OMA designs sustainable City Hall in Rotterdam

Office for Metropolitan Architecture worked with Werner Sobek and engineers ABT and won a competition to design a new mixed used building at Rotterdam’s City Hall in the Netherlands.
Set for completion in 2014, the innovative and sustainable scheme for the city council includes municipal services, offices and residential units.
The new building will be made up of smaller box-shaped cells to generate maximum efficiency and versatility in construction and features a modular structure with repeated units gradually set back from the street as they rise into two irregular peaks. Units can be added or taken away as needed.
Besides this particular structure, the building has a climate regulated by warm air stored in summer and released in winter, and vice versa, and the use of hi-tech translucent insulation in the building’s glass façade, addressing the main requirement for this building: to be the most sustainable building in the Netherlands.
The highly insulated glazed building will also include green terraces for residential occupants on higher levels providing the possibility of an apartment with a garden in the heart of urban Rotterdam!
OMA partner Reinier de Graaf said: “Rather than posing as the city’s next superlative, the design for the Stadskantoor is partly a building, partly an urban condition – a skyline in its own right.”

More OMA in Future Architecture here

A FLOATING WORLD

The Waterpod demonstrates future pathways for nomadic, mobile shelters and water-based communities, docked and roaming. It embodies self-sufficiency and resourcefulness, learning and curiosity, human expression and creative exploration. It intends to prepare, inform, and provide an alternative to current and future living spaces.
In preparation for our coming world with an increase in population, a decrease in usable land, and a greater flux in environmental conditions, people will need to rely closely on immediate communities and look for alternative living models; the Waterpod is about cooperation, collaboration, augmentation, and metamorphosis. As a malleable and autonomous space, the Waterpod is built on a model comprised of multiple collaborations. The Waterpod functions as a singular unit with the possibility to expand into ever-evolving water communities; an archipelagos that has the ability to mutate with the tides.
The Waterpod codifies the language of mobility in contemporary architecture and historicizes the notion of the permanent structure, simultaneously serving as composition, transportation, island, and residence. As with all art forms, architecture is largely about stories: stories of its inhabitants, its community, its makers and their reflections on the past or expectations of the future.
Based on an economy of movement, this structure is adaptable, flexible, self-sufficient, and relocatable, responsive to its immediate and shifting environment. It gives shape to the communities of the future, marking a new nomadism.
The Waterpod is an extension of body, of home, and of community, its only permanence being change, flow, and multiplicity. It connects river to visitor, global to local, nature to city, and historic to futuristic ecologies.
With this project, we hope to encourage innovation as we visualize the future fifty to one hundred years from now.

A Good Read by Green Guru Michelle Kaufmann

Michelle Kaufmann, award-winning green architect and sustainable living expert, today announced the release of the white paper, "Embracing Thoughtful, Walkable Neighbourhoods," and with it, her firm's 10 EcoPrinciples for Communities.

In the white paper, Kaufmann looks toward the future--when the economy begins its inevitable recovery and credit flows again--and argues why we must resist the temptation to recommence our most unsustainable mode of developing new housing: suburban sprawl. By turning to sprawl's alternative, smart growth, Kaufmann asserts we can open the door to a new era in housing development that helps secure the health of our communities and our planet.

The white paper, which is available for download , also introduces Kaufmann's 10 EcoPrinciples for Communities. From Smart Design and Water Conservation to Smart Auto Strategies and Location, the 10 EcoPrinciples map out elements that can be incorporated into a community to make it even more sustainable.

"Now is the perfect time to reexamine the qualities we value in our neighborhoods and hopefully shift our focus onto those qualities that are conducive to financial, environmental, and sociocultural sustainability," explained Kaufmann, founder and chairwoman of Michelle Kaufmann Companies.

By reducing resource consumption, waste, costs, and building time by up to 50%-75% over conventional building methods, Michelle Kaufmann's prefabricated, modular building techniques deliver benefits to individual homebuyers as well as builders/developers, who are interested in building green multi-family and community developments.

ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability Revitalizes Old Building

Old buildings of Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability, situated in the campus’ are now beautifully renovated with enviromental sustainability. Conceived by Lord, Aeck & Sargent along with Gould Evans Associates, the $6 million renovation included asbestos abatement and standard modernization for classroom use along with a bundle of environmentally and sustainable enhancements. Their innovation turned a once dreary, old and dark building into a new institute filled with enough daylight to inspire its new inhabitants as they look for ways to improve the environment, the economy, and the social challenges we all face today.

One of the most obvious sustainable additions to the building is its six wind turbines that are mounted along the eastern edge of the roof. Each of the turbines is powered by thermal updrafts (it is located in Arizona after all) and provides 1,000 watts of power directly into the Arizona Public Service Grid. More energy generating capabilities will be added next year with the installation of a 24-killowatt photovoltaic solar array. Other sustainable additions include the generous use of recycled content throughout the building in the form of insulation, countertops, and even furniture along with the light sensors, an automated landscape irrigation system, and pervious paving to control storm water runoff.With energy savings of more than 18% and more than a 50% reduction in water use, the building has its site set on attaining LEED Silver upon completion. Being the first institute of its kind to offer transdiciplinary degree programs geared at finding solutions to environmental, economic, and social challenges, the new home for Global Institute of Sustainability is making its mark and proving that re-invigorating something old can be just as good as building something new.

source: Inhabit, ASU global institut of sustainability, Gould Evans associates , Lord Aeck and Sargent