Links: Eric Owen Moss

Links: LPzR
Via: materialicious

with its “extremely advanced” “PVC-framed double glazed windows, gypsum plasterboard walls and an advanced timber framing system”. It sounds all too plausible, what with his line of McMuseums and all, and you can bet something similar will be appearing soon, somewhere. In the suburbs of Dubai perhaps? Very witty, guys.

(Photo Nobiiru)

All the signs have been there for a long time…

(Image The Rev Anaglyph)

you should have investigated further. Now you’d better start being nice to cats and the rest of the planet’s creature or you’ll be meeting the Prince of Darkness….

With many thanks to the delightful Tetherd Cow

PS We’ve been having server and wordpress meltdowns over the last few days, apologies to everyone, we are slowly getting it under control we hope.

(Photo DetroitDerek under CC-BY-ND licence)

OK, enough gloom, let’s get it all into perspective. If you need to understand that apocalypse could still be fun then you need go no further than the Heidelberg Project in Black Bottom (seriously!), one of the famously derelict suburbs of Detroit.

(Photo retardita under CC-BY-NC-SA licence)

Strictly speaking the Heidelberg Project is not adaptive reuse, well maybe in part, but it shows why adaptive reuse may be far more important than it seems. What attracts us to adaptive reuse is that even when it is most serious it can still be play, the type of play that demonstrates how resourceful and resilient humans can be, how they can adapt and reframe a situation and how they can even make something great using the impossible raw materials left over from a disaster.

Tyree Guyton (Photo DetroitDerek under CC-BY-ND licence)

And it’s hard to think of less promising raw materials than the derelict gang ridden suburbs of Detroit. If you want to see the future, after climate change has decimated the deluded industrial nations of the world then Detroit is definitely Tomorrowland. And this is how its creator Tyree Guyton found it:

The Heidelberg Project is, in part, a political protest, as Tyree Guyton’s childhood neighborhood began to deteriorate after the 1967 riots. Following his stint in the Army, Tyree Guyton described coming back to Heidelberg Street and the surrounding neighborhood as if “a bomb went off”.

At first, the project consisted of a series of houses on Detroit’s Heidelberg Street, painted with bright dots of many colors in conjunction with salvaged items being attached to the houses. It was a constantly evolving work that transformed a hard-core inner city neighborhood where people were afraid to walk, even in daytime, into one in which neighbors took pride and where visitors were many and welcomed.

Tyree Guyton worked on The Heidelberg Project every day with the children on the block. He and director, Jenenne Whitfield, gave lectures and workshops around the country. Their main goal was to develop The Heidelberg Project into the city’s first indoor and outdoor museum; complete with an artist colony, creative art center, community garden, amphitheater, and more.

Now, it has over 250,000 visitors a year and is one of Detroit’s major tourist attractions, despite City Hall expressing its disapproval by partial demolition (talk about declutter!).

Guyton says about his work

“I like to take that which is dead (cast aside, thrown away) and put life back in it by adding colors and shapes and making it speak back to the world.”

What’s not to love about it?

(Photo DetroitDerek under CC-BY-ND licence)

The dot house…

(Photo retardita under CC-BY-NC-SA licence)

the animal house…

(Photo DetroitDerek under CC-BY-ND licence)

Cinderella’s warholian slippers…

(Photo technochick under CC-BY-SA licence)

the wonderful sorcerer’s apprentice parody of the marching vacuum cleaners…

(Photo retardita under CC-BY-NC-SA licence)

the art gallery…

(Photo laughlin under CC-BY licence)

sculpture whose precariousness would put Richard Serra’s to shame…

(Photo DetroitDerek under CC-BY-ND licence)

or the memorial to Rosa Parks? It’s all proof that no matter what happens, humans will still somehow manage to be happy if they are working together and creating. Have a happy Chocolate Festival!

Links Blackburn Architects

We are supporting the March 19 blogswarm marking the fifth anniversary of the start of the insane and unjust Iraq war.

From the beginning it was nothing more than an unjustified war of aggression by a group of countries, the US, UK and Australia, whose historical pretensions of moral superiority can now clearly be seen as false, disguises for greed and criminality. It has put the final nail in the coffin of the US economy and completely corrupted the already fragile US political system, probably beyond repair. Not only has it ruined countless lives, the money it has wasted would have gone a long way to solving the real crisis facing the world and that is climate change.

But it’s not worth arguing about anymore, it’s an appalling evil and most people want it to end. How many ways can it be said, the ship is sinking, the theatre is on fire, the ivory tower is collapsing and it is much, much later than you think. It’s time to kick out the criminals and charlatans that have taken control of politics and business and start dealing with the real problem, the looming climate disaster that makes every other problem an irrelevancy. The Europeans are now leading the way and it’s time for the rest of us to follow them.

Here are some links you should visit

March 19 blogswarm

no war no warming

5 years too many

winter soldier

And if you are in the US, get out on the streets today and join the protests!

We’ve always argued that in most cases the best building is the building that is already there. In sustainability terms, at least, the reasons for adaptive reuse of existing buildings seem obvious. Even if the proposed new building is greener than green there will still be a considerable CO2 cost in the new materials, and since many modern building materials only have an expected life of around 25 years there is a considerable future CO2 expense as well. Long lasting but expensive traditional building techniques and materials rate better than cheap modern materials - in other words don’t let accountants design your building, it will cost the earth in the long run.

But we’ve never found figures to back our assertion. Well, now someone has proven it. In a report that has got a bit of coverage in the UK (here, here, and here) the Empty Homes Agency has done research to show that reusing existing buildings is greener than building new “green” buildings.

The report, compiled by the Empty Homes Agency with help from the Building and Social Housing Foundation, indicates that the embodied carbon - the carbon released as a direct result of building a new home - accounts for nearly three times as much as the building’s lifetime emissions.

The agency claims that building a new home emits more than four and a half times as much carbon dioxide per square metre as refurbishing an existing one. As much as 35 tonnes of carbon dioxide could be saved by bringing an existing home up to scratch - equivalent to driving a car from London to Sydney and back seven times. Over 50 years, this means that there is almost no difference in the average emissions of new and refurbished homes.

So there, we told you so! Here is the summary and this is the full report.

Plimsoll Street, Liverpool, UK (Photo from community brother’s Liverpool housing flickr set )

One of the implications is that in a world desperate for a few instant solutions, a moratorium on demolitions, the restoration of empty buildings and the restriction of new building to greenfield sites must suddenly look appealing. It would be interesting to speculate on the effect this would have on the dynamics of the future metropolis - cityofsound, Geoff Manaugh, where are you?

Now the other thing we have been saying is that there will be a world wide ban on coal mining in under ten years - you must remember we live in an area completely economically dependent on coal mining yet the local government strategic plan for the next twenty years does not even mention climate change despite our attempts to raise the issue. Since the European Union, (the world’s biggest economy) is now threatening the US and China with trade sanctions if they don’t get moving on greenhouse emissions, the coal mining ban is looking increasingly possible. Perhaps we should make a long bet on it.

Links: bldgs NY Times article

Via: ApartmentTherapy

Links: Corrour Estate
Suzy Hoodless
Via: Remodelista