A Dutch court has ordered the government to cut the country's greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25 percent by 2020 in a groundbreaking climate case that activists hope will set a worldwide precedent.
A judge in The Hague said the state must “ensure that the Dutch emissions in the year 2020 will be at least 25 percent lower than those in 1990.”
— Al Jazeera
What would you do about the drought if you were Jerry Brown? A new 2-3 player board game by Bay Area-based graphic designer Alfred Twu allows you to play the politics of water in California.
Twu specializes in designing games that try and have fun with complex issues. Currently, he is developing one called “California Housing Crisis” that deals with San Francisco’s runaway housing costs, and he previously designed a fantasy map for a U.S. national high speed rail system that went viral.
— blogs.kcrw.com
Have an idea for how to address the drought with design? Submit your ideas to the Dry Futures competition! View full entry
In true ephemeralizing fashion, Bucky's seminal work Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth has been published on iBooks by the Estate of Buckminster Fuller. First published in 1968, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth gathers Bucky's ideas of global consciousness and actions – in short, "we... View full entry
Fittingly, Poolside’s version of “Harvest Moon” echoed off the wooden planks of the Broad Arts Center at UCLA on June 10th as a crowd of optimists, architects, and Ira-Glass lookalikes drank their way in and out of the opening reception for BI(h)OME, Kevin Daly Architects’ proposed... View full entry
When most people think of the Arabian peninsula, they think of the opulent man-made islands of Dubai and that city’s sparking, futuristic towers... But with his series Crossings, Arko Datto shifts the attention to the millions of migrant workers from throughout Asia who are building these structures.
Datto used Google Maps and Google Earth to capture the vast highways, sprawling landscapes, and grand projects that laborers have built under conditions that border on slavery.
— Wired
“The work deals with the issue in a fairly abstract/tangential way,” Datto told Wired Magazine. “The total lack of human presence in the images is symbolic of the anonymity, facelessness, and lack of representation that the migrant workers suffer.” View full entry
He has a vision of a future where his company makes a third of the world's buildings – all modular, all steel, and all green.
“The biggest problem we face in the world right now isn't terrorism or world war. It's climate change,” he says.
— bbc.co.uk
A fascinating profile of Zhang Yue, the man behind Mini Sky City, a 57-story tower built in 19 days. Yue's company, the Broad Sustainable Group, was able to construct at such speeds by assembling prefab parts at the rate of 3-storeys a day. Now, Yue's set his sights on on building the full-size... View full entry
The California Supreme Court decided unanimously Monday that cities and counties may require developers to provide below-market-rate housing as a condition of a building permit.
The decision is expected to make it easier for Los Angeles and other cities with housing shortages to force developers to build or pay for affordable housing.
— LA Times
Right now, Amsterdam’s Center Island (Centrumeiland in Dutch) doesn’t look like much [...] The island, in use for the first time this summer as a campsite-cum-art installation, is in fact an entirely artificial creation, lying at the heart of what could currently be Europe’s boldest engineering and housing program. [...]
The archipelago will eventually be home to up to 45,000 people in 18,000 homes, 30 percent of which will be earmarked for affordable rent.
— citylab.com
Construction is slated to start this month on what-will-be the world's first high-rise residential tower built according to Passive House (PH) standards, considered the most rigorous criteria for reducing a building's greenhouse gas emissions. Passive houses, such as the building on the right in... View full entry
For decades, tourists have been coming to Southern California's Coachella Valley, drawn by spectacular mountain vistas, great weather and lush landscapes.
Those landscapes have been, for the most part, man-made — an artificial oasis in a land of desert. [...]
As California enters a fourth year of drought and state and local water officials unveil a series of conservation dictates, at least some hotels in the valley — big and small — have begun launching water conservation measures.
— USA Today
Have an idea for how to address the drought with design? Submit your ideas to the Dry Futures competition! View full entry
Completely stable on the water, the base of the island is built to last for far over 100 years and will create a new underwater habitat for sea life, the company states, adding, it is building similar islands in Maldives and in Miami in the US. — emirates247.com
Dubai's "The World", a man-made archipelago of islands arranged like a world map, is now spawning private floating homes. The "luxury floating private islands" will be designed to specific client wishes, and reportedly will all come with a pool. Developed by Amillarah Private Islands, these aren't... View full entry
Green roofs are nice, but rooftop farms are better.
They’re the future of living architecture, say international green roof advocates who gathered in Toronto last week. [...]
“We have a handful of agricultural green roofs and all of them are community projects,” like Eastdale Collegiate, Ryerson’s Engineering building and the Carrot Common, said Peck. “But we don’t have any commercial-scale agriculture on roofs — that’s the next thing.”
— thestar.com
A diverse alliance of communities — including Los Angeles County's third-largest city — is fighting California's long-planned bullet train route into the heart of the San Fernando Valley, saying it would bring irreparable harm... The coalition of communities is demanding that only routes that are predominantly underground should be considered.
The growing resistance is coming in part from urban, working-class neighborhoods that are portraying the surface route as an environmental injustice.
— LA Times
In short, the bullet train faces opposition from basically every direction. One proposed route, which would include several above-ground stretches, worries residents of the town of San Fernando – because it would basically cleave the city in two, wiping out a significant chunk of the downtown... View full entry
On September 2, 1666, a fire began in a bakery on Pudding Lane in London. By the next day, the flames had fanned out north and west, engulfing much of the city’s medieval center. The fire, later knowns as the Great Fire of London, destroyed much of the old cathedral of St. Paul as well as the... View full entry
Each year, the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) bestows its Walter Gellhorn Innovation Award to a federal agency with the best model practice that can be adopted government-wide. Today, ACUS announced that the 2015 Walter Gellhorn Innovation Award is being presented to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Rebuild by Design Competition. — US Department of Housing and Development
There's something of a mise-en-abyme quality to a competition winning an award, but it's a good occasion to remember the Rebuild by Design was, after all, not quite your regular competition. Organized in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and funded primarily by the US Department of Housing and... View full entry
