Engineering the Environment

Over the past decade or more there has been a great focus in LEED buildings.  Clemson University for instance touts the number of LEED buildings on campus, which, according to the website, sits at 21.  LEED is a great initiative in creating more sustainability but as Mostafavi puts it in Ecological Urbanism "But there remains the problem that the moral imperative of sustainability and, by implication, of sustainable design, tends to supplant disciplinary contribution.  Thus sustainable design is not always seen as representing design excellence or design innovation.  This situation will continue to provoke skepticism and cause tension between those who promote disciplinary knowledge and those who push for sustainability, unless we are able to develop novel ways of design thinking that can attribute to both domains."  Essentially, from what I gather, LEED is like a report card, you get points for checking off all the boxes, a certain number of checks will allow you to get the Gold status.  However when you look at a survey of LEED buildings, they are mostly ordinary and mundane.  In this realm of building, design and creativity aren't used as a metric towards becoming a building worth of LEED if they can't meet the minimum requirements.  I really like the point in this week's lectures where we need to stop seeing the environment and the city as two separate problems and instead see them as one interconnected problem.  When you look at the places that is doing this well, look no further than The Netherlands.

This environment is engineered to protect this town from storm surges.  These sanddunes are engineered to break up the surge and double as parking garages that can hold up to 700 cars.  This beach town is popular for tourists but outside the summer seasons it is quiet.  Putting the parking underground allows for the cars to be stored without straining the local infrastructure.  Charleston had a very different response to storm surges, they decided to build a wall on the Battery to fight back surges.  They are now in the midst of building a taller wall to protect the city for the next 50 years.  Their solution works against the environment rather than with it and is in no way as aesthetic as what the dutch did in Katwijk.

A sunken courtyard/basketball court doubles as a cistern to hold stormwater in Rotterdam 

After Hurricane Sandy the town of Rockaway decided to rebuild in a resilient manner.  Usually federal government relief through FEMA involves building back what was destroyed.  the town of Rockaway decided they could do better and build resiliently. They ultimately put their relief funds to a design competition.  The winner selected was White Arkitekter from Stokholm.  Their design titled, "Small means, great ends" focused on building resiliency through a phased-project that would focus small interventions to rebuild the environment to mitigating hurricane damage the next time a "Sandy" passed through.  This approach protected the community both ecologically and economically.

For the sake of brevity I'll end here, but I encourage you all to check out this project!