Emerging

The fragile ecology of the nation of Tuvalu coupled with frequent natural disasters and rising sea levels due to climate change, is causing strife for its citizens. In line with the country’s master plan to promote sustainable living, this project is for the design of an Eco-House, and Educational Center for the small atoll island nation of Tuvalu as a demonstration of living/working without use of fossil fuels, while preserving the natural environment, and growing and harvesting one’s own food and water. Expanded to a national scale, Tuvalu’s goal is to become a living example for other countries who want to exist carbon neutral and mitigate global warming.

Although mitigation efforts may seem in vain, the country’s strong desire to go carbon neutral suggests a resilience and openness to change in order to set an example for other nations that strive to reduce global warming. The House will be a physical manifestation of human life harmonious with the land and water. The powerful combination of solar energy, replenishing water systems, and food production in a single dwelling is sure to stimulate the public. This can create real ways to empower the citizens to adopt more ecologically sound ways, and to believe that the land can in fact provide sustenance when tended to. This is important for the survival of the indigenous Tuvaluan population.

The world needs sustainable living examples in microcosm in order to implement in larger countries. As a small, isolated island nation, Tuvalu is an appropriate candidate for this project and the timing could not be more urgent.

Ecology for Architects

For the past three + months I have been teaching a new course at NYIT called Introduction to Ecology (for Architects). The course introduces students to ecological systems with respect to interactions between the natural and built environment, and specifically with regard to shelter and environmental conditioning. Students are asked to consider the relationships between technology and culture as they learn how old and new technology can compliment the rhythms of the sun, wind, rain, water conservation and cycles of biomass and waste when designing habitable spaces.

As the semester ends, I must say that I tremendously enjoyed teaching this class. The students were inquisitive at a variety of levels, sometimes asking deep questions about how we live on the earth to asking the simplest questions that revealed how disconnected we are from our food, water and energy. Second, the course gave me a platform for disseminating my travel research in New Orleans, Bangladesh, India and Brazil (not to mention my composting experiments at the community garden this summer). I also gave a separate lecture on water to 60 first-year students and faculty. My skills as a lecturer/professor are slowly developing. I'm learning how important it is to engage the students, to make the class fun and stimulating and to really listen to them and offer the best feedback I can give.


Ecology students on a tour of the new LEED-platinum rated visitors center at the Queens Botanical Gardens


Assignment: collect the garbage that you would normally throw away over the course of one day. Discussion: How can waste become resources? How can we redesign products and packaging to become useful "technical nutrients"? What role can architects play in reducing the amount of waste that ends up in landfills or polluting water?

Edibles & Colorfuls

After returning from India, JP and I started growing things. Arugula (wilted flowers pictured here), heirloom tomatoes, Portugal hot peppers, sugar snap peas, herbs, cucumbers, and mesclun for eating, marigolds and hollyhocks for dyes.
Our apartment is overgrown, our fire escape would be hazardous to negotiate in a fire situation, and we've spread our growing fervor to neighbors. We have a community garden plot too. A 4 x 4 plot of arable land. 16 square feet to farm. We compost food scraps. We save water for the plants by keeping big jars and buckets in the shower while waiting for the water to heat up. We haven't produced much yet, but each tomato is cherished and shared in a slightly ceremonious pseudo-harvest.
Now if only my landlord would let me on the roof...

Red Hook

Shifting

This is Long Beach, Long Island. Flat, watery & fragile, its edges shifting whether we like it or not, eroding, building land, and occasionally brought back from natural disaster by conservationists to its "natural" state. Like most water's edge sites on Long Island, this place was inhabited by humans, reconstituted, dredged, paved, jettied, bulkheaded and stabilized. Certain sites are left "natural" like beaches for human pleasure. When a storm blows over and washes miles of this beach away, it is promptly rebuilt with sand that had been deposited in the "wrong" place.

The lives of Long Beach are fascinating. People who live near the coast have a stronger connection to the land and water, and it brings a sort of cadence to everyday life. The rise and fall of tides, the telling winds, the threat of a storm, the weathering of everything from the salty air. It is a microcosm of the long sandbar that is Long Island, although LI has been developed so much that living just slightly inland can destroy any intuition of living on an island.

My first architectural project on the water is becoming a laboratory of renewable energies and sustainable manipulations of water for human needs. This structure will take salty water from the Bay to a rooftop pond where it will be heated by solar thermal tubes, turn to steam and condense into a channel leaving the salt and minerals behind. When enough water has been purified and collected in the channel, it becomes a waterfall off the side of the building into a tank below, alerting the inhabitants to the progress of the system. The water is then potable and the salt collected is the kind of sea salt that gourmet food stores sell at high prices.

This is a new architecture for Long Island in which the building (working with its inhabitants) makes its own sea salt, cleans water, produces its own energy with photovoltaics, grows its own food (there are herb and vegetable gardens), and uses geothermal for heating and cooling.