Could we design a skyscraper & sewer system with the intent of creating ecological niches all through the building? Some of the work with green roofs touches on this... can your building handle rain like a forest, not produce fast run-off? Maybe even act as a water sink for less well designed nearby areas. You collect the runoff and get all the moss and plants your parking garage neighbor can't be bothered with.
Don't be mad about the bugs in the walls, design walls that attract the best bugs.
@futurebird We should all give more thought to buildings, especially dwellings that are part of an environment. Too often especially here in Nashville where I live, people perceive a house as a capsule cut off from the rest of the world. That includes all the many colleges and churches, which spray tons of herbicides to give their surroundings a clean-shaven look, which is the opposite of a natural look in our ecosystem here (pic attached, as seen from my bed right now: I live on the 12th floor of a brutalist 70s bldg. that requires daily maintenance now).
Think of a LEED-certified campus bldg., say at Vanderbilt U, and a crew of immigrants leafblowing and spraying herbicides from March to October. That's the reality right here.
@futurebird
The Vancouver Convention Center took some steps in this direction. It's a relatively low, broad building with a green roof populated with local grasses selected so regular rainfall will keep them healthy, supplemented by trickly irrigation from the building's gray water. The vegetation is dense enough that its runoff mimics that of a grassy field.
The HVAC system is centered around a chiller that uses Coal Harbour as a latent heat reservoir. It heats and cools the building using much less energy than a standard system.
On the other hand, it's a convention center, built for the purpose of having thousands of people travel long distances for a meeting that could have been an email. 😉
@futurebird
the hardest part would be getting rid of all the people who think "ecosystem" is a marketing buzzword. After that, there would still be many difficult tasks, but if anyone who thinks of "ecosystem" as a buzzword is anywhere near, all those other tasks would be impossible, rather than difficult.
@futurebird
I like the idea of attracting the best bugs to live in the walls 😎
If I could persuade the ant colony in my back yard to inhabit the wall cavity and actively manage the temperature and humidity in the cavity, and the moisture levels in the bricks either side of it, that would be awesome.
Of course, I'm assuming they don't already, except perhaps at ground level 🤔
@futurebird I am increasingly skeptical of ideas that fall under the umbrella of "ecological intensification", which is the idea that we can engineer ecological systems to maximize the ecosystem services that we want. I think in the end they are doomed to fail because they fundamentally model a holisic system as reductive (i.e., as a menu of services). But since the system isn't reductive, it will respond in non-linear and unanticipated ways.
@futurebird
Don't get me started on LEED.
One of the basics I tell my org's #water resources interns is that LEED is a crock and efforts to make buildings LEED competitive should be avoided if possible.
We have a lot to learn! And there's not much will to invest the time and effort needed to learn it... but should a civilization take pride in its architecture? Don't we dream of making buildings that can endure? I don't know... I'm in a strange mood today. Thinking about what everything will look like in 100 years, 200 years ... and on.
@futurebird@Nazani Imnit saying it can't exist just that it does not exist now.
And I get in those head spaces too. My house is 130 years old and needs to help to get another 130. My grandmother-in-law lives in a 200 year old house that has made it in spite of her ministrations. There are 300+ year old stone houses in my town.
And all of these suburban developments that will be falling over without real money in another 30 years.
@futurebird we already know all we need to know about this from various scientific fields: ecological restoration, marine construction, walkable city design, sewage treatment design, psychology, .... unfortunately the only field that's consulted about what can be done is the pseudo-scientific field of economics @InkySchwartz@Nazani
This is much harder than I'm making it sound. You'd need to pull on all that people have learned about naturally integrated buildings from human history and then recognize that the building would need to be refined and revised until all the systems were balanced.
I get that it's hard, but I don't get why we aren't more focused on going in this direction. Just getting a layer of turf on the roof is like pulling teeth.
Too often "green buildings" become just ... about an aesthetic. Having more plants which is nice, but not really integrating the building into the natural fabric of the city like an organism.
And no one talks about waste and sewer management enough.
One Central Park in Sydney was an award-winning green development that won many awards.
From Vogue in 2014:
"Sydney’s One Central Park complex says a lot about the possible future of our architecture: that buildings needn’t be a strain on the environment, that more high rise doesn’t have to mean less greenery, and that tall buildings may even be able to improve rather than diminish their surrounds. Designed by Atelier Jean Nouvel, One Central Park in Sydney’s Chippendale has been given 12 awards since its completion in December 2013: it took out the title of overall winner as well as taking out Sustainabilty Award at the international LEAF awards, and has just been awarded ‘Best Tall Building Worldwide’ by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) in Chicago."
Then in 2022, the planter boxes literally fell off:
"2022 saw a planter box fall to the footpath below, with local Council calling for repairs to protect the public to take place immediately. Structural engineers have been assessing the safety of other planter boxes that adorn the biophilic building, with some boxes supported by ropes to mitigate risk, while 33 have been removed."
Oh, and it also turns out the planter boxes are flammable:
"Category A and B cladding – the two most flammable – were found on the doors, structures (Cat A) and planter boxes (Cat B) respectively, with the dispute currently before the courts after the Planning Department issued an urgent fire safety order in January in the wake of the cladding inspection."
@PaulWermer@ajsadauskas@futurebird The problem is that it's always going to be an extra cost; increasing the price of apartments and increasing the risk to the developer. Highrise buildings are already green by simply being extremely land efficient, anything that makes it more difficult to build highrise is impacting on that massive environmental gain for minor additions.
there's been a lot of work re green building and building impacts - I've seen some of it in discussion of Goldilocks Density for housing.
Turns out high rises are much less efficient than many assume over the full life cycle, and density is less than well designed mid rise. Lots of complex contributing factors. But net is high rises, unless very carefully designed, are not great. Sweet spot seems to be around 6 stories.
And we have a first coat vs total cost problem. A well designed signed green building will cost a bit more to build, but payback on energy savings is pretty fast. Problem is developer pays first cost, and buyers/ renters pay operating annmaintenance costs. Split incentives, occupant is worse off
@PaulWermer@jessta@ajsadauskas@futurebird green building codes are needed to counter the split incentive. Typically this would require action by state legislators, but there are other ways. In #StLouisPark if a builder wants city help with financing (TIF), they need to follow a greener code and make a certain number of the units affordable.
@andyw350@jessta@ajsadauskas@futurebird San Francisco implemented a green building code several years back (Based on LEED), but only for larger buildings. California's Title 24 does a good job on energy efficiency for all buildings. So yes, code is important.
Too many people look at purchase price only, and don't really understand O&M costs. Definitely an education issue; things like purchase price vs life cycle costs should be part of basic financial literacy for any high school grad.
@futurebird Singapore urban design is actually doing some things related with many building integrating greeneries including trees all along their facades.
I did not investigate on the efficiency with regard to ecological niches and compensating the concrete footprint but there are certainly some papers on this.
@futurebird
There was the show-sky scraper in Milan, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosco_Verticale
An ex collegue who's from there said all the apartments got bought up by rich people who aren't living there for clout and now a lot of the plants are dead.. Maybe a good start though!
@futurebird It’s a lovely aesthetic, but it’s surely a ton of work to maintain. Plants definitely absorb water and sunlight and improve the local climate, but they also have their own agendas, and limits to what they can tolerate — as anyone who has killed a houseplant knows.