‘Ecologies of Gold: The Past and Future Mining Landscapes of Johannesburg’ was published in Places Magazine today.  The article features an abstract of research done by Dorothy Tang and I in Johannesburg, South Africa as well as an extensive slide show documenting our visit.

Neues Olympiadorf is a new Olympic Village for the 2018 Winter Games in Munich, Germany.  Re-using the site of the 1972 summer games, the Neues Olympiadorf attempts to model a contemporary understanding of sustainability in the same way that the 1972 Olympiadorf was a showcase for sustainability in its time.  Ecological relationships are created at three scales – the complex, the housing block and the unit.

The complex is sited at the southwest corner of the large Olympic Park, the stadiums to the north, fields and a man-made forested hill to the east.  A major arterial runs on the western edge of the site with a patch of urban fabric to the south.  The site, therefore, straddles the edge of the site, mediating the dense urban fabric of five-story block buildings to the west and the expansive park to the east.  A hybridized block structure is employed to create a gradation within a field of buildings, mediating the appropriate scales from urban edge to park.  A series of infrastructures tie the field of buildings to the site—canals, roads, paths, open spaces and tree alleys.  Each network ties the complex into an ecological system related to the urban edge, the park or a mediation between the two.  An urban section through these networks illustrates how the system responds to seasonal changes, providing site drainage, various forms of recreation, and site circulation along the way.

The housing blocks are sited in relationship to solar orientation.  Utilizing a 45-degree grid, buildings are sited to provide well-lit open spaces. Building heights are limited so that no building casts a shadow on another based on the sun angle at the winter solstice.  Building massing is composed such that taller buildings are allowed where larger open spaces exist to the north, thereby allowing larger shadows.   The building is sited with is north to a strong street edge and its south to an open space.  Each open space defines a semi-private domain of allotment gardens and recreational areas.

The unit embodies the personal relationship to ecological systems.  It is composed around the relationship of person to water cycles, solar orientation, food supply, and waste disposal.  A key factor of this is the provision of open spaces for every unit, especially the light courts that penetrate each building block, bringing daylight, atmospheric conditions, and social interactions into the center of each unit.  Various screening devices are used to mediate this relationship, providing the ability to regulate ones intimacy to nature and one another.

with Michael Murphy

Post-Disaster/Conflict Housing

Development financing happens in phases. After a conflict or a disaster, massive amounts of relief financing is opened up quickly to provide immediate solutions to basic amenities like shelter, food, and health. Often, this temporary relief becomes permanent and long term while more sustained aid is proposed and expected. Generally emergency mandate NGO’s provide access to this aid and these related services. After a time of relative peace and stabilization, emergency mandate NGOs are phased out and more development focused, long-term support NGOs enter providing different services and different sources of financing. In both cases, money and resources are wasted based upon the phase of development their mandate allows them to operate within. Our project asks the question if we could rethink the inter- section of this transition (in Liberia this was about seven years after war) and allow emergency mandate NGOs to provide more permanent infrastructures, and development NGOs to work on more immediate services, a potential cost-savings and solution oriented practice could emerge. Realizing that this would require different and upfront financing, we propose to think about housing within a carbon credit financing system to suggest more permanent shelter in what would be considered a temporary scenario.

Value Added Housing

The value of shelter is typically correlated to the value of the property, land plus structure. This model relies on stable property markets and clear tenure rights. However, these conditions do not apply to much of the world’s population, specifically in urban informal settlements. How else could the value of shelter be valued to relate to the specific environments in which these people live? Shelter, through the act of dwelling, may have other valuable benefits than the basic correlation of property value. To evaluate these benefits, it is necessary to model shelter as a system with inputs and outputs that have values attached to them. In the typical association of shelter to property value, ownership in a supply and demand market generates property value. In this new model, shelter’s value is dependent on many additional factors beyond ownership, such as tax revenue, provision of available labor, advertising rights or carbon offset credits. By creating multiple ways of valuing shelter, more economic sources can be tapped for the improvement of shelter beyond typical bank mortgage solutions. These additional streams of potential revenue may allow governments to provide greater investment in public housing stock, encourage the involvement of NGOs or provide investment opportunities for public private partnerships.

Value Added Systems: Carbon Credits

When that shelter and its systems are aggregated into larger developments, cost savings are provided by a number of variables including sharing of resources, community centered services and the bundling of finances through different investments. That applied to the context that the community lives within (for example how long since a conflict or disaster) can be a useful – if not reductive – gauge for the type of investment opportunities available. This time line also highlights the type of NGOs and development groups working in the country focused on Emergency mandate, Long Term Development solutions, or Government financed poverty reduction developments. By harnessing clever models of home building, for instance through new opportunities like the Carbon Market, potential exists to build better buildings earlier than typical financing would suggest. The Kuyasa project shows an example of how a South African project was able to use carbon credits to provide better homes to people with the help of Government financed schemes and a mix of private investment. We aim to investigate these types of projects further to see if this financing could be applied to countries in earlier stages of development, closer to the stage of conflict/disaster, and that have significantly less financing available – like Haiti or Liberia.

Value Added Housing Components

Value Added Housing Components can be divided into three categories: Construction, Land Management and Energy. These three groups describe the type of system that is being modified to capture greater value through the creation, deployment, and use of housing. Construction refers to the method and means of building the housing units. Here, the construction method is conceptualized as an on-site prefabricated system that efficiently builds reproducible units that can be measured and tested for compliance to applicable standards. On-site prefabrication brings additional jobs to the local community and creates an initial infrastructure for future light manufacturing. Land management describes the method of deploying housing units on a site. In this case, each house has been paired with a tree to combat deforestation. The relationship of each tree to house is governed by solar access for photovoltaics and the aggregated spaces created between units that may serve as places for future expansion. Energy Use encompasses all of the components of a house that may directly or indirectly reduce the amount of energy used, thereby cutting the CO2 emissions generated by a given unit, and increasing the amount of carbon credits that can be traded for.

Carbon Credit Model

Carbon Credit programs require a long validation and approval process. Currently thousands of proposed projects wait in the approval process and are undergoing significant review. Once a program activity is approved however, this type of project can easily be replicated in differ- ent locations. One type of project, called a Program of Activities, or a POA, bundles multiple approved project types or components to easily argue for the increased carbon absorption, sequestration, or offsets. We propose to bundle our housing project for Mirabalais with two ap- proved types (afforestation and the Kuyasa utility concept) with a proposed program of carbon absorption materials. We used Novacement as an example of building materials which absorb carbon instead of creates emissions. While there are others, this example provides unique insight into how dramatic the built environment is on the quantity of carbon emissions in our atmosphere annually and the tremendous opportunity to rethink construction through carbon credit financing sources.

Value Added Housing can create large new housing settlements that respond to housing crisis around the globe. By leveraging mechanisms such as carbon credit markets or local economies, housing for the displaced and low-income may become an investment opportunity rather than a charitable donation. Housing then becomes an asset, enabling future economic growth and building wealth at a local level.

Exhibit at Harvard University Graduate School of Design

March 7th-13th

by Andrew Watkins and Dorothy Tang

Over the last century, the extraction of gold in Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni has created a constantly shifting landscape. Regional urban form is tied to global gold prices, mining, and waste. Deep shaft mining has actively altered the topography, hydrology, and ecosystems of the 80 km mining strip that traverses the two municipalities.    In the 1970′s, the decline of the mining industry set the stage for informal settlements to occupy former mining lands. The degraded environmental conditions are major obstacles for these communities to improve their livelihood. Now, with advances in technology and rising gold prices, mining has been reactivated and massive topographical and hydrological operations are set in motion once again. Our research documents the physical and invisible infrastructures that support informal settlements and gold mining as a means to reveal opportunities for collaboration and future growth in both constituencies.

Over 300,000 people in Ethiopia contract Tuberculosis every year.  It is estimated that over 5,000 of these cases are multi-drug resistant, an especially deadly variation of the disease.  TB is an airborne pathogen, infectious as an aerosol, the design of the spaces of treatment are especially significant in reducing the contagiousness of patients.  While all cases of TB are treatable, many cases require lengthy treatment regimes that require long clinic stays.  To adequately treat TB, clinics must be created that can process new patients and care for those in treatment all while providing an atmosphere with constant air changes and generous light.

The clinic is designed to filter patients and staff into a series of courts, each providing a porous space for the stages of the treatment process, from diagnosis to outpatient care.  The courts are formed by a series of parallel bars, stepping up the slope of the site and connected by a system of circulation paths.  While the layout of this clinic is specific to a particular site, the framework may allow for the configuration to be altered to fit different sites and programmatic balances.  Each bar may shrink or grow, and bars or courts may be added to the composition.

The clinic in Gondar sits on a hill adjacent to the city core.  The positioning allows the clinic to participate in the cultural landscape of the city while also being set apart as a retreat for healing.  Public functions are located along the road with increasingly private and health sensitive spaces located further up the hillside.  The primary entrance to the clinic is marked by a planar bar extending through the open building to a plaza, enclosed on three sides and open to the landscape beyond.  From this plaza, users may access the clinic that climes up the slope to the northwest or the cultural museum to the southeast.  The bars are grouped into similar programmatic elements, each grouping forming a small courtyard that has increased circulatory connections.  Between courts, the surrounding landscape is allowed to penetrate though the building composition, further distinguishing the series of programmatic changes and establishing a hierarchy of thresholds between bars and courts.   Circulation paths alternate between connecting bars to form courts and connecting courts to form the overall building composition.  The courts, defined by a pair of bars, are organized on the slope so that each court defines a flat plaza while the land between the courts slopes.  This organization increases the perception of a threshold between courts while allowing a continuous progression between elements.  The sloped landscapes between bars are allowed to grow with the natural vegetation including large trees that temper the area.  This tempered air is drawn into the clinic bars through series of chimneys, creating a constant non-mechanical and tempered ventilated space.  Each chimney structure also captures solar radiation and water to service the needs of the program below.  The bars of the building are composed of a series of regular units, defined by the structural walls and the roof canopy form.  Each unit can be arranged to meet a variety of programmatic needs, from a patient room to a laboratory.

The construction method consists of a series of foundation fins running perpendicular to the slope of the site and mitigating the elevation change.  On this series of fins, a ground slab is poured.  Walls can be poured flat and tilted into place, forming the major vertical structural element of the building.  A roof canopy is erected on top of the walls, creating a system of chimneys where ventilation is required to service the programmatic needs below.  The canopy is erected using a series of temporary supports.  The temporary support poles are places in a regular pattern on the floor but vary in height to create the roof form.  Strips of cementitious fabric are strung between supports such that a triangulated structural surface is formed.  Once the strips of fabric are in place, water is added to harden the structure and bond the strips together.  The temporary poles are removed, and the structure is finished.

CSA’s—short for Community Supported Agriculture—are a form of food delivery system that pairs production directly to the individual consumers.  CSA’s work with slight variations, however, the CSA’s being analyzed here all work on a subscription basis, produce boxes being delivered to drop-off points on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.  The concept is that by supporting a CSA, a consumer can get a full diet of produce—fruit and vegetables—that is grown locally, in season and always fresh.  By creating this connection, a sustainable system of food delivery can be established.

01 CSA Routes

In Los Angeles, four primary CSA’s were identified:  Tierra Miguel Foundation, South Central Farmer’s Cooperative, Tanaka Farms, and JR Organics.  Each CSA has distinct distribution routes based on the farm location, drop-off locations, and days of delivery.  All four farms are located just outside of Los Angeles County, but within a 200 mile radius of downtown LA.  The closest farm, Tanaka Farms, is located just south of LA in Orange County.  Tierra Miguel and JR Organics are located near one another in Riverside County.  South Central Farmer’s Cooperative was located in South Central LA but has since located north of Los Angeles to Kern County.  The location of these farms outside of LA is indicative of the fact that agricultural land is extremely scarce within the county boundary.

02 CSA Route Analysis

The distribution routes of Tierra Miguel illustrate how CSA’s function.  Tierra Miguel has two delivery days in LA County—Wednesday and Friday.  Each drop-off location has its own characteristics based on who has volunteered to receive produce boxes and act as a local distribution point.  Tierra Miguel is specifically interesting because it uses the most grassroots distribution system where any house or business could be a local node.  The local nodes of Tanaka Farms are primarily based on schools and some churches while South Central Farmer’s Cooperative and JR Organics use farmer’s markets as local nodes.

The local nodes of Tierra Miguel each receive a different number of boxes based on the number of subscribers in that area.  The minimum number of boxes for a local node is five while the greatest is twenty-five.  At this point, there does not seem to be any correlation between the number of boxes being distributed per local node and the use typology—commercial or residential—of that node.

03 CSA Boxes

CSA boxes contain a variety of produce each week based on what is in season.  Each box always contains vegetables, fruits, and herbs.  The contents of each box are not known until the week of the distribution as farmers decide which crops are ready to pick, and which need to wait.  While in concept, all produce in the box is grown on the CSA farm, some farms do supplement boxes with produce from other local farms as the scales of operations do not permit a consistent weekly harvest.  In addition, some produce is grown year-round and can be found in almost every box including greens, carrots, tomatoes, apples, and oranges.  Boxes are 10-25lbs in weight—depending on the type of produce included—and roughly the size of a paper or banker’s box.

04 CSA Agricultural Land

The concept of CSA’s is that you can locally source all of your produce, creating a sustainable system of food production, delivery and consumption.  If this concept were applied to the entire diet, including dairy, starches and protein [specifically meat in this case], would LA be able to supply itself with enough food?

Land requirements vary per diet type, vegan diets using less land than diets that include dairy and meat, as land requirements for livestock are much higher than those for produce.  A vegan diet requires 700 square meters of land per person, while a omnivore diet needs 3500 square meters.  We have already established that LA has very little agricultural land.  This is in large part due to the density of development, covering almost all developable land.  LA has a density of 45 square meters of land per person, not nearly enough to sustain itself on any diet, even the most basic diet of potatoes still requires 300 square meters per person.  When accounting for the entire Southern California region, 1,175 square meters is available per person, a little less than what is required for a diet that includes dairy.  This shows that the density of population in Southern California, especially in LA County and Orange County cannot be supplied by a sustainable diet of locally produced food.  LA must rely on external production centers to supply much of its diet, especially the meats and some dairy.  However, LA could hope to rely on the surrounding counties for its produce consumption.

Harvard Treasures Tour: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

Friday, November 20th

Member Event

Mary Daniels, Special Collections librarian, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Andrew Watkins, AIA LEED, Harvard University Graduate School of Design (AM ’10)

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, on Quincy Street, is the only building in North America designed by the French modernist architect Le Corbusier. It represents his attempt to create a “synthesis of the arts” that integrates architecture with painting and sculpture. Mary Daniels will show Le Corbusier’s original sketches for the building, an unpublished sketchbook, and Le Corbusier paintings from the Special Collections of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and members will tour the building with Andrew Watkins.

Participation is free, but registration is required. Harvard Treasures is a new series offered to members only that will explore the university’s architectural riches and art holdings beyond the Harvard Art Museum.

http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/calendar/detail.dot?id=25234

Diridon Station covered in:

“New A’s Ballpark”, a local San Jose, CA blog covering all news and events revolving around the pursuit of a new ballpark for the Oakland Athletics.

“Athletics Nation”, a fan page of the Oakland Athletics.

“Divergent Convergence: Designing China”
An Exhibition presented by the USC American Academy in China

Beijing Urban Planning Centre
60 South Lishi Road, Xicheng District 10045 China

August 23 — September 23, 2009

press release

How does the next generation of Western architects see China?

What is the Western perception of Chinese art, architecture and urbanism?

From the Curator’s Statement:

“Divergent Convergence will, for the first time, collect in a single exhibition the work of students and researchers from across American architecture schools, produced over the past decade. Projects will range in scale from individual works of architecture to proposals on an urban scale. More specifically, the selected projects will illustrate the responses of students and researchers to a series of questions critically relevant to the Chinese city today: How can architecture adapt to a hyper-compressed design and construction schedule? Should ancient neighborhoods be demolished to make way for new construction? Can cities accommodate rapid demographic change without opening up irreparable social rifts? How dense should cities become? How can sustainability be achieved in the context of increased industrial production? Ultimately, this multiplicity of investigative angles will constitute an in-depth study of Chinese urbanism and architecture in the context both of global economy and local culture . . .”

Press Release:

“Divergent Convergence” is an unprecedented exhibition of how America’s next generation of design leaders see China. The exhibition displays the work of students and researchers from 15 premier architecture programs including the University of Southern California, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale University, and Princeton University.

“Divergent Convergence” will be shown at the Beijing Urban Planning Centre, August 23 – September 20, 2009. The Centre is located at 60 South Lishi Road, Xicheng District 10045, near Tiananmen Square.

Qingyun Ma, dean of the USC School of Architecture and founder of the American Academy in China created “Divergent Convergence.” Joesph Grima is the curator for the exhibition. Renowned architects, academics and theorists including Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and Thom Mayne are involved as academic advisors. “Divergent Convergence” is the capstone of AAC’s summer program in China — dedicated to building bridges between China and the United States.

Selected projects illustrate the responses of students and researchers to a series of questions critically relevant to the Chinese city today, such as: How can architecture adapt to a hyper-compressed design and construction schedule? Should ancient neighborhoods be demolished to make way for new construction? Can cities accommodate rapid demographic change without opening up irreparable social rifts?

The 100 student responses to these questions will be on display in the form of drawings and text printed on translucent film shown atop lighted tables, offering the public a unique opportunity to view conceptual work from top architectural programs in a landmark space.

According to Dean Ma, “This exhibition is long overdue. Urban problems are never simply local, and solutions for current urban China have to be investigated by multiple minds.  Aside from the China content, ‘Divergent Convergence’ creates an event that is cross-cultural, cross-institutional, and across minds–elements critical to urban culture, regardless of locality.  Education is a business for the future; therefore, the effectiveness of putting Western universities’ work in front of Chinese eyes will only be amplified as time passes, and as our exhibition repeats in the future.”

“Divergent Convergence” is created by Dean Qingyun Ma, AIA, Dean of the USC School of Architecture. Born in Xi’an, Dean Ma earned a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering in Architecture from Tsinghua University. In 1996, Dean Ma founded the renowned design firm MADA s.p.a.m. in Beijing, which has given us Qingpu Community Island in Shanghai and the Centennial TV and Radio Center in Xi’an, among other industrial and commercial projects.

The exhibition curator is Joseph Grima, Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City. Mr. Grima is a New York-based architect and researcher who recently published the book, “Instant Asia: Fast Forward through the Architecture of a Changing Continent” (Skira, 2008), a guide to emerging Asian architects in collaboration with photographer Gaia Cambiaggi.

Exhibition Founder:

Qingyun Ma
Founder, USC American Academy in China
and
Dean, USC School of Architecture

Exhibition Curators:

Joseph Grima, Storefront for Art and Architecture
Jiang Jun, Urban China
Charlie Koolhaas, Artist and Writer
Qin Lei, Domus China Magazine

Exhibition Academic Committee:

Participating Organizations (as of 5-22-09)
Harvard University
Yale University
MIT
University of Southern California
Columbia University
Princeton
University of Pennsylvania
Cornell University
Sci-Arch
University of Michigan
University of Tennessee
B.A.S.E. Beijing
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Woodbury University
Architectural Association

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