In Brooklyn, NY for the Terrafarm Summer Workshop . For my own benefit I'll do my best to digest what happens here.
The first day we got a view of the Metropolitan Exchange Building, an interesting relic of pre-war downtown Brooklyn. Worthy of its own post, the building houses a number of business and organizations geared towards sustainability and urbanism. Among them is Terraform One, who have developed a vibrant laboratory with different green roofing methods and technologies. I have a feeling we'll be spending more time up here when it comes to the design/build charrette portion of the workshop, but below are a few first impressions.
The green roof theme continued into the seminar portion of the day with Marni Horwitz of Alive Structures .
Marni seems to be essentially a green roof contractor and cited alot of the green roof facts and figures that anyone who's spent time around an architecture school in the past few years will be familiar with.
One interesting insight the business perspective had given her was that New York State incentives do NOT cover the cost of architects and expediters required for the extra green roof permits, thus making green roofs not cost effective for smaller and adaptive re-use projects. Also, it was interesting how she noted she no longer tries to sell green roofs as an effective means for cutting energy costs. Moreover, current green roof technology is reliant on energy intensive, processed and value added materials such as blended soils and expanded shale that are not available locally in NYC. Is NYC too expensive for Green Tech industries?
The extensive maintenance issues associated with green roofs are also revealing of the lack of integration of the city, "green architecture" included, into the actual biological processes occurring in our urban ecosystem.
Marni, for example, described the scourge of green roof contractors, the resilient "tree of heaven", found growing out of buildings and invading green roofing membranes across Brooklyn.
We know the root structures of the 'tree of heaven" can damage conventional construction, but haven't we come to the point where we understand these sorts of things as criteria to be integrated into design and not pests to be eliminated?
The second lecture was Dickson Despommier of the Vertical Farm Project. If you've made it this far, its fair to assume you're familiar with Despommier's work. He's essentially an advocate for reducing the footprint required of mega cities by integrating intensive hydroponics into the urban scheme and restoring the rural landscape from industrial agriculture.
Maybe what was most surprising about his lecture was how deep he had gotten into Gaia Hypothosis and the Noosphere.
He stepped back several times to put things in cosmic/galactic perspective, noting that the sun itself is not a sustainable entity. Catch some his vibe here: 