Mossnets x Radical Intersections

The following images come out of trying to visualize how nature makes it’s way back into these communities in behaviors, structure and culture. I’d like to share this set of images as a way to visualize nature finding it’s way back into these communities in the structural, as well as social and cultural realms. These are photos along the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena.

The rock wall held together by cement is the vision of or current situation with a structure largely defined by the materials of it’s construction, functioning but somewhat inflexible.

In some places along the wall the moss grows out of the cement and branches out to eventually cover the cement portions, leaving islands of stone peeking through. How does this growth of a living colony over a manmade solution function as a methodology for re-designing communities and social interaction? Does it scale up to communities such as the ones in our exercise? Can this vision be seen as a way to re-imagine the growth of these communities over time? Can it happen quickly?

This image is of a work by Gordon Matta Clark and one of his intercuts in to a suburban home on the east coast. I share this image as a way to spark imagination about the possibility of radical intersections in the communities. Can we strip away pieces to reveal or allow new growth to occur. What form does this take or how does it re-define pre-exisiting ones?

The Importance of Instilling Values in the Community

by Mari Nakano, Justin Gier, Jonathan Jarvis

Instilling proper values and ideas about sustainability is just as important as a successful sustainable infrastructure. Without the mentality to live in a fashion that is protecting the community, the community will most likely fall apart and not maintain it’s original goals. Therefore, it is important to consider the various ways in which one can instill such values into the community without it being considered a form of brainwash.

Our group looked into how the socio-cultural can contribute to creating a sustainable tract-home style community. I focused on the possible roles of youth, and I also researched models of existing eco-communities. There are a lot of ideas that we can pull from the articles on these links.

Education
Green Schools Initiative
Having a green school can allow sustainable education to naturally happen

The Eco Literacy Project
This project was founded by Fritjof Capra. It talks about how to incorporate healthier lifestyles (particularly around food) in the school.

Youth Leadership
This link is an example of how youth leadership can play a role in the environment. This site also talks about making eco-projects part of the graduation requirement.

Transportation & Other Things We Should Consider
Green Cities and the End of the Age of Oil
This is a good article that gives us things we can consider when building our own

Models of Existing Eco-Cities
Green Affordable Housing Initiative
Sustainable environments are possible for everyone – not just the rich.

Audubon International
Scroll to the middle of this article and read Audubon’s International’s Principles of Sustainability.

New Urbanism and CoHousing
Check out examples of eco-communities and homes. They talk about “co-housing” which is this idea of having to work on parts of the community together or have to contribute to communal activities. This article also touches upon building on the natural landscape, which is something we talked about in class last week.

I also included some points that I found would be helpful or worth considering for our project:
• making things accessible within walking distance to lower fuel emissions.
• designing the architecture of the home to be more energy efficient/ sustainable
• Supporting initiatives that can push/ support the idea of green building practices.
• Instilling conscious values into the youth – particularly through school curriculum or school graduation requirements
• Biomass: “releasing solar energy stored in plants and organic matter by burning agricultural waste and other organic matter to generate power.” This could really legitimize the idea of burning cities.
• Friendly Competitions: i.e. Competition for Most Eco-Friendly City of the Year. Can be city to city or neighbor to neighbor.
• How can “outsiders” (those not living in the community) contribute to sustaining and protecting the community? How can they benefit the community? How do they benefit by helping?

Earth-Sheltered Housing?

I still think this might be of some interest if we are thinking about developing a fire proof community from scratch:

These are some links to various sites about underground living\building:

http://www.undergroundhousing.com/

Also, a site discussing this kind of solution ( and others) for housing on Mars (maybe not so relevant for L.A at this point, but amusing at any rate..):

http://www.iit.edu/~mars/housing_report.html

And, a pdf covering some of the specifics surrounding earth-sheltered building methods:

http://www.uaf.edu/ces/publications/freepubs/EEM-01359.pdf

(Cat)

Uninventing Suburbia…

There was a page on a NY Times blog this morning about suburbs and energy consumption. There are a number of links on the page that might be of interest. One is to a trailer of a film called the End of Suburbia which examines the evolution of these systems. A paper on the concept of retrofilling and a lot of the positive work being done to adapt these existing structures. There’s also a link to a website on dead malls. It seems that in trying to adapt these systems to deal with the fire ecology that modding or solutions will also be tied to other issues with this type of lifestyle.

Burning Edge Cities Brainstorm #2

Our group discussed the realities of making cities that, to quote the video from James Howard Kunstler, “were worth caring about.” It seemed to us that his ideas were excellent in terms of designing new things, but that the costs of retrofitting/redesigning old things to have more value to a community of “citizen”-minded residents could be extremely prohibitive. Who would foot the bill for it? This was somewhat frustrating to us led us to discuss what it would take to enable such a sea change for consistent value in both new and existing communities, and our main thought was that any change on a large scale would need to be driven by the citizens themselves. Values such as sustainability and usability will need to be adopted by communities on a huge scale before the people who actually make things and design living spaces (we talked a lot about homebuilding corporations) will be willing to spend a little extra money on things like only buying local raw goods or making commercial spaces more appealing and functional. There needs to be some kind of financial motivation for them to do it; it seemed to us that they need to know that people are interested and willing to buy and use thoughtfully produced residences/communities/commercial districts etc…Otherwise their main concern will only be their profit margin.

Fantasy NBA System Model

This is a model of the network of relationships in a NBA fanatsy sports league. The lines between clusters show patterns of influence. The chart flows from left to right in terms of a timeline: for example, the NBA exists first, then the fan, then the fan makes a fantasy league, and so on. The size of each circle indicates its step in a process; bigger circles mean that they are things that happen before events in smaller circles. Each circle only touches events that directly relate to it. The color of the circle is dependent on which of three real life factors influence it: NBA players and their statistics are orange, Individual decisions are green, and decisions influenced by the people you are playing against are brown.

Burning Edge Cities Brainstorm

This image is our brainstorm about suburban communities in Southern California and their interactions with wildfires. This relationship that became more explicit during the Summer and Fall of 2007 with whole sections of these homes burning to the ground. We looked at possible alternate structures and community activities that might integrate some of the ecological renewal that comes from the fire ecology into these neighborhoods. Look at our notes from the session here.

Interesting Artwork

On January 28th, 2008, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, and Janez Janša performed at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, a walking action in the corridors of the Memorial. Each one of them, equipped with a GPS device, covered a different path within the Memorial’s structure this way, together assembling a common signature visible only in the internet. During the performance artists continuously repeated “Jaz sem Janez Janša, Jaz sem Janez Janša, Jaz sem Janez Janša…” (”My name is Janez Janša”). »Signature Event Context« at the Holocaust Memorial puts together 3 concepts (signature, event and context) from Derrida’s essay in complex relation; signature itself is an event which re-contextualizes the site of signature. The performance scheduled for the opening of TRANSMEDIALE.08 the 29th of January 2008 at 8.30 pm at the foyer of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany, was conjunctively cancelled by the director of transmediale Stephen Kovats and the Guest-Curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez. Consequently, Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša rescheduled the date of the action performing on January 28, 2008 at 00.01 am.