1. BODIES &
BUILDINGS
NYU ITP LECTURE COURSE SPRING 2013
MARCH 25, 2013
JEN VAN DER MEER @JENVANDERMEER WWW.JENVANDERMEER.COM
2. ASSIGNMENT:
In the same way we reviewed health apps for our first
assignment, find an app, website, or some other technology
service that gives an end user the ability to interact with her
environmental data.
Write a review of this experience – would you use this system
for your personal understanding? What kinds of feedback
loops are built into the design of the system?
March 25, 2013
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3. BUILDINGS:
Part 2: Buildings
7. Clean Tech Failures, Clean Tech Long Term View, March 25, 2013
8. LEED and the Passive House Movement, April 1, 2013
9. Passive House + CoGen, April 8, 2013
10. Generative Architecture, Responsive Design, April 15, 2013
Part 3: Concept Development and Final Presentations
11. Concept strengthening – design thinking exercises, business case
building, April 22, 2013
12. Final Presentations with guest critics, April 29, 2013
25, 2013
March
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4. PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM:
12. Constants, parameters, numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards)
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (transport networks, population age structures)
9. Length of delays, relative to the rate of system change
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information)
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints)
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure
3. The goals of the system
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system – its goals, power structure, rules, its culture-arises
1. The power to transcend paradigms
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5. 3. The goals of the system
The goal of the system is a leverage point
superior to the self-organizing ability of a
system.
That’s why I can’t get into arguments about
whether genetic engineering is a “good” or
“bad” thing. Like all technologies, it depends
upon who is wielding it, with what goal.
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6. 3. The goals of the system
Whole system goals are not what w ethingk of as
goals in the human-motivational sense. They are
not so much deducible from what everyone says
as from what the system does. Survival,
resilience, differentiation, evolution are system-
level goals.
Even people within systems don’t often recognize
what whole-system goal they are serving.
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7. 3. The goals of the system
Whole system goals are not what we think of as
goals in the human-motivational sense. They
are not so much deducible from what everyone
says as from what the system does. Survival,
resilience, differentiation, evolution are system-
level goals.
Even people within systems don’t often
recognize what whole-system goal they are
serving.
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8. What is the goal of this system?
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10. ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT:
SUPPLY SIDE
Most of the technological interventions in the global
environment have focused on the supply side:
The availability of land (conservation)
The availability of fuel (gas crises, investment in clean tech)
The availability of greener products with greener materials
(green product development/greenwashing)
In this class we focus on the demand side – making buildings
so that they demand less from the earth. But to understand
the context, we need to know our recent history.
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12. HISTORY
1845: Thoreau Walden; or Life in the Woods
1864: Yosemite
1886: Audobon Society
1892: Sierra Club: John Muir
1910: Lakeview Gusher San Joaquin CA
1916: Nat’l Park Service
1848: Donora PA, Zinc
1962: Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
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13. SILENT SPRING
These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost
universally to farms, forests, and homes- nonselective
chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the “good”
and the “bad,” to still the song of the birds and the leaping of
fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and
to linger on in the soil – all this though the intended target
may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is
possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface
of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should
not be called “insecticides,” but “biocides.”
Rachel Carson
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14. SILENT SPRING
There is still a very limited awareness of the nature of the
threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his
own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger
frame into which it fits….
It is a public that is being asked to assume the risks that the
insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it
wishes to continue on the present road, and it can only do so
when in full possession of the facts. In the words of Jean
Rostand, “The obligation to endure gives us the right to
know.”
Rachel Carson
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15. CARSON’S LEGACY
Environmental Defense Fund (1967)
EPA (1970)
Clean Air Act (1970)
DDT Ban (1972)
Deep Ecology (1972) Arne Naess
Carson “quite self-consciously decided to write a book calling
into question the paradigm of scientific progress that defined
postwar American culture.” – Mark Hamilton Lytle, biographer
Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964)
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16. DEEP ECOLOGY
Naess saw two different forms of environmentalism:
Long-range deep ecology movement: deep questioning, down to
fundamental root causes. Involves redesigning our whole
systems based on values and methods that truly preserve the
ecological and cultural diversity of natural systems. Without
changes in basic values and practices, we will destroy the
diversity and beauty of the world, and its ability to support
diverse human cultures.
Shallow ecology movement: stops before the ultimate level of
fundamental change, often promoting technological fixes (e.g.
recycling, increased automotive efficiency, export-driven
monocultural organic agriculture) based on the same
consumption-oriented values and methods of industrial
economy.
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17. LATER HISTORY
1969: Cuyahoga River on fire
1970: Earth Day, NRDC Founded
1971: Greenpeace Founded Canada
1972: OPEC Oil embargo
1978: Love Canal
1979: Three Mile Island
1981: PETA Founded
1984: Bhopal Union Carbide
1985: Vienna Convention on Ozone
1986: Chernobyl
1987: Brundtland Commission
1989: Exxon Valdez
1992: Earth Summit Rio
2005: Katrina
2006: An Inconvenient Truth
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18. BUILDINGS HISTORY
1973: AIA committee on energy
1980: Sustainable Buildings Industry Council
1984: Sick Building Syndrome
1987: UN World Commision defines “sustainable development”
1988: PassiveHaus
1989: The AIA Committee on the Environment
1992: AIA Environmental Resource Guide
1992: Earth Summit
1993: USGBC
1998: LEED 1
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19. THE DEATH OF
ENVIRONMENTALISM
Today’s environmental leaders are addressing tomorrow’s
problems with yesterday’s tools: regulatory and policy fixes.
And because serious global problems like climate change and
the looming water crisis have been narrowly defined as
“environmental,” their equally narrow solutions are easy to
marginalize and dismiss by conservatives, cynics, and other
non believers.
Environmental leaders need to “take a collective step back to
rethink everything.” specifically, how to reframe issues and
build coalitions around big ideas and values, not specific
programs, much as the conservative movement has done over
the past 40 years. – 2004. Michael Shellenberger and Ted
Nordhaus.
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March 25, 2013
20. THE DEATH OF
ENVIRONMENTALISM
Today’s environmental leaders are addressing tomorrow’s
problems with yesterday’s tools: regulatory and policy fixes.
And because serious global problems like climate change and
the looming water crisis have been narrowly defined as
“environmental,” their equally narrow solutions are easy to
marginalize and dismiss by conservatives, cynics, and other
non believers.
Environmental leaders need to “take a collective step back to
rethink everything.” specifically, how to reframe issues and
build coalitions around big ideas and values, not specific
programs, much as the conservative movement has done over
the past 40 years. – 2004. Michael Shellenberger and Ted
Nordhaus.
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23. CRYING AT TED
Curbing climate change : “the largest economic opportunity of
the 21st century, and a moral imperative”
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24. CLEAN TECH BOOM
In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the
hundreds of millions of dollars. The following year, it
ballooned to $1.75 billion, according to the National Venture
Capital Association. By 2008, the year after Doerr’s speech, it
had leaped to $4.1 billion. And the federal government
followed. Through a mix of loans, subsidies, and tax breaks,
it directed roughly $44.5 billion into the sector between late
2009 and late 2011.
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27. “WHY THE CLEAN TECH BOOM
WENT BUST”
There was an additional factor at work: impatience. Venture capitalists tend
to work on three- to five-year horizons. As they were quickly finding out,
energy companies don’t operate on those timelines. ...Of all the energy
startups that received their first VC funds between 1995 and 2007, only 1.8
percent achieved what he calls “unambiguous success,” meaning an initial
public offering on a major exchange. The average time from founding to IPO
was 8.3 years. “If you’re signing up to build a clean-tech winner,” Nordan
wrote in a blog post, “reserve a decade of your life.”
The truth is that starting a company on the supply side of the energy
business requires an investment in heavy industry that the VC firms didn’t
fully reckon with. The only way to find out if a new idea in this sector will
work at scale is to build a factory and see what happens. Ethan Zindler, head
of policy analysis for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, says the VC
community simply assumed that the formula for success in the Internet
world would translate to the clean-tech arena. “What a lot of them didn’t
bargain for, and, frankly, didn’t really understand,” he says, “is that it’s
almost never going to be five guys in a garage. You need a heck of a lot of
money to prove that you can do your technology at scale.”
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32. CLEAN TECH TO MAIN TECH
Worldwide, 500+ million affluent people enjoy an “energy and
resource rich” lifestyle but five billion people are still striving
for this prosperity. The only way to bridge this gap is
innovation and increased resource efficiency.
As we like to say, new technologies that meet the “Chindia
Price” – the price at which China and India will adopt a
technology without subsidies – by reaching unsubsidized
market competitiveness and obeying the “laws of economic
gravity,” will do well if they can survive until they scale.
Survival of good technologies unfortunately will not always be
assured.
– Vinod Khosla in Forbes 11/27/2012
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33. SUPPLY SIDE TO DEMAND SIDE
For the rest of this course – we move from a supply side to a
demand side view of energy, choosing the BUILDING as the
place to intervene in the system.
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39. ASSIGNMENT
Calculate your carbon footprint.
1. Calculate the carbon footprint of your country:
http://www.carbonfootprintofnations.com/
2. Find a personal carbon footprint calculator that you trust.
Prepare a one page/slide view of your footprint. Why did you
choose this particular calculator. What were the inputs. What
did you learn.
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41. LINKS AND PRESENTATION
Today’s class presentation is available
http://www.slideshare.net/bettybluegreen/bodies-and-
buildings-nyu-itp-3-25-2013
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