Spotted: Space technology analysts expect the growing concern over the effects of climate change to increase demand for satellite-based Earth Observation data and to hasten the development of additional innovations within the industry. More satellites will create more data, and there is already a lot available. So much, in fact, that it can be difficult for organisations to know what to focus on and how to make the best use of the information.
Hoping to tackle that information overload is Netherlands-based Meteory. Meteory combines public and private satellite data with its proprietary machine learning, AI, and data science processes to provide organisations with clear, usable information on which to base their sustainability decisions. No matter the industry, Meteory can help businesses understand what is happening on the ground and how conditions are changing.
Meteory’s platform combines 40 years of historical data with real-time datasets and uses machine learning to analyse terabytes of data in seconds. Organisations customise their dashboard to track Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals and see how different decisions will affect them. With Meteory’s platform, companies don’t have to build their own analysis systems, but can still access essential insights and indicators in real time.
Meteory brings together a range of data types, including radar, ocean, atmospheric gases, soil information, public forest monitoring, carbon dioxide emissions, and more. As well as the platform for real-time tracking and analysis, the company offers automated summary reports that users can set to receive at any frequency.
Satellites are helping organisations in a number of fields better care for the land, with innovations in Springwise’s library including a platform for preventing forest fires and a new method for hyperlocal rain forecasts.
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In 2023, terms like environmentalism and sustainability have a decidedly bleak emotional valence. Although the worst consequences of climate change are expected to arrive in future decades, the looming specter of this slow leviathan is having an emotional impact on people today. According to the Yale Program on Climate Communication, 3% of Americans regularly experience anxiety about climate change. The number is higher if you look at individual demographics. For instance, 5% of Americans under 35 suffer from climate anxiety, as do a shocking 10% of Hispanic Americans.
Fear. Depression. These are the emotions that the phrase climate change evokes. Morally, the term coincides with a demand for austerity, an idea of living with less. It is no surprise, then, that many climate activists, like countless religious movements of old, have a decidedly iconoclastic rhetorical bent. The notorious Just Stop Oil organization made headlines by throwing soup on famous paintings like Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Like Girolamo Savonarola, who burned Renaissance masterpieces to protest sexual immorality, Just Stop Oil carries a grim and uncompromising sermon. They desecrate art, they say, to mirror the way industrial society desecrates nature.
Girolamo Savonarola leading a “Bonfire of the Vanities” in 15th century Florence, encouraging his followers to burn “immoral” painitngs. Painting by Ludwig von Langenmantel, 1879, via Wikimedia Commons.
But here is the problem with puritanical movements: they fizzle out. Some people are motivated by a call for austerity, but most are not. People want joy. They want beauty. They want to be told that there is a way for them to live well, today, in this life. They do not want to forsake the present for the world to come. Well intentioned or not, if the vision of a sustainable future is a vision of deprivation, it will not motivate people to change their behavior.
This has been my perspective for a while now. And it is why I enjoyed “Emerging Ecologies”, MoMA’s new exhibition on environmental design. Unlike another exhibition I recently visited on sustainability — “The Future is Present“ at the Design Museum in Denmark — “Emerging Ecologies” is not a dystopian lecture about the way our progeny will need to learn with less. To the contrary, the exhibition celebrates architects of the past who grappled with the question of how to design with the environment, taking their cues from the landscape. The show reveals how this approach is not only ethical, but has the potential to produce buildings that are beautiful, quirky, creative and stimulating. Drab this show is not.
“Emerging Ecologies” showcases a few contemporary projects, but the emphasis is on work from the 1960s and 70s, the period when the idea of ecology was still “emerging.” The first thing visitors to the exhibition see is a magnificent model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, perhaps the only 20th century building that both modernists and traditionalists agree to be a masterpiece.
The centrality of Fallingwater is, I think, the most inspired curatorial choice in the exhibition. But what does it have to do with sustainability? Quite a bit, it seems. Frank Lloyd Wright’s building is designed to complement the landscape rather than dominate it. While the building might not have been created with the purpose of lowering carbon emissions, it does represent the type of attitude architects might come to embrace if they are serious about the ideal of sustainability. Working with nature, rather than against it, could lead us to a future where people live and work in buildings like Fallingwater — an attractive prospect indeed.
Other projects featured early on in the show include Malcom Wells’s design for subterranean suburban dwellings, an approach playfully known today as “hobbitecture.” Wells was interested in these types of dwellings in the early 1960s, but they really caught on in the 1970s, when the oil crisis led individuals to consider ways to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels. Wells’s view was a bit more ambitious than this. He hoped that subterranean architecture would allow “wilderness” to reclaim the American suburbs, quipping that it has the advantage of “millions of years of trial and error” over human civilization. On the surface, this quote seems to echo the misanthropy of Just Stop Oil, but the designs themselves belie this reading. Wells’s houses are cozy habitats for human flourishing.
“Emerging Ecologies” is the inaugural presentation by the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment. Many of Ambasz’s works are among the 150 projects on display, and the curation, handled masterfully by Carson Chan, speaks to Ambasz’s commitment to an imaginative, even utopian vision of sustainable architecture. As Matt Shaw notes in his review for e-flux, the show “traces the twentieth century of American idealism, from crank scientists like Buckminster Fuller to later hippie fever dreams, such as Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s sixties-era nude summer workshops, in a surrealist collection of alternative US futures.” Within the exhibition, low-tech back to nature fantasies exist alongside futuristic visions such as that of the Cambridge Seven Associates, who proposed a lush and self-sustaining rainforest enclosed in a geodesic dome for the Tsuruhama Rainforest Pavilion in 1995.
“Emerging Ecologies” is refreshing in its lack of pedantry. It does not propose to know the way forward. Rather, it looks back to a history of environmental architecture in order to highlight a number of potential pathways. If you are in New York this holiday season, I strongly recommend skipping the Rockettes and seeing this instead. The exhibition runs until 20 January.
Cover Image: Vincent Van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
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Spotted: When we think of global warming, the itchy eyes of allergy season are unlikely to be the first thing that springs to mind. But, experts highlight that worsening climate change means longer pollen seasons – and more runny noses for hay fever sufferers.
Historically speaking, researchers have analysed pollen in the air manually, which is a highly laborious task. Now, to monitor the growing rates of pollen and better understand environmental change, scientists from the University of Exeter and Swansea University are turning to cutting-edge technologies –including imaging flow cytometry and deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) to create a system that’s able to spot and categorise different pollens much more quickly.
As researcher Dr Ann Power highlights, “Pollen is an important environmental indicator, and piecing together the jigsaw of different pollen types in the atmosphere, both today and in the past, can help us build up a picture of biodiversity and climate change.”
As well as helping us to better understand our changing environment and shifting biodiversity levels, the AI-powered system could also help those with severe pollen allergies better manage their symptoms. Understanding when certain types of pollen are most prevalent, such as the grass pollens that so many are allergic to, would help to improve pollen forecasting so that individuals can limit exposure or take medications accordingly.
Accurately keeping track of biodiversity and climate change is the first step in ensuring that we are moving in the right direction for environmental protection. In the archive, Springwise has also spotted the use of AI and sensors to monitor farms and assessment software to forecast climate change risk.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has opened an exhibition focused on the relationship between environmentalism and architecture in the 20th century.
Organised by the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) recently established Ambasz Institute, it is was created to expose the public to strains of thinking, including some that are relatively unknown to the broad public.
“The aim is to have, for the first time in a major museum, a platform where the fraught relationship between architecture and environment can really be discussed and researched and communicated to a wider public,” exhibition curator and Ambasz Institute director Carson Chan told Dezeen.
Carson Chan is the director of the MoMA’s recently founded Ambasz Institute. Photo by Peter Ross
The show is largely historical, focusing mainly on the work done in the 1960s and ’70s, when environmentalist themes were being exposed to the general public on a massive scale, evidenced by the popularity of ideas like those in Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring.
However, precursors to that moment, such as work by early twentieth-century modern architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, with his organic architecture, and Richard Neutra’s “climate-sensitive architecture”, were also included.
The exhibition featured documentation of built and conceptual work. Photo is of Eleanor Raymond and Mária Telkes at the Dover Sun House. 1948, courtesy of MoMA
Chan told Dezeen that this historical focus was presented to orient contemporary audiences to the roots of current movements.
“A lot of ideas have changed from that moment, half a century ago,” he said. “The show is looking at how far we’ve come from that moment, but also look at what we can learn from that moment to trying to understand where people were coming from, why they kind of the ambitions they had, why they wanted to do things, the things they wanted to do,” he continued.
“Assessing that moment is a big part of the show.”
The exhibition focused on 20th-century environmentalist architecture. Photo is of Emilio Ambasz’s Prefectural International Hall, Fukuoka, Japan by Hiromi Watanabe, courtesy of MoMA
The works include a number of highly conceptual architectural projects such as American architect Buckminster Fuller’s proposed dome over Manhattan, Glen Small‘s sci-fi-inflected Biomorphic Biospheres and Malcolm Wells‘s underground architecture. The paintings of contemporary architect Eugene Tsuii also demonstrated biomorphic forms.
These works imagined radical infrastructures that accounted for changing environments and growing populations
The exhibition showed precursors to current environmental thinking. Image is of Glen Small’s Biomorphic Biosphere, courtesy of MoMA
The exhibition also included built work including Michael Reynolds‘s waste-built Earthships and the New Alchemy Institute‘s self-sufficient ark buildings, as well as the tree-covered works of Argentine architect Emilio Ambasz, after whom the MoMA’s aforementioned institute was named.
There were also works of radical cartography that served to show the complexity of the landscape. These included American academic Ian McHarg’s detailed ecological maps of the Delaware Upper Estuary, which showed data-driven layers of ecological features such as soil conditions and sun conditions.
However, Chan was careful to note that these understandings of environments predated the environmental movement.
“Doing research or producing knowledge about the environment – or as I call it, producing ecological knowledge about the environment – did not start in the ’60s and ’70s,” he said. “There are communities of Indigenous people that have been tending to the land for generations.”
“The Delaware River Basin is the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people who possessed this very knowledge already. And we could have received it from them if they weren’t displaced in the first place,” he continued.
“Making structures requires money and requires people to be proximate to power. And so this is one reason why historically we haven’t seen a lot of structures by people of color, and by women.”
It reflects architecture’s changes in the face of environmental degradation. Photo is of Aladar Olgyay and Victor Olgyay’s Thermoheliodon by Guy Gillette, courtesy of MoMA
The inclusion of these groups mainly focused on activism. For example, a protest against a proposed dam on ancestral land by the Yavapai people showed how the stoppage of landscape-altering super projects is in itself a kind of architecture.
“Subtracting is also a way of making architecture,” said Chan.
In addition to the images and models in the exhibition, the curators also included a number of small audio devices that included commentary from contemporary architects and designers such as Jeanne Gang and Mai-Ling Lokko, aimed at contextualising the historical work.
The Ambasz Institute was created to promote environmentalism in the architectural field and besides exhibitions, it will also carry out a number of community outreach projects and conferences.
Other exhibitions that examine architectural history include an exhibition showcasing the history and work of Vkhutemas, a Soviet avant-garde school of architecture at the Cooper Union in New York City.
The main image is of Cambridge Seven Associates’ Tsuruhama Rain Forest Pavilion, courtesy of MoMA.
Emerging Ecologies is on show at MoMA from 17 September 2023 to 20 January 2024. For more exhibitions, events and talks in architecture and design, visit the Dezeen Events Guide.
More work is needed to improve the sustainability of trade fairs like Salone del Mobile, designers told Dezeen at Milan design week.
British designer Tom Dixon warned it could take a decade for brands to transform their operations at events like Salone in order to reduce emissions and resource consumption.
“It’s a lot of people coming from all over the world – it’s a lot of carbon footprint just embedded in the flights,” he said. “I think we’ve got to rethink completely how we show [products], where we make them, where we transport them to, and the rest of it, but that’s a project which is a 10-year project.”
Need “to rethink completely” how products are showcased
Norm Architects’ Frederik Werner, in Milan to exhibit a collaboration with Japanese furniture maker Karimoku, suggested that fewer trade fairs should take place during the year to cut the carbon cost.
“I think for the setup of the fair itself there’s no hiding from it, it’s kind of crazy how much is being produced and built, and that’s just the reality right now,” he said.
“I think probably the main issue is that there’s so many venues around the world doing the same, with things being shipped around. It somehow makes sense to create one hub for it to happen.”
Around 2,000 brands showcase their products at Salone, shown here during setup. Photo by Andrea Mariani (also top)
Salone del Mobile was held in Milan last week, back in its conventional April slot for the first time in four years following covid disruptions.
It is the world’s biggest design fair and forms the trade centrepiece of Milan design week.
The organisers have sought to improve the sustainability of the event in recent years, signing up to the UN Global Compact corporate sustainability pledge for 2023 and updating voluntary guidelines for exhibitors.
In an interview prior to the event, Salone president Maria Porro told Dezeen that the fair has tried to use recycled and recyclable materials and work with organisations committed to caring for the planet.
But with 2,000 brands showing their products at the week-long show and around 400,000 visitors expected, mostly from overseas, some remain concerned about Salone’s environmental impact, including Dezeen columnist Katie Treggiden.
“We’re all part of it, as we flew to Milan”
“We can’t walk around the city, gelato in hand, and pretend that almost 2,000 international brands haven’t shipped or air-freighted their wares into the Rho Fiera Milano fairgrounds,” Treggiden wrote in a recent piece.
Dutch designer Maarten Baas deliberately referenced the contradiction of promoting more sustainable designs by flying them to Milan in a collaboration with fashion label G-Star RAW.
His More or Less exhibition for the brand features a private jet wrapped in denim.
“Each year in Milan, I enjoy the tragicomic dialogue between green design and mass consumption,” he told Dezeen.
“We’re all part of it, as we flew to Milan to enjoy our prosecco next to some works of recycled materials.”
Around 400,000 people visit the fair, which is the world’s largest. Photo courtesy of Salone del Mobile
Nevertheless, designers argued there is still a value to large-scale physical events like Salone.
“Airplanes aren’t sustainable but I think people coming to see art and people coming to see new ideas is always a benefit to society,” said Santiago Brown of New York-based Forma Rosa Studio.
“The issue is transportation, but it’s super important for people to see art and not just on Instagram.”
“In this digital era you can see everything online but, especially with materials when it’s about the haptic, the touch, the interaction, you come to a better understanding of the research project when you see it with your eyes, when someone talks to you about it,” added Crafting Plastics’ Vlasta Kubušová.
“So for me, it still makes sense to do this once a year I think, even if we have to travel – and we always will travel.”
Studios and brands try to use less materials
Jussi Laine of Nemo Architects, who designed the Habitarematerials installation at Milan design exhibition Alcova, said he is “absolutely” concerned about the environmental impact of Salone.
He said it was important for designers travelling to Milan to use it as an opportunity to learn about how to make their work more sustainable.
“Design shows are a way to pass information and knowledge,” he told Dezeen. “It is really up to us how relevant the message is, and also up to us how we receive that information and act upon it.”
Brands and designers have attempted to improve the sustainability of their activities in Milan, especially by planning for the re-use of materials.
“For this year’s fair we’ve tried to work with systems and patterns that we can reuse for next year, so all the louvres and lamellas can be stored and put away again,” said Werner.
“Half of the furniture collection I think might be taken to our next exhibition instead of being shipped back to Japan.”
“Our booth is made out of storage racks that we took from our own storage,” Mexico-based David Pompa told Dezeen.
“So we took them, we built them down, we build them up here and we’re going to build them up again in our storage after the exhibition. So we’re not throwing away anything.”
However, Dixon admitted it was still “difficult to claim total sustainability”.
“We’ll reuse a lot of this stuff,” he said. “I’m sure a lot of people are thinking about how they can do that.”
“But it’s difficult to claim total sustainability in the context of fairs, I’m not going to try and greenwash you on this one.”
Milan itself is frequently ranked among Europe’s most polluted cities, though it is working on an ambitious project to construct 750 kilometres of bike lanes by 2035 as part of a strategy to become net-zero by 2050.
Additional reporting by Cajsa Carlson and Jennifer Hahn. The photography is courtesy of Salone del Mobile.
Salone del Mobile 2023 took place from 18 to 23 April at the Fiera Milano exhibition centre, Italy. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
Architects are increasingly using mass timber in the hopes of creating net-zero buildings but carbon assessments are missing key sources of potential emissions, researchers tell Dezeen in this Timber Revolution feature.
The standard method for determining a building’s overall carbon footprint is a whole-building life-cycle assessment (LCA) that breaks down emissions at every stage – from the sourcing of raw materials to their ultimate disposal.
These calculations tend to indicate significantly lower emissions for timber structures compared to those made entirely out of concrete and steel. But experts warned that LCAs only tell part of the story.
“LCAs do not typically consider anything that happens in the forest,” said forester and timberland manager Mark Wishnie.
“And the land management side is, from a climate perspective and a biodiversity perspective, enormously important,” added Steph Carlisle of the Carbon Leadership Forum research group. “That’s really where all the action is.”
End-of-life “very, very important”
Because so few mass-timber buildings have been constructed – let alone demolished – researchers are also unable to reliably forecast what will happen to engineered timbers at end of their life and what emissions this would entail.
“There’s not a lot of data available to predict end-of-life and that can be very, very important,” Wishnie said.
This leaves both researchers and architects with an incomplete picture of mass timber’s climate impacts, which urgently needs to be addressed if the industry is to scale up sustainably without adverse effects on the environment.
Mass timber offers one potential route to achieve net-zero buildings. Photo by George Socka via Shutterstock
“We need better transparency and traceability,” Carlisle said. “When architects use tools and they don’t necessarily know what’s going on behind them, they can really mislead themselves about the real emissions.”
“If we get this right, it has such incredible potential,” added Robyn van den Heuvel of the Climate Smart Forest Economy Program. “Not just for the built environment but also to ensure forests are sustainably managed.”
“But there are incredible risks of getting this wrong. It could result in the exact opposite effects of what we’re trying to create.”
Badly harvested timber has higher embodied emissions
Timber’s climate potential lies in its ability to sequester large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere during its growth – in contrast to common building materials like concrete and steel, which mostly just produce emissions.
As a result, mass timber has been widely hailed as a way to help architects make their buildings net zero and, by extension, help the built environment mitigate the 13 per cent of global emissions that stem from the construction of buildings and the materials used in the process.
Research indicates that substituting wood for steel and concrete in mid-rise buildings could reduce emissions from manufacturing, transport and construction by between 13 and 26.5 per cent, depending on the building’s design, the exact wood products used and where they are shipped from.
Forest management is an important part of the equation, not just because it can help to prevent deforestation and protect biodiversity but also because it has a huge impact on a forest’s ability to act as a carbon sink.
Felling all the trees in a forest at the same time, in a method known as clear-cutting, can generate significant emissions by disturbing the soil and releasing the carbon it stores, which accounts for almost 75 per cent of a forest’s total carbon stock.
When this is combined with other harmful practices such as converting old-growth forests into tree plantations, this could actually make a timber building more emissions-intensive than a concrete equivalent, the IISD suggests.
“It’s neither true that all wood is good, nor that all wood is bad,” said Carlisle. “Architects really need to understand that it matters where your wood comes from.”
Forest certifications falling short
However, none of these important land-management impacts – whether good or bad – are reflected in typical life-cycle assessments.
“They don’t account for an increase in forest carbon stock or a decrease in forest carbon stock, an increase in forest area or a decrease in the forest area,” said Wishnie.
“Often, if you’ve got that wrong, it doesn’t matter what else is happening in the value chain, you already have a bad carbon story,” agreed van den Heuvel, who leads the non-profit Climate Smart Forest Economy Program.
To some extent, these concerns are addressed by forest certification schemes – the most comprehensive being FSC, which covers crucial factors such as forest health, biodiversity, water quality, and Indigenous and workers’ rights.
But these certifications do not require forestry companies to track and quantify how different management practices impact the carbon stock of a forest, which makes them impossible to represent in the LCAs used by architects and building professionals.
6 Orsman Road is a demountable timber building by Waugh Thistleton. Photo by Ed Reeve
“Right now, I have no way of representing FSC-wood accurately in a life-cycle assessment model,” said Carlisle, who is a senior researcher at the Carbon Leadership Forum.
“There’s a lot of work happening on the certification side to do that research and publish it so it can come into our models. And we really need it because it’s not going to be sufficient in the long run for certification to be a stand-in.”
FSC certification is applied to 50,000 companies globally, making it harder for architects to discern which of these companies provides the best forest management and the most sustainable, lowest-carbon product so they can vote with their wallets.
“As the user, I can’t really make choices,” said Simone Farresin, one-half of design duo Formafantasma. “I can’t evaluate if one seller is better in community support or another in sustainable growing. It’s certified and that’s it. It’s not specific.”
“When you’re looking at materials, you have all these different grades of quality,” he continued. “And we need to reach the same in terms of sustainability – we need to be able to detect these different grades.”
“No consensus” over end-of-life emissions
Another area that is lacking in reliable information, and therefore hard to represent in LCAs, is what happens when a mass-timber building is demolished.
“There is a lot of debate about how to model end-of-life and it gets really contentious really quickly,” said Carlisle. “There is no consensus. The fight is very live.”
If a building was designed for deconstruction and its timber components are reused, this could offer substantial carbon and ecosystem benefits – providing continued long-term carbon storage while reducing the need for renewed logging as well as for emissions-intensive steel and concrete.
A small number of architects have begun to deliver demountable mass-timber buildings to facilitate material reuse, such as Waugh Thistleton’s 6 Orsman Road in London.
However, most timber demolition waste today ends up in either landfills or incinerators, with both scenarios resulting in some net emissions.
“Depending on what country you’re in, that waste looks very different,” said van den Heuvel. “But that also has a really massive impact on your total carbon story.”
In the case of incineration, all of the carbon stored in the wood would be released into the air, negating any storage benefits but potentially generating renewable electricity in the process if burned for biomass energy.
In a high-quality modern landfill, on the other hand, engineered wood products are estimated to lose only around 1.3 per cent of their carbon, although part of this carbon is released as methane – a powerful greenhouse gas that is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
“This is counterintuitive to people,” Carlisle said. “But you see very small emissions at end-of-life from landfills because that material is largely considered sequestered and stored permanently.”
“We can’t aim for perfection”
Crucially, estimates about end-of-life emissions are mostly based on products like medium-density fibreboard (MDF), which are less elaborately engineered than structural materials such as cross- and glue-laminated timber and so may respond differently.
“There is more uncertainty around what will actually happen at end-of-life because there are so few mass-timber buildings,” Carlisle said.
Researchers and institutions such as the Carbon Leadership Forum and the Climate Smart Forest Economy Program are working hard to fill in these gaps. And ultimately, they argue that governments must set national and international standards to ensure responsible sourcing and disposal if we hope to accurately assess and realise mass timber’s climate potential.
But in the meantime, all parts of the timber value chain – from forest managers to manufacturers and architects – should be more transparent about their carbon accounting.
“I would hate to see a world in which we stop everything to make sure all the certification is perfect,” said van den Heuvel. “Because buildings are still going to get built. And if we’re not using mass timber, we’re using a product that’s going to be even worse for the environment.”
“We’re running out of time, so we can’t aim for perfection. We should aim for good enough and transparency around it so that others can improve.”
Timber Revolution This article is part of Dezeen’s Timber Revolution series, which explores the potential of mass timber and asks whether going back to wood as our primary construction material can lead the world to a more sustainable future.
Spotted: Living organisms leave behind genetic tracks in the environment – DNA or eDNA. Ecologists then inspect these tracks to catalogue biodiversity, uncovering which species are active in that area. However, while following some organisms is easy, others reside in hard-to-reach areas, often turning research into a cold case. To improve the data collection, researchers at the ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research WSL have developed a drone that can land on tree branches and collect samples.
The aircraft first lands on a branch to gather the sample using a sticky strip. Then, back at the lab, researchers can extract DNA from the adhesive strip and analyse it. Finally, the team will assign genetic matches of the various organisms using database comparisons.
But all branches are different, with varying elasticity, thickness, and sturdiness and overcoming these issues proved a challenge for the team, as landing on the branches required complex control. To address this, the researchers fitted the drone with a force-sensing cage to enable it to gauge the flexibility of the branch on a case-by-case basis and incorporate this into its landing technique.
To date, the drone has been tested on seven tree species. But now, the team has been prompted to improve the device in the hopes of winning a competition to detect as many species as possible across 100 hectares of Singaporean forest in 24 hours.
Springwise has previously spotted other innovative drone technologies, including a drone that can inspect and repair wind turbines, and a startup that revolutionises drone control interface.
Ford Calumet Environmental Center – Once a dumping ground from nearby steel mills, Big Marsh park opened in 2016 on the southeast side of Chicago. The Chicago Park District asked Valerio Dewalt Train to design an environmental center that serves as an education hub and a gateway to eco-recreation opportunities throughout the region. The design responded to the park’s past by marrying the industrial with the natural. The exterior is clad in a rain screen of weathered steel that recalls the site’s steel mill history, with an exposed mass timber interior. Two large rooftop light monitors, clad in exposed Nail-Laminated-Timber, flood a double-height exhibition area with daylight.
Architizer chatted with Tom Daly, Project Manager and Joe Valerio, Design Principal at Valerio Dewalt Train, to learn more about this project.
Architizer: What inspired the initial concept for your design?
Tom Daly: Historically, Chicago’s Southeast Side has been burdened with the effects of industrialization and left with remnants of steel production in the region of the city. The building’s materiality serves as a metaphor to the site’s industrial past and forward-thinking future: the corten steel that wraps around the building is an acknowledgement of that past, while the two wooden forms cantilever dramatically to both mark the entry and frame a view of the interior, while from the inside they focus your attention on small but significant vignettes of the restored natural landscape. They deliver a message about an environmentally responsive and conscious future.
This project won in the 10th Annual A+Awards! What do you believe are the standout components that made your project win?
The design serves as an example for a progressive future of building in the City of Chicago, a city known for design innovation. The center was the first wastewater wetland system in the city, and the first mass timber building for the Chicago Park District. The building also actively improves living conditions for its surrounding inhabitants. Its highly bird-safe design rates a 4 out of a 100 level scale, with 0 being the highest, and provides a resource for the surrounding communities who have suffered from a lack of investment and park services for decades. It’s sculptural form and rich materiality serve as a gateway to the park at large.
What was the greatest design challenge you faced during the project, and how did you navigate it?
The overall project budget was $6.6M, and was made possible by a major contribution from the Ford Motor Company. The Design Team was immediately challenged when it was discovered that the nearest sanitary sewer line was 1.6 miles from the site. The cost of bringing a sanitary sewer to the site was $2.0M – threatening the viability of the entire development. Working with our civil and plumbing engineers, we developed a design for an on-site black water treatment system where the outflow was clean water. The Ford Calumet Environmental Center is the first time a wastewater wetland system has been permitted by the City of Chicago.
How did the context of your project — environmental, social or cultural — influence your design?
The project’s environmental, social and cultural context are intertwined. Historically, Chicago’s Southeast Side has been financially underserved and burdened with the effects of industrialization. The Ford Calumet Environmental Center is a bold statement of how we can re-inhabit landscapes destroyed by 20th Century technology. A major focus were local residents of the four surrounding neighborhoods including South Deering, Pullman, Trumbull Hill and Hegewisch. Our Media-Objectives Studio reached out to community leaders and developed an award winning exhibit which focuses on their past and optimistic future. Through environmental education and eco-recreation, the center serves as a community resource and cultivates advocacy for positive change across the Calumet Region.
What drove the selection of materials used in the project?
The building’s materials reinforce its mission. The 20th Century industries that so damaged this region were major sources of carbon released in the atmosphere. The weathered steel cladding is recycled – which has a low level of embodied carbon compared to other building materials. The decision with the most impact is the use of a mass timber structure. The embodied carbon is lower than almost any other material, in addition the timber sequesters carbon leading the way to an environmentally-responsive future.
What is your favorite detail in the project and why?
Early in the design process our focus was on creating an open and welcoming architecture with a daylit interior. Big Marsh Park is also on one of the major migratory routes for birds, drawing attention from an important constituency for the Park – bird watchers.
The two wooden forms that cantilever over the corten facade, bring daylight from above into the exhibit space. The eight foot cantilever results in eliminating the reflection of the sky in the large clerestory windows, bird safe glass is also used for these window. There are six large windows around the perimeter that bring daylight into all the interior rooms. Each is equipped with large doors, covered in perforated corten steel. In the open position, the doors shade the glass reducing the reflection of the sky. During the migratory season, the doors are kept closed, with the perforated metal still providing adequate light
How important was sustainability as a design criteria as you worked on this project?
Sustainability was a driving factor in the design and overall project mission. Sustainable features like the wastewater wetland system are put on display, demonstrating how it takes inspiration from the marshes’ natural processes to treat the building’s blackwater and release clean water back to the site via a leach field. Renewable resources in the project include Nail Laminated Timber, giving the building warmth and a lower carbon footprint. An eco-friendly alternative to aluminum, weathered steel has a lower carbon footprint as well, reducing the building’s overall embodied carbon while providing a durable layer of protection with a beautiful orange patina.
In what ways did you collaborate with others, and were there any team members or skills that were essential in bringing this Award winning project to life?
Collaboration was critical to the success of the FCEC. It began with the Chicago Park District who were willing to explore new solutions to old problems. In addition, from the beginning one of the Districts goals was to engage the adjacent minority communities.
Designing and permitting the wasteland wastewater system involved many members of the design team, the Park District, and the Chicago Building Department.
Finally, our Media-Objectives Studio brought leaders and residents of the surrounding neighborhoods into the design of the exhibit which includes the history of these communities including photographs of some of the residents including their own words about the past and future of the region.
Were any parts of the project dramatically altered from conception to construction, and if so, why?
There were a number of changes, but nothing that represented a dramatic change.
How have your clients responded to the finished project?
The FCEC is one of the most widely recognized buildings completed by the Chicago Park District. Among the awards and publications the most significant is first place in the yearly Driehaus Foundation Award for Architectural Excellence in Community Design was established to recognize the importance of great architecture and craftsmanship to city life.
How do you believe this project represents you or your firm as a whole?
Good design is always the answer.
Team Members
Steffan Schoenauer – Project Manager (Chicago Park District); Joe Valerio – Design Principal Mark Dewalt – Principal-in-Charge, Tom Daly, Alexander Raynor – Project Manager, Lauren Shelton, Matt Gamache, Michael Johnson, Susan Crockett, Nina Cackovic, Haydyn Jones, (Valerio Dewalt Train); Joe Lawton – Principal, Allison Rokusek, Jacob Goble, Rafael Barontoni, Stephen Killion – Graphic Designers (Media–Objectives)
Consultants
Chicago Commercial Construction – General Contractor; Primera – Civil Engineer; Jacobs Ryan Associates – Landscape Architecture; Matrix Engineering – Structural Engineering; dbHMS – MEP Engineering; Tom Harris – Photography; TetraTech – Environmental Consultants; BioHabitats – Green Infrastructure
