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Modern environments are awash with pollutants churning through the air, from toxic gases and intensifying carbon to carcinogenic particles and novel viruses. The effects on our bodies and our planet are perilous. This is the first thorough study of the increasingly widespread use of digital technologies to monitor and respond to air pollution. It presents practice-based(...)
Citizens of worlds: Open-air toolkits for environmental struggle
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Modern environments are awash with pollutants churning through the air, from toxic gases and intensifying carbon to carcinogenic particles and novel viruses. The effects on our bodies and our planet are perilous. This is the first thorough study of the increasingly widespread use of digital technologies to monitor and respond to air pollution. It presents practice-based research on working with communities and making sensor toolkits to detect pollution while examining the political subjects, relations, and worlds these technologies generate. Spanning three project areas, this study describes collaborations to monitor air pollution from fracking infrastructure, to document emissions in urban environments, and to create air-quality gardens. As these projects show, how people respond to, care for, and struggle to transform environmental conditions informs the political subjects and collectives they become as they strive for more breathable worlds.
Environment and environmental theory
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Beirut-born, Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh (born 1980) specializes in ultra-contemporary, sustainable public and industrial buildings made from locally sourced natural materials. Her 2023 design for the Hermès leather workshop in Normandy, using the region’s traditional bricks, was the first manufacturing building in France to achieve net-zero carbon emissions.(...)
Windows of light: Lina Ghotmeh
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Beirut-born, Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh (born 1980) specializes in ultra-contemporary, sustainable public and industrial buildings made from locally sourced natural materials. Her 2023 design for the Hermès leather workshop in Normandy, using the region’s traditional bricks, was the first manufacturing building in France to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. Light, another natural and physical phenomenon, has also been another source of inspiration for Ghotmeh. Her research on this topic, collected in Windows of Light, draws upon examples from centuries of visual culture. Ghotmeh explores the symbols, myths and innovations of light, and outlines how it fundamentally shapes our biological, astronomical and architectural environments. Anchoring the many representations of light is a photographic narrative that reminds us that access to artificial light in many regions of the world remains a privilege rather than a right.
Materials and Lighting
Lawn: Object lessons
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A quintessential feature in Western gardens and landscaping, the lawn is now at the center of a climate change controversy. The large carbon footprint maintenance, its unquenchable thirst for fertilizers, weedkillers, and water, and the notorious unfriendliness towards all forms of wildlife have recently attracted criticism and even spurred an anti-lawn movement. Lawn(...)
Lawn: Object lessons
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A quintessential feature in Western gardens and landscaping, the lawn is now at the center of a climate change controversy. The large carbon footprint maintenance, its unquenchable thirst for fertilizers, weedkillers, and water, and the notorious unfriendliness towards all forms of wildlife have recently attracted criticism and even spurred an anti-lawn movement. Lawn untangles the colonial-capitalist threads that keep our passion for mown grass alive despite mounting evidence that we'd be better off without it. The lawn is aesthetically and ideologically versatile. From museums and hospitals to corporate headquarters and university campuses, it has become the verdant lingua franca of institutions of all kinds. Its formal homogeneity and neatness imply reliability, constancy, and solicit our trust. But beneath the lawn lies a stratification of intricate ideological and ecological issues that over time have come to define our conception of nature.
Critical Theory
A-Frame: New concept
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A-Frame constructions emerged in the mid-20th century and have been forgotten for decades. In recent years we are seeing how the spirit of A-Frame style houses is gradually being revived by avant-garde architects who have adapted this approach to more modern times. It is not uncommon nowadays to find examples of modern houses with A-Frame architecture as a hallmark in(...)
A-Frame: New concept
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A-Frame constructions emerged in the mid-20th century and have been forgotten for decades. In recent years we are seeing how the spirit of A-Frame style houses is gradually being revived by avant-garde architects who have adapted this approach to more modern times. It is not uncommon nowadays to find examples of modern houses with A-Frame architecture as a hallmark in leading design magazines. This type of construction stands out for its structural simplicity, which in most cases reduces costs, and also for its great capacity for thermal and acoustic insulation, greater speed of construction, elimination of the need for columns, greater strength and structural consistency, among many other benefits. A-Frame homes have a better environmental impact due to energy savings in both construction and utility costs, not to mention a smaller carbon footprint for the environment.
Residential Architecture
Empire, state & building
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This book considers the material basis of building as a key impetus of both urbanization and the energetics of urban life. The otherwise externalized material geographies and thermodynamics of building’s material basis reveal much about the dynamics and efficacy of how we build. This book plots the material history and geography for one plot of land in Manhattan—the(...)
Empire, state & building
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This book considers the material basis of building as a key impetus of both urbanization and the energetics of urban life. The otherwise externalized material geographies and thermodynamics of building’s material basis reveal much about the dynamics and efficacy of how we build. This book plots the material history and geography for one plot of land in Manhattan—the parcel of land under the Empire State Building—over the past two hundred years. Through rich illustrations, it tracks all the building material that have passed through this parcel or remain it in geographic and ecological dynamics: spatially (in terms of their geographic material footprints and industrial processes) and quantitatively (in terms of embodied energy, embodied carbon, and emergy flow). In successive chapters, the book articulates the empire and states that are inherent to building, but remain unconsidered—abstract and unknown—by architects.
Urban Theory
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Architecture accounts for one third of global carbon emissions, energy consumption and waste. Buildings are increasingly understood to impact broader ecologies. Yet embodied energy – the various forms of energy required to extract raw matter, to produce and transport building materials and to assemble a given building – remains largely underexplored. "Embodied Energy and(...)
Embodied energy and design: making architecture between metrics and narratives
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Architecture accounts for one third of global carbon emissions, energy consumption and waste. Buildings are increasingly understood to impact broader ecologies. Yet embodied energy – the various forms of energy required to extract raw matter, to produce and transport building materials and to assemble a given building – remains largely underexplored. "Embodied Energy and Design: Making Architecture Between Metrics and Narratives" addresses and thoroughly examines the issue. This book reconsiders the act of making a building as an act of energy expenditure and asks questions about a variety of related scales, methods of analysis and design opportunities. How might new technologies and materials challenge default positions on sustainability? Should we think of buildings as dynamic systems connecting multiple sites rather than as static and isolated objects? Does the duration of architecture extend beyond the life of a built structure?
Contemporary Architecture
Transport and neighbourhoods
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As the environment becomes more fragile, existing transportation networks are more and more strained. Issues such as food miles and embodied energy in goods and products will become far more significant. Personal carbon quotas are likely to force a re-evaluation of our current lifestyles and single trips will carry greater levels of expectation. Casual long distance(...)
Transportation, Tourism, Migration
June 2008, London
Transport and neighbourhoods
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As the environment becomes more fragile, existing transportation networks are more and more strained. Issues such as food miles and embodied energy in goods and products will become far more significant. Personal carbon quotas are likely to force a re-evaluation of our current lifestyles and single trips will carry greater levels of expectation. Casual long distance travel may be socially decried. Edge Futures are a series of six books that explore the impact that climate change will have on different aspects of our lives in the future. They are available to order as individual titles or as a complete set. The Edge is an innovative and creative think-tank, sponsored by building industry professions, that seeks to stimulate public interest in policy questions that affect the built environment and to inform and influence public opinion.
Transportation, Tourism, Migration
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For readers of ''The Sixth Extinction'' and ''The Uninhabitable Earth,'' ''Concrete'' explores the history of a material that has been central to architecture and design for thousands of years-and what its future looks like in a world experiencing rapid climate change. Imagine a world without concrete: there'd be no skyscrapers, no grand irrigation projects, no out of(...)
Concrete: from ancient origins to a problematic future
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For readers of ''The Sixth Extinction'' and ''The Uninhabitable Earth,'' ''Concrete'' explores the history of a material that has been central to architecture and design for thousands of years-and what its future looks like in a world experiencing rapid climate change. Imagine a world without concrete: there'd be no skyscrapers, no grand irrigation projects, no out of season vegetables, no highways. There would be a shortage of electricity, more mud in some places, more solitude in others. But because of the fossil fuels and other resources required to make concrete, there also would also be less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and less dramatic climate change. In ''Concrete: From ancient origins to a problematic future,'' Mary Soderstrom tells the story of concrete's surprising past, extravagant present, and uncertain future with careful research, lively anecdotes, and thoughtful reflection.
Architectural Theory
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The product of an innovative research project realized in cooperation between three Swiss universities—École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s School of Architecture, the College of Architecture and Technology in Fribourg, and the University of Fribourg—the smart living lab is a research and development center for the built environment of the future. This high-tech(...)
July 2019
Exploring: research driven building design
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The product of an innovative research project realized in cooperation between three Swiss universities—École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s School of Architecture, the College of Architecture and Technology in Fribourg, and the University of Fribourg—the smart living lab is a research and development center for the built environment of the future. This high-tech structure also serves as an emblem of the cooperative’s aim to translate academic research into actual buildings. The follow-up to ''Thinking,'' ''Exploring'' presents the next phase of research at the smart living lab, which focuses on the various problems that must be solved to satisfy future buildings’ sustainability goals. Given that the building sector is one of the world’s biggest contributors to CO2 emissions and energy consumption, the researchers are seeking strategies to improve energy and carbon performance at the smart living lab, anticipating tight requirements thirty years from now.
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As photosynthetic organisms, seaweeds and other algae transfer billions of tons of carbon globally from the atmosphere to the deep ocean each year. Coming in all manner of colors, shapes, and sizes, from bioluminescent single-celled algae to giant kelps, they form the basis of most marine food webs, and are found in almost all environments on the planet. Touted as the(...)
The lives of seaweeds: A natural history of our planet's seawees and other algae
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As photosynthetic organisms, seaweeds and other algae transfer billions of tons of carbon globally from the atmosphere to the deep ocean each year. Coming in all manner of colors, shapes, and sizes, from bioluminescent single-celled algae to giant kelps, they form the basis of most marine food webs, and are found in almost all environments on the planet. Touted as the biofuel of the future, seaweeds and algae also hold promise for biodegradable packaging, offer a nutritious food source, and exhibit antiviral and antitumor properties. Combining accessible text with stunning images and graphics, this book takes a deep dive to explore the unique characteristics of seaweeds and other algae, outlining their extraordinary evolution as well as their morphology, life histories, ecology, and uses. Offering rare insights into the algal world, ''The lives of seaweeds'' is essential reading for naturalists and marine life enthusiasts.
Fauna and flora