Elemental

These are my links for April 7th through April 8th:

• Bleak and tortured: Kapoor’s Orbit is hardly an Olympic ideal | Building Blog – “the fact that Kapoor’s works seems to have garnered criticism from critics and the public alike renders it, in this regard at least, unique.
  what does it say?
  And this perhaps is Orbit’s biggest flaw and the reason why it has attracted such negative publicity. To the mayor of London and the London 2012 organising committee, who have been gushing profusely about the sculpture since it was unveiled, it clearly provides a big, pop-art symbol of the games that will doubtless look good on TV and divert attention away from the fact the London Olympic Park lacks much of the architectural ‘wow’ factor so clearly evident in Beijing.”
• Self Reliance Myth – Debunking some myths (read the whole post): “I hear people say they are growing 30%, 50%, even 70% of their own food. What they usually mean is that they are growing fruits and vegetables that make up some percentage of the total cost or weight—but not calories—of their food. Vegetables are high in wet weight, but low in calories. If you are growing 100% of your own vegetables, they provide about 15-20% of your daily calories, unless you are living mostly on potatoes or other starchy veggies. Most daily calories come from grains, meat, or dairy products. So if you’re not raising large-scale grains or animals, it’s unlikely that you are growing more than one-quarter of your own food, measured honestly by nutritional content. In that case, it’s not accurate to claim you are “70% food self sufficient.” …. Now we begin to see how difficult, and even undesirable, self sufficiency is. You won’t have time for much else if you are truly food self sufficient, even in a permaculture system.”
• IES » » In Practice: linking Revit to IES – “it is important to note that gbXML is not perfect and limitations transferring information between BIM and energy simulation software still exist. A key issue to understand, when looking to cycle through design options in a timely manner, is that there are some fundamental differences between an energy model for analysis and an architectural model used to generate construction documents. For example, many BIM elements do not support information exchange identifying the thermal performance characteristics that are needed to run energy analysis. …
  At early stages, if you take the perspective of the energy modeler they want to include the minimum amount of information to answer the question at hand, to reduce the variables and the analysis time. If you take the perspective of the architect, the visual character of the overall model is important to convey the design intent, as well as the details to express the layering of the idea(s).”
• marklynas.org | Why no party can afford to be anti-nuclear – “By attempting to be populist but appearing merely outdated, the Lib Dems have produced an energy policy that is by far the least realistic of the plans by the three major parties. On 19 March, the Conservatives launched a sensible plan for a carbon tax on electricity generation to encourage investment in both nuclear and renewable power. After years of dithering, Labour is now on track with its large-scale offshore wind programme, nuclear new-build and major grid upscaling.
  The Lib Dems are left with wishful thinking. The writer David MacKay summarised their approach in his book Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air as “Plan L”, which would leave a zero-carbon Britain dependent on imports for two-thirds of its electricity, and on coal for much of the rest. (This is “clean coal”—a technology yet to be invented on the required scale.)”
• House 2.0: Part G and the Water Calculator – Comment from Nick Grant on Mark’s Part G post: “The calculator approach is inherently flawed (on many levels) but cannot easily be dropped as it was voted on by ‘Stakeholders’ and became policy. There is a critique on my website which led to a review for CLG. Unfortunately the report of the review has not been published as I would rather reference that.
  Many of us find it really draining to have to put so much effort into debunking seriously flawed policies as you regularly flag up on your blog. We would rather get on with designing more sustainable buildings (and renovations) but have to spend huge amounts of time and effort (usually unpaid) arguing against supposedly green policies that are making things worse.”
• Awash in Awareness: Knowing a Product’s “Water Footprint” May Help Consumers Conserve H2O: Scientific American – “Concerns over greenhouse gas emissions have vaulted the term “carbon footprint” into mainstream vernacular. Now, by promoting the concept of a “water footprint” with the goal of including it on product labels, researchers are hoping to draw similar attention to how drastically we’re draining our most precious resource. As the use of a footprint to gauge water use gains popularity, however, researchers are struggling to reach a consensus on how best to measure that footprint so the public understands its full impact.”
• Urban Resilience § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM – Fascinating article on resilience: “From a systems standpoint, what cities are doing is creating a network—which in itself could strengthen resilience. Knowledge generated in one place could be used in another, and experiences and best practices could be shared. But this power shift raises an interesting governance question, as every organization in place today when it comes to global governance—the CBD, the United Nations, the Law of the Sea—is based on the nation state. Now on the sidelines, a very powerful network of cities is growing, sharing information technology, and driving an ambitious sustainability agenda.”

admin News BIM, calculator, complexity, Economics, footprint, G, nuclear, Olympics, Part, permaculture, resilience, Sustainability, urbanism, water

These are my links for January 23rd through January 26th:

• Not the last straw: Homes made from straw bales make a comeback | MNN – Mother Nature Network – Volunteer labour makes costing straw bale difficult: "Though the materials used for straw bale buildings – straw & plaster – are typically inexpensive, the special knowledge required to design & build these structures usually means that labor costs can be anywhere between 10 percent and 20 percent higher than for traditional buildings, though some of that cost is made back through energy efficiency.
  “The construction of these buildings takes a person who’s done tons of training to really understand exactly how to get the material to behave,” says Moore. “It just ends up costing the consumer too much money for the benefit it produces.”
  In addition, straw bales can create extra hassle in terms of coordinating their delivery from local farmers, having a big enough job site to store all the bales and keeping them dry during construction.
  One way that people help keep labor costs down is to throw “bale raising” parties where friends & family members help stack bales and plaster walls."
• Forget Sustainability, It’ s Time to Talk Resilience – "There's a new concept infiltrating the climate change conversation, and it has the potential to change the conversation altogether. It’s time to give sustainability a rest and start talking about resilience, Rob Hopkins writes in Resurgence.
  “The term ‘resilience’ is appearing more frequently in discussions about environmental concerns, and it has a strong claim to actually being a more successful concept than that of sustainability. Sustainability and its oxymoronic offspring sustainable development are commonly held to be a sufficient response to the scale of the climate challenge we face: to reduce the inputs at one end of the globalised economic growth model (energy, resources, and so on) while reducing the outputs at the other end (pollution, carbon emissions, etc.). However, responses to climate change that do not also address the imminent, or quite possibly already passed, peak in world oil production do not adequately address the nature of the challenge we face.”"
• House 2.0: The Denby Dale Passive House – "Because of all this, the house down the end of Geoff and Kate’s garden has assumed a significance they cannot have dreamt of when they first contacted Bill Butcher. It’s not just a low energy house, it’s a Passive House. And it’s not just a Passive house, it’s an assault craft landing on the beach that is the Code for Sustainable Homes. By 2016, when in theory the Code should kick in fully and all new homes should be “zero carbon”, you would not be allowed to build this house. For a start, it is going to have a gas boiler — not permitted under Code Level 6. And it will have nothing in the way of home-generated electricity (although the Feed-In-Tariff coming on stream later this year may cause Geoff and Kate to reconsider)."
• Archinect : Views : Victory Gardens, or the Impact of the Financial Crisis on Architecture – Gloomy, but worth reading the whole article: "The hard part is going to be for architects to understand just how this is healthy for the profession. First, architects have hardly raised their productivity since the integration of digital design tools into their work. Sure, designs have gotten much more complex, but more isn’t always more. Many firms have wound up wasting labor on gimmicky designs produced by an army of interns. Now those firms are going to finally begin using technology the way it was meant to be. Watch as fifty-person firms shrink to five or ten core employees. Instead of talking about the cool things that digital technology can make, architects are going to talk about how fast and efficient digital technology makes them.
  That will be a huge paradigm-shift and will lead to more interesting work along the way."
• Sustainability: Carbon reduction – Building – Everything you need to know about CRC: "So is the financial liability placed on organisations by the CRC significant enough to demonstrate a convincing business case for improving energy performance in existing buildings? Not quite. However, the business case becomes more compelling when energy savings are taken into account as shown in the table below.
  Early investment in more energy efficient systems can reap significant savings in terms of reduced energy costs. The example shows the initial investment paid back in less than four years. If early action is difficult due to the current economic climate, then appropriate investment in time for the capped phase (2013) will also significantly reduce CRC liability and generate substantial energy savings. "

admin News AECB, BIM, CRC, future, passivhaus, recession, resilience, rob_hopkins, straw-bale, Sustainability, TT

These are my links for June 3rd through June 4th:

• Stumbling and Mumbling: Greens vs “conventional economics” – Chris Dillow takes on Tony and Tim's spat over at CIF: "the question is not: environment versus economics? It’s the technical ones of how to create effective property rights, and how to price access to them." Good stuff.
• Marginal Revolution: Cap and trade vs. carbon tax – Cap and Trade vs. carbon tax is an issue which has been rumbling in the econ-blogosphere for an age. This article has good links to explore further.
• It’s the economists, stupid | Comment is free – Why do I continue to rubberneck at CIF? Tony Jupiter comes back at Tim Worstall. I don't have the strength to read all the comments but Tim hasn't responded at the time of me posting. Tony makes good points about externalities.
• BRE: Green Guide: Welcome to The Green Guide to Specification Online – The Green Guide to Specification online will be publicly launched on 6 June 2008 (better late than never)
• IES::News::IES VE-WARE DOWNLOAD GOES LIVE! – IES VE-Ware is a new FREE building energy and carbon assessment software tool that can make a real difference to the green credentials of a building
• Financial Times // brand tags – "boring" "money" and "pink" the most popular tags for the FT – oh dear…
• Exhibit at the Hayward, London – "a show of the work of 10 contemporary artists, all of whom, in one way or another, take the built environment as their theme" until late August 2008

mel starrs News BIM, branding, carbon, Economics, environmental, Events, externalities, free, green, guide, ies, Software, specification, tax, Tim_Worstall, Tony_Jupiter

These are my links for May 29th through June 1st:

• is there a fourth sector? | design activism – Interesting discussion on businesses straddling the line between not-for-profit and for-profit (resonates with Yvon Chouinard's book Let my People go Surfing)
• Appraisals of Extensive Green Roofs – via Building magazine forums, a survey from Liverpool JMU on green roofs. Go help research and fill it out.
• Medicority « Life’s too short to drink cheap wine. – Great post about user competence and associated levels for Revit. Would love to see a similar one for IES<VE>. Agree with most of the observations. Anyone involved in BIM at any level should read this one.
• Mixed use needs real meaning – Building Design – "enormous plazas surrounded by galumphing great modern warehouses full of people sitting at computer screens earning the money needed to buy shiny gewgaws inside other galumphing great modern warehouses stuffed full of throwaway things made in China."
• Greener B-Schools, Greener Employees – Harvard Business Online’s Leading Green – Convergence ahoy! Andrew Winston (Green to Gold) is writing for Harvard Business Online. Sustainability is no longer an option.
• Sustainability in construction industry organisations – Nick Reilly's blog – the list of bloggers continues to grow.
• Want to Boost Productivity? Give Workers Bigger Screens – Why bigger or two screens are a good idea. From HBR.

mel starrs News article, BIM, blogger, business, construction_industry, fourth_sector, glancey, green, Productivity, R&D, Revit, roofs, survey, Sustainability

These are my links for May 26th through May 27th:

• IES Launches Free Tool : VE- Ware – IES’s VE-Ware, which is available to download for free online, gives limited but incredibly valuable access to its world leading <Virtual Environment> Apache thermal analysis software. New and existing buildings can now have their energy and carbon emis
• C-Plan – Carbon Impact Assessment – C-Plan is a revolutionary web-based service, developed by ECSC, that allows planning authorities and developers to demonstrate and verify compliance with climate change policy.
• Brickonomics – Newish blog from Construction Journal by Brian Green, combining an economics view with construction.
• Experts warn of looming climate change migration crisis – Countries that have the greatest responsibility for creating climate change also have a responsibility to deal with the casualties
• Stumbling and Mumbling: Public intellectual – an oxymoron? – To be very prominent in public affairs requires a dogmatism and capacity for soundbites that sits uneasily with the doubts and humble pursuit of “truth” that mark a true intellectual.

mel starrs News BIM, blog, climatechange, construction_industry, crisis, culture, Economics, environmental, freeware, ies, planning, policy, responsibility, Software