Archive for the 'Environment' Category

Construction began on a bright Peruvian summer day, after all the fog had lifted from the rooftops and the cars filled the streets. All my plastic panels sat neatly stacked in a corner as I broke out my lumber, my saw, and a measuring tape. My plan called for a large wooden frontispiece to anchor a metal frame forming the back three walls and the support for the roof. The large wood piece would contain shelves,the door jamb, and a large foldup garage door to serve as a makeshift patio. It was, undoubtedly, the most important piece of the home, the object that allowed everything else to work. Naturally, I almost messed it up.

I´m no carpenter, and I proved it almost immediately. The ferreterias, the hardware stores, lacked a bunch of brackets, screws, and bolts I guess I took for granted as being available at my local Home Depot or Lowe´s. This led to the first rule of amateur carpentry: half-inch nails cannot hold a building together, and even if they could, you don´t know how to do it. I pretended to believe I could nail a kind of plywood sheet to a 2×2 frame and it would all just, you know, work. It didn´t, as the whole structure almost tore itself apart the first time I got it upright. Back to the to the drawing board.

Amateur carpentry rule number two: you cannot cut straight if you cannot measure correctly. Nothing really matched in length because I was cutting by hand and my arm angle sent my saw in wild, inventive new directions. Thank goodness for shims.

Eventually, I got the darn thing to stand up and not try to kill me. A coat of black paint later, I moved on to the frame. The frame was a cinch; I didn´t have to cut anything, and a little duct tape worked to hold all the joints together in the corners. In order to form walls, I stapled my plastic panels onto wood slats running vertically then stapled extra thick plastic strips to one side of the slat, wrapped it over the metal pipe and stapled it to the opposite side of the wood. In this way, sort of like a shower curtain, I hung my walls. I used a similar strategy to attach the vertical metal poles to the wooden frontispiece. I repeated the process on the bottom of the plastic assembly in order to keep my walls from flapping.

I used simple hinges to attach my door, and some cheap wiring to put in some low-energy bulbs. I was ready to move in, not knowing how it would be to live on the roof in a plastic box.

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On some basic level, everyone is an environmentalist; you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who honestly doesn’t want clean water, or clean air, or the occasional frolicking animal. I don´t really consider myself an environmentalist, not so much because I don´t believe in saving the planet but more from upbringing; where I grew up, ´environmentalist¨ replaced ´Communist´ as the pejorative of choice around 1992. So it came as a bit of a surprise that I ended up building my own green building out of recycled and recyclable products. I didn´t even use power tools.

Lima´s weather is some of the strangest in the world, not in its variety but in its unnerving consistency. Despite being on the ocean, it never rains, it never gets hotter than about 85 and never colder than the low 50s. It is an easy town to dress in, and even easier to design a home for.Because of the mildness, my house used plastic panels as walls – no need for insulation. If nothing else, I could rest assured that no spring showers would expose my poor engineering.

The panels took forever and a half to make by myself, each by hand. I used vegetable bags, the kind you get at the supermarket for your tomatoes, layered three deep in two by two sections. I used a piece of butcher paper to cover the sheet and then ran a regular clothes iron in circular sweeps over the paper. Though the iron is relatively cool, the plastic melts readily to itself. The resulting material is waterproof, and surprisingly tough,almost tarp-like. The more layers, incidentally, the tougher the material. Though this blog has discussed items being made in this way (such as wallets) I don´t think it´s common to make such large sheets of plastic and to use them as a building material.

In the end, I made around seventy 24 in x 18 in panels, using about 1200 bags in the process. I lost many afternoons behind my iron, but in the end I had my walls.

Popularity: 11% [?]

For the next few weeks, as over half of Vestal’s employees roadtrip through the Andes, blog editor Jeffrey Goodman will be sharing some of his experiences in designing, constructing, and living in a sustainable house on the roof of Vestal’s Lima office. Look for updates in the coming days from the road.

Once in college, in some seminar I took, there was an angry discussion about what it means to have the title “architect” rather than “builder.” I remember claiming that anyone can do architecture, that the act of designing a building makes you an architect; maybe not a good architect, but an architect nevertheless. To claim a separate world known as Architecture, guarded by gatekeepers known as Architects, is pretentious and delusional; as if I need a trained chef to supervise all my dinners. What architects need to do (as my table of grad students grew increasingly restless) is give up on the economics of construction and focus on becoming artists, sculptors of the built environment.

The point is, you simply don’t need a MArch and years of experience to design a good, interesting, beautiful building. You only need those things in order to place yourself into a specific professional position to be taken seriously in the industry that is architecture, not in the artform. The grad students did not accept this idea one bit. I wouldn’t either if I had to pay the tuition they were paying.

I am, in no way, a professional architect, but I designed my home with architecture in mind. The beauty of a program like Google Sketchup is not in its sophistication – at times it resembles MS Paint – but that it even exists, for free, for all the world. As I tried to design my house, any idea could be almost instantaneously manifested in front of me – no blueprints, no $8000 software, just rendering pure and simple. It was beautiful, even if my ideas sometimes weren’t.

My final design, more or less, ended up as a multicolored futuristic tea house; a strange facade, made stranger by being completely removed from this (or really any) context. I had followed my own advice and “sculpted the urban realm” with a combination of free software, intense pretension, and a basic knowledge of aesthetics. I figured I could build this structure without major hiccups. It turns out, I grossly underestimated Peru disdain for multicolored futuristic tea houses.

Things went poorly.

Popularity: 14% [?]

For the next few weeks, as over half of Vestal’s employees roadtrip through the Andes, blog editor Jeffrey Goodman will be sharing some of his experiences in designing, constructing, and living in a sustainable house on the roof of Vestal’s Lima office. Look for updates in the coming days from the road.

Possible itinerary, depending if our car breaks down:

Lima – Arequipa – Tacna – Santiago – (Somewhere in Patagonia) – Southern Argentina – Buenos Aires – La Paz – Puno – Cusco – Lima.

What could go wrong?

Popularity: 12% [?]

Many top restaurants take a perverse pride in serving only bottle water, as if anything from the tap is filled with ghosts and cholera. [Here in Peru, it actually is.] But for uberchef Alice Waters, it’s now adios to Evian in her very chic Chez Panisse restaurant. After twisting “24,000 bottles,” Ms. Waters is simply “over” the self-importance (not to mention the pollution) stemming from store-bought H2O, preferring to offer her patrons filtered Bay Area tap. Even in fickle Los Angeles, several high end eateries (including Mario Batali’s new pizzeria) have installed filters and ditched the pricey Italian imports.

Few people realize that bottled water – as a “food” – is regulated by the FDA and not by the significantly more stringent Environmental Protection Agency, as tap water is. In fact, a 1995 study by the NRDC found that over a third of water brands contained “significant” bacterial or chemical contamination, while Consumer Reports rated LA’s water “flawless” and New York Magazine said it was “exceptional.” Good work LA DWP!

Tap water (maybe with a little filtering to remove any residual chlorine taste) is simply a better option than anything you can buy in a store. It’s cheap, it’s safer, and its global footprint (both in packaging and shipping) is minimal. The barely-regulated, glass-bottled, shipped-all-the-way-from-France eau ... not so much.

Link to LA Times Food

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Billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, when he isn’t rolling around on a giant pile of money, is out to make New York City a better place. His latest target: the dirty taxi fleet, and all its pollution. According to CNN, Bloomberg will instruct Matthew Daus – the head of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission – to begin replacing 20 percent of the city’s 13,000 cabs each year with eco-friendly hybrids. By 2012, everything yellow will be green.

Despite boasting the largest public transportation system in the nation, the Big Apple continues to push for a better way to get around town, and that’s commendable. The biggest loser in this shift may be Ford Motors: only one of the six approved hybrid models is made by Ford, the current supplier of the ubiquitous Crown Victoria taxis. Detroit better get some R&D guys on that fast.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Brought forth from the depths of the Earth by demonic instinct, swarming across the land in a great buzzing cloud, the cicada is nothing but pure evil. Sure it can’t bite, or sting, has trouble flying, and is easy prey for squirrels, foxes, and the occasional toddler; these are merely Big Cicada’s lies, told by so-called “professional entomologists.”

Why are we talking about these hellbeasts right now? Apparently Brood XIII (17 year cycle) is about to hatch, promising to overrun the Midwest with the bugs’ distinctive sound. Another swarm – this one of Internet fans – is organizing a massive investigation into Brood XIII using all the latest Internet tools: maps, forums, YouTube, and who-knows-what-else.com.

In many ways, the Internet allows people to immerse themselves so completely in a microscopically-scaled niche that they form mutually supportive groups around any variety of topics. These groups can be benign (like Wookieepedia’s minutiae about Star Wars) or despicable (as in any pro-pedophilia forums out there.) But some people would rather just spend their time on cicadamania.com, and – in the grand scheme of things – that’s not so bad.

Link to Cicadamania

Link on Brood XIII via CNN

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Natalie Jeremijenko’s Feral Robot Dog project – which just about everyone at Vestal worked on except me – continues to be a popular item in the design world. Currently on display at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, the dogs are hacked toy robots used to gather information on toxic substances in a media-friendly way. Also, they are really cute.

Look over our portfolio page, then go support the only Smithsonian museum focused on design! It’s the National Design Triennial – if you miss it now, you’ll have to wait until 2009.

Link to Vestal Portfolio

Link to Current Exhibitions at Cooper-Hewett.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Even as the price of a gallon of gasoline reaches a national average of $3.11, few summer travelers plan on adjusting their trips because of the cost at the pump. AAA is predicting 32 million Americans will hit the road for Memorial Day – an increase of 1.7% from 2006 – despite gasoline being 16% more expensive than a year ago.

If crude prices have fallen in recent weeks – as they have – then why is gas so expensive? Why aren’t there riots in the streets about this? Well, simply, people have accepted the slow unstoppable creep of gasoline prices as inevitable and are finding other ways to save money, from lower-end hotels to cheaper meals.

Environmentalists have a long-held belief that if gasoline were suddenly three (or six or ten) dollars a gallon, American consumers would rise up in some sort of transit rebellion. The truth is, people hate paying at the pump but see few other options to Big Oil. Until most Americans have access to alternatives, they face little choice.

A good first step, perhaps, is to divert the many, many taxes on gasoline from road maintenance to public transportation. The longer we continue to invest in a flawed system, the longer we will have to accept muttering under our breath at the pump.

Link via CNNMoney

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I came across this interesting BBC article on the current fragility of Rome’s ancient monuments. While the article’s main focus is on how many of the monuments do not have the funds to sufficiently be repaired, it also had this interesting by-line:

One of the big problems is global warming. The climate is changing. From time to time the city is deluged with water from freak rainstorms. Water that seeps into the caverns further erodes the foundations of the [Palatine] hill. [Vestal Note- Ironically, a large part of downtown Rome was originally marshes before the Romans built a massive sewer system to drain the area]

The article fails to mention that the cause of global warming, pollution, has also been slowly eroding the monuments over the past century, turning many columns from white to a charcoal black. Due to a city-wide facelift for the Jubilee celebrations in 2000, most of the facades across the city are again a pristine white, but these cleaning techniques are sometimes as harmful as the pollution itself. However, if you need to remind yourself of the harm global warming is doing not just to our future, but also to our past, drop by the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome. Inside you’ll find the original famous Marcus Aurelius statue (pictured above),which was the centerpiece of Michaelangelo’s design of the Campidoglio. However, over the past century, the statue became so corroded by acid rain, it had to be moved indoors.

Link to BBC Article

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