These days you can’t go anywhere or do anything without being practically hit over the head with the responsibility to be “green” whether it has to do with the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the products you buy, make or use, the air you breath and how you conduct your daily activities. But with that all this focus on saving our planet…what about us?

I believe that now more than ever, we need strong green infrastructure wth good quality spaces that engage people not only with the outdoor environment but with each other. Yes, thining about our planet is good, but we can’t completely take the focus off our own well-being both physically and emotionally. As human beings, we need to be engaged, inspired, and continually challenged. We need to touch, smell, hear, taste and see. With all of this sustainabilty talk surrounding everything, I have to wonder if people don’t just feel overwhelmed and discouraged and wonder if they are even allowed to experience what it’s like to be carefree and happy. And to make it worse, our parks and urban spaces now have to compete with the fleeting emotions people experience while interacting in the various online social environments. Our outdoor spaces need to encourage people to step away from the computer and engage all of their senses with the world and interact with it and their community in a physical way.

image via Arch Daily

When I see buildings like Vincent Callebaut’s Dragonfly I can’t help but fear for a future that puts little worlds inside of skyscrapers with all attention turned inward, away from the ground level and away from social, physical interaction. To me, buildings like the Dragonfly feel like little factories washed in green. The idea of having vertical gardens sounds great of course but the renderings show images of palm trees with seagulls flying and yet it’s supposed to be in NY. The vision doesn’t seem to be rooted in reality. Instead it just looks like a strange fantasy world from a movie where Earth’s air has become unbreathable and we’re all trapped inside buildings. And raising animals inside of a skyscraper? What about the well being of the animals? That is definitely not moving towards free-range. I feel like the designer is really reaching here, and trying way too hard to just shove everything into one building when one building does not need to have all the answers. Nor should it. The idea of creating intelligent buildings that take a more dynamic approach to using wind and solar energy in conjunction with using rain, like that being explored by Philips which I posted on earlier, that also deal with it’s own waste and survive completely off the grid is indeed intriguing but it also needs to be somewhat realistic.

image via Arch Daily

While I will never be one to say that we shouldn’t think outside the box or just throw out any and all ideas, I worry that what will happen is places like Dubai where every idea gets built without concern for the whole. I think it’s time that individuals need to stop looking at it as thinking outside of a box and instead everyone needs to come together and create a new box, a collaboratively designed box, one that creates a new model for what a sustainable city should be from the ground up. And most importantly, to me anyway, to not forget about the importance of the ground plane and how we interact with it.

image via Landscape + Urbanism

Back in the beginning of April, the Harvard Graduate School of Design held an exciting conference called Ecological Urbanism. This was exciting to me because it’s a topic I am very interested in. The conference brought together people from many professions from engineers and politicians, students and public health specialists and of course, design practitioners and environmental scientists. The idea behind the conference was to delve into the understanding of what ecological urbanism is and what it could mean for the future. And speaking of the future, it is conferences like this that have me begging for live video feeds of the events so that those of us who can’t afford to go across the country for a conference can attend virtually.

But, we at least now have access to the next best thing. While checking out my colleague Jason King’s blog, Landscape + Urbanism, I realized he had posted some information on this conference having released podcasts of the proceedings. Cool. It looks like they will be continually adding more so it’ll be good to check back.

There are a lot of great speakers and I’m sure some great ideas and discussions were exchanged. My previous employer Herbert Dreiseitl was there as well, which I am sure what interesting. While working at Atelier Dreiseitl I had the opportunity to work on projects in many parts of the world and what I particularly liked about their approach to projects in any part of the world, both large and small, is that everything ultimately boils down to the people and their interaction with the space. That may sound as though it should be obvious but I feel like so often people are forgotten and that designs aren’t truly considered from a users perspective. I’m very interested to hear what he and many others have to say regarding the topic of Ecological Urbanism.

While I write, I’m downloading the podcasts and look forward to making my way through them. That means I will likely be writing more in the near future.