DOE Solar Decatholon Winners_Let the Sun Shine on Innovation

When I was in graduate school in the the early 1990's sustainable design was just getting off of the ground in the way we know it now. (I know it's been around since Mesa Verde, but the current generation of thinking)

I wish programs such as the Solar Decathalon held each year in the fall in Washington D.C. were around then. It is sponsored by the US Dept of Energy and teams from universities and colleges from all across the world compete in it. It provides an oppourtunity for pursuing design innovation and experiential learning on a small solar home scale. What a fantastic all around oppourtunity!

The program has six-goals worth noting. The basic premise is to invigorate interest, research and developing marketable technologies able to be brought to the market-place. Another one is to help develop zero energy homes which is something many of us want to know more about.

The winners this year, especially the top three, offer a wide ranging view of how to solve the design challenge. Check out the winners! I wonder if teams from Norwich University or Yestermorrow Design Build School have ever entered? It seems like this program would be right up their respective areas of focus. I'll have to check with friends who teach there.

See photostreams of the homes on Flickr and Hi-res Gallery of Homes on the DOE site.

Enjoy seeing what the next generation of design leaders are up to!

Seeking and Sensing the Sacred in Jerusalem_Part 1

Originally published in the July 1998 Newsletter from the "Colorado Architect", the journal of the American Institute of Architects state wide Colorado chapter. This is a two-part blog article. I traveled to Israel and Jerusalem specifically as mentioned in prior posts in the summer of 1994. I had received a small travel grant from AIA Colorado. It was an especially troubling time with much strife between Israelis and Palestinians. This article isn't about that though. It's about searching for the sacred in one of the holiest places. There I learned how ironic it was that as sacredness increased so did the intensity of the profane.......

It was one o’clock in the afternoon. Since early morning I had been sitting in the tall belfry of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, located in the Muristan or Christian Quarter of the Old City. From this high point I could see the roof-tops of the Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Armenian Quarters, the Mt of Olives and Western and Eastern Jerusalem beyond the walls. My dreamy reverie was interrupted by the minaret of the nearby Mosque of Omar, crackling into life with the mid-day call to prayer. Soon, its sound was joined by minarets of other mosques. What began as a single voice, slowly grew into an amazing chorus of Arabic readings from the Koran blaring loudly all over the city, until a single sound formed which penetrated the very pores of my skin. People emerged out of their homes, offices and stores walking to their neighborhood mosque to pray and gather in community with one another. Slowly, the single voice started to break apart as the calls to prayers ceased and all was silent again but for the doves cooing in the vaulted steeple above my head.

All of us have experienced sacred places and spaces in our lives. Whether they were the special hiding places of our childhood, the kitchen table or campfire, the concept is clear. They are places which provide sanctuary, a sense of respite from the harsh forces of life. They are also found in our places of worship, the temples, mosques and churches which form the center of spiritual and cultural life for many. For others, natural spaces and places have the same kind of personal and collective power.

For two months in the summer of 1994, I traveled to Jerusalem and various parts of Israel and the West Bank on an AIA Colorado Fisher Traveling Scholarship. In preparation, I read much about the region, its history and texts about sacred place and space. I was most interested in experiencing these places outside of their dry academic context. To describe them I would sketch, photograph, interview others and write about what I was experiencing. As a maker of space and place, I felt much of which I lived in and experienced at home was devoid of spiritual depth.. I sensed studying sacred places and spaces in their context would help me to design more meaningful and unified communities back home. Thus I sought out Jerusalem.

As one of the longest continually settled places on Earth, the city presents an incredible richness of cultures and urban conditions to experience and study. Digging down into the Old City one finds a tightly woven mesh of physical, spatial and mythological relationships unparalleled in complexity and significance. I sought to compare and contrast the differences between the physical design and cultural use of space and notions of place exhibited in the Old City by the Western or Wailing Wall of the Jews, The Church of the Holy Sepulcher of the Christians and the Dome of the Rock of the Muslims. Surrounding each Holy Place lay a district or residential area which supported the sacred activities within. As sacred precincts, the Jewish, Christian and Muslim quarters exhibited profound differences and similarities as compared to one another. Each revealed essential qualities of how space and place were culturally perceived and expressed through their design and history.

In numerous conversations with others and through my experiences, I concluded that without those who use the spaces, the places themselves can not remain sacred. The continuity over four millennium of the presence of people practicing the rituals and traditions within the monuments and holy places, saturates them with sacredness. These holy shrines and places are mere instruments or containers which promote and enable the rituals to be practiced and engaged in. Without this human imprint of activity and use they would stand inactive and forgotten, hence not sacred. It is in the remembering and renewing of the great stories of the Talmud, Old and New Testaments and the Koran which enlivens the silent monuments with a sense of narrative space and sacred time.

A favorite memory was walking the ramparts of the great stone wall surrounding the Jewish, Christian, Armenian and Muslim Quarters within the Old City. One traverses each area without actually entering them. From the ramparts one could also see the different sections of Western and Eastern Jerusalem and the outlying hills and valleys beyond, each with their own rich layers of physical design and symbolic qualities. From this high place it was easy to assess the physical and symbolic aspects of the city, drawing relationships impossible to arrive at on the ground. I spent a number of afternoons slowly moving along the walls, sketching, thinking and taking photographs, trying to unravel and make sense of what I saw. The city and its history awakened before my eyes and under my pen.

end of part 1 - to be continued

A Sacred Threshold in Jerusalem, an overnight at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Nightly the door of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher shuts to visiting pilgrims and tourists. At nine o’clock in the evening, after the final Pilgrim is ushered out its private side emerges out of the mysteries of its inner spaces. Many years ago, in a Summer visit to this Holy City, I had the opportunity to experience this sacred place due to the persistence of a new friend met while staying at a Hostel in the midst of the Old City of Jerusalem.

To stay overnight at this, one of the most holy of sacred places in Christianity, individuals or small groups may ask to remain in the church after-hours to worship and mingle if they make the request to the attendant at the entry. Doing so, sets in motion a complex ritual interchange between the various factions residing in the Church to gain its approval. Latin Catholics, Armenians, Greek Orthodox, Syrian Coptic and Ethiopian together share the Church. Each has their own distinct sacred precinct whether in the nave, the apse, side galleries or up on the roof or in the bowels of this most sacred place. In order to approve entry after-hour a representative of each faith must be asked and the issue debated together with final approval by the Latin priest. This is evocative of the collaboration and friction felt daily while experiencing the Church’s holy spaces.

After much bantering in a variety of languages, they granted our request. We settled into old wooden next to the doorway to observe the ritual closing of the great wooden doors. Four men from various faiths work together. An Armenian pushes the door closed. It is locked by a Greek Orthodox from the outside. A small hatch in the massive Medieval door is opened and a ladder used in locking the door is pushed through from the outside. A Latin receives it and leans it against the aged., pockmarked wood where it lies until being used again to open the door later in the evening. I drew the door from the inside while watching the ritual of closing the door for the evening.

My friend and I split up to pursue our own personal explorations within the Church. The darkness of the night amplifies the candlelit shadows and eerie quiet due to the absence of the hordes of visitors wandering its spaces. The lights are turned off. My footfalls echoed off the ancient stone columns and walls disappearing into the vaulted darkness above. I walked around the various shrines alone with quiet thoughts feeling the cloak of silence and darkness so different from the day.

A quietude settled into my own thoughts as I sat watching candlelit icons and statuary set upon altars waver and flicker in their shadows. I drew only a little and thought deeply about my mother whom I lost to a valiant struggle with cancer a few years before. Sitting in prayer-like reverie in the wavering candlelight, I slowly realized I had traveled so far to not only chart and describe sacred place and space in this holiest of cities, but also to come closer to the soul and memory of my mother whom I dearly missed. I came to mourn her death while loving her life.

Somehow, I felt, coming to Jerusalem, I could come closer to her here due to its sacred and mysterious qualities and the direct physical connection to the holy in this sacred city. The primal spaces of the Old City, built of stone and standing for so many millennium, stood for me outside of time while fully of my time and place. Walking the narrow streets and pathways in and around the Old City, I imagined the many lively histories gracing these doorways and ancient surfaces layering over one another.

Does being deep Green include Corporate Responsibility?

DEEPGREEN AND CR

I wonder if being deep green can include believing in corporate responsibility and people, planet and profits together? I was listening to NPR driving home. They were discussing a recent Time article, "The Responsibility Revolution" published recently. I know living in Vermont this isn't necessarily breaking news. We know corporate responsibility efforts and green behavior have been tightly linked for over a generation with early adopters and maturing companies in the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility(VBSR.org) sphere. It seems just like good business sense.

The more I practice archtecture the more I believe in the importance of respecting and sustaining natural systems revolving around energy, water and waste in the creating of buildings and places. The USGBC's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design or LEED program now maturing and gaining mainstream acceptance around the country, offers a framework for aligning the goals of respecting natural systems. Conversation involving sustainability should also include discussing social and cultural systems intertwined with the natural. Thus the corporate responsibility movement offers a wider promise, a deeper more inclusive platform gathering elements such as Green thinking and design together. Organizations, for example, such as Winning Workplaces examine the nexus of building positive workplace culture and operations. The idea of respect permeats both the natural as well as the workplace ecosystems, albeit in differing ways. I think it is interesting to bring this idea into the design of green workplace where natural systems and social and organizational systems collide with delightful oppourtunity for productive cultivation into a more sustainable whole.

It's not easy though...That is why it is so fun to be a green architect and design strategist. It's also like being a gardener where you never really have the "right" answer, but only ones which are relative to the soil you till and the weather and climate surrounding you.

Iconography and weathervanes

I found this weathervane a few years ago atop a barn in Vermont where I live. It is a truly unique object. I appreciate the multiple readings it provides. Yes it is a weathervane. Yes it identifies rather strongly its place from other places. It could be an owl, a wizard, a frog. But no it is a cow in silouette. The strong graphic character is unmistakable against the sky. It is both weathervane, symbol, utilitarian object and storytelling device. The visual onomonpheia of the image and implied function and connection to farming is exact and unmistakable.

By learning to look at the everday object such as this and wonder why it is so powerful, we can use this lesson in seeing to communicate meaning and symbolism intrinsic to creating design which connects to the emotions and resonates with the subconscious.

Another reason not to look down at your feet, but rather up to the sky, out of your ordinary field of view.

Newsweek Green Rankings_Top 500 Companies

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Newsweek just published an article and first ever Green Rankings of the top 500 companies in the USA. It's an interesting list of who's who in corporate america and has a distinctly Main Street focus. I did a quick scan of the list and found companies absent I'd expect to see somewhere on it. This gives me pause to reflect about the companies I'm aware of here in Vermont and in our region. Pretty much none of them showed up. You know the one's you'd might expect in the Corporate Social Responsibility space.
Be that as it may this is an interesting effort. Ratings such as these will most definitely provoke controversey and discussion. And if this mainstream media ranking takes hold perhaps it could be a driver of sorts to move sustainability forward. I know of no other truly mass media ranking like this...so it's a beginning at this larger scale.
Newsweek has an article explaining its methodology and the partners it consulted with to assist them in measuring and verification leading to the ranking. You should check it out. One interesting anecdote, I listened to a recent Treehugger radio podcast where they interviewed a deputy editor who helped manage the effort at Newsweek. She said if they knew how much work it would prove to be they might have reconsidered the article and ranking effort. They learned a ton along the way but it was very, very hard work and difficult to figure out how to measure efforts, compare and rank companies. This is no surprise. Green isn't easy. When you tackle systems based issues with all of their interconnectedness it's hard slogging. Kudos for Newsweek to jump into the fire pit along with the other less well known dancers who've been there for a while already.

The top 10, then 100,200 etc... are as follows:
1. Hewlett-Packard
2. Dell
3. Johnson & Johnson
4. Intel
5. IBM
6. State Street
7. Nike
8. Briston-Meyers Squibb
9. Applied Materials
10. Starbucks
....
100. Marathon Oil
200. Costco Warehouse
300. Shaw Group
400. C.R. Bard
500. Peobody Energy

Seeking an intimacy with the Natural World

As fall in Vermont meanders its way through September there is much to see and ponder in the everyday landscape outside Montpelier where I live. Templeton road intersects with County Road which leads to Calais and Maple Corners. Bursting from a dark tunnel of maple canopies into a large open area of pastures, a pond and hay fields one moves from the darkness of the forest into the light of the clearing.

In the early morning fog a magical time awaits an eager exploring eye. Here in the break of morning you really feel the transition from the coolness of night to the heat of mid-day. Atmospheric conditions present themselves unlike any other time of day to stimulate creative compositions derived from the mysterious qualities of fog. If I could express photography in terms of watercolor it would be seen in the quiet of this time of day amidst the breezy moisture. Mid-day precision dissolves for a while in fuzzy disorientation and otherworldly diffusion. This leads to a reflective intimacy with the natural world. For the world is waking, stretching and rising to meet the new day.

Why is seeing this way important to an architect? The buildings and places we design must connect to the land. The land must also connect and relate to the building. Building and land come together to create a sense of place. Blending the horizontal forces of the landscape with the vertical urges of buildings and structures is a lifelong quest. It's important to seek a balance between both to create a more powerful presence of place. By actively looking for this sense of balance around me whether here where I live in Vermont or wherever I go is instructive. By learning to look I see and feel the mood of a place. The fog teaches one how to see mood and symbolism in everyday things, bringing a sense of wonder to the ordinary, turning mere things into the extraordinary.

Our work in our building and design teams involves visualizing how and where and why to put and place structures in the land, in cities and villages. Do they blend in? Do they create a sense of contrast? How does this new place present itself visually in the land? Is it sited to invite discovery or be hidden from on-lookers? How can we turn the ordinary into the extra-ordinary?

Cultivating such abilities to see and interpret helps to produce a sense of mood, narrative and experience contributing richness and beauty to otherwise functional design. That's why it's important to keep learning how to see.

Toward Collaborative Interactive Meeting Spaces: Surface & Media:scape

Last night I visited Business Interiors in Williston, VT, a local systems furniture / space solutions company affiliated with Steelcase among other manufacturers. They hosted area Architects and Designers in a mixer celebrating surviving the tumultuous last year and introducing Mediascape and the Combi Chair. Jim Baker, BI President, shared some encouraging words and that he was feeling more optimistic about the economy and business activity.

Later while sitting around the Mediascapes interactive table and screen environment, talk turned immediately to collaboration and how it offered an effective resource to enhance group effectiveness and dynamics. Dave McGill, a visiting regional Steelcase Market rep from the Boston area shared how he seems to use it more and more when he visits showrooms and client in meetings. For him, it really jump starts information sharing and cross-collaboration between others at the table. Meeting participants plug in their laptops, adaptive mobile devices into the table to be able to share interactively on the common heads up screen whatever relevant info they need. Whether powerpoint slides, websites, spreadsheets, pictures or videos any content is fair game. Up to 4 screens can be seen at once. It can be web camera enabled to allow for video conferencing so different locations can see each other.

A sales team could come together and present mini-reports about their sales work with each other. Because of how visual it is, info can be rapidly shared and given the multiple screen capability, cross-connections between information, click-throughs to interesting websites etc. Sometimes the best conversations are a little less linear and more dynamic. Or a design team could have a shared 3d model saved on a common site and interactively manipulate it individually around the table. Reflecting on the experience, one downside I saw or limitation was how much wires were strewn around the table and how everyone were tied to separate laptop devices or screens while sharing one large common one. The table wouldn't really work for those of us who like to work with the table, lay drawings down and draw and interact that way. Like for instance, sketching or editing design ideas together, marking up documents collaboratively etc.

At the Media Scape table last night, I shared how last year I watched a briefing scene from the Quantum of Solace James Bond film and saw a highly interactive computer table used at the cinematic version of M1-6, the British equivalent of the CIA. (I may have reported on this in an earlier post) Owen Milne, Business Interiors Marketing and Environmental Resource shared he'd seen a something like that called Microsoft Surface. Ironically, he typed it up and it came up on the media scape screen where we looked together in excitement.

Surface provides a flat table interface where like Media Scape people can gather around the table top. I want Steelcase to design and produce a 2.0 version of Media Scape using this technology so we can do away with our individual laptops and roll up our sleeves around the collaborative table together.

Here's how Microsoft Surface really stands out (4 Key points from the website)

• Direct interaction. Users can grab digital information with their hands and interact with content on-screen by touch and gesture – without using a mouse or keyboard.
• Multi-user experience. The large, horizontal, 30 inch display makes it easy for several people to gather and interact together with Microsoft Surface - providing a collaborative, face-to-face computing experience.
• Multi-touch. Microsoft Surface responds to many points of contact simultaneously - not just from one finger, as with a typical touch screen, but from dozens of contact points at once.
• Object recognition. Users can place physical objects on the screen to trigger different types of digital responses – providing for a multitude of applications and the transfer of digital content to mobile devices.

You can set down your I-phone or other enabled smart device and its screen becomes an icon on the surface! I can envision a time in the near future where these kinds of interactive tables become common place in conference rooms or specialized media oriented meeting spaces. I looked at the site, right now it's glass table top which sits on a very large grey box which contains the souped up computer enabling the interactive magic above to happen.

Another regional Steelcase rep (Anita?) said her biggest challenge is getting potential customers excited about Mediascape and its merits and integrating it into their work styles. For so many, 30 to 50 somethings we're used to meeting around tables with laptops or other devices open some of the time but we're mostly still face to face. Based on past life-experience technology will only get more effective with time. The screens will continue to get larger, the supporting computing more powerful and smaller. This is the kind of collaboration environment, my children who are 9 and 10, will be using in their College libraries, cafe's, student activity centers. Eventually, it will become common place in their workplace's meeting and collaboration spaces.

For now, can the R&D people of Steelcase and Microsoft get together and start working towards developing better, easier and more affordable to use products? It would make a world of difference!

Meanwhile, it's going to be a while until I visit my son's at college so please keep the innovation going...