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Found on a dusty shelf…

Scrapyard Windpower Realities: Building Windmills with Recycled Parts by Hugh Piggott (1992)

Complete with diagrams:

And Basic computer program to help you design the blades:

My lazily blogged image of Bill Dunster’s ruralZED from the floor at Ecobuild has produced some useful comments from one of his colleagues, bringing news about crucial elements of the design that deliver the thermal mass and also mention of upcoming timelapse photos of the 3 day construction…

hogthrobb says:

Hi Eversion,

thanks for posting this, I work for the architects behind it. Yours is the only picture so far posted on flickr.

Did you enjoy the house?

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eversion says:I did enjoy the house, but only from the outside as I was pressed for time and there was quite a queue.

I’m a big fan of passive solar techniques and have been pursuing the same approach in my own work too. The construction approach here is very satisfying and the joinery reminds me of Walter Segal’s work. I heard Bill Dunster talk very convincingly against lightweight construction at a conference a couple of years back, so was slightly surprised to see timber frame being embraced so wholeheartedly. I guess the mass here is to be found in the super insulated walls.

Final comment is that I was also delighted to find that it wasn’t quite so frumpy (a well known architectural term!) as the PR had seemed… the axonometric of the CFSH stages doesn’t do it justice.

p.s – I met with Phil Clark from Building magazine over lunch that day and he was telling me all about the video interview he did with Bill. I’ve just noticed that he has posted it on his blog:

sustainaballs.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/02/dunster-video-.html

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hogthrobb says:Yes we still dont believe in light weight construction but the building has specially designed eco concrete wall panels and terracotta ceilling blocks so plenty of thermal mass. Sorry you couldnt get in – we had crowd loadings to consider and the health and safety for the exhibition were straight out of the SS hand book. It was good for us though as we had a queue for 3 days which always attracts interest.

I have seen the interview its pretty good – we will have a timelapse up at www.ruralZED.com sometime this week which is worth a look.

I’m heading to Ecobuild at Earl’s Court tomorrow. In the morning I’ll be attending the ‘Carbon Reduction Begins At Home’ conference, then touring the green(wash?) products in the afternoon. Stopping for a coffee with Phil Clark from the Sustainability Blog along the way.

Anybody else attending tomorrow? Are the usual suspects up for a drink in the evening?

Proving that blogging can be a slow medium too, here’s the second part to an entry written almost a year ago…

December 2006, London, RIBA HQ. Flicking through the pages of the book to accompany the Eric Lyons exhibition at the RIBA, I send a text to Rod: In the RIBA cafe, muffins are terrible. A quaint, pre-twitter messaging technique that now seems obscenely intrusive.

Not all muffins you understand, just these ones, in that moment. Taking the edge off an otherwise enjoyable exhibition. Criticized in reviews, fairly I think, for being little more than a version of the book blown up and pasted on the wall, I was nevertheless glad I made the trip to see for myself. Sedate, linear, easy to follow, suburban even, I made the most of having the time to soak it up slowly; something that my parental duties usually prevent me from doing.

Colleagues had recommended I look at Lyons after I designed a project that reminded them of his work (see part 1). Pouring over the images on the wall I certainly had to (proudly) admit there were moments when we spoke in the same suburban dialect; the same vernacular language, but a direct reference didn’t jump out at me.

Until I opened the book. Muffin in one hand, page 30 in the other, I found the connection.

And, not for the first time, I had to admit that without the benefit of input from older, wiser colleagues I would have continued to believe that I’d reinvented the wheel. The image shown in the brilliant essay by Alan Powers is taken from a book published in 1938 called Europe Rehoused and is cited, along with the work of Trystan Edwards, as a likely influence on the young Lyons. Shades of it can perhaps be seen in the plans for New Ash Green or Templemere.

I wonder with increasing regularity, how often my peers, currently finding their feet in senior positions in offices across the UK are fortunate enough to be directed to moments like this. Helped, gently through the Total Persepective Vortex of housing design history and reminded of where we’ve come from.

Humbled and reassured I went back to the exhibition with Rod (and his camera) and before long we homed in on the drawings. All two of them. This is where the exhibition missed out, there simply wasn’t enough drawings. Surely there are piles of them in storage somewhere?

I’ve been thinking about this drawing and the importance of landscape to Lyons work ever since.

Continuing the theme of slow blogging, I offer it to Sue Thomas from Writing and the Digital Life as a possible answer to her question from December 2006: “How might one build a physical groupspace for work and leisure according to Web 2.0 principles?”

The answer is found in landscape. The communal spaces between the private thresholds of the Span houses engender social networking. There’s no need for me to expand on this further because, thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded, it’s already been written up for me. Look:

He placed three basic principles at the heart of the Span projects:

• community as the goal
• shared landscape as the means, and
• modern, controlled design as the expression.

Many developments focus only on the creation of private domestic space – they treat the area beyond the front door as incidental.

But Eric Lyons turned this on its head. Each development found ways of building the homes around central or shared green spaces. The architect’s aim was to engineer a sense of community by forcing people to interact.

from the BBC article: A house like no other?

Treat Span as interchangeable with web 2.0 and Eric Lyons as interchangeable with your favourite interaction designer and you’ll see what I mean.

Could there be a relationship between the form of the media we are using and the wide ranging appeal of some of the sites that curate the analogous topic? Landscape, blogging, topography, delicious, geology, fffound, urbanity, flickr – medium and content seamlessly linked.

For the last few months I’ve been working on a project to refurbish 6 terrace properties in Newcastle-Under-Lyme. We won the project after a competitive bid last summer and today sees the launch of the public web site charting the progress of the work. As you might expect, I’ll be recording the project on the eocterrace web site using a number of blogging techniques such as a written diary, a phonecam blog, flickr images and del.icio.us links.

ecoterrace.co.uk

The goal is to substantially increase the environmental performance of the properties and help take part in the progress of the national debate about the importance of improving the quality of the country’s existing housing stock.

One of the most interesting aspects of the project will be the post-occupancy monitoring work we will be completing in collaboration with the guys from Hockerton Housing Projects. In a couple of years time we will hopefully have something valuable to say about the actual results of some of the design techniques and products, as well as an understanding of what it’s like to live in a property like this.

I’ll be covering it in more detail here soon, but if you tune into Radio Stoke this morning at 11:20 GMT (it’s available over the web) you’ll hear my colleague Mike Menzies give a brief interview about the project out on site.

(thanks to Adam Freetly from ArchGFX for his help on the WordPress tweaking and Mat Brown from moblog.co.uk for input on the phonecam RSS… now I just have to create some content!)

Our man in Australia, Dan Hill from City Of Sound, sends his latest dispatch by video over at InterestingSouth2007, pitching an idea for sustainability points scoring encouraged by neighbourhood social networking competition. Bruce Sterling meets Robert Venturi – toaster spimes shout via roof top neon signs.

Home owners collate their energy use, export the stats to their neighbourhood’s Facebook group and then float the results out over the street with a hovering, illuminated super-graphic. You can imagine a community where street lights have been replaced with glowing balloons of green pride or red shame.

Dan’s request for input makes me recall the notes I took at last year’s Ecobuild conference:

Enter Carrera and his ‘City Knowledge’ project, which aims to ‘…transform municipalities from hunter-gatherers into farmers…’, farming information about it’s energy uses throughout all it’s processes to build a constantly up to date database. Described in three moves, this takes you from,

plan demanded data,

which is costly to turn into

plan ready information,

when it would have been better to have

plan demanding knowledge.

Because at this point you get the reverse and the knowledge begins to demand a plan, creating new, unforeseen possibilities.

This was part of a presentation by Fabio Carrera about the work he was developing with Adrian Hewitt (of Merton Rule fame), following his PhD exploring the concept of City Knowledge:

City Knowledge leverages the dominant plan-demanded mode of data acquisition to gradually and inexpensively accumulate high-return data and to ensure sustainable, low-cost updates. It produces plan-ready information, by exploiting the self-serving and opportunistic pursuit of instant return-on-investment by frontline offices. Thanks to its emergent qualities, City Knowledge engenders unexpected plan-demanding situations, where the ability to conduct second-order analyses leads to deeper knowledge of our cities.

Carrera and Hewitt have begun to collate environmental data and combine it with GIS mapping. Following Carrera’s ‘middle-out’ model, this emanates from the municipal departments, rather than bottom-up people power or top-down government departments. Described in his 2004 dissertation thus (in a section seductively topped with references to both Lynch and Calvino):

With the advent of the web, a culture of interconnectedness and a certain familiarity with the concept of sharing through a distributed network of independent computers have created the right mindset upon which the City Knowledge concept of “middle-out” can now be grafted. Middle-out entails that each department will first and foremost take care of its needs, so that the primary functions that the department or office performs will be invariably performed with or without the connection to the outside world.

The City Lab department of WPI has been developing this middle out data farming in a number of fields, including the Local On-line Urban Information System (LOUIS).

It seems to me that LOUIS needs help to get out of the lab and into your living room. In Dan’s model, the middle-out municipal department is the aggregation of a community through web 2 social networking. The people become their own Ministry of Environmental Truth, with an attractive AJAX interface, freely accessible API for iPhone toaster control apps and a folksonomic tagging system for all the white goods.

These two approaches should get together for a meetup. Tom Carden should be invited. Carrera seems to have dabbled with web 2 ideas, but the trail disappears after a single blog entry and solitary del.icio.us bookmark – perhaps he’s moved onto web 3.

Final proof that these were two paths destined to cross eventually: Carrera’s City Lab has its own City Sounds project

Elsewhere, Matt Webb – characteristically ahead of the game – announces his sustainability score to the neighbourhood by burning tyres on the roof.

Some work on a lecture I recently gave about Secured by Design (more on that coming up) produced a spin-off diagram worth sharing. Unashamedly following the Indexed model (what’s the formal name for this diagram type?), it pitches three elements of urban design (accommodation, people, transport) against each other and marks intersections, inputs and outputs.

What I’m interested in here is the way this type of diagram turns boundaries or edges – lines – into space to inhabit, both intellectually and physically. Territory that is usually microscopically small, like the surface tension between liquid and its container – such as the boundaries that bump into each other between a path alongside a garden, or a pavement alongside a road – is ripped open, forming a space (A, B and C) that must be negotiated and moved through, rather than stepped over.

I like the idea that these rifts, as Jack Harkness might call them, have a temporal viscosity, as Fassin Taak might say, that could range from foggy pea-soup to sticky treacle. I like the fact that the intersections, the crossing of streams, as Egon Spengler might say, rather than “…causing “total protonic reversal”, destroying the gate and removing Gozer…”, denote the rainwater outlets. The gutters. The connection to the wider infrastructure beyond the diagram.

At the end of all this, when I’m cross-hatching the bits in the middle, I’m defining that qualitative quantity ever-present in urban design discussion: density.

Update: Let’s be more explicit with our hyperlinks: the foggy link is an overlap with some recent posts by Adam Greenfield commenting and expanding on the work of Steven Flusty – see this post also: Foggy, further to Flusty’s five.

Also, I realise now that this was merely a continuation of my previous posts, Vacant Space and Theory about practice.

Architecture Week is upon us and we’ll be taking part in Open Practice in Birmingham again this year. Axis Design will be opening it’s doors to the public on Friday 22nd June to talk about our latest work; the topic this year is How Green Is Our Space? We’ve had a very successful year developing a number of projects with a strong green agenda and I’m excited about the opportunity to get some comments and input from visitors.

Unfortunately, to my bitter disappointment, we weren’t included in this year’s paper catalogue. After a few moments of cursing and wondering whether to call it off for fear of lack of advertising I gathered my thoughts and realised I had a secret weapon: You.

Please, help me spread the word and flex my Google muscles a little. Pass it on, tell your friends, link me up – I’ve put an entry on the office web site with more details, please drop it into whatever blogging, bookmarking, digging, tumbling tools you have at your command:

Architecture Week Open Practice Day

Better yet, come and see me next week, I’d love to show you some of the work we’ve been doing. Failing that, I have a shiny new digital whiteboard to play with and if you’re lucky I’ll get some biscuits in.

Continuing in the yearly tradition, I’ve picked out a few items (after the jump) from the Architecture Week events list for the West Midlands. Work your way through as many as you can and then come and tell me about them when you visit next Friday! Last year’s podcasts and Google Earth route is still available to help you find your way to the office.
Read the rest of this entry »

Notes from last week’s Ecobuild conference

Some advice: If you’re due to speak at a seminar about the environment any time soon, please, stop to think about what your audience is likely to know already.

Ditch the stuff about how we’re all doomed and you’ve got the pie chart to prove it. We know. It’s not looking good and that’s why we’re there, listening to you, in the first place.

Ditch the stuff about how you knew this years ago, before the rest of us, but no-one has been listening.

Ditch the sermon from atop the moral – sustainably drained – high ground.

Just get on and tell us what you think we should do when we get back to the office.

That’s hopefully set the scene. Here are a few quite a lot of notes I took from some of Thursday’s speakers.

Adrian Hewitt from the London Borough of Merton presented some research done in collaboration with Fabio Carrera from WPI to help allow municipalities to understand it’s energy uses. Hewitt, understandably proud of his success in achieving the ‘Merton rule’, spoke about his plans to roll out CHP systems in Merton but was restricted by the cumbersome, costly process of assessing where best to deliver it. Enter Carrera and his ‘City Knowledge’ project, which aims to ‘…transform municipalities from hunter-gatherers into farmers…’, farming information about it’s energy uses throughout all it’s processes to build a constantly up to date database. Described in three moves, this takes you from,

plan demanded data,

which is costly to turn into

plan ready information,

when it would have been better to have

plan demanding knowledge.

Because at this point you get the reverse and the knowledge begins to demand a plan, creating new, unforeseen possibilities.

The project has been farming the data and combining it with GIS mapping. Carrera’s research can be found at www.wpi.edu/~carrera

Peter Studdert from Cambridgeshire Horizons gave a very good talk on ‘design and sustainability at 3 levels – sub-regional, neighbourhood and individual buildings’ – via an all too familiar theme of comparisons with projects in the Netherlands and Germany. They always do it better abroad. Examples worth creating carbon emissions to visit include:

Cambourne SUDS Flows Project

Accordia, Brooklands Avenue

SmartLIFE

Malmo – Bo01

Vauban and Riesenfeld in Freiburg

He gave a sound assessment of the value of design codes versus current development control techniques – get the overall urban design principles right and let the details deliver diversity, rather than ignoring the bigger picture and just coming down hard (and late) on styles of windows.

Professor Koen Steemers talked us through the detailed computer modelling of urban microclimates (in relation to ‘urban heat islands’) and his findings on the relationship between choice and perceived comfort. An external environment version of the ‘adaptive opportunity‘ work in indoor spaces that shows how being able to choose, for example, to move between a warm space and an open window creates a greater perception of comfort than a space that delivers a steady optimal temperature throughout. The conclusion: microclimate diversity results is greater desireability. He had the nicest graphs.

Sandy Halliday from gaiagroup.org provided the I’ve-been-doing-this-since-the-70s talk. Which, for me, got in the way of what was otherwise clearly an impressive body of work. To end the morning session, Michael Squire pointed out to us that trying to ‘save the planet’ was daft, as numerous previous extinction events demonstrate that the planet will get along just fine; it’s the humans that are screwed.

In the afternoon I switched to the Cityscape session (podcasts available) to hear the talks on a topic close to my heart: suburbia.

Nick Falk from URBED continued the examination of Freiburg mentioned already during the morning session and added Almere in the Netherlands. His ‘lessons to be learnt from the Dutch’ highlighted a fact that had been touched on by others and I can corroborate with experiences in my own work: the rented housing sector is the only one delivering the quality that the industry is supposed to be striving for. I’ve no doubt CABE would agree.

I enjoyed his simple suggestion that front gardens are the epitome of suburbia. He also pointed out that the urbed.com web site was replete with studies and critical tools, and Built Environment magazine was worth a look. I hadn’t heard of that publication before.

Richard MacCormac made me jealous by talking about some research that I never seem to be able to find the time to do. His study examined housing typologies and the resulting densities over 5 combinations, ranging from 50 dwellings per hectare to 120.

• Courtyard housing
• Terraced
• Mews
• Mews and terrace
• Mews + flats and maisonettes

A valid question however, is whether either MacCormac or I need to do the research from scratch at all, as the debate about housing density has been going on a long time and there are plenty of existing examples to look at. I was reminded of a study published in 1934 that I recently learnt about on page 29 of ‘Eric Lyons & Span‘:

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. You’ll be hearing lots more about it from me in the coming weeks, especially this particularly outstanding chapter – Models for Suburban living – written by Alan Powers. Here he is describing the study behind this image: A Hundred New Towns For Britain by Arthur Trystan Edwards.

Edward’s two storey terraces, each with at 150 square feet of private outdoor space, were to be ‘charming streets and quadrangles which represent a happy mean between garden suburbia on the one hand and the tall standardised block on the other’, built at densities of 30 to 38 houses per acre.

The combination of distinctly recognisable typologies is as seductive now as it was in 1934 because it provides fertile ground for a debate on economics and aesthetics simultaneously. McCormac worked through the presentation of the aesthetics for each group and then moved to the economics to help him make a proposal for the most useful and robust density for new housing.

It goes like this: DETR figures state that for a neighbourhood to be served by a viable transport network you need 5000 dwellings. To design a ‘walkable’ neighbourhood we should provide all key facilities within a 10 minute walk. This defines an area contained within a circle of 600m radius. Take away the space recognised as necessary for communal facilities and roads and you’re left with a dwelling density of 50 per hectare.

Cue a series of images showing potential layouts at 50 per hectare, which MacCormac admitted himself was barely the beginning of any qualitative judgement of the resulting spaces. His key point, touched on throughout the presentation, was how this qualitative judgement is dependent on an improved understanding of the net vs. gross density – or, crudely put, the houses vs. the spaces.

He’s absolutely right and there’s a thread across this entry that moves from the CABE audit I mentioned earlier (which has much to say about better highways integration), to the car free environment of Trystan Edward’s terraces (whose high density probably land back at about 50 when you introduced parking), through the Span story of quality landscape better mediating the Radburn car/pedestrian divorce, to the shifting tessellations of MacCormac’s houses and gardens.

Relax, we’re almost done.

Hugh Barton from the WHO Collaborating Centre for Healthy Cities and Urban Policy had the thankless task of talking us through a bunch of statistics at 3:30 in the afternoon. However, beyond the tables of numbers was a perfectly timed foil to the density studies of the previous speaker. Interviews of people in 6 different suburban communities examined the actual performance of walking/cycling/driving possibilities to assess the health implications for residents. His conclusion? Reductionist principles to urban studies do not work; we need phenomenological case studies.

Ian Abley, the chair for the afternoon session, began the final panel discussion but stumbled out of the blocks confused about what the net vs. gross stuff all meant. Discouraged I headed for the door to deal with the all too phenomenological train journey home, wishing the density of passengers hadn’t caused me to sit next to the self righteous prick with the Powerbook who wouldn’t shut up about people’s phones going off in the ‘quiet zone’.

A good conference, which I’ll certainly be attending again next year. Splitting the day across different sessions was a good way to avoid excessive greenwash. Remind me next time to pre-book the lunch.

Related links: notes from Hana at Developing News