Archinect - News

Denmark is moving forward with a controversial man-made storm barrier in Copenhagen

2023-01-13T14:54:00-05:00

In January 2022, a team of developers, architects and environmental consultants began work on a 50-year project that — if completed — will become one of Denmark's most ambitious and controversial infrastructure schemes to date: A 271-acre man-made peninsula devised to shield its capital, Copenhagen, from rising sea levels. But the multi-million dollar environmental project has drawn vocal criticism — primarily, and somewhat ironically, from those concerned about the climate.

Despite its intent, Copenhageners have lodged multiple unsuccessful attempts at halting Lynetteholm’s construction in the European Parliament and national assembly. The design calls for a linear wall shielding 35,000 new homes that can be bolstered as necessary in what is called a “process landscape.” Environmentalist opponents have answered back with claims of “maladaptation.” It will eventually join a currently under-development modular floating habitation from the Danish studio MAST that will take shape in segments over the coming decade.

Record high temperatures are making European cities look elsewhere for future heat mitigation plans

2022-07-20T15:16:00-04:00

Cities across Europe are scrambling to implement public infrastructure upgrades to combat rising temperatures. As a result, many areas are "melting" under the strain of heatwaves that have already claimed more than 1,900 lives in Spain and Portugal alone. Not to mention the record high temperatures in England this week, where the area reached 40°C (104 F) for the first time.

According to new projections from the United Nations, the effects of heatwaves are expected to continue in frequency until at least the 2060s. As a result, nascent Heat Actions Plans in cities like Paris (where only 35% of Metro cars have air-conditioning) are planning for tests that will likely be further exacerbated by an expected influx of climate refugees from some of the most-affected regions during that same timeframe. As news continues to break, architects and urban designers try to face the worsening impacts of climate change's increasingly moribund demands.

For example, efforts to alleviate the heat is...

Milan and Costa Rica among winners of the inaugural Earthshot Prize

2021-10-18T19:27:00-04:00

The Duke of Cambridge appeared in apt attire last night as he announced the first slate of winners of his newly-launched Earthshot Prize celebrating innovations in the ongoing fight against climate change.

The city of Milan was among the five inaugural winners of the prize, which is the brainchild of Prince William and famed British naturalist television presenter Sir David Attenborough. Awards were given out across five separate categories each with a £1 million ($1.37 million) prize.

Image courtesy Earthshot Prize

The Italian city won in the ‘Build a Waste-Free World’ category for its food waste scheme that can recover around 350 kg of food a day from supermarkets and restaurant venues and redistribute it to the city’s different areas of need.

Image courtesy Earthshot Prize

Costa Rica took home the inaugural ‘Protect & Restore Nature’ award for a Ministry of Environment program begat in the late 90s that pays citizens to plant trees and eventually help restore the country’s greate...

Miami’s $4 billion plan to combat sea level rise has radical urban ideas

2021-06-01T11:43:00-04:00

The City of Miami has published a draft of its Stormwater Master Plan; a $3.8 billion plan to be enacted over the next 40 years, seeking to mitigate the impact of rising sea levels on the city. The plan sets out a wide portfolio of measures, from stormwater pumps and sea walls to more novel approaches such as floating neighborhoods and streets converted into canals.

The report sets out both short and long-term strategies for the city’s defense from rising sea levels. Near-term resiliency measures, with a 20-to-50-year planning horizon, include both structural and non-structural actions, encompassing everything from infrastructure construction to reformed insurance models. The plan proposes an upgrade to building code strategies, including minimum structure finish-floor levels informed by predicted water surface levels, and a requirement for piled or stilted structures, both buildings and roadways, to consider future sea level rise.

Previously on Archinect: Rising sea levels threa...

How planting trees could save the world

2019-07-05T15:13:00-04:00

There is enough room in the world’s existing parks, forests, and abandoned land to plant 1.2 trillion additional trees, which would have the CO2 storage capacity to cancel out a decade of carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new analysis by ecologist Thomas Crowther and colleagues at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university.

Following new research, Thomas Crowther and colleagues at ETH Zurich estimate that there are 3 trillion trees on Earth, more than seven times the number previously estimated. Crowther argues that given this new knowledge, it is possible that new and existing forests could become more important in the fight against climate change than previously thought.

“There’s 400 gigatons [of CO2 stored] now in the 3 trillion trees,” Crowther told The Independent, “If you were to scale that up by another trillion trees, that’s in the order of hundreds of gigatons captured from the atmosphere – at least 10 years of anthropogenic emissions completely wiped out.”

MVRDV makes 5 proposals for resiliency in San Francisco Bay Area

2018-09-13T19:00:00-04:00

At San Francisco's Global Climate Action Summit yesterday, MVRDV presented a report offering 5 recommendations to Bay Area officials on the region’s plans for a resilient future. Their report, titled Too Much + Too Little, was created as part of the NL Resilience Collective. Below are the firm's 5 proposals for the city:

1. Update long-term plans to include water management and climate adaptation
2. Install a Bay Area Resiliency Commissioner
3. Understand your system
4. Develop a set of design principles for local communities across the bay
5. Start both big and small

Read the full descriptions for each recommendation here.

Liverpool aims to be world's first climate-positive city with blockchain technology

2018-07-26T16:20:00-04:00

Liverpool City Council (LCC) has announced a new partnership with a blockchain platform company to offset more than 110% of its carbon emissions, with the city announcing its bid to become the world's first climate-positive city by the end of 2020. LCC will conduct a year-long trial with the Poseidon Foundation to use a blockchain platform to offset the carbon impact of all products and services in the city by supporting global forest conversation projects.

Liverpool's ambition to become the world's first climate-positive city by 2020 has been announced with the city's blockchain technology partnership. Committing to a year-long trial of this sustainable technology, Liverpool City Council strives to reduce its carbon impact by installing more than 15,000 energy saving LED streetlights across 2,000 streets to reduce streetlight energy consumption by 82%.

The Poseidon’s Foundation, Laszlo Giricz stated, “This is a ground-breaking partnership not just for Poseidon and Liverpool, but globally. For the first time, a city will use blockchain technology to go beyond rebalancing its carbon footprint – leading the way in the fight against climate change."

Penda's Tel Aviv Arcades offer arches and terraces rather than the generic glass tower

2018-06-25T15:39:00-04:00

The Austrian branch of Penda reveals a residential high-rise for Tel Aviv defined by arches and cascading terraces. The design responds to the broad display of the city’s Bauhaus era and responds to the city's climate challenges rather than opting for another glass tower.

Tel Aviv Arcades rendering by Penda Austria. Image: Penda Austria.

Defined by the arch, the structure's design allows for views while still minimizing openings to direct sunlight in order to cooperate with the mediterranean climate. Varying terraces are used as a shading devices while also functioning as a vertical neighborhood for residents.

Tel Aviv Arcades rendering by Penda Austria. Image: Penda Austria.

The condominium tower measures approximately 380 feet in height featuring about 58 square feet of residential areas on 18 floors. The building will ...

Your Sea Wall Won't Save You

2018-03-29T09:21:00-04:00

Concepts like “making room for the river,” which works well in the Netherlands, can mean mass evictions in the Global South. Too often, the rhetoric of climate adaptation is doublespeak for the displacement of poor communities, and an alibi for unsustainable growth.

As coastal megacities adapt to climate change, they often bring in outside planning experts who push highly engineered, technocratic resilience programs. Lizzie Yarina looks at how this trend is affecting local communities in Bangkok, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Jakarta, and argues that "resilience is not fundamentally a technical question. It is social and political. Planners and designers must recognize and negotiate the diverse "resilience imaginaries" across the cities in which they are needed."

Pop-Up garage designed by Third Nature guards against flooding

2017-12-12T09:28:00-05:00

During extreme storms, it's common for city infrastructure — from roads to subways to parking garages — to flood. Architects from Danish firm Third Nature want to build garages that can cope with future storms. They designed a garage that could automatically move up and down as its water reservoir fills with and empties floodwater.

Third Nature's conceptual garage structure, Pop-Up, consists of an underground water reservoir, five parking levels, and a pedestrian space on top. Most of this 30,460-square-foot structure could exist underground on dry days. On wet days, the structure would automatically pop up using hydraulics and reduce the risk of flooding; a handy design for flood prone cities and as climate-change storms increase.

Tour Norway's "Doomsday" seed vault, deep within the Arctic Circle

2016-06-15T13:24:00-04:00

What is the architecture of forward-thinking climate change? One example is the Svalbard Seed Vault, which when full will house roughly 3 million different species of plants in anticipation of a future that may be hotter, drier, or simply climatically different than the one we inhabit now.

This video offers a rare tour of the three-vault, minus 5 degrees Celsius interior storage facility, which is located within a mountain in Norway in anticipation of rising global sea levels:

Scientists Propose Using Lasers to Fight Global Warming

2014-08-24T23:21:00-04:00

At the world's first major geoengineering conference, two separate scientists put forward proposals to use lasers to modify the Earth's climate and fight global warming, from space. One suggested that a satellite equipped with a high-powered laser could grow clouds in the atmosphere below; the other proposed lasers that would blast greenhouse gases from orbit to effectively erase the agents of climate change.

For those unaware, geoengineering, in this context, refers to large-scale, intentional interventions in the Earth's climate, particularly towards the end of fighting global warming. There are two main categories of proposed technologies: carbon-dioxide removal and solar radiation management. In general, many in the scientific community and general public reject most proposed geoengineering projects for various technical reasons, as well as feasibility, cost, and their potentially devastating repercussions. Moreover, one could contend that the hubris behind the idea that humans can tinker with delicate systems that we don't fully understand is exactly what got us in this "mess." On the other hand, the other two ways to potentially combat climate change or reduce future devastation – mitigation and adaptation – aren't exactly going accordingly to plan.

While generally sounding more like science fiction than reality, weather manipulation has actually been going on for decades although ...