 -0400

1 Bryant Park in New York, which opened recently to great fanfare as the first LEED Platinum skyscraper, highlights one of the biggest problems with LEED: Because it's a system of additive credits, you can accumulate credits in a number of ways while doing some really silly and unsustainable things, like building with a glass curtain wall. Let’s look at the glass wall problem first, then look at the LEED problem.
The Glass Problem
Here’s an image of 1 Bryant Park. The rest of the images are of other buildings in other cities, but it doesn’t really matter because it’s a problem everywhere that there’s a summer or a winter.
Why is this a problem? There are several reasons:
1. The smartest glazing I’m aware of is from a company called Serious Materials. They really live up to their name; everything they sell is very high-performance. Yet their best glass isn’t quite as good an insulator as a plain old 2x4 wood frame wall with fiberglass batt insulation. So the best glass you can buy leaks more energy than the cheapest tract house wall it’s legal to build in most places. And most glass isn’t nearly as good as Serious. Typical “high-performance” glass curtain walls leak three times as much energy.
2. Ask anyone on the street whether they like more light or less light in their workplace, and most of them say they like more light. Yet a solid wall of glass over-lights a room so badly on a sunny day that curtain walls are typically tinted or mirrored to exclude more than half of the light (often up to 2/3,) otherwise it would be so bright you couldn’t work. So clearly, you don’t need the entire wall to be made of windows in order to daylight the space. Windows with clear glass occupying 1/3 of the wall would provide the same amount of light as a wall of glass that lets in 1/3 of the light that shines on it. Old buildings did this naturally, it should be noted.
3. A typical office tower in most regions requires air conditioning year-round because of the amount of heat generated by lights, computers, equipment, people, etc. This means that these buildings never need any solar heat gain... yet half of the walls of a square tower face either east or west, and anyone who knows anything about passive heating and cooling knows that one of the very first things you want to do is to reduce east- or west-facing glass because that’s where the sun is low in the sky, shining directly in the windows.
4. Glass curtain wall buildings carry health consequences for their occupants that have been well documented over the years. There are a number of reasons for this that are beyond the scope of this blog post, but you may have heard of one of the big ones, which is Sick Building Syndrome (SBS.)
I did this rant on glass walls while at the AIA convention recently. More recently, Alex Wilson did an excellent and well-documented post on the problems of glass wall buildings on Building Green. You need a membership to get to the article, but his stuff is so good that it’s well worth the annual subscription. The bottom line is that fewer things you can do to a building are less green than coating it in glass... which brings us to the other item:
The LEED Problem
Before getting into the details, let me say that I’m a big supporter of the mission of the US Green Building Council, which is to provide incentives for building in a more sustainable fashion. As a matter of fact, I serve on a USGBC Technical Advisory Group that advises on issues having to do with building location and context. Our work primarily affects LEED-ND, the neighborhood rating system. So I’m not a typical LEED-basher... but the system isn’t perfect, either.
The glass wall problem shows one fault of an additive points-based system: you don’t have to consider far smarter systems that are fundamentally better, such as walls that are solid, punctuated with only enough windows to provide the light, ventilation, and view that we need. Instead, you can do something much less intelligent like a glass wall and score points for doing so more efficiently. In other words, it’s a system that encourages us to continue our enormously wasteful modern construction systems, so long as we build them a bit more efficiently.
Here’s another illustration of the weakness of an additive point-based system: adding a bike rack and a changing room scores as many points as re-using 75% of an existing building. Is biking to work good? Absolutely. But there’s no question which is easier for a developer to do: “crank up those bulldozers and trash the existing building, boys... we’ve got our LEED credit with the bike rack!”
It’s important to point out that these issues are not problems with LEED calibration. The USGBC hasn’t done a bad job fine-tuning LEED, in other words. Rather, these are structural flaws of additive points-based systems. It’s time to consider a change.

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there. The only exception is the 1 Bryant Park image, which isn’t one of mine.

Losing the Second Battle of New Orleans

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:47:53 -0400

Why is nobody nationwide paying any attention to the new disaster in New Orleans? Katrina was an act of nature. The oil spill was an act of stupidity. This third great disaster, however, is an intentional act by the old-boy network, and they’re winning. What’s at stake?
Ever heard about about when Robert Moses tried to ram an expressway through the middle of Greenwich Village in the 1960’s? This is every bit as egregious. The basement and first level of Charity hospital was flooded during Hurricane Katrina. “Three weeks after Katrina, then-Governor Kathleen Blanco said that Charity Hospital would not reopen, even though the military had scrubbed the building to medical-ready standards.” (see full story here)
Now, the power brokers (including the Veteran’s Administration) are trying to demolish 27 square blocks of the historic mid-city neighborhood around Charity. They’re proposing to replace it with a suburban-style medical complex that has nothing to do with the character of New Orleans or its urban setting.
Let that sink in a minute... 27 square blocks! That’s comparable to the portion of the Lower Ninth Ward that was smashed when the levee burst.* But unlike the Lower Ninth, where most of the houses were postwar ranchers, scores of houses within the path of destruction of the hospital abomination are actually listed on the National Register, and many others are excellent as well. And yet there’s no outcry. Matter of fact, outside of the city of New Orleans, other than Roberta Gratz’s excellent article on citiwire, there has hardly been a whimper.
How can this be happening? How is it that we are proposing to throw away excellent buildings... again... and replace them with something less? When will we ever learn that sustainability is just meaningless marketing fluff so long as we continue to throw things away so easily?
To understand how it’s happening, just follow the money. Billions of dollars will be spent on the projects, which include both a VA hospital and an LSU hospital on the same mega-site. How can a city that has been so battered in recent years turn its back on an influx of cash like that?
Most cities tend to focus on big silver-bullet projects they hope will save them. Everyone wants the “Bilbao Effect.” More often, they get the “Renaissance Center Effect” instead: a big project on which lots of money has been spent, but which doesn’t revitalize the surrounding neighborhoods. Detroit got the Center, but not the Renaissance. In short, it was false advertising... as it almost always is. Here’s why:
The cash influx lasts as long as construction is ongoing, but even that is deceiving. Roughly half of typical construction cost is materials. If your town doesn’t produce those building materials, then that money immediately leaves town. The other half is for labor and administration. Projects of this size ordinarily draw a lot of attention from companies all over the country, so it’s highly unlikely that most of the buildings will be built by New Orleans contractors. That means that a substantial portion of the labor and administration costs is leaving town, too. So only a small fraction of those big budget numbers will actually get plowed into the New Orleans economy. And it’s temporary... lasting only until the completion of construction.
After that, the city is left with the repercussions of the design that was built. Far too often, the design is corrosive, as it is here. There are several problems:
* Trading historic buildings that look like they belong in New Orleans for buildings that look like they could be anywhere seems more like an esoteric architectural discussion than an economic development debate. But consider the fact that New Orleans takes in over $5 billion from tourism. Now ask yourself this: do tourists come to a city full of buildings that look like they could be anywhere, or do they instead go to places with a strong identity? The answer is clear.
* The hospital projects create a completely unwalkable environment around them. We know the physical characteristics of walkable streets, and also of unwalkable ones. It’s no mystery anymore where people will walk and where they won’t walk. And this hospital district fails every test of walkability. Why should walkability matter? Several reasons. Ever seen a tourist destination where people travel from far away just to drive around? Of course not. The billions of tourist dollars New Orleans rakes in each year are a direct result of the high walkability it has created.
* It’s not just tourism, either. It’s true that hospital patients come from all around, so they’re highly likely to arrive in a car (or ambulance.) But as fuel costs continue to rise, walkable workplaces are going to become more and more important to both employees and employers. With the pace of urbanization in China and India, it’s likely that between them, there may be a billion cars on the road in those two countries in a few years that don’t even exist today. Imagine those billion cars competing with America’s 300 million cars for gas, all at a time that we’re having to go to more hostile places to find oil. Not much doubt where the price of gas is going, is there? It’s not so hard to imagine a near future when corporate recruiters include the caveat that “you can walk to work from a cool nearby neighborhood. Too bad for these hospitals that it’ll never happen there due to their physical design.
* Even if you don’t work in the hospitals, the “walkability shadow” their suburban design casts can still impact you if you live or work nearby. The coolest and most valuable places in New Orleans are almost always the most walkable, as they are everywhere. Unwalkable places, on the other hand, are almost never the coolest in town. It’s quite apparent that walkability is a significant threshold for coolness in cities all over, including New Orleans. It’s equally obvious that coolness is a huge driver of increasing values: cool places increase in value, while uncool places are much more stagnant, or even decline. So the walkability shadow cast by this design is also a coolness shadow and a potential value shadow as well. If the walkability shadow only extends 3 blocks all around the hospitals, that means over 100 square blocks of real estate values could be impacted. Add up all the real estate value on those blocks. Even if it’s only $5 million per block, that’s a half a billion dollars worth of real estate value on 100 blocks. So even if the walkability shadow only makes difference of a few percentage points in value, we’re still talking about a huge potential impact.
* The hospitals sever the grid repeatedly by cutting off a number of streets. This is a bad idea on several counts. Going from destinations on one side to destinations on the other require more time, gas, and therefore money. This may not seem like a big item, but consider this: If each of the 9 streets cut off currently carry only 10,000 cars per day (probably a low number) and if the average detour is only 2 blocks each way (also a somewhat low number,) then that’s 9 x 10,000 x (2+2) = 360,000 extra blocks that citizens of New Orleans will have to drive every day. At 350’ per block, that’s nearly 24,000 miles per day that New Orleans residents will have to drive out of their way because of cutting these streets... roughly the distance to go all the way around the world... every day! And at an average speed of 15 miles per hour (counting stopping,) that’s a waste of 1,600 hours per day by residents having to drive around this thing. New Orleans’ Living Wage is nearly $10/hour, which means that the impact of clipping the streets in terms of time wasted is $16,000 per day. That’s on top of the costs of driving.
I could go on, as there are many other detrimental aspects of these designs, but let’s listen to some of the locals who have been bravely fighting this monstrosity with very little outside support until now. Michael Rouchell is a local architect and preservationist who has been prolific in his writing, including this post on Roberta Gratz, this cost comparison of renovating Charity versus building new, and this overview of the whole sordid affair, which includes excellent illustrations.
Michael pointed me to a number of other resources, including the Save Charity Hospital blog, the Foundation for Historical Louisiana’s page on the wasting of Charity, and Inside the Footprint.
Gate Pratt, another local architect who’s also fighting, suggested these resources as well: PreserveNation has weighed in on the issue, as has the Louisiana Landmarks Society. Save Mid-City Houses is a blog devoted to the fight.
Michael and Gate are two of a small but committed band of preservationists in New Orleans who have been doing the street-fighting, but they’re exhausted, and just about out of time. The Mayor just established a 45-day final review period, but if nothing changes, then the rumbling noise you’ll hear will be the bulldozers cranking up to level block after block of historic structures.**
The bottom line is this: the detrimental aspects of this design will cost the city more in the long run than the billions of dollars spent on its construction. Please help by lending your voice to the effort to save New Orleans from this mammoth act of disastrous short-sightedness. Say something! In 45 days, it will be too late.

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

Corrections:
* “... comparable to the portion of the Lower Ninth Ward that was smashed...” refers to the portion that was physically smashed by the force of the water, not just flooded. This was roughly the first 3 blocks from the levee. At 10 blocks wide, that was essentially 30 square blocks.
** Michael told me this evening that only the LSU portion of the project got the 45-day review period. The bulldozers are already demolishing the historic houses of the VA portion, so timing is critical.

BP or Us?

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:53:32 -0400

Who’s the biggest culprit in the Gulf disaster? Everyone’s talking tough about BP and their culpability. The President, in my opinion, said exactly what he had to say about the catastrophe 36 hours ago. Late last night, I saw where one lawmaker, referring to BP CEO Tony Hayward’s testimony before congress later today, said “They’re going to take his hide off, as they should.” All reports point to a corporate culture of risk-taking at the expense of safety, the story says. There’s talk of extracting massive reparations from BP for damages to the region.
This is reasonable. Livelihoods are being lost. In all likelihood, thousands of jobs will be lost as a result of the fact that you can’t fish there anymore. And it isn’t just commercial fishermen, either. The sport fishers support local hotels, restaurants, retail, and the like.
And that’s only the human side of it. Most of the victims in this disaster can’t hire attorneys for a class-action lawsuit. Countless creatures are dying, and precious wilderness is being spoiled for decades, or even generations. We likely have very little idea what the long-term toll to the environment will be. So clearly, BP should pay.
But the BP blood-lust, and the countless newspeople who are fanning those flames, are completely missing the real point. Because the ultimate fault lies not so much with some foreign corporation, as with us. We are to blame, and we’re going to cause even more of these disasters. How can that be?
We’ve created a suburban nation, where the only way to get around is to drive. The easy oil to support that lifestyle has been pumped years ago, so oil companies are having to go to greater and greater lengths to find new reserves. Much has been made over the fact that the gusher is buried a mile deep in the Gulf. Drilling so deep was unthinkable just a few years ago, but expect it to become much more common in the near future. Here’s why:
Two really big things are happening at once: We are arguably reaching worldwide Peak Oil right about now, a condition that was predicted in 1956 by Shell Oil geoscientist M. King Hubbert. We reached Peak Oil in the lower 48 states of the US in 1970. Since then, we have pumped less and less oil as reserves have dwindled. The same thing has happened or will happen in other countries, of course. No finite resource lasts forever.
The other really big thing happening right now is the fact that in China and India alone, there are roughly 2-1/2 billion people who have until recently lived in very low-impact agrarian settings who are now moving to the city... and that’s not counting other populous nations like Brazil that are going through similar changes.
In the US, we have roughly 300 million cars for 300 million people. If China and India do 2-1/2 times as our ratio of cars to people, then there will still be a billion cars on the road in those countries in a few years that don’t even exist today. Combine that with the fact that oil supplies are going to decline, and any student of Economics 101 knows we have a major problem.
So whether or not we put BP out of business, we’ll be clamoring for whatever oil companies remain to keep drilling, and they’ll have to keep going to more treacherous lengths to extract the stuff. And as all humans do, they will occasionally have accidents. The problem is that these increasingly inhospitable sites raise the stakes. The harder it is to get to, the bigger the risk and the worse the accident. It is going to happen again! More frequently. And the damage will be worse.
So who’s really to blame? In the words of the long-ago cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” It’s us, and our suburban lifestyle, that have created the massive demands for oil, because it simply isn’t possible to live in sprawling suburbs without driving everywhere. We drive to work, to shop, to school, to worship, and to play. We have no choice because of the design of our cities... if you live in the suburbs, try walking to work. It’s likely so far that you just might get there by quitting time. But the walk would be so dangerous that you just might not make it in one piece.
What’s the solution? There are several, actually, and it’s high time to get to work on them. First, we really must quit building our world in its currently highly segregated fashion, with subdivisions, shopping malls, office parks, and pods of other uses connected only by massive roads. The New Urbanism movement has been working on solutions to this for years, and they’re really quite good at what they do. Next, we can’t just discard the suburbs... far too many people have their life’s savings tied up in their homes there, and most of them are unlikely to be able to walk away, even as the price of gas skyrockets as the reality of Peak Oil hits home. So we’ve got to find ways of repairing the suburbs to transform them into real hamlets, villages, and towns, where you can live, work, shop, learn, worship, and play, all within walking distance. Fortunately, the New Urbanists have been working on that, too. Look for the Sprawl Repair Manual, to be released shortly. If we get to work now, we just might be able to turn the tide before another disaster occurs.

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

the Original Green and the Transect

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:14:45 -0400

As promised, here’s the first Original Green post by another voice... this one is by Ann Daigle. If you have noteworthy insights on issues either surrounding or central to the Original Green, please write them up and send them in. This blog should be our voices, not just my voice.

For over 5,000 years, people have built settlements. They gathered together for safety and economy, and formed societies to share resources and responsibilities. While the earth and its civilizations are vast, people and the settlements they built are remarkably similar. Very early on, humans recognized that the impermanence of life could be overcome through a society’s built legacy – and that what they built formed lasting impressions about their civilization.
Note from Steve: I’m illustrating Ann’s post with images from the French Quarter of New Orleans because it’s Ann’s adopted hometown.
No matter what country or culture, what geography or climate, permanent villages, towns and cities shared (and still share) particular design characteristics thanks to the similar aspirations and physical makeup of their inhabitants. The way they grew was organic and naturally sustainable.
Building followed eight simple rules that ensured people’s and community’s needs were met:
• Settlements were close to food and water sources to nourish inhabitants,
• They were easily accessible to better foster society, governance and commerce,
• People were able to meet their daily needs within easily walkable distances,
• Buildings and public spaces were safe and secure,
• Land use and buildings were frugal to conserve resources,
• Buildings and public spaces were durable and enduring so they lasted for generations,
• Buildings were flexible so that interiors could be accommodated for changing times, and
• Places were built to be beautiful so they were lovable, comfortable and made people happy.
Lasting settlements grew at choice locations near abundant natural resources. These locations and the settlement layout maximized environmental and geographic conditions to offer protection from wild animals and human enemies. They were strategically accessible for trade by land or water, and shared paths for exploration.
When people settled, they built communities in compact configurations that leveraged available resources and provided internal safety for the people and their possessions. The design they chose expressed the favored customs and aspirations of their society. They set aside key sites – the highest and best land – for important buildings and shared spaces, and the most fertile land for grazing and farming.
Early builders developed geometries for stable buildings with locally available materials. Their designs maximized assets of light and air, while minimizing impacts of rain, harsh sun and wind. More valuable permanent materials, difficult techniques and ornamentation were saved for buildings that housed important community functions so that the cultural, social, spiritual and economic longevity of the society could be furthered for posterity. Shared housing was substantial. Individual houses were less permanent, a characteristic that paralleled the mortality of individual residents.
As settlements grew and prospered, people organized their buildings in more formal and sophisticated configurations that favored efficiency, accessibility and ambiance, and that brought comfort and delight to inhabitants. Street widths and spaces between buildings were appropriate to the climate and topography, as were building heights and details. Street size and connectivity facilitated mobility and way-finding by pedestrians, and paired with strategically placed buildings, generated a comforting sense of enclosure. As early as 2,000 BC, dimensions were codified into regulations to ensure all building was compatible and to promote “equal ability to enjoy property.”
Public space was balanced with private to support social mores and customs and reinforce the importance of common goals. Special public gathering places were carefully selected at central intersections so that all paths lead to them. Bounded with the most important buildings, these spaces were beautifully framed and ornamented like grand outdoor rooms. Physically and symbolically they were the centers of community, and provided a stage for gatherings.
Comfortable arrangements of houses, shops and religious, government and institutional buildings reflected important economic relationships. Shops were situated at intersections and congregated together for easy access and visibility. The majority were at the centers near key gathering spots and public buildings. Housing surrounded this urban core of activity. Most were raised above the streets in upper stories above modest shops and offices where residents made their living.
Buildings closest to the center shared permanent materials, and accommodated as many people as comfortable in close proximity to the center where they could enjoy the vast array of services and civic life. Houses further away were less permanent, and less defensible. Street intersections were punctuated with shops to provide daily necessities. The urban fabric eventually feathered into less-formal arrangements of sheds, farms and fields at the settlement’s edge, beyond which wilderness reigned.
The organic growth of settlements followed geography and topography. As growing populations and the need for services increased, compact neighborhoods were replicated, growing next to one another so that new and more precious resources could be shared at their edges. The overall pattern that formed towns and cities resembled a constellation, with satellites of smaller commercial nodes encircling the major center. All were connected and easily accessible, generally equidistant from the center and one another, with numerous pathways to get from one place to another.
The natural inclination of early settlers and builders to build sustainably is what architect and town designer, Steve Mouzon, calls, “the Original Green.” Every decision about how, why and where the community and buildings were formed was guided by rational environmental, economic and cultural reasons. The organization of spaces and the building techniques that worked best were replicated, modified and enhanced, then replicated again by successive generations. Successful solutions eventually became what we call, traditions.
One of the most obvious historic patterns inherent in all communities throughout civilization and across all cultures is what planners today have named the “rural to urban Transect of human settlement.” It reflects the Original Green principles, and has been researched and analyzed internationally. It now forms the framework for policy and codes for community building that are healthy and sustainable.
The Transect is observable in all walkable pre-automobile and pre-zoning code communities, and in most places built before the era of Modernist urban and building design. It (or its remnants) is often recognized as the locations in today’s cities and towns that feel authentic and have a greater sense of place and local character. The Transect can be viewed in ancient Chinese scrolls, maps of 1700 London, illustrations of 1850 New Orleans and in photographs of 1900 San Francisco.
At its most simple, the Transect is a gradual change and undulation in character as one moves from the city center to the rural edge. More complexly, the Transect borrows from environmental study. It describes the city as a series of “human habitats” that like natural ecosystems are at their healthiest when they co-exist, are integrated, mutually beneficial and self-sustaining.
For planning and coding purposes, the Transect can be expressed as a hierarchy of “Transect Zones” that exist within a sustainable city from its center to its edge. Planners have identified six “T-Zones” that are evident in healthy, walkable places in varied mixes and patterns: (T6) Urban Core, (T5) Urban Center, (T4) Urban General, (T3) Suburban, (T2) Rural and (T1) Natural.
Transect zones do not exist alone, as monocultures, but rather work in concert with other T-Zones to form complete neighborhoods. The most delightful places are those in which transition from T-zone to T-zone is fine-grained and complex. Real neighborhoods are not subdivisions, but rather walkable places with a mix of uses, housing types and public spaces, such that people can meet their basic daily needs within a five to ten minute walk. Historically neighborhoods cover a ¼ mile radius “pedestrian shed,” which is an approximate five-minute walk from center to edge.
Here’s an example of the French Quarter’s T3:
All T-Zones share similar elements - they all have buildings, landscape, infrastructure, public and private spaces. However, the elements of each zone also have distinct characteristics that make each habitat or zone unique. For instance, while barns are common buildings in T2 Rural, they are inappropriate buildings for the Urban Center. Likewise townhouses belong in Urban areas, but are inappropriate in Suburban or Rural zones.
In general, as one travels from Urban to Rural areas, density, building height, the mix of uses and public amenities are reduced, and the natural landscape becomes more dominant. Important civic buildings, commercial and mixed-use buildings give way to sparsely sited houses, then to farms and agriculture, and there are fewer opportunities for entertainment, culture and socialization. Streets and sidewalks move from formal hardscaped boulevards and avenues to unpaved roads with swales and nature paths.
Here’s some of the French Quarter’s T4...
The characteristics of T-Zones, while sharing common elements and similarities, also vary in regions based on local geography, climate, social culture and building traditions. Their evidence can be observed, analyzed, measured and documented, and the most desirable characteristics entered into form-based codes and polices for new and infill development.
Planning, coding and (re)building a neighborhood with a mix of Transect Zones ensures that what came naturally at one point in city development - the places that people love and admire - can once again become the DNA of growth. Transect Planning is based on the premise that for people to be happy and healthy throughout their lives they must have access to the full diversity of rural to urban habitats within their community – ideally within walking distance. This mirrors the basic principles of the Original Green, and emphasizes the idea that sustainability and human happiness go hand in hand – naturally.
... and this is a sample of the French Quarter’s T5:
The goal for a city seeking sustainability is to nurture authentic places that accommodate the Original Green via a full set of Transect habitats. This gives residents the option to “age in place” by offering opportunities for children, young singles, families and those in their prime to safely live, work, shop and play within their neighborhood.
Just as the gulls on the seashore could not exist without the wetlands or upland forests, so man cannot exist without access to urban civilization or the rural landscape. Suburban places, no matter how seemingly pastoral, cannot exist as monocultures without farmland and wilderness or the greatest achievements of urbanity.
The Original Green and the Transect provide for places – and life - that is enriched with quality. This is the DNA of “Community Building.”

~Ann Daigle

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on Steve’s Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

Opening Up the Original Green

Tue, 25 May 2010 22:05:44 -0400

I believe it’s time to open up the Original Green... let’s discuss your ideas on how best to do it. I’ve always intended to open it up for everyone to use once it properly matured. Andrés Duany followed a similar course with the Transect, holding it close to the vest until it was robust, then releasing it for everyone to use. Today, the Transect is broadly useful to many people. There’s no reason the Original Green can’t be widely useful once released, too.
The last several weeks have been fascinating on several counts, including the fact that the Original Green book has been released, but it’s possible that the most important event might have been the CNU Open Source strategy session on the opening of the Original Green. Here are some of the things we discussed, in the order in which we discussed them:
Voice
Every Original Green blog post to date has a single voice. That’s about to change. Ann Daigle wrote a piece on the Original Green and the Transect that will become this blog’s next post. Look for it in the next few days. If you have noteworthy insights on issues either surrounding or central to the Original Green, please write them up and send them in. This blog should be our voices, not just my voice. I’d like nothing more than for there to be such a flood of great ideas that my posts become a small minority of the total number.
Patterns
We’re going to find a way to build a resource bank of Original Green patterns that everyone can contribute to. Likely, it will be a wiki of some sort. I’ll set the graphic standards, then everyone will draw up their own patterns. The standard likely will be similar to that which I’ve set up for the Living Tradition series of books so that patterns from this series can be used, jump-starting the process.
Principles
We’ll develop a series of illustrated Original Green principles that anyone can download from the site. The idea is that if your project embodies Original Green principles, you ought to be able to promote it as such, without having to write up every word and draw every drawing from scratch. Obviously, the idea here is to help those who are upholding Original Green principles to set themselves apart from others who are not.
Standards
This one will likely take some time to develop, and we need to do other things first, but Original Green principles could eventually lead to Original Green standards. Could this turn into a rating system someday? Possibly. What about LEED? This system should be supportive of LEED, not competitive with it. If we move forward with this, my objective would be to create a simple and transparent system that does two things: rates places and rates buildings. Multiply your place rating by your building rating to get the total rating, so a good building in a bad place doesn’t get it, nor does a bad building in a good place. One person should be able to produce a neighborhood rating in an hour or less. One person should also be able to produce a building rating in an hour or less. And it should be free. Quoting from Apple, it should be “a rating system for the rest of us.”
Creative Commons
We’ll look into Creative Commons licensing to help assure that the free resources are not misused. I don’t yet know precisely how this will work, but the intent is to make sure that both the core principles and the resources can spread freely.
Presentations.
A few of the Original Green presentations given to date are already posted on this site’s Presentations page. Eventually, I’d like to post most of them, or at least most of the recent ones. Download them and use them wherever they’re useful in your work. The only thing I ask is that you don’t alter the images or the text on any of the slides... but feel free to pull out the slides you need and rearrange them any way you like. And if anyone asks, tell them where you found them, so that they might find something useful here, too.
Original Green Buildings
If you either find a building that’s especially representative of Original Green principles and patterns, whether it’s new or whether it’s old, please photograph it, write a story on it, and send it in. It can even be one of your buildings... just make sure that it is as Lovable, Durable, and Flexible as it is Frugal. I’ll eventually take the best of these and write a book about them.
Original Green Places
I plan to do the same thing with Original Green Places. Matter of fact, I’ve already done one blog post on South Main. Take a look at it as an example of the amount of writing and photography you’d need. As you can see, you don’t need a ton of images... just make sure they’re good ones. Also, please follow the general layout of the article, stepping through each one of the Original Green foundations the place fulfills.
What do you think? Let’s talk about it!

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

A Gift to the Street

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 07:23:00 -0400

There is no greater expression of neighborliness than showing kindness to someone you may never know. We can give gifts to strangers in person, of course, but our buildings can do it, too. Imagine what your neighborhood would be like if every home and shop gave a gift to the street! Wouldn’t it encourage you to walk more, where you could savor those gifts, rather than just zipping by in a car? And as we’ve discussed here on numerous occasions, encouraging walkability is one of the most important things you can do to make your neighborhood healthier and more sustainable. There are several types of gifts you can give to the street:
Refreshing
A Gift to the Street can refresh people. The most active way of refreshing people is by providing a sidewalk cafe, such as the one shown here. But there are simpler ways, too, such as a simple water fountain along the street, or a much larger street fountain which children can run through on a simmering summer day.
Sheltering
This shopfront gives several Gifts to the Street, including sheltering people who stand under the awning from sun and rain. There are other good ways of sheltering people. A gallery can be as light and lacy as those lining the streets of New Orleans’ French Quarter, shielding passers-by from torrential Gulf Coast downpours. A colonnade is very similar, except that it’s much more heavily constructed, supported by brick or stone piers. An arcade does the same job, reaching across the sidewalk to shelter those walking by under its shade... the only difference is that it’s supported by arches instead of a beam.
Delighting
This frontage garden has no place for the owner to sit, because it’s too public. Rather, it exists solely to delight those who pass by. Frontage gardens are by far the most common forms of gifts to the street that delight people. Occasionally, there are others, however. Civic art can serve this purpose, for example.
Directing
Sometimes a gift to the street serve to direct people along their way by proving a goal at the end of a path, such as the steeple of this chapel on the hill. Planners call this a “terminated vista” because at the end of your view, you see something to walk towards, helping to entice you along the way. Vista terminations are usually tall, so that they can be seen at a great distance.
Entertaining
Some gifts are simply entertaining, such as this storefront which has many things to entice the eye. People “window-shop” on Main Streets or High Streets where there are many entertaining storefronts, for example. We normally think of entertainment as something where we watch others play or dance, but an entertaining gift to the street makes our eyes the performers as they dance around on many interesting things.
Informing
The sundial is an ancient method of informing people of the time. More recently, the wall-mounted clock does the same thing.. You might ask “but what about a billboard; doesn’t that inform people, too?” It does... but is it a gift? Not at all. It’s asking you, either directly or indirectly, to buy something. A gift asks nothing in return.
A Gift to Help Them Remember
Memorials remind future generations of the things that their forbearers found most important, such as this memorial to the citizens of this city who died in World War I.
A Place to Rest
There is often no gift so welcome as the gift of rest. The sidewalk bench is an obvious gift of rest, but there are other ways to provide this gift. Wanda is resting here in front of the New Old Inn across from the River Windrush in Bourton-On-The-Water on her 50th birthday. (Sorry, I just had to tell the whole story on that one because those Brits have such a knack with names!) But in any case, she’s resting against a stone bollard with a thoughtfully rounded top edge which makes for a comfortable surface to lean onto for a while as you decide where to go next.
Gifts to the street are one of the top ten things you can personally do to be more sustainable, as described in the Original Green [Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability]. It will be released a week from today (May 7.) If you’re in Miami, please join us for the South Beach Launch Party!
The book outlines three top tens: the top ten things we’re doing now to be green that can’t work, the top ten things our nations and our cultures should be doing if we want to be truly green, and the top ten things each of us individually can do by ourselves to be more green. Some of the items near the top of this last list might require major changes in your life, and might take a while to accomplish, such as living where you can walk to the grocery, or making a living where you’re living.
A gift to the street, however, is different. Depending on which gift you want to give, it’s actually possible to do some of these things today! So let’s get started!

~Steve Mouzon

Original Green Book Launch Party Next Friday!

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:22:13 -0400

If you’re on South Beach next Friday night (May 7,) please stop by Books & Books at 927 Lincoln Road between 7 and 9:30 for the Launch Party of the Original Green book! I’ll be signing books if you’re interested in one. Please RSVP to Ty Reid if you can make it... thanks!
Beyond that, there will be book tour destinations posted, beginning with the Congress for the New Urbanism in Atlanta. Other events are in the works. If you’re on facebook, please go to the Original Green book page and click “Like,” and well keep you up on the events as they unfold.
*********************
From the earlier post...
18 months after work on the book began, the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability] is complete! ... Here’s how it’s laid out:
The first chapter, “What’s the Problem?” is a Top 10 list of the things we’re doing to be green, but which are not winning strategies. Each has a secret (or with some, not-so-secret) flaw that prevents it from achieving real sustainability.
The second chapter, “What Can We Do?” is also a Top 10 listing of the most important principles that should underlie real sustainability. Several of the mechanisms described here are nowhere to be found in most current green discussions, but they should be. I serialized these first two chapters on this blog, beginning a year ago today... Because of many comments posted on this blog, and also much off-list email discussions, many parts of these chapters have been refined, so what’s contained in the book will be improved from what you read here.
The third chapter, “What’s the Plan?” outlines the Original Green, which begins with sustainable places, in which we can then build sustainable buildings. Sustainable places are nourishable, accessible, serviceable, and secure. Sustainable buildings are lovable, durable, flexible, and frugal.
Everything until this point deals with big-picture stuff that needs to be done by regions, by cultures, and by nations. The fourth chapter, however, gets personal. “What Can I Do?” is a Top 10 list of the things that each of us can do individually to help become more green. It begins with things we can do easily, and moves up to the life-changing things that make the greatest impact.
The book closes with a Resources chapter that includes websites, blogs, Apps, and books that support Original Green principles. After the index and glossary, it closes with a page on the New Urban Guild’s Project:SmartDwelling.
~Steve Mouzon

Earth Day - A Symptom of Our Disease?

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:11:45 -0400

Is it possible that Earth Day, conceived as an event to raise environmental awareness, is actually part of our immense environmental problem? Let that sink in a minute, then let’s consider the facts:
Take almost any metric of environmental impact and look where the charts have gone for the past forty years. The water and the air are definitely cleaner, but those changes were mandated on a relatively few industrialists, because there are tens of thousands of times as many people as there are industrial corporations. But how about the metrics that involve us? Are we driving more? Are we consuming more stuff? Are we building bigger houses? Are we building them further out from where we work? Are we fatter? Is it because we’re consuming more food? Is that food coming from further and further away? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. So after 40 years of Earth Day, all the metrics of our own behavior are getting worse.
I clearly remember the first Earth Day 40 years ago; I was ten years old at the time, and in fourth grade. My school made a really big deal of it. I recall the great optimism of those days, when we thought we might finally be making a difference. My mother would shortly open a health food store, and she regularly had lecturers come in and speak about the more natural ways of doing things. Hopefulness hung thickly in the air.
So how could we have gotten it so wrong? Do you remember Earth Hour a few weeks ago? Everyone was supposed to cut off their lights for one appointed hour early in the evening. Did you do it? Did it make you feel good? But was it a bit inconvenient? Stubbed your toe on something you couldn’t see, or stumbled over something? Have you cut off your lights more often as a result? I didn’t think so.
Here’s the problem: Annual events that require us to give up something for an hour or a day in exchange for a warm fuzzy almost never result in long-term change. It’s simple human nature: we’ve filled our “warm fuzzy quota” for the environment (or whatever the cause is) and we’ve suffered a little bit. The natural reaction is to think “I certainly won’t be doing that tomorrow!” The net effect is that one-time events in which we’re inconvenienced a bit in exchange for feeling responsible may actually act like a vaccination against the very thing we’re trying to encourage! It’s a small dose that ensures we won’t get the big infection.
If we’re serious about making a difference, then several things must happen: Everyone must be involved. The manufacturers can’t get the job done just by making more efficient stuff. We won’t solve sustainability by going shopping. And if our behavior doesn’t change, our machines can’t save us.
So our behavior ought to change... but there’s a big problem with things we ought to do. Simply put, we often do what we want to do, but only infrequently do what we ought to do. The bottom line is that if we really want people to behave differently, we’ve got to entice them to do it, not nag them to do it. We will not scold the world to sustainability.
So what should we be enticing ourselves to do?
Here’s the Earth Day Top 10 I did last year that has a lot of ideas, but really it comes down to this: to cut stuff off as part of our daily life. To need less heating and cooling, and less electrical light. Less driving. Sounds a bit like suffering, until you realize that it actually results in a condition I call Living In Season, where you live in a way that you can throw the windows open much of the year.
Doing this means you’ll need to spend more time outside, getting acclimated to your local environment. You might spend some of that time in your neighborhood park, or in your garden. And your garden doesn’t have to be just ornamental; it can also help to nourish you. If your neighborhood really is a neighborhood instead of just a subdivision in sprawl, it’ll be compact, mixed-use, and walkable so that there are actually destinations to walk to, and it’s pleasant along the way. New Urbanists have been figuring out how to do this for years. They’re meeting next month in Atlanta... you might want to check it out. Some of these things aren’t possible today in a sprawl subdivision, but they’re also working on ways to repair sprawl, and to re-write the rules for how cities are built to be far more sustainable.
Our homes and shops need to change, too. Buildings must first be lovable, so that they will last. We need to build them with materials for the ages, not stuff that falls off in the driveway in ten years. And this isn’t just buildings; the rule should be: “Choose it for longer than you’ll use it,” or “choose stuff you can hand down to your grandkids someday, and they can hand down to theirs long after you’re gone.”
If this sounds a bit like some sort of American Eden; some paradise this country lost long before Earth Day began, then you’re exactly right... that’s precisely what it is, and can be again. My Original Green book, which will be released May 7, puts all these things into a coherent story. But if we want these things, then we need to stop doing things that temporarily make us feel good, and begin enticing people to make real change by building places and buildings where they will love to live. Does this mean we’ll have to rebuild much of what we’ve built in recent years. Yes. Isn’t that wasteful? Yes. But don’t worry... it’s falling down soon anyway, because it was never built to last.

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

Curing Cancer of the City

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 06:08:01 -0400

Sprawl is Cancer of the City, as we’ve discussed earlier. But what’s the cause? And what’s the cure? The answers might shock you. It all begins with the things we’ve been doing to the city for years:
We’ve polluted the air with our factories, our powerplants, and our cars. We’ve polluted the water not only with our factories, but also with things we spill from our cars and trucks, the detergents we use to do our laundry, and the chemicals we spread on our lawns. We’ve even polluted the earth when our chemicals seep into the soil.
We’ve trashed it building places and buildings that are so unlovable that they’re quickly abandoned, like this failed shopping center. Look how small all but one of the trees here are... this place probably isn’t even ten years old! This is the worst way to trash a city: by building places and buildings that are quickly discarded, left as a scab and then a scar on the city.
We’ve damaged the built environment by ramming huge highways through it. This used to be someone’s neighborhood. We’ve also damaged it by tearing down entire neighborhoods in our cities because we wanted buildings that were shiny and new, even if it meant losing thousands of buildings that were like old friends.
And we’ve made the built environment much more dangerous, primarily because of our cars. Most wild animals have long since either left places like this or become road kill. The one’s we’re killing and injuring now are ourselves. Cars kill tens of thousands of people every year and injure many more. Can you imagine trying to cross this street on foot? It’s even dangerous if you’re riding in a car!
Matter of fact, we’ve damaged the built environment so much that lots of people say “I can’t live there anymore.” And so they leave. But in doing so, they create the thing that spoils the environment worst of all: sprawl, or Cancer of the City. For fifty years, we’ve built our suburbs in a sprawling way, leap-frogging across the landscape, taking up far too much land. Here, you can see sprawl at the top of the picture about to gobble up lots of farmland. Other times, it gobbles up wetlands. Why is sprawl so bad? Let’s take a look:
Sprawl puts all the houses in subdivisions by themselves and spreads them out. If you’re at home and want to visit a friend at their house, it’s probably too far to walk, so you have to drive. Sprawl puts all the shops together in one district, then it spreads them out, too. Ever walk from Barnes & Noble to the Old Navy? Sprawl puts all the offices together in another district, then it spreads them out, too, with huge parking lots and landscaped berms in between, so that you have to drive everywhere. Think about the lunch-hour traffic jams. Sprawl puts places to play together in huge recreation centers. Because you have to drive there, and because there are usually several types of sports there, the parking lots in front of them separate them from everything else. And of course, the schools are in their own district, too, normally out on the highway at the edge of town. They’re so big today that kids have to ride in from miles away.
By separating all these things, we’ve gotta drive everywhere. At home and wanna go shopping? Gotta drive. At work and wanna go home? Gotta drive. At the rec center and wanna get something to eat? Gotta drive. So whatever you’re doing, if you want to do something else, you’ve gotta drive.
So why does sprawl spread everything out? Here’s why:
If you’ve just moved out of a city that’s been spoiled, then it’s probably because you’ve felt the pollution, the trash, the damage, and the danger of the spoiled city closing in tightly around you. You want out, towards the country, where the air is clean, and everything is neat, tidy, and safe. And you want more space. A lot more space, where you can kick up your heels. So everything gets spread out, like we’ve already seen. It’s the natural reaction we should expect to the pollution, the trash, the damage, and the danger.
Why is it bad to spread & separate? Because when things spread out like this, you have to drive everywhere. This pollutes our air and water like we’ve already seen. Sprawl is already trashed before it’s even fully built by unlovable buildings and places. Ever seen a lovable Wal-Mart? Sprawl damages the land by disturbing far too much of it, and leaving useless strips of undeveloped land in between. And it’s a very dangerous place, because it’s filled with streets and highways that are big and fast.
It’s all a cruel joke because when we build sprawl, the things we fled the spoiled city to escape will soon spoil our suburb, too. And so we move out of those suburbs to new suburbs we build even further out. And on and on it sprawls, eating up our land like cancer, leaving discarded, unwanted places behind. But we can’t go on this way, because we’ll run out of land someday, eating up the natural environment. What then? Sprawl is Cancer of the City... and it doesn’t just eat up the city, but it eats up the land for miles around it, too. And we all know how cancer ends.
Suburbs aren’t evil; sprawl is evil. Cancer and sprawl are unhealthy growth. There’s also such a thing as healthy growth, which we’ll talk about in a minute. it’s only bad growth when the wrong thing grows. And for many years, we’ve been building our suburbs in a sprawling pattern.
What’s the cure? There’s a light around the corner now. The cure for Cancer of the City is to build a sustainable city, and not let it get spoiled by pollution, trash, damage, and danger, or heal it if it’s already spoiled. What does it mean to be sustainable? It means “keeping things going in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future.” What is a “healthy way?” It’s a way that’s free from illness or injury, which for a city, are things like pollution, trash, damage, and danger. What’s an “uncertain future?” It’s one where we don’t know what the price of gas will be, or when we might run out of it. In an uncertain future, it’s much better to rely on things nearby rather than things further away.
So a sustainable city is a healthy city. And precisely because it is a healthy city, people don’t feel like they need to flee to sprawl. This means that countless acres of the natural environment are preserved instead of gobbled up with endless sprawl. Put another way, we can’t have a healthy natural environment around us if we don’t have a healthy city. This means that we need to design and build cities differently than how we’ve been building them recently, if we want to cure Cancer of the City.
If you’re serious about helping cure Cancer of the City, then you need to be at CNU 18 in Atlanta next month. The Congress for the New Urbanism has for years been leading the charge to find a cure for sprawl, both in the new places we build and in the repair of sprawl that’s already there. This year’s CNU focus is New Urbanism: Rx for Healthy Places. Come help us find the cure!
~Steve Mouzon

Parks vs. Recreation Centers

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:34:03 -0400

Parks are essential elements of vibrant and sustainable neighborhoods, while recreation centers get most of their DNA from super-sizing and sprawl. Both parks and recreation centers foster fitness activities, but there are several differences crucial to the health of the neighborhood and the greenness of the city.
Parks are places where people can enjoy countless outdoor activities. See the patch of grass the people above are sitting on? Earlier that morning, it might have been used for a pick-up softball game. After these people leave, a few kids might kick around a soccer ball. Later in the day, you might see a couple young lovers on a stroll along the shadows at the edge of the field. Most activities are relatively unplanned. Most often, park recreation planning goes something like “hey, let’s go down to the park and see if anyone wants to play ball,” like the guys in the picture below. You don’t have to pay admission or get permission to go to the park.
Recreation centers, other than the fact that they also involve physical activity, are quite the opposite. Recreation centers have extensive facilities for certain organized sports: a swimming pool, baseball diamonds, soccer fields, tennis courts, basketball courts, etc.
Because recreation centers require major investments, they often have to charge admission of some sort to help pay back that investment. You also may need to be a member of the recreation center’s association to gain access. As a result, many of the activities in recreation centers occur behind walls or chain-link fences.
Once, a basketball court or two, a baseball diamond, a couple tennis courts, or even a soccer field were often tucked around the edges of many parks. More recently, however, our penchant for super-sizing everything, plus our deference to major sporting events that might happen only once or twice a year have resulted in the need to expand one or two of everything to dozens of everything. Two tennis courts are now no longer good enough... gotta have a couple dozen in order to possibly host a city-wide tournament at some point in the future. One baseball diamond? Forget it... gotta have eight so you can host a tournament there, too. There are several hidden problems with these super-sized recreation centers:
You can’t walk your dog on the tennis courts. Or in the swimming pool. Or on the basketball court. A tennis-focused recreation center, for example, is only useful to people who play tennis. Because recreation centers focus on single-use recreational uses (like sprawl does with land use in general,) they eliminate fields for dog-walking, tossing a frisbee, pick-up games of whatever you want to play, or just laying in the sun or sitting on the park bench watching the world go by.
Do we need specific-use recreational facilities like tennis courts, swimming pools, etc.? Of course. It’s just a question of proportion.
Here’s one of the problems with proportion: If only a fraction of the population within walking distance of a recreation center play tennis, then building enough tennis courts to hold a major tournament means that most of the people playing on those courts will have to drive to get there. There are several sustainability ramifications here: Most obvious is the fact that you’re burning a lot of gas to get there. But you also have to surround the recreation center with lots of parking for all the cars. Plus, you’re clogging the streets of the neighborhood with traffic. Also, because the recreation center doesn’t attract nearby neighbors for all the general-use stuff like dog-walking, you’re starving the neighborhood streets of pedestrians that would otherwise make the neighborhood more vibrant and safe as I described in this post.
There are a couple rules of thumb distinguishing between parks and recreation centers: First, parks are made up primarily of multi-use fields. This means that less than half of the space in a park should be dedicated to single-use recreational facilities. A much better number is less than one-fourth single use, with the vast majority being multi-use. Many great parks are completely multi-use.
There’s also the Grandstand Rule: If an activity needs a grandstand, it’s probably drawing a crowd from further around than just the neighborhood.
So is there a place for a recreation center? Yes: Out on the highway somewhere. They are large, expensive, sprawl-based facilities, but if your community can’t do without one, then put it where it belongs: where lots of traffic can get to it quickly and easily. But by all means, don’t put it in a neighborhood. It’s not a good neighbor. It needs to keep to itself.
Parks, on the other hand, are necessary parts of a sustainable neighborhood. Everybody should be within a five-minute walk of a park, and smaller playgrounds for kids should be scattered throughout the neighborhood so that every kid is within a two-minute walk of a playground. Town planners such as those at the Congress for the New Urbanism, of which I’m a member, support these park principles.
There is a growing threat to neighborhood parks today: they’re increasingly being eaten up for single-use recreational activities, so in effect, they’re being transformed into recreation centers right under our very noses! My own Flamingo Park in Miami Beach is in grave danger of this fate. Already, so much of the land has been given over to single-use activities that there are only two general-use fields left, and they constitute a ridiculously low percentage of the entire park. Now, the tennis advocates want to take one of those two fields so that they can add to the seventeen tennis courts they have already! Might as well change the name to the Flamingo Rec Center and build a new parking lot on the other remaining field to handle all the extra traffic!

~Steve Mouzon

Note: If any of the images above are useful to you, they’re available at high resolution for printing or download on my Zenfolio site. Just click on the image and it’ll take you there.

Havana vs. Sawgrass Mills Mall

Fri, 9 Apr 2010 11:14:59 -0400

Look carefully at the images above. On the left is La Habana Vieja, or Old Havana. It’s an entire city. And a great city... a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as a matter of fact. No US city has yet made that list. Renowned New Urbanist Andrés Duany calls Havana “Rome, 90 miles from Key West.”
On the right is Sawgrass Mills Mall, not far from Miami, including its outparcels. In both cases, I’ve included the roads and port facilities required to make each place function.
Here’s the kicker: both are shown at the same scale! The choice is almost unthinkable, but true: we can build a great city using less land than it takes to build a shopping mall!
Kaid Benfield has a must-read blog post today entitled The Environmental Paradox of Smart Growth. It deals at length with the environmental benefits of building more compactly.
But before the facts and figures, there’s the “blink test” written about incisively by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, where he makes the case that a first glance is often more accurate than long deliberation. The first glance here shows there’s simply far more stuff in the city than in the mall, which is made up primarily of parking lots and roads. Simply put, most of what we build today is mostly empty most of the time.
It’s not just about how full the land is, however, but about the character of what we’re building. Would you rather be in this picture, or at a mall?
The choice is clear: spending time in a city that’s a World Heritage Site is a memory you’ll retain for a lifetime, whereas a trip to the mall will be forgotten by the weekend.
What are some of the other “blink tests” we can do on cities versus malls? One really obvious one is that you can do almost anything you want in the city, while you can only shop at the mall. One of the Sawgrass Mills outparcels is a subdivision and another is the Bank Atlantic Center, which is the home of the Florida Panthers, but nobody ever walks between them and the mall. Want to go home? You’ve gotta drive. Want to go to work? You’ve gotta drive. Want to play ball? You’ve gotta drive.
Here’s another test: What are the chances the shopping mall will be there in a hundred years? Malls, as we know, are usually thrown up with the cheapest construction, with no intention that they’ll last very long. How sustainable is it to be littering our landscapes with throwaway buildings? I blogged some time ago about Cancer of the City, and will have more to say about it shortly, some of which involves throwaway buildings and throwaway places.
Meanwhile, Havana has been there for almost 500 years, and it’s easy to imagine it being there centuries into the future... provided that the next regime brings some financial prosperity. Castro’s revolution has impoverished Cuba so badly that most buildings have had no maintenance in the half-century since the revolution. But imagine what a shopping mall would look like in 50 years with no maintenance! Actually, it might be in a state of total collapse in less time than that if it were not maintained.
It’s no accident that great and sustainable cities tend to be more compact than shopping malls and office parks. Compactness contributes both to sustainability and to potential greatness by bringing things closer together. A building in a parking lot isn’t a place... it’s only a building. And landscapes composed of buildings in parking lots connected by networks of highways are neither destined for greatness, nor for being here for a very long time.
~Steve Mouzon

How Green is Grass?

Sun, 7 Mar 2010 10:52:54 -0500

Grass is not nearly so sustainable as you might think, for numerous reasons. This is a big problem, because grass occupies the largest area of countless American landscapes. The word “grass” has been synonymous with “green” for ages because of its color. But let’s take a look at its sustainability:
Grass is the one part of the landscape that requires maintenance every single week from spring to late fall. This maintenance requires a lot of time... either your time, or a lawn service you hire. But unlike trimming a hedge, which can be done manually, mowing grass also requires fuel. Most people use gasoline mowers, but even if you use an electric mower, the electricity is usually generated by converting some sort of fuel (coal or nuclear fuel, for example) to electricity.
But it isn’t just the mowing that’s a problem. Scraggly lawns are embarrassing to most people, while a lawn that is lush and green is usually a big source of pride to its owners. As a result, countless millions of dollars are spent each year on synthetic fertilizers to feed the grass, poisons that kill its pests, and other chemicals that cure its ills. A “well-maintained lawn,” therefore, usually causes more poisons and other chemicals to be spread across your property than anything else on your property.
That’s not the end of it, either. Grass looks great when it’s nice and clean, but it has the lowest tolerance of anything in a landscape except maybe concrete for imperfection. If leaves fall in a planting bed, nobody notices. They first become part of the mulch of the shrubs and trees in the bed, then eventually decompose to feed those shrubs and trees. But leaves (or other debris) falling on a lawn are intolerable today. Once, when our tolerance of imperfection was higher, we would simply rake the leaves in the fall, and that was that.
Today, it’s not so simple. Because everything has to look perfect all the time (almost to the point of looking plastic) we have to crank up the leaf-blower to blast all the little imperfections off the lawn. Everyone in the neighborhood knows when we fire it up because unlike the equally loud lawnmower, which usually runs at a single speed for long stretches, the leaf-blower is constantly being throttled up or down. So while you can eventually ignore the mower because of its monotone roar, the leaf-blower’s throttling means that it can’t be forgotten, making it “the nuisance heard ‘round the block.”
But the fact that leaf-blowers annoy all of your neighbors is not their worst characteristic... there’s more: Because 99% of the gas blowers are powered with 2-stroke engines, they emit tremendous quantities of greenhouse gases. As a matter of fact, they’re so bad that if you wanted to dump as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as an average gas-powered leaf blower, you’d need to drive a Hummer 100 miles! Put another way, the only way the Hummer could dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at the rate of a leaf blower would be to drive 100 miles per hour! When I first heard this several years ago, I couldn’t believe it, but I’ve checked multiple reliable sources, with very similar results. Rather than me posting a couple of them and asking you to believe it, just Google for yourself and you’ll see.
There are other issues, too. This paper from the California Environmental Protection Agency outlines several more of the problems, including health problem. Bottom line: be nice to yourself, your neighbors, and your planet; don’t use a leaf blower. Shouldn’t you spend your time outdoors listening to a fountain, to the songbirds, or to your children?
But let’s get back to grass... why use it? Grass is clearly useful for some things. If you’re looking for a play surface, for example, nothing is better because you can run on it a lot without damaging it, and can fall on it without hurting yourself (most of the time.) Countless people therefore say “I need a yard where my kids can play ball.” But the fact is, most yards are far too small to play a game of just about anything. The proverbial “baseball through the kitchen window” is testament to that. For full-scale games of soccer, football, or baseball, you need something the size of a neighborhood park, not a backyard.
So if you don’t put grass in your yard, what do you do instead? It’s somewhat more expensive in the beginning, but designing your property as a series of garden rooms is a great alternative. I did that with SmartDwelling I. Outdoor rooms that entice you to come outdoors acclimate you to the local environment and help you to live in season. There’s almost nothing you can do that has a bigger impact, because living in season means you can leave your heat pump off for long stretches, and the most efficient machine is one that is off.
I’ll blog soon about the particulars of building garden rooms instead of empty yards... there’s a wealth of really cool stuff you can do. The bottom line is that you can create a landscape full of outdoor living spaces, surrounded by lush landscape rather than just an empty lawn. Which sounds more enticing?
~Steve Mouzon

the Long Tail of Housing Demand

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:00:58 -0500

Builders made the same strategic blunder countless times leading up to the Meltdown: they focused on the sweet spot of the market. Today, the market is deluged with strikingly similar Sweet Spot Houses all over America. This may cause the housing recovery to take years longer than necessary, because banks won’t lend again and builders can’t build again until most of this huge oversupply of homogeneous houses is sold.
Chris Anderson’s excellent book The Long Tail describes the discovery of a powerful phenomenon of our aggregated age: The curve of available products begins with the “big head” of blockbusters and superstars on the left, but then drops off “sickeningly.” See how the curve seems to go quickly to zero? Before Amazon, everything after the big drop-off was invisible because no bricks-and-mortar store could afford to carry stuff with sales so low. Amazon was the first to aggregate these low sellers (books, to begin with) online, and what they discovered was that the sales curve extends further out to the right than anyone previously imagined. If companies are able to provide a nimble way of searching so that you can short-cut to the niche you want, the “long tail” of the sales curve extends almost forever. In many markets, there may actually be more sales in the long tail than in the short head of super-sellers and greatest hits, just as more light reaches your eye on a clear night from the billions of stars too faint to see than from the thousand or so that are actually bright enough to see.
New home construction pre-Meltdown had an extremely big head and essentially no tail at all because very little of the product fell outside of the sweet spot in most markets (3 bedrooms, 2-1/2 baths, 2,000 to 3,000 square feet... you know the drill.) Most variations involved the addition of bedrooms, baths, square footage, and extra living spaces, but even the mansions were still almost always the same house type: single-family detached, sitting near the middle of the lot. There were townhouses and condos as the housing supply curve dropped down, too, but even though they were not detached, their bedroom and bath counts were likely close to the norm.
And the crazy thing was that the so-called sweet spot wasn’t necessarily even the sweet spot of the market, but rather the sweet spot of previous sales. Running a business this way is closely akin to driving by looking in the rear-view mirror, where you can clearly see what you’ve just run over, but not what you’re about to hit.
There’s another half of the long tail equation that isn’t being discussed much. Anderson deals primarily with the long tail of supply, but that long tail would not exist except for the long tail of demand. It’s especially instructive to look at the long tail of housing demand, because it’s demand that’s been hideously under-served since even before World War II.
Consider this: people may have a home-owning life of sixty years or more, from their early to mid-twenties to their early to mid-eighties. The period of time that children are at home (assuming the heads of household ever have children) is roughly 30% of that time. So for 70% or so of your home-owning life, you’re saddled with a house larger than what you need. And it isn’t just size, either. The types are so similar that it seems we’ve forgotten how much housing once varied.
Take a walk through great old neighborhoods like the French Quarter of New Orleans, and you’ll find housing types we haven’t built in a hundred years: corner court mansion units, garden court flats, mews units on their own mews courts plus B-street mews units, carriage house units, double cottages, sideyard houses, corner court houses, townhouses & double townhouses, rear court houses, studio flats (real ones, not the ones that just use that name meaninglessly,) workshop lofts, and the live-work units that were the staples of Main Streets all across America. And that’s just some of the house types you’ll find in the French Quarter, which is just one neighborhood of one American city. Each old city has its own wealth of home types. Look at Beacon Hill in Boston, for example. Or Charleston. Or Alexandria.
The home types were so varied because the people were so varied... but today, the American population is more varied than ever before, even while our housing choices have become more bland. Nielsen Claritas has identified 66 market segments in their PRIZM system. Zimmerman/Volk Associates, long recognized as the foremost forward-looking market analysts of the New Urbanism, has identified a similar number of household types: everything from the New Bohemians to the Rustic Elders. None of these segments constitutes more than just a few percent of the market.
The Sweet Spot House that the builders once drooled over actually meets the needs of probably 20% of the market by serving several segments well: Full-Nest Exurbanites, New Town Families, Heartland Families, etc. But the other 80%? They’re poorly served, but the builders don’t feel like they can build for them because their segments might only be 1% to 3% of any given market. But that’s a dark illusion... the builders would be much better off serving these markets. Here’s why:
Let’s say that you’re a Young Digerati, and that a garden court flat would be perfect for you. Typically containing only one bedroom but just off Main Street, garden court flats are often a short walk from a B&B where guests can stay when they’re in town. It’s also a short walk from most of your other necessities of life, which suits you perfectly. Problem is, nobody is building them... nor have they built them in the past hundred years.
Now let’s say that you’re living in a city of 250,000 people, and that Young Digeratis are only 2% of the population of the city. That means there are 5,000 of you. Because Americans move roughly every seven years or so, that means that in any given year in your town, there are about 700 of you that are looking for a new house. What do you think a builder’s chance of success would be building 30 or 40 of these units that perfectly suit Young Digeratis, versus building the same old Sweet Spot House and competing with every other builder in town? The principles of supply and demand tell us that when there are 40 units that 700 people want, the clever builder who builds the garden court flats would have a Young Digerati bidding war on his hands.
Everyone would be better off. The Young Digerati population would love it. The builder would do strikingly better than ever before. And the town would be a more interesting place. It’s time for the building industry to wake up and start satisfying the long tail of the housing market.
~Steve Mouzon

Original Green Book is Finished

Mon, 8 Feb 2010 12:47:25 -0500

18 months after work on the book began, the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability] is complete! Since last posting to this blog on January 22, well over 100 new pages have been written. Here’s how it’s laid out:
The first chapter, “What’s the Problem?” is a Top 10 list of the things we’re doing to be green, but which are not winning strategies. Each has a secret (or with some, not-so-secret) flaw that prevents it from achieving real sustainability.
The second chapter, “What Can We Do?” is also a Top 10 listing of the most important principles that should underlie real sustainability. Several of the mechanisms described here are nowhere to be found in most current green discussions, but they should be. I serialized these first two chapters on this blog, beginning precisely one year ago today... wow, I didn’t realize that until just now! Because of many comments posted on this blog, and also much off-list email discussions, many parts of these chapters have been refined, so what’s contained in the book will be improved from what you read here.
The third chapter, “What’s the Plan?” outlines the Original Green, which begins with sustainable places, in which we can then build sustainable buildings. Sustainable places are nourishable, accessible, serviceable, and secure. Sustainable buildings are lovable, durable, flexible, and frugal.
Everything until this point deals with big-picture stuff that needs to be done by regions, by cultures, and by nations. The fourth chapter, however, gets personal. “What Can I Do?” is a Top 10 list of the things that each of us can do individually to help become more green. It begins with things we can do easily, and moves up to the life-changing things that make the greatest impact.
The book closes with a Resources chapter that includes websites, blogs, Apps, and books that support Original Green principles. After the index and glossary, it closes with a page on the New Urban Guild’s Project:SmartDwelling.
My editor is coming down from New York this weekend, and I anticipate we’ll spend several days on her edits. Once we’re finished, it will be ready to go to press. The target release date is March 15... stay tuned!
~Steve Mouzon

How the Simpler Way Works

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:28:49 -0500

We discussed the Simpler Way recently in this post; now, let’s take a closer look at how it works. The engine of the Simpler Way is the Classical-Vernacular Spectrum. The most classical building in an American state is often the state’s supreme court building or the state capitol. The most vernacular building in the state is a very simple barn. Everything else is located somewhere in between.
The classical end of the Classical-Vernacular Spectrum is the most refined architecture, and is very broad, spreading across entire continents. Europe, North America, and South America all share Western Classicism as their classical ideal. The most refined architecture of Asia, on the other hand, is a very different thing. But for the purposes of this discussion, let’s look at the Classical-Vernacular Spectrums of Europe and the Americas.
While many cultures of these continents have long shared the same classical ideal for their most refined architecture, the vernacular end of the spectrum is widely varied, as illustrated in the diagram above. The six places shown each once had strong living traditions of place-making and building-making based on regional conditions, climate, and culture.
the Regional Conditions
Regional conditions include things like topography: is it a mountainous region, a coastal plain, or a prairie region? The most sustainable ways of building are different in each. What are the most readily available building materials in the region? This matters more as we try to find closer sources of materials with which to build. And what natural risks does the region face? People living in places frequented by hurricanes need to build in a certain way in order to have a good chance of surviving them, while people living in earthquake zones have different concerns to have the best chances of survival. Some regions face conditions so severe that you can’t build strongly enough to endure them, such as tornadoes or volcanic eruptions. In those places, your only choice is to simply rebuild. But most other conditions are survivable if the architecture is smart enough.
the Regional Climate
The region’s climate is the most obvious source of sustainability patterns. Places that are hot and humid need far different architecture from places that are cold and dark, or places that are hot and dry. Some regional green patterns have to do with ways of either welcoming the warmth of the sun in cooler places (or in cooler times of the year in temperate places) or excluding its heat in hotter places (or hotter times of the year in temperate places, of course.) Other regional green patterns deal with moisture: In dry places, they collect water for many uses. In wet places, the bigger concern is getting water of torrential rains away from the building so the building doesn’t deteriorate and so the water doesn’t damage the surrounding landscape. Humidity is another source of green patterns. In dry places, rooms often cluster around enclosed courtyards to protect them against the wind, so that fountains and pools can create a more moist micro-climate than the surrounding bone-dry landscape. The architecture of humid regions finds ways of letting air flow freely through to lessen unhealthy growth of mold and mildew. Daylight is also a concern; places frequented by bright sunshine need shady environments where people can work, while places that are frequently cloudy and dark use many methods of enticing light into the buildings. The wind is another source of green patterns, because a cooling summer breeze is very welcome, whereas a cold winter wind is something to be deflected away. And in some places such as mountainous regions, the wind can be so strong most of the time that homes and workplaces always need to be shielded.
the Regional Culture
The human culture of the region can influence places and buildings in a number of ways. Some are as simple as color preferences, which help determine whether buildings are loved or viewed as odd foreign objects. Think of how strange a brightly-colored Guatemala courtyard house would look sitting side-by side on the street with the stone houses of a Cotswold village in England, for example. Other regional cultural influences can have a more basic effect. Regional skill sets are a classic example. Some still remain even today. For example, masonry buildings finished in stucco are still fairly affordable in Miami because that’s the way people build there. Even Habitat for Humanity builds that way, because their volunteers know how. But in the mid-South, stucco on masonry is very expensive because few people know how to do it. Once, nearly all the parts of a building depended on regional skill sets, and that may happen again as the Offshoring Reversal moves forward.
the Classical Convergence and Sustainability
So the regional conditions, climate, and culture create regional vernacular traditions as varied as the regions, but the Classical-Vernacular Spectrum of each region converges on the classical ideal as we move up the spectrum. What’s useful about that?
There’s at least one highly useful thing about this, from a green building perspective: Most places in the US didn’t have time to develop a robust Original Green living tradition between the arrival of European settlers and the beginning of the Thermostat Age. Native Americans had strong living traditions in most places, but those were discarded by the European settlers, illustrating why the regional culture is an essential part of the equation above.
The American places shown in the diagram above are some of the exceptions because they were settled so early. But for the others, how do we go about figuring out what the regional vernacular would have been had it had time to develop?
This is far more of an art than a science, but one way is to look at some of the best classical work in the region. Because good classical work must be done by a trained and thoughtful hand, there’s a good chance that if we look closely, we can see ways that the building diverges a bit from the classical ideal. Does it have more porches than what might be expected? How do its windows diverge in size, proportion, or count? What materials are used in its construction? Every place that the building diverges from the classical ideal is a potential hint at what the non-existent regional vernacular should possibly look like. And when we get to the vernacular end of the Classical-Vernacular Spectrum of the region, we’ll find the greenest architecture of the place.
the Questions
Here are two likely questions about this discussion: are we saying that highly classical architecture isn’t so green? And if the Native American architecture was so green, why not look to it for inspiration?
The Native American traditions of most regions are so organic that our culture, at least for today, would veto them. How many people do you know who would live in a teepee? Or a lodge built of sticks and branches? Architecture of the desert southwest is an exception, as it borrows much from Native American traditions.
As for the greenness of highly classical buildings, let’s consider this: clearly, they’re not so attuned to the regional climate, but highly classical buildings are usually built strongest of all, able to withstand the harshest conditions. For example, most of the highly classical buildings of the Gulf Coast were built of stone, and were untouched by Hurricane Katrina, even though lesser buildings all around them were demolished. And architecture at the top of the Spectrum is often the highest expression of the culture of that place, so while they respond less to the regional climate, they come through in spades in response to the regional culture and often the regional conditions.
Consider these aspects of responding to regional climate: highly refined public buildings such as cathedrals or courts aren’t places that you live, but rather places where you go for a limited time, then return home. Plus, you don’t get undressed there to bathe, change clothes, or to go to bed. Before the Thermostat Age, people would simply bundle up if they were going there in winter. In a Long Emergency of reduced energy sources, they could potentially do so again. Another type of highly classical building is the mansion of extremely wealthy people. No matter what the cost of energy is, the wealthiest people will always be able to power their homes. But there simply aren’t enough of these mansions in most places to make a blip on the energy consumption of the region, so as long as the people inhabiting them are OK with their utility bills, we don’t need to worry about them, either.
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is the last part of #7 in the top 10 things we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

Sharing Wisdom

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:11:52 -0500

The Sharing of Wisdom and the Involvement of Everyone are so interrelated that we could have lumped them into a single item, but they’re so important that it made more sense to tell two stories rather than one so as to cover them more thoroughly. Here’s how they fit together: The Sharing of Wisdom is essential if we hope to involve everyone in a sustainable future... and if we don’t involve everyone, we likely won’t have a sustainable future. Let’s look first at the most common ways that wisdom is already shared. Next, we’ll think about how we can do it better.
The three most common current ways of spreading wisdom, from the broadest to the highest, are public education’s way, higher education’s way, and the specialists’ way. Each has strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, those weaknesses prevent each of these ways from solving the problems of sustainability on their own. Fortunately, there’s a fourth and far more capable way that has been around since the dawn of time; we simply need to learn how to tap into it.
Public Education’s Way
Public education in most countries spreads wisdom very broadly, but not so high. It begins formally with pre-school, although parents almost always engage in some form of home-based learning before children enter their formal education. Often, it’s as simple as story-telling or reading with their children. Next comes elementary and then middle school. Formal public education in most places ends with the high school diploma.
Public education after graduation is mostly self-directed. Once, it consisted primarily of visits to the public library or to the bookstore. Today, the Internet has firmly replaced both of these as the primary resource for self-directed learning.
Public education in developed countries intends to reach all children, so it is very broad, normally having the force of law behind it to ensure that all children attend school. And while you can theoretically learn almost anything on the Internet, the fact is that people who have only a public education most often use their education for basic social and economic competencies. In other words, a public education by itself is much more likely to be used to balance a checkbook or text a message to a friend than to find a cure for cancer... or to find a solution to the mysteries of real sustainability.
Higher Education’s Way
Higher education begins with undergraduate education. It can continue with graduate degrees, and occasionally culminates in a doctorate degree.
Higher education (undergraduate in particular) can be characterized as years of listening to lectures, working through innumerable problems appropriate to your field of study, showing your work to your professors, getting graded on your work, and eventually getting a degree for all your efforts. Higher education intends to elevate students to levels of wisdom far above those which they usually obtain from public education. But it’s not very broad. If you doubt that, count the number of people in almost any crowd, then ask how many of them have at least one PhD. Normally, it’s a very small percentage.
the Specialists’ Way
A specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about only one thing. Some disagree, saying that the ultimate specialist is someone who knows absolutely everything about nothing at all. Let’s use the first, less offensive definition, and use it to look at how specialists spread wisdom.
Specialists handle a great deal of information on their chosen specialty. This information is usually more complex than information shared by the general public. In other words, specialists are less likely to discuss things like dogs, cats, and fish with their fellow-specialists, and are more likely to discuss things like Hexadecacarbonylhexarhodium, the Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineers, or the Positron Emission Tomography Scanner.
Each of these terms is shared only by the specialists that deal with it, and each term has a long story behind it. Learning everything about the Positron Emission Tomography Scanner might take years, for example. Because of this, specialists have what amounts to their own private language of technical jargon, each term of which is embedded with lots of meaning that goes unspoken most of the time. These private languages aren’t the result of some nefarious scheme, either; they’re the necessary by-product of specializing in something.
If you tried to read any of the three terms above out loud, you know that they’re each quite a mouthful. The specialists noticed that, too. So in order to save time, they often use acronyms or codes to shorten them. So Hexadecacarbonylhexarhodium becomes Rh6CO16, Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineers becomes RED HORSE, and the Positron Emission Tomography Scanner becomes the PET. Any slight chance that someone outside a particular specialty might understand specialist jargon goes to zero when the jargon turns into acronyms.
This moves the chances of the specialists’ knowledge spreading outside their specialty from “slim” to “none.” So what are we left with? We have one system (public education) that spreads low-level information like reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic, broadly. At the other end, we have a system that spreads extremely high-level information, but only to a tiny group of specialists, and to make matters worse, it protects that information with an indecipherable secret language known only to members of the specialty. In the middle, we have a system that spreads mid-level information to a middling degree.
The problem should be clear when we consider the fact that while many of the best minds around the world have been working for years to try to figure out how to live sustainably today, they haven’t figured it out yet. So it’s reasonable to assume that once they do, it’s likely to be some extremely high-level wisdom. But if we’re going to achieve sustainability, that information needs to spread broadly. Clearly, none of the primary methods we’re currently using are up to the task. We need a system capable of the best of all our systems.
Nature’s Way
It turns out that there is such a system. And it has been around for a long time. It’s nature’s way. Consider this: the most complex wisdom humans have ever encountered is the human genetic code. Scientists around the world worked for many years just to document the entire human genome, and they’re just now beginning the long process of unlocking what it all means. In all likelihood, the task of unlocking it will still be going on a century from now.
But stop and think for a moment about how that genetic material spreads. Take humans, for example. As we know, the process begins when two humans are attracted to each other. They mate. They breed. (Not necessarily in that order.) And the genetic material is passed on.
But almost none of the people replicating genetic material are human genome scientists. Nearly all of them, in fact, are completely unschooled in genetics, and most have only on-the-job training in the replication of genetic material. How is this possible?
Nature’s way involves a really nifty trick: nature takes the great wisdom of the genetic code and embeds it in beauty. This lowers the bar unimaginably, so that people only have to consider one another attractive; they don’t even need a passing knowledge of genetics in order to pass on some genes.
Looking at the young woman in this picture having lunch with a friend on the streets of Paris, one might conclude that she has a good chance of passing on her genetic material if she so chooses because she has enough beauty to attract a choice of mates. But if you told her that, she might respond “Yes, but there’s so much more to me than just my appearance,” and she’d be right. Life is that way, too. There’s so much more to life than just the process of passing it on. Architecture can work in a somewhat similar way. Here’s how:
Someone might work for years to work out the best possible eave for their region. They might do sun angle or wind speed calculations, and take all sorts of other things into consideration. But if they hope to spread the design of that eave by asking people to work out the same calculations (like higher education asks us to work the problems of our field of study) then it’s impossible that the eave would spread. If, however, the designer embeds the wisdom they’ve spent years to discover into beauty so that people love that eave, then it can spread all over the region. It helps if the people have a passing knowledge that the design is good for sun and wind, but all the really have to know is “we love this.”
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #2 in the top 10 things we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

the Localized Operations

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:57:38 -0500

Sustainability is all but impossible if we have to condition the world, but it becomes easier and easier as we’re able to condition smaller pieces of it. Look carefully at the image below. Can you see the tractor-trailer rig on the bridge in the distance? The cab is barely visible, and the driver is microscopic. But Waffle House has the unenviable task of attracting that driver (and fellow-travelers on the bridge) to come for breakfast. So what do they have to do? Let’s take a look:
The first thing they are forced to do is to erect the 200 foot tall sign that probably costs $200,000, because travelers at highway speeds will only be on the bridge for a few seconds, and if Waffle House doesn’t entice them to exit by then, they’ve lost their business. Next, because their entire customer base arrives by motor vehicle, they must pave every square yard of their site not occupied by their building for parking to accommodate their customers’ cars (the semis must park on the street.) So is there any shadow of doubt why poor Waffle House has such ugly buildings? Of course not! They’ve completely blown their budget on the sign and the parking lot!
Contrast that with this shop on Nantucket. The man in this picture (who happens to be renowned New Urbanist Mike Watkins) arrived on foot to this storefront, and is standing less than ten feet from the sign, which was probably procured for something much closer to $200 than $200,000. Because this store doesn’t have to operate at a wide extent to attract customers, they’re able to spend their money on other things... like being able to afford high rent in a nice building on Nantucket. Which place would you rather be?
This issue, however, goes far beyond desirable places. Everywhere we look, there are problems that can easily be solved if we’re able to do it small, but that become very difficult if we have to do the same thing larger. Consider this extreme example: What if we were able to create clothing that made people comfortable in all but the most ridiculous environments? So if the Boise office is 35°F, no problem... I’m toasty in my enviro-suit. Or if it’s 98°F in Orlando, no problem again... I’m completely cool. Conditioning the person rather than the entire building means the cost should be much less. The example is extreme, but it illustrates the point that as the area we have to condition gets smaller, less energy is required.
We operated on this basis for almost all of history. Three Dog Night was a ‘60’s rock band, but long before that, it was a strategy for staying warm... and alive. A one-dog night was pretty cold, where you let one dog into your bed to sleep on your feet and keep them warm. A two-dog night was colder, and a three-dog night was the coldest night. The canopy bed (like the alcove bed in Katrina Cottage VIII) worked in a similar way... close the curtains, and your body heat (and that of your bed-mate) would keep you toasty even when it was absolutely frigid throughout the rest of the house.
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #3 in the top 10 items we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

the Expanded Comfort Range

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:33:10 -0500

The human comfort range has shrunk to its smallest size in human history over the past half-century. Our ancestors had a comfort range of probably 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Near 90 degrees, they might cool themselves with a hand-held fan. Near 60 degrees, they would put on an extra layer of clothes. Today, however, there are Thermostat Wars all over the US over 2 degrees. Don’t laugh... you likely have participated in some of them at some point yourself. And Jimmy Carter lost his re-election campaign in part because he famously asked Americans to wear sweaters and cut the thermostat down in winter to help with the energy crisis of that day. The sweater therefore became the only article of clothing to ever play a role in ending an American presidency.
Ask any mechanical engineer to describe the impact of a 30 degree comfort range versus a 2 degree comfort range. She will tell you that a 2 degree comfort range requires the conditioning equipment to run basically all the time, because outdoor temperatures are almost never within that 2 degree range. And if the equipment is going to be running almost all the time, why even have windows that are operable? So they seal up the buildings where you can’t ever open a window to catch a breeze.
A 30 degree range, on the other hand, means that there are several months per year when the air outside is within the comfort range at least part of the day. So if the building is designed cleverly enough, it can condition itself for most of the year in many places, requiring mechanical conditioning only in more extreme weather.
How do we expand the human comfort range again, getting it back close to where it has been for almost all of recorded human history? Carter’s approach of telling us what we ought to do is no more likely to work now than it did then, as discussed earlier in “the Fate of Ought-To”. People rarely do what they ought to do, and resent being told what they ought to do. But they often do what they want to do. So what’s the most effective way of assuring that people want to expand their comfort range?
The best known way is to entice them to go outdoors. As people spend more time outdoors, they become more acclimated to the local environment and need less full-body conditioning when they return indoors.
My own experience provides a good example. I moved to Miami in the fall of 2003. My home on Miami Beach is just a few blocks from my office, so I walk. Within a ten minute walk of my office, I can get to dozens of restaurants, several grocery stores, a hardware store, a drug store, my bank, my doctor, my accountant, and lots more. And it isn’t like walking alongside the highway, either... they are highly interesting walks through beautiful places.
Because I walked everywhere, cranking the car only a couple times per week, I quickly became so acclimated to the local environment during that first fall and winter, which is almost always mild in Miami. As springtime turned into summer, I noticed something strange: so long as I was in the shade and could feel a breeze, I was never uncomfortable. That is still true today, almost seven years after moving here: I have never been uncomfortable in Miami so long as there’s a breeze in the shade. And this is a place where the basketball team is named “the Heat.”
The difference between running the mechanical conditioning equipment all the time and cutting it off several months of the year is so big that it dwarfs any equipment efficiency increases we could hope for in the near future. So which is better: spending lots of money for slightly more efficient equipment that will have a small positive effect on energy use, or spending to create great outdoor public and private realms that will have a large positive effect on energy use, with the added bonus that people get great pleasure out of them?
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #4 in the top 10 items we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

the Source of Stuff

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:12:03 -0500

This one seems so elementary that you might think it’s an item we don’t even need to talk about. The further something has to travel while it’s being made and sold, the more energy it usually consumes. And common sense tells us that we should be saving energy, not using more energy to make the same stuff. So the most sustainable source of stuff should therefore be nearby, right?
Our recent track record, however, says that we have other priorities. Try this test: Turn your head and look around the room. Most of the things you’re looking at have traveled thousands of miles to get to you, from the places where the resources were extracted from the earth to the places where the parts were made to the factory where the whole thing was assembled to the warehouse where it was stored to the shop where you bought it. Common sense tells us that being green is a pipe dream if nearly everything we touch has thousands of Embodied Miles. Some complex things like cars may actually have more Embodied Miles than it takes to go all the way around the world.
I read recently, for example, about a particular make and model of car that happened to be from Japan. Or at least the corporate offices were located in Japan. The resources were extracted in mines around the world. Many of the parts were made in Japan, but then the parts were shipped to a factory in the United States for assembly. Finally, some of those cars were shipped back to Japan and other Asian nations to be sold.
In recent years, Everyday Low Prices have been the most important things in commerce. We’ve voted with our wallets, and Everyday Low Prices are more important to us than the countless small hometown businesses we’ve lost because they weren’t quite so cheap. Everyday Low Prices are more important to us than the millions of jobs that got offshored because we wouldn’t work for so much less. Nobody wants to waste money when they’re buying toilet paper, even if we’re wasting towns and wasting our fellow-citizens’ jobs to do it. But because we don’t want to waste money, this may just be one of the only items in this chapter that takes care of itself. Here’s why: As fuel costs rise, as they must certainly do as tens of millions more cars get on the road every year in China and India alone, and as oil supplies dwindle, it’s obvious that the cost of shipping stuff around the world to get to us simply can’t be sustained.
What does a sustainable future look like? Sustainable things are things which we can keep going in a healthy way long into an uncertain future. There are many things we don’t know about an uncertain future, especially including what the cost of transportation will be, so the only certain sources of stuff in an uncertain future will be those that are nearby. And it’s not just the cost of transportation. The world has painfully seen recently how wars can start over resources like oil.
One thing we must do if we want to keep things going in a healthy way is to quit throwing so much stuff away. The Story of Stuff tells an incisive tale of the consequences of our consuming ways in recent decades. The Story of Stuff deals mainly with consumer goods, but we throw other things away, too... like buildings. Including factories... remember the term “Rust Belt”?
But that’s not all... if we want to keep things going in a healthy way, then our sources needs to be close enough that we can keep an eye on them. Making things in distant lands means that we can’t see the horrible conditions people (including children) must endure in the sweatshops, but that’s only the beginning. Making things overseas also means that we can’t see how bad the environment is being trashed to make our stuff until the effects go global.
How close is close enough? That depends mainly on two things: the weight of the item versus its value and the complexity of the item that’s being made. The heavier stuff is, the closer the source should be to where it’s used because heavier stuff requires more energy to ship than lighter stuff. Long before the gasoline engine, people shipped spices from one continent to another because the spices were so light enough and valuable enough that a chain of camels could deliver a lot of value on each trip to the traders that owned them. Bricks, on the other hand, were often made from clay dug up in the back yard. That may be a bit extreme today, but you get the picture.
The complexity of the item matters because its possible to have a cabinet shop on every corner of a town center, but it’s not possible to do the same with a car factory because while the cost of setting up and equipping a simple cabinet shop might be less than the cost of a car, the cost of a car factory is hundreds of millions of dollars. The more complex things must be made more centrally and shipped further in order to eventually pay back their investment... just not as far as we’ve been shipping them in recent years.
It’s not yet apparent how far is too far, but the best rule is: the closer the better. The best policy would be to live within the same region as most of our sources of stuff. Kind of like living within our means.
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #5 in the top 10 items we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

China Car Sales Overtake US

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:02:53 -0500

The BBC and other sources are reporting this morning that car sales in China surpassed the US for the first time in 2009. But it’s not simply the fact that they did so, but how they did so: China’s car sales surged a staggering 53% over the previous year, to 13.6 million vehicles. And common sense tells us that there’s no end in sight. Here’s why: As discussed last year in the 2-1/2 Billion People post, the American middle-class suburban lifestyle is now no longer the world’s biggest ecological problem. Now, the biggest problem is the export of the enticing image of that lifestyle to 2-1/2 billion people in China and India who have previously lived very low-impact agrarian lifestyles. And now, they want the things they see us having.
Nearly two years ago, USA Today reported on the export of American suburbia to China. And today’s reports are only the tip of the iceberg. Think about it for a minute: There’s basically one car per person in the US, counting the people who don’t drive, because many of us have more than one car. It’s that way because it’s what you need to live in suburbia. It’s not possible to live the American middle-class suburban lifestyle without a car, because you have to drive everywhere in suburbia. So if China and India adopt our lifestyle then it’s reasonable to assume that they’ll need a lot of cars, too.
How many? Let’s take a really conservative approach for a moment and assume that they’re a lot smarter than us, and figure out how to achieve our lifestyle with 60% fewer cars. In other words, 4 cars per 10 people rather than our 10 cars for 10 people. Even then, they’ll need a billion cars that don’t even exist today for those 2-1/2 billion people. How long will that take? If sales keep increasing at the rate they did from 2008 to 2009, then the billion new cars will be on the road by 2018.
This is a problem for so many mammoth reasons that it’s hard to know where to start, so let’s start with the simplest and least debatable one: the demand side of the Law of Supply & Demand. If you take the US’s roughly 300 million cars and add the billion cars to it, you’re quadrupling the number of cars competing for gas. The Law of Supply & Demand says that as demand goes up, prices go up, assuming that supply is stable. How much? That’s hard to say, but this much is certain: if the demand quadruples with a steady supply, the price doesn’t just quadruple; it has the potential of going much higher because it turns into a bidding war when it’s the economic survival question of: “How am I going to get to work?”
The other side of the Supply & Demand equation isn’t looking so good, either. Peak Oil is an idea that was first proposed in 1956 by M. King Hubbert, a Shell geoscientist. In a nutshell, Peal Oil is the point in time when the world reaches its maximum oil production and begins to decline. Peak Oil in the United States occurred in 1970. Today, the US produces roughly half the oil that it did then. Peak Oil has been hotly-debated in recent times, but now, the reality is beginning to set in: the most optimistic estimates are that worldwide Peak Oil will occur around 2020. Many believe that Peak Oil is occurring right now.
What happens when you combine a quadrupling of demand with a dwindling supply? Things could get downright scary, as Jim Kunstler described in The Long Emergency. Jim’s a friend of mine, and I respect him highly. His books from several years ago read like history now, because he successfully predicted so many things, from details of the Meltdown to smaller stuff like the Somali pirates. But I’m an optimist, and I believe that we can come out OK... if we get our house in order now.
What will it take to do that? Immediately stop building additional suburbia... well, OK, the Meltdown took care of that. But as population grows, we’ll eventually have to build at a larger scale again, and we need to make sure that the places we build and re-build are those that don’t require a car for basic economic survival: places that are accessible by a range of transportation choices, especially including the self-propelled choices of walking and biking. And we need to build and re-build places that are serviceable, where people can get the basic services of life within walking distance, and where making a living where you’re living is a choice for a lot more of us than it is today. In short, we need to be building and re-building Original Green places again.
~Steve Mouzon

the Many Uses

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 07:59:43 -0500

[All images in this post are from Katrina Cottage VIII]
If we hope to stem the tide of consumption, then we need to learn how to design and build things that have many uses again. In other words, double- or triple-duty is just the starting point. Today, we’ve not only lost this ability, but now, we have extras of everything instead.
It begins at the scale of the neighborhood. Because there’s no neighborhood coffee shop within walking distance, some homes now have a “cafe” in the kitchen, with a cute little awning over the espresso machine. Because there’s no neighborhood cinema, people feel that they need a home theatre. Because there are no parks within a couple blocks, people need big back yards for the kids.
But it’s not all the neighborhood’s fault. Secondary bedrooms in many homes sold just before the Meltdown had better-appointed third and fourth bedrooms than master suites a generation before. If we were to believe the floor plans, then it was the birthright of every American child to have a walk-in closet and compartmentalized private bath by the time they moved out of the nursery.
All these things would be fine if we had unlimited money to buy stuff with and unlimited energy to run that stuff with. But that’s not the case, either on a global scale or on a personal scale, as we have all discovered to varying degrees of pain since the Meltdown.
Double-duty (or more) is not a new idea. Ask your grandparents. The “waste not, want not” ethic was central to nearly every culture around the world less than a century ago. Read Benjamin Franklin and it’s clear that America was founded by people who valued frugality instead of celebrating consumption.
I’ve had a recent close encounter with the need for extreme double-duty. I met with Andrés Duany on the Saturday after Hurricane Katrina and we laid out the foundation principles of what would soon come to be known as the Katrina Cottages. The idea was to help people gain a foothold on their property again by building tiny cottages that were appropriate to the architectural needs of the region, excellent in design, and deliverable by all major construction methods: site-built, panelized, modular, and manufactured.
I put out a call to the New Urban Guild for Katrina Cottage designs. Andrés, his partner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and the Congress for the New Urbanism orchestrated the largest planning event in human history (the Mississippi Renewal Forum) on the Gulf Coast just six weeks after the hurricane, with nearly 200 planners, architects, and other professionals participating.
But even before that event, nearly two dozen Katrina Cottages had been designed by Erika Albright, Bill Allison, Bill Dennis, Victor Deupi, Frank Greene, Gary Justiss, Alex Latham, Matt Lister, Tom Low, Eric Moser, Dan Osborne, Julie Sanford, Laura Welsh, and myself. All work was done for free, of course. During the Forum, several more Katrina Cottages were designed, including the little yellow one by Marianne Cusato that has since received a great deal of press. Since the Forum, still others have been designed by an expanding circle of architects and designers.
One of the biggest lessons we learned is that you can’t just shrink a house and expect people to like it. If you take away size, you’ve gotta give something else in return. Ask someone to move into a cottage half the size of their current house, and they’ll likely turn you down. But if the cottage lives twice as big as its footage, then that’s a different story.
This is an idea I call the Smaller & Smarter Cottage, and it has other benefits, too. In order to be Smaller & Smarter, the cottage has to be able to store a lot more stuff per foot than the bigger house, but the entire floor plan can’t be just one big closet; everything has to be rethought. We even carve into the walls themselves, leaving no cubic inch unused. Why shouldn’t interior walls be used for shelving, rather than just wasted? The side-benefit to this is the fact that the storage methods (such as shelving walls) that are visible can be quite attractive, and contribute mightily to the cottage’s charm.
There was another problem, too: the first generation of Katrina Cottages didn’t expand very well. This is because in a tiny cottage, the exterior walls quickly get taken up with things that are difficult to move, like kitchen cabinets, bathrooms, and closets. So we developed a new type of Katrina Cottage: the Kernel Cottage. Kernel Cottage I is the plan on the left below. To the right, you can see one of the many ways it can expand.
The second generation of Katrina are called “kernel cottages” because, like a seed, they are designed to grow easily in many directions. People can buy a smaller cottage today than they’ll need in the future if the path to expansion is obvious. Before home mortgages, everyone built this way. Thomas Jefferson lived in one of the little garden pavilions on the back side of Monticello for several years while he was building the main house. If Jefferson could do it, why can’t we?
Interestingly, one of the things people enjoy most about the character of pre-mortgage houses is the story they tell in the incremental way they have grown from one generation to the next. But it wasn’t designed that way from the beginning, as we might suppose today. Rather, it’s the character that emerged from many hands working over time.
Beyond the obvious savings in building materials, there’s a huge, three-pronged sustainability bonus that comes from building much smaller to begin with, then adding on later: First, because the square footage is a lot less, it costs much less to condition. Second, because rooms in tiny cottages are likely to have windows on both sides, they cross-ventilate wonderfully in summer, and also daylight beautifully. This saves even more in conditioning expense. Finally, if the designer really does their job and the cottage lives much larger than its footage, people might just discover that they don’t need to add such a big addition when it comes time to expand.
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #6 in the top 10 items we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

LEED for Homes Awards - or - How To Shoot Yourself in the Foot

Fri, 8 Jan 2010 12:13:36 -0500

Residential Architect just did an article on the LEED for Homes Awards, and I’ve gotta confess that when I first saw some of these, I checked the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April Fool’s Day. The very first Original Green blog post detailed how we lost the first green revolution thirty years ago. If these awards are any indication, we’re in danger of losing this one, too. The Engineering vs. Design post further describes the danger. Simply put, people will only tolerate sustainability for so long if its artifacts aren’t lovable. How many people would look at the house above and say “I love this”?
But it isn’t just the thoroughly regrettable design of this house that’s problematic. It also apparently is located somewhere in sprawl for two reasons: the lot appears large, and the front-loaded double garage make it obvious that it’s located in an auto-dominated place. If you have to drive everywhere, then the carbon footprint of the building is meaningless. This is a classic example of one of the problems of the Carbon Focus: looking at the carbon footprint of the building, rather than the carbon footprint of the inhabitation of the building. Most of these award-winners have these problems... and others, too. Let’s have a look:
I’ll begin and end with two that have the most promise, with the others in between. This project, Rosewood Hills, appears to be making some attempts to be walkable... at least there’s a sidewalk. And the houses make some attempt to be lovable. And it not only has retail shops and parks in the neighborhood, according to the website, but is an infill project located within walking distance of a number of nearby services and attractions.
This should all be applauded... kudos to LEED for selecting this one. But it’s not without problems, judging from the photos. The porches are far too narrow to be useful, and the lower level porch is too low, especially without a frontage fence. This isn’t about aesthetics; it’s about what works. We now know how to design porches and fences so people will sit on the porches and visit with their neighbors walking by. The porches shown here, because they ignore these things, have become expensive decoration rather than very useful outdoor living rooms. And it’s not just the fact that sittable porches are an important part of the social glue that transforms co-inhabitants of a place into neighbors... there’s also a huge underlying benefit of outdoor rooms and gardens that most people don’t realize: when you spend enough time outdoors, you get more acclimated to the local environment and need less full-body conditioning when you return indoors... so the heat pump doesn’t have to run as much. (See Item 3 on Garden Rooms.)
Also, what in the world is it doing with dark asphalt roofs? The project is located in Columbia, South Carolina, where it’s hot much of the year. Reflective metal roofs reflect a high percentage of the sun’s heat away from the house, so they’re a great passive cooling device. Also, they last far longer than asphalt shingles which, by the way, are made from fossil fuels and are not recycled.
This one is simply trying to jam too much ugliness onto the face of the building. They bulldoze buildings in a couple decades for being less ugly than this. How unsustainable is it to continue building things that are so quickly discarded? This is called a “snout house” because the protruding garage pointing squarely at the street often resembles a pig’s snout. Snout houses are almost always built in unwalkable (and therefore unsustainable) places.
This one appears to have the biggest budget of all the houses in the story... and technically, it’s not a snout house because the porch sticks out further than the double garage. But look at that street frontage: totally blank! Not one window. Eyes on the street, particularly at street level, are one of the most important factors in making a neighborhood safe. Unsafe places are unsustainable places, because people won’t stay.
One other thing... see the metal fence? In real life, you have to get your car into the garage, so over half of the fence couldn’t be there if this wasn’t a model home used for sales. And over half of the landscaping wouldn’t be there, either... it would be replaced with a double-wide driveway. Sidewalks crossed frequently by double-wide driveways are unsafe and unpleasant places to walk, so it’s a fairly sure bet that houses like this are built in unwalkable (and therefore unsustainable) places.
Nice photo... the fading sunset behind huge expanses of windows glowing out onto the snowy evening. What’s wrong with this picture? The smartest windows I’m aware of are from a company called Serious Materials. They’re several times more efficient than most windows: their best window has an R-value of 11. But the thinnest batt of fiberglass wall insulation you can buy is R-11, so by the time you add the sheathing and wall finishes, that means that the cheapest wall it’s legal to build is a better insulator than the very best window. So large expanses of glass are almost always a bad idea, except in the most unique climates. So how did this house win an award? It likely had to do some other very clever things to make up for the heat loss. Clever is good. But why not get the common-sense stuff right to begin with, so you’re not forced to be so clever?
Part of the cleverness in this case can be seen tacked on the roof: two huge L-shaped banks of photovoltaic solar collectors with what appears to be a smaller hot-water collector high in the middle. And I’ve gotta hand it to them for at least making the collectors parallel with the roof so they don’t stand out so much. But it’s not good enough because they’re still ugly blotches on the roof. Solar collectors were torn off by the millions in the decade after the end of the last Green Revolution when people said “I don’t care if that hideous thing is saving me money; get it off my roof!” Collectors should either be incorporated into the roof design, or the building should be designed in such a way that they disappear entirely.
Modernism has a terrible track record for lovability. If you doubt this, drive around any American town and find out what fraction of 1% of the houses are Modernist. But this one is fairly benign... style is not the main problem here. Rather, it’s the fact that this house nearly turns its back on the street. Only one tiny window really faces the street... the one beside the garage door. The rest are nearly hidden behind a tall concrete wall protecting the entry court from the sidewalk... and from any chance of getting acquainted with the would-be neighbors. Clearly, this house contributes nothing to the walkability of the subdivision. If other houses follow suit, it’s highly unlikely to become a sustainable place.
Here’s the last one, which is promising on several counts. It’s a 42-unit apartment building with lots of PV solar panels on the roof. It’s located in California, so the architecture seems to fit the regional character fairly well, from what we can tell in this photo. And the creation of the courtyard in the middle is promising; it could end up being one of those outdoor rooms mentioned earlier that entices people outdoors so they become more acclimated to the local environment.
High-density housing can contribute to making a sustainable place... when it’s connected. But as you can see here, this appears to be plopped in the middle of a parking lot. It’s obviously not attached to a Main Street. That means everyone has to drive to get anywhere... and surely we’ve learned by now that a place can’t be sustainable if it makes you drive everywhere... or have we?
Here’s the bottom line: an award program should award projects that are exemplary on many counts, and that get the basics right. The LEED rating system is made up of prerequisite requirements and credits. If you don’t get the prerequisites right, then your project is out... you have no shot at getting any credits. The same standard should be applied to an awards program for green houses: get the basics right first. And the basics include building in a sustainable place, which is a place that is nourishable, accessible, serviceable, and securable. The basics also include building in a way that is lovable, durable, flexible, and frugal. And the frugality should begin with the natural things, then using mechanical things to bridge the gap. If the basics (prerequisites) aren’t right, then things like the number of PV solar panels on the roof don’t matter nearly so much.
~Steve Mouzon

the Simpler Way

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 16:26:49 -0500

Humanity has, for almost all of recorded history, had an excellent way to build simply and control costs, but we discarded this method in most places roughly a century ago. Today, we seem bent on getting the look we want, even if it means we have to build with plastic wrap and duct tape. What was that simpler way, and why does it matter to sustainability?
The simpler way is something known in some architectural circles as the Classical/Vernacular Spectrum. The most classical building in a state or province might be the state capitol or the state supreme court building. The most vernacular building is a very simple barn. Everything else is somewhere in between these two ends of the Classical/Vernacular Spectrum.
the Image Problem
Most of us living today have spent our entire lives in the era of “ticky-tacky houses,” so it’s hard to even imagine how the simpler way worked. Let’s first consider how today’s method works: Developments most likely begin in the offices of the marketing strategist, who comes up with an image of the place. Maybe they call it Fox Run, and infuse the marketing package with naturalistic pictures. But of course, what Fox Run really means is “the place where the foxes will never run again.” Or maybe it’s a more refined image, like Georgian Estates, with pictures of fine brick buildings from the days of King George III. The specific image is unimportant... the point is that a place today starts with an image. Here’s why that’s a problem:
the Image Paradox
As the quality of the marketing strategist’s work gets better and better, the chances of the developer being able to execute the image gets worse and worse. Here’s why: If the image in the marketing package is vague (think the architectural equivalent of comfort food instead of fine French cuisine,) then it’s easier to build in a way that occasionally comes close to fulfilling the marketer’s promise. But if the image is powerful, then it evokes strong connections with images of ideal places in our minds. Because the image in our mind is strong, we know without doubt when the developer has failed to build to the image.
Portofino, shown here, has been used as a development image countless times, yet there is still only one Portofino. The better the image created by the marketing consultant, the more miserable the failure of the developer when the place doesn’t measure up.
And it isn’t just that they fail, it’s how they fail that is so regrettable. Because the development image rarely squares up with the best and most sustainable ways of building in a place, the developer is reduced to using the region’s normal construction methods to build the building shell, then slathering architectural “image goo” all over it. In most cases, the image goo is cheap plastic, foam, or other stuff that is all too often a sad and hideous fake of the material it is intended to represent. Buildings made in this way are far too easy to discard at some point in the not-too-distant future. Clearly, throwaway buildings are unsustainable.
the Classical/Vernacular Spectrum
The Classical/Vernacular Spectrum works in an entirely different way. First, it is based upon the best ways of building in a particular region. This makes image goo unnecessary because you don’t have to fake anything. Next, it is infinitely adjustable based on the needs of each building. Need something more affordable? Fine... just dial it down the Spectrum a bit. Need something more refined? Just dial it up. And it’s highly explainable to everyone from homeowners to builders to framers to masons, so that everyone understands why we build this way in this place. It’s not just about something as fleeting as architectural fashion; rather, it’s much more durable, and is characterized simply as “this is how we build here.” It’s not a style; it’s what works best, for this people and for this place.
Sustainability versus Construction Cost
Sustainability is about much more than Gizmo Green, but unless you’re building in a place where natural methods can do the whole job of conditioning a building, then more efficient machines are essential. And better machines are almost always more expensive machines. Within a fixed construction budget, something’s gotta give. In tough economic times such as the ones during which this book is being written, people usually choose the long, slow bleeding of monthly utility bills over up-front costs for energy equipment that would dramatically reduce or even eliminate the utility bills.
In order to buy the energy equipment, we must find savings elsewhere in the budget in most cases. The Classical/ Vernacular Spectrum is the most powerful cost-control device in the history of human construction. As a matter of fact, it has created more affordable housing than any other method ever devised. It’s high time to employ it once again... and put away the architectural image goo once and for all.
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #7 in the top 10 items we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

the Green Country to the Green City

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:22:19 -0500

American environmentalism makes a fundamental error when it defines the ideal condition as pristine wilderness, untouched by human hands. European environmentalists don’t make this error, because there’s no pristine wilderness left to protect in Europe. This American error makes almost all human actions a degradation of the ideal, and something to be avoided. This view places humans apart from nature, and the logical conclusion is that the best thing for the earth would be for the humans to die so that the whole world could go back to wilderness.
Some extreme city-lovers make an equally erroneous mistake in the opposite direction. They correctly observe that many metrics of environmental impact are better for city-dwellers than for those in the suburbs because urbanites don’t have to drive nearly so much. But then they take that observation and use it to argue that the city is the ideal condition, and that humans shouldn’t live elsewhere. Interestingly, the city-lovers’ view is similar to the American environmentalists’ view in this respect: by saying that we should all live in the city, it also implies that we should stay away from the wilderness and therefore not spoil it.
Both of these views are incorrect for two reasons: because each view tries to make a single setting the ideal to the exclusion of all others, and because each view misrepresents the proper relationship of humans and nature. We’ll address the single-setting problem in a moment, but let’s first look at the relationship of humans to nature. This book firmly takes that position that humans should be seen as being part of nature, not apart from nature. How can this be?
the Relationship of Humans and Nature
Let’s start by comparing a natural place and a man-made place. Look closely at this image. What do you see? This appears to be a completely natural scene, with no evidence of human intervention. What are the components of this scene? We can see green things that are living. We can also see dead wood that was once alive, but no longer is. And we can see rocks that have never been alive. And we can assume that various creatures probably scurry, slither, or crawl across this scene from time to time, even though none of them appear to be here at this moment.
Now look at this image. What do you see? This is clearly a place that has been built by humans. What are the components of this scene? We can see green things that are living. We can also see things that were once alive, but no longer are, like the wood in the shutters, windows, and doors. And we can also see brick, stone, and metal that has never lived. And we can assume that various creatures (mostly humans, but probably dogs, cats, birds, and other creatures) run or walk across this scene from time to time. Matter of fact, if you look closely, you’ll see that one fellow is in the picture now, walking along the sidewalk under the gallery.
So it’s clear that both the natural place and the man-made place have some of the same categories of materials. Their arrangement, however, is completely different. The natural scene is arranged by forces of nature, while the man-made scene is arranged by human hands for the shelter, comfort, and convenience of the humans that live there.
But we’re not the only creatures that make homes for ourselves. Birds build nests. Bees build hives. Beavers build lodges on ponds they’ve created by damming streams. Rabbits build underground warrens, as do many other burrowing creatures. Bears find and inhabit caves. Spiders build webs. Ants build anthills. Many creatures build or find their own particular type of home. The homes that humans build are more elaborate, to be sure, but we are by no means the only creatures that modify the natural world to shelter and protect ourselves.
Some creatures are exceptionally clever because rather than building their own homes, they entice other creatures to build homes for them. This is a picture of my puppy Sally. She was only three months old when this picture was taken, but she’s such a sweetheart that I bought this bed for her. And that’s not even half the story, because really, my whole house and garden is hers, too. Really clever.
Nature, then, is shaped not only by natural forces like gravity, wind, water, and sunshine, but also by all the creatures that make their homes there... including humans. But humans have built many horrific landscapes in recent years. It’s an impossible stretch to say that a coal power plant or an auto junkyard is a part of nature, isn’t it?
What standard can we use to distinguish between places like this hamlet, that can reasonably be seen as being a natural part of the landscape, and places like a boarded-up suburban strip mall, which nobody would ever consider to be a part of nature?
How about using the standard of sustain-ability:“keeping things going in a healthy way long into an uncertain future.” A “healthy way” means that we should leave it better than we found it, but it’s better yet not to leave it at all, like this hamlet that has likely been inhabited for centuries.
A sustainable place is a place where you want to stay, not a place that you want to leave. So many places built in recent decades are so bad that we discard them as quickly as possible, littering the landscape with cast-off places that are far worse than the places they replaced.
It’s clear that the error of the American environmentalists’ view of nature stems from our recent track record of building horrific places and quickly discarding them. That truly does spoil the environment. Interestingly, there has not been pristine wilderness in Europe for a very long time, so environmentalists there are much more likely to see humans as a part of nature rather than apart from nature like their American counterparts.
the Problem of Single Settings
The other problem identified earlier is the problem of establishing a single ideal environmental setting whether it’s wilderness or city, and then trying to make everything fit into that setting. People don’t live in only one type of settlement (the city, for example) We need to know how to build the city sustainably, and also its suburbs. We need to know how to build towns sustainably. We need to know how to build villages sustainably. And we need to know how to build hamlets sustainably, too.
It isn’t just the cities, suburbs, towns, villages, and hamlets that need to be sustainable. All of the parts of those cities, suburbs, towns, villages, and hamlets need to be built in a sustainable way, too.
the Transect
The best tool available today for building all of the parts of cities, towns, villages, and hamlets in a sustainable way is a set of ideas known as the Transect. It was originally developed a century ago as a management tool for the natural environment. The Natural Transect illustrated above shows a series of adjoining habitats. Each has its own set of conditions, and it’s own set of plants and animals that thrive there. For example, sea oats thrive on the dune, but would die in the ocean.
In the late 1990s, New Urbanist planner Andrés Duany realized that the Transect could also be applied to human habitat. The Transect of the human habitat begins at t1, which is most rural, and runs to t6, which is most urban. Specific Transect zones are:
t1 Natural: This zone is untouched nature, or a park designed with no apparent human hand. Nobody lives here except the forest ranger. t1 could be dangerous; something might bite you, or even eat you.
t2 Rural: This zone is largely agricultural; it is made up mainly of farms, orchards, and meadows. The human hand can be seen here, but only very lightly, like a fence across the land, or a country road disappearing in the distance.
t3 Sub-Urban: This zone is found primarily near the edges of neighborhoods, where the houses are spread more thinly. Large swaths of t3 are the main ingredient of many suburbs, which often suffer from having too much t3.
t4 General Urban: This zone makes up much of the fabric of good in-town neighborhoods. Trees line the streets, which are flanked with fences with porches behind them. Townhouses and occasional corner stores can be found in t4.
t5 Urban Center: Think of t5 as Main Street, with bustling sidewalks fronted by shops and restaurants with apartments above. Buildings sit tight to each other in t5, with offices, townhouses and apartment buildings on less busy streets.
t6 Urban Core: This zone exists in larger cities, but not towns or villages. This is where the buildings are the largest, the lights are the brightest, and things are happening until late at night.
Each Transect zone provides certain unique attributes and has certain needs. For example, we’ll see later that if we want to build sustainable places, then most of the people need to be able to make a living where they’re living. There are plenty of places to make a living in t5, but not in the less urban zones. It’s clear, then, that sustainable places need to have some t5 in nearly every neighborhood, or at least in the adjacent neighborhood. But t5 has several special needs. For example, if there’s not enough traffic (whether pedestrians, bikers, or cars) then it will starve because the businesses won’t have enough customers. Once we know the important attributes and needs of each zone, the Transect allows us to very intelligently calibrate the sustainability of a place.
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This post is part of the serialization of the second chapter of the Original Green [and the Mysteries of True Sustainability]. The chapter is entitled “What Can We Do?” It describes principles upon which real sustainability can be based. This post is #8 in the top 10 items we can do.
~Steve Mouzon

the Green Top 10 for 2010

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:02:32 -0500

2010 is shaping up to be a momentous year on several counts, especially for issues having to do with sustainability. Here are the top 10 things that appear likely to develop, from an Original Green perspective:
the Offshoring Reversal
Offshoring of manufacturing has had a long run, beginning in earnest a few decades ago. But as fuel becomes remarkably more expensive (see #2,) expect this trend to begin to weaken. We’ll likely only see faint beginnings of the reversal in 2010, but look for it to pick up steam through the decade. And it will eventually play a major role in our ability to live sustainably. Here’s why: Turn your head and look around the room. Most of the things you’re looking at have traveled thousands of miles to get to you, from the point where the resources were extracted to where the parts were made to where the whole thing was assembled to where it was warehoused to the store where you bought it. Common sense tells us that being green is a pipe dream if nearly everything we touch has thousands of Embodied Miles. Jim Kunstler’s World Made by Hand and Christopher Steiner’s $20 Per Gallon each tell excellent stories that support the reality of the Offshoring Reversal.
the Sustainability of Preservation
For several years, there has been a growing realization in some circles of the green building world that something is seriously wrong when you can get almost as many LEED credits by installing a bike rack as by preserving an entire building, and this inequity has set the preservationists against the green building industry. But until now, we haven’t had the tools to do anything about it. Now, however, a number of people are working on ways to factor in the true value of preservation, both within the US Green Building Council and elsewhere, because how can we say that we’re being green if we keep throwing buildings away? Look for several of these tools to surface in 2010 from a variety of sources.
Gizmo Green Gets Exposed
Gizmo Green is the idea that all we need to be green is better equipment and better materials. There are two problems: First, Gizmo Green can’t really make us sustainable because efficiency alone isn’t enough. But if it could make us green, there’s still the fact that better equipment and better materials cost more money. That’s OK when times are good and budgets are fat, but 2010 isn’t shaping up to be a fat-budget year, and the first thing to get cut out of a construction budget is usually the expensive stuff, because people almost always choose the long, slow bleeding of monthly utility bills over up-front costs. So what works? Natural green measures, like passive heating & cooling, daylighting, etc. You know, the stuff that has always worked, since long before the Thermostat Age.
the Meltdown Vacuum
There’s a silver lining to the catastrophic effects of the Meltdown on industries and professions surrounding construction: The vast machine of developers, bankers, planners, architects, builders, and real estate agents has largely been immobilized, leaving a vacuum of building design and construction leadership, and 2010 isn’t looking much better. Pre-Meltdown, this machine paved huge swaths of the country with a carpet of suburbia, but everyone who’s still operating now is doing so at a much smaller scale. On the other hand, shelter shows such as those on HGTV have never been stronger, with regular people learning more and more about the design and construction of their own homes and shops. These two trends will combine to create a much more grassroots construction industry than we’ve seen in at least a couple generations... and that’s great for sustainability because a more grassroots construction industry is far easier to infuse with the simple wisdom of how best to build green for a region’s conditions, climate, and culture. And it’s already beginning. The New Urban Guild’s Project:SmartDwelling, for example, sets out to do exactly these things for each region of the US, as illustrated by SmartDwelling I which was published recently in the Wall Street Journal.
the Return of the Garden
The trend of food coming from further and further away will begin to reverse in 2010, as the realization spreads that local food isn’t just fresher, healthier, and better-tasting, but it’s also far more sustainable to ship food only a few miles as opposed to today’s 1,500 Mile Caesar Salad. But this won’t be your grandmother’s garden. Rather, it’ll be full-blown Agricultural Urbanism, with everything from good-neighbor Employing Farms that can nestle tightly around cities, towns, and villages, all the way down to window gardens. DPZ, arguably the biggest rock stars of planning today, is one of a number of notables working this out. And there are already neighborhoods where these ideas are being tested, such as Serenbe in Georgia, which is fairly mature, and which I described here. Sky in the Florida panhandle and Southlands near Vancouver are in the planning stage, while Schooner Bay in the Bahamas and the Town of Hampstead in Alabama are in the early phases of construction.
the Re-Coding of the City
I’ll warn you up front... this one is a little bit boring. It has none of the drama of the Meltdown Vacuum, nor any of the sexiness of the Return of the Garden. But it’s an essential step in building sustainable places. Sprawl not only flings suburbs all over the map, but it lays them out in such a manner that whether you want to get to the city, or whether you just want to go to the store, the office, or to school, you’ve gotta drive. And if you have to drive everywhere, sustainability is impossible. But sprawl didn’t just happen. It was planned. By devices known as Euclidean zoning ordinances. Every city has one. Until now. DPZ (yeah, them again) has worked for years to develop an alternative zoning code that reverses sprawl; it’s known as the SmartCode, and it’s based on an idea known as the Rural-Urban Transect. The Smart Growth Manual illustrates what kind of places the SmartCode produces. Their colleagues have developed similar codes, and lots of firms are geared up to implement them. And now, the cities want them. 2010 looks like it might be the year that’s the tipping point with cities choosing this very smart way to reverse the tide of sprawl and make green cities possible. Here are lists of places where SmartCodes have been adopted, are in progress, and places with other form-based codes.
the Return of Durability
It sounds crazy, but the tough post-Meltdown economy of 2010 looks like it will finally make us buy stuff that’s better and more durable, and that just might turn the tide on a throwaway century during which pretty much nothing was designed to last. Here’s why: when cash is flowing, we can afford to throw stuff away, but when times are tight, we can’t. So although it’s more expensive to begin with, it’ll be much less costly in the long run. The Story of Stuff does a great job of showing why high consumption is unsustainable. So what’s the alternative? Using things that last for generations, rather than stuff meant to last only for a few months, weeks, or maybe even a single use. Things like reusable shopping bags are part of the story, but look for 2010 to be the year that we begin to realize that everything must be more durable... including our buildings themselves.
the Emergence of the Live-Work
The US was originally built largely by people who lived near the shop. Everyone from the President (the West Wing is part of the White House, remember?) to shopkeepers, woodworkers, blacksmiths, and even farmers, all lived very close to where they worked until trains and then cars made it possible to commute. Today, three trends are converging: Countless people have been laid off post-Meltdown, and the scarcity of jobs has many of them striking out on their own. The Internet makes working from home more feasible than at any other point in our lifetimes. And a cadre of planners and architects known as New Urbanists have been working for years to figure out how to get workplaces back into our neighborhoods so we don’t have to drive everywhere. The Live-Work Unit, designed so you can live and work on the same piece of land, is where these trends converge. Now, you can finally “make a living where you’re living.” Look for the Live-Work Unit to be a household term by the end of 2010.
the Big Convergence
Three world-changing trends that need no introduction are converging right now, and 2010 looks like the year when most people realize we’ve got to think differently about “business as usual.” They are the Meltdown, Peak Oil, and Climate Change. The Meltdown has seared our consciousness like no economic event since the Great Depression. Peak Oil was once hotly debated, but now the evidence is mounting that we’re running out. And Climate Change is still debated, but not ignored. Any one of these three should be a warning that we need to change, but all three emerging at once make it clear that we have some serious adapting to do. There’s a lot of hand-wringing over all this, but I believe that if we take these things seriously in 2010 and adapt in an intelligent way, it could lead to the next Golden Age... something that would have been impossible in our previous sprawling, over-consuming, debt-ridden condition.
the New City
How might we live in this next Golden Age? Our cities, towns, villages, and hamlets should be nourishable, because if you can’t eat there, you can’t live there, and accessible so you can get around in a number of ways, especially including walking and biking, which the price of gas can’t touch. They should be serviceable so you can get the basic services of life within walking distance, and the people serving you those services can afford to live nearby, too, and securable from undue fear. These things make a place sustainable. Once we’ve done that, then we need to build sustainable buildings, which are first of all lovable, because if they can’t be loved, they won’t last. If they’re lovable, then they should also be durable so they’ll endure, and flexible so they can be used for many things over the centuries. And they must be frugal, beginning with things that work naturally. What does this look like? It looks a whole lot like the New Urbanism, a movement which has been working for decades to figure these things out. A growing number of experts agree that the New Urbanism will be the most important green trend of 2010. I think they’re right... it’s about time!
~Steve Mouzon