Archinect - News

10 architecture jobs focusing on sustainability and urban ecology

2022-08-12T08:40:00-04:00

Continuing with Archinect's weekly job highlights, we've put together a list of firms that put sustainability and ecological design/research at the forefront of their practices. If you're an architectural designer or experienced architect with a passion for environmentally driven projects, check out these six firms below. Be sure to check the Archinect Job Board for new jobs listed daily.

1 Great Jones Alley by BKSK Architects. Image render by MARCH/Courtesy of BKSK Architects.

BKSK Architects, LLP seeks a Sustainability Coordinator
Location: New York, NY
Experience Level: 1-3 years

Details: "Founded in 1985, BKSK Architects is a New York City-based firm specializing in design that is socially, contextually, and ecologically engaged [...] We are looking for a Sustainability Coordinator with 1-3 years of experience to join BKSK’s Sustainable Design Team. The group is growing to deliver on our commitment to delivering healthy, resilient, and sustainable projects in New York City. We are ...

Terreform's ONE designs Monarch Butterfly sanctuary tower

2019-06-24T14:15:00-04:00

The visionary team at Terreform ONE in New York City have unveiled designs for an eight-story Monarch Butterfly sanctuary tower that promises to enliven the facade of a forthcoming commercial building with a vertical terrarium.

The diagrid structure will be made out of 3D-printed carbon-sequestering concrete components infilled with a dual-skin facade wrapped with glass and "pillows" of ETFE foil. The design will create a three-foot by 70-foot "vertical meadow" filled with "suspended milkweed vines and flowering plants to nourish the butterflies at each stage of their life cycle," according to a project website.

Rendering depicting the building interior, including butterfly atrium and facade terrarium. Image courtesy of Mitchell Joachim, Terreform ONE.

Facade detail. Image courtesy of Mitchell Joachim, Terreform ONE.

The performative facade will also be coated with "hydrogel bubbles" and small algae-filled sacs that will serve to purify air and building wastewater, while also mainta...

McHarg Center exhibition highlights global ecological urbanism

2019-06-20T13:28:00-04:00

In the face of increasingly destructive climate collapse, the University of Pennsylvania's McHarg Center for Urban Ecology is launching Design with Nature Now, a sprawling survey of some of the most inventive ecologically-driven landscape infrastructure projects from around the globe.

The exhibition comes as the recently-launched McHarg Center takes shape and begins to tap into the growing national and international conversation regarding the proposed Green New Deal.

Some of the projects highlighted in the exhibition are well-known, others, less so. Divided into five discrete categories, the collected projects present a vision for how humans can use the principles of ecological urbanism to meet their own needs while also staying out of nature's way.

Some projects, like BIG's Big U plan for Battery Park in New York City, aim to retrofit existing urban ecologies for the coming era of sea level rise.

Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Animal crossing overpass, Banff Nati...

Smog-choked Beijing plans "ventilation corridors" to provide much-needed fresh air

2016-03-03T14:14:00-05:00

Beijing is stepping up measures to fight against smog and pollution by building a web of ventilation corridors as one of its plans to combat climate issues, according to municipal authorities. “Ventilation corridors can improve wind flow through a city so that wind can blow away heat and pollutants, relieving urban heat island effect and air pollution,” Wang Fei, deputy head of Beijing’s urban planning committee, told Xinhua News Agency.

The planned "ventilation corridors" would range from less than 80 meters to more than 500 meters wide and – hopefully – do what their name suggests, providing a conduit for wind to blow away pollutants like particulate matter.

Five major corridors are planned for the Chinese capital, running primarily from the northern suburbs to the south of the city. One will cross Beijing's central axis, running from Taiping Suburban park down through the Olympic Park and the Temple of Heaven before finally intersecting with the Beijing-Shanghai Highway.

Ventilation corridors have already been carved out of other Chinese cities such as Shanghai, Nanjing, and Wuhan. In Wuhan, planners believe that the corridors have lowered temperatures by as much as 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (urban temperatures and pollution levels correlate).

Beijing has struggled with its pollution problem for many years now, with only marginal improvements following the closure of the city's worst polluting factories. China has also...

Mindy Thompson Fullilove is a psychiatrist for cities

2015-08-22T21:47:00-04:00

Fullilove increasingly came to see cities as ecosystems, with streams and channels, one flowing unseen into the next, disruptions wreaking havoc, threatening vitality everywhere. In a 1999 article in The International Journal of Mental Health, she showed federal urban renewal policies to be a fundamental cause of disease

Robert Sullivan profiles Mindy Thompson Fullilove. Trained as a psychiatrist, she studies the links between the environment and mental health and adapted the concept of "root shock" from gardening, which she applied to her studies of urban planning/policy and community psychology.

Our infrastructure is expanding to include animals

2015-05-07T14:07:00-04:00

municipal infrastructure is being expanded to include living creatures. In many ways, of course, this is simply the contemporary urbanization of a practice that goes back millennia. However, the ensuing juxtapositions – of 21st-century landscapes and cities being maintained not by high-tech machines or by specialty equipment but by neo-medieval groups of trained animals – can be quite jarring. Animal labour is once more becoming an explicit component of the modern metropolis

The absolute premise, and conclusion, here is that human urbanism is ineluctably woven within all animal ecologies, and that harnessing inter-species relationships within urban systems can be advantageous for every bit of the food web. A few instances from the piece are:

landscaping llamas for Chicago's O'Hare's "Grazing Herd"
falcons in Dubai trained to thin out pesty pigeon populations
waste-clearing pigs in Cairo

Using natural animal processes to the urban-human's advantage is all well and good, but as the article points out, it's not one that can be easily "scaled". When urban needs outpace the natural rhythms of a supportive ecological system, when we just can't scale nature big enough, humans will simply create their own animal helpers – New Scientist alludes to a future in which animals are modified to better serve human needs.

Problem Plants - Weeds in Ecology, Art and Culture

2015-01-23T22:57:00-05:00

the spontaneous plants, remain wild in the city, choosing to live among us. What allows these plants, the successful weeds of the city, to thrive in sidewalk cracks and rubble piles while valued native species retreat to rural landscapes? What are the characteristics of a successful invaders, colonizers and pioneers?

Ellie Irons on Nativeness, Biodiversity, and Urban Flora in the Anthropocene.

Pluralizing or Provincializing Urban Political Ecology? [In a World of Cities]

2014-02-18T13:02:00-05:00

Indeed, at heart of our SUPE Platform lies a sincere wish to contribute to a broad conversation on urban political ecology that takes a broader experience of urbanization into account...We wish to participate in building a collaborative and supportive community open for conversation to all those interested in understanding the politics of urban ecologies and environments in a world of cities

Henrik Ernstson reflects on the difference between “pluralizing” and “provincializing” urban political ecology.