Jeffrey Sipprell
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January 15, 2007
A Change so Massive...
This past holiday break I had a chance to visit Chicago and several of the area museums with the fam. While the King Tut Exhibit at the Field Museum was certainly entertaining (if not downright bursting with tourists), the standout of the bunch would definitely be the Massive Change exhibit that completed its run New Years Day at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Now I'll admit that I own the book by Mr. Mau, but have done little more than thumb through it from time to time. And while my colleague on this site posted a blurb about the subject well over a year ago, I felt it necessary to provide my own thoughts on the subject particular to the exhibition.
Before doing so I'll also state that I was with my mother who is kind of a skeptic on this whole global warming thing. While she's not completely ignorant of the amount of damage that we as a species might be wreaking on the planet, she certainly isn't ready to call up her pals in the White House demanding an enactment on the Kyoto Protocols. So at the very least I was entertained watching her try to be dismissive about some of the content presented there, and at the very least I can take solace in the fact that it opened her eyes, if even it was the tiniest of tiny bits.
Now I'm not going to tackle each and every gallery in the show (a description of each can be found here), but I did want to comment on the three that struck me the most - energy, manufacturing and urbanization.
Energy is something that as a responsible architect, I'm becoming more aware of. As Chicago and countless other cities around the country push towards more and more LEED certified buildings, we as architects are being asked to do something we should have been doing all along - namely to understand how much of our resources is being poured into the design, construction and life cycle of a building. Certainly the work of architects like Cook + Fox is inspiring to see in its relatively complex execution, but as I toured the exhibit I wasn't really struck by what my responsibility as an architect is in this mess we've created for ourselves, but rather what my responsibility as a person is. The one fact that I've been able to recite to many since I've been is that if every household in Canada replaced one 100 watt light bulb with a 20 watt compact flourescent, they'd be able to close 6 of their 15 coal fired power plants. That's almost half! Upon my return to LA I have begun a process of changing all of the incandescents in the apartment to compact flourescents. They've got excellent prices at this site - even on ones that match the warm color temperature that we're used to.
And of course there's this statement: "In one hour the sun gives the earth more energy than is used annually by our global population." I mean I know this stuff but to see it in 10" sanserif lettering on a gallery wall really makes you stop and take stock of what it is we're doing.
The second gallery I enjoyed on the tour was the space dedicated to urbanization. The urban room is designed to be an immersive visual and audio experience - a six-screen, five minute video is continuously projected onto a 56 ft. long cityscape sculpture while a voiceover encourages a different view of the city and our increasingly urbanizing world. As you go through the room five questions are presented on transparent globes.
Is urbanization our unspoken belief system?
How can we provide shelter for the entire world?
How can cities be sustainable?
Does density offer hope?
Where does the reach of the city end?
The last four are pretty standard boiler plate in any contemporary critique about our position to the urban environment. But that first one was something I never really thought of before - that urbanization was perhaps some sort of unconscious shared view by all of humanity - that our desire to be around other human beings and to be a part of a community would be fostered in the mind of all six billion of us in some manner or form. It's a powerful thought when you look across all of the diverse cultures and experiences this planet has to offer - that maybe the one thing linking us all, despite all our differences, is our desire for community and therefore urbanization.
The last gallery is quite a bit less touchy feely and quite a bit more pragmatic to the world we live in today. It was no surprise that Cradle to Cradle was featured so prominently, but it was fascinating to see how many companies were starting to take up their mantra and doubly fascinating to actually see the products in their physical form. There were the shoes by Nike, the SUV by Ford, and countless others I'm doing a disservice to by not remembering them adequately.
It's a shame that the exhibit is over, but if it is to tour again in your area, I would highly recommend a visit.
Posted by jsipprell at 11:02 PM | Comments (0)
January 3, 2007
Refabricating Architecture
About a year ago I read Kieran & Timberlake's Refabricating Architecture, finding it to be the perfect, not too theoretically deep, architectural manifesto that one could digest over the course of many 30 minute trips via the L train in Chicago. It's sort of the 'Towards a New Architecture' of the early 21st Century - first building up its argument through an attack on historical modes of production before positing its own vision for the future at the end.
It is that 'future' that I read with some extra care as it is always a rare treat to see an architect's polemic actually practiced within the same text. Face it, I'm a guy who needs pictures. Often I'll go to the bookstore, see a very interesting book on some facet of architecture, and find out that it's about 150 pages on of fine print text. NO Thanks! I've gone through enough poorly put together course readers in my days to want to come home from a hard day's work at the curvy titanium farm to want to crack into one of those babies. But, this isn't a rant about architects who can't write for shit, but rather a post to heap praise on the authors of this book.
Even though the examples they showed were somewhat limited, there was a genius in even the simplest examples that one could grasp. The bathroom at Cornell I found the most compelling as I know from experience how many different on-site trades who barely know what they're doing are involved in even the simplest of toilet rooms. Yet here was an example of where something quite exquisite could be done and with the control and precision of something as finely tuned as crafted millwork. It was certainly the beginning of what would be some compelling work.
Why am I writing about this now you might wonder? Well I recently opened the January 2007 issue of Wired Magazine and found myself reading their annual 'Wired Home' section. It featured Kieran and Timberlake's Loblolly House "where the walls and floors are made of panels that were manufactured with wiring, insulation, plumbing and ductwork already in place. And the two main power systems of the home, including two bathrooms and a galley kitchen, were delivered to the construction site in pre-assembled, plug-and-play units. After the site was prepared, the 2,200-square-foot house took three weeks to assemble."
One statistic I was truly amazed by was that "from the fuel used by commuting workers to onsite diesel generators, the construction and operation of homes and other structures generates 40 to 50 percent of all the greenhouse gases in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration. On top of that, studies suggest that more than half of a home's leftover materials - drywall and lumber - winds up in landfills."
I currently work at a firm that has pioneered the use of a part-for-part digital model of a building - mostly to allow for the construction of highly complex formal moves in the architecture of Frank Gehry. K/T has used the same technology (or something similar) in an entirely different way (and in my opinion more important to the discourse of architecture). Here they have leveraged the software to create pre-fabricated units that contain all of the guts of a living, breathing building - allowing for smarter and more complex systems of design and integration. Not only does the fabrication eliminate waste, but it's also elegantly designed to have as little impact on the environment - the perfect marriage between digital information modeling and sustainable responsibility.
Loblolly in Wired (Available January 9)
Loblolly House in Architectural Record
Posted by jsipprell at 10:29 PM | Comments (0)
