Archives For infrastructure

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Green Buildings: Salem Harbor Station

Power Plant COOKFOXA Lighter Image of Power

All Imagery Courtesy of COOKFOX Architects & Terrain

Talking about the “power grid” in the U.S. can bring to mind images of high tension wires strung across massive metal towers and hefty brick buildings with large smokestacks built in the mid-20th century. For a lot of our electricity infrastructure this picture would be accurate. Our power grid is showing its age–not only in our continued reliance on a dirty fuel source, but in the plants that burn it as well. The boom of building coal-fired generation in this country spanned from the 1960’s to the 1990’s when new capacity turned to natural gas. While most of the natural gas plants we have are less than 20 years old, 71% of their coal-burning cousins have been around for over three decades. These older plants represent not only the dirtiest, but often least efficient components of our grid–sometimes with net efficiency as low as 33%.

Fortunately, we are at a pivotal point where the nature of how we produce power is changing. COOKFOX Architects along with landscape architecture firm Terrain are working together on a new breed of power facility in Salem, Massachusetts that questions many of our infrastructural assumptions not only in functionality, but urban presence and response to the local community. The Salem Harbor Station exemplifies the near term transition that we need to encourage in order to take quantifiable steps in improving the rate of pollution and carbon emissions attributed to our power supply.

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Infrastructural 
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Stop Making Gasoline, Make Power Instead

An Ironic Pairing

One of the biggest dangers of coasting along in the mentality of business-as-usual is that inefficiencies can become cemented into the forces that are considered to be essential to our daily lives. At some point, rectifying the problem can require more time and effort than most are willing to stomach. Our tendency to allow historical experience to evolve into present-day gospel can lead us to miss opportunities for innovative improvement, especially when it comes to sustainability.

Let’s take one of the pillars of American energy usage: our cars. Every living American can look back on the constant of gasoline serving as the energy source for our mobility. Meanwhile we have watched cars become more efficient over time, bolstering our confidence in the system. As part of this mindset, the bulk of our efforts in increasing efficiency have revolved around the puzzle of how to make cars get more miles for every gallon of gasoline they consume. But what if instead of doing more with gasoline it was actually more efficient (maybe much more) to burn oil to create electricity and use it to power cars instead? Perhaps the cultural constants that we assume are the best solution actually don’t hold as much as water as we think.

As it turns out, it is true. Continue Reading…

Infrastructural 
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How Much of Making Transit Easier is Making Driving Harder?

los angeles traffic jamsAdvocates of alternative transit are often trying to lobby for new infrastructural systems so that increased access can create opportunities for a new rider base that move away from relying solely on automobiles.In designing a pedestrian-oriented space, success not only comes from making pedestrian access an easier option, but making it the easiest. The same can be true for all modes of transit. Reaching parity with cars in terms of convenience isn’t always enough to alter people’s use patterns. Sometimes this could mean not just opening up new avenues for transportation, but constricting old vehicular ones as well. Continue Reading…

Infrastructural Urban Planning 
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Restoring Infrastructure With Interaction

Gowanus Canal from the BQEMayor Cory Booker said it well: “from the Transcontinental Railroad to the Hoover Dam, to the dredging of our ports and building of our most historic bridges – our American ancestors prioritized growth and investment in our nation’s infrastructure.” Throughout history the image of new infrastructure has been synonymous with progress. The need for newer, larger and faster services brings the perception of an advancing society. The perception of progress and political tenure have proven to go hand in hand, so we seem to be able to find money to finance large infrastructural additions.

But when we look around at our infrastructural landscape, most often it is not progressing, but languishing. This is partly because fixing old infrastructural systems is not nearly as glamorous as building ones. Whether its the systems that move water, power, waste or people, the neglect of these essential systems has left them decayed, at times to a point requiring wholesale replacement. There have been designs that reuse dilapidated infrastructure for something new, but what if part of the problem is not just that systems are old, but that their relationship to the public encourages their neglect? Continue Reading…

Infrastructural 
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EPAs One-Two Punch to Coal, Let the Market do the Rest

As one of the nation’s largest producers of pollution and carbon emissions, the vastness of coal’s contribution to the nation’s power supply has left them a champion of the economic and political realm with a lot of weight to throw around. Not long ago the EPA stopped dancing around the ring and decided to throw some weight behind an overdue advance on the coal industry. It is easy to forget that the EPA’s prime function is neither research nor public awareness (though both are important). It provides “protection” as an agency of enforcement. Continue Reading…

Political 
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American Infrastructure: The Next Generation

Waste Transfer Renovation RenderingA New Life Proposed for a NYC Waste Transfer Station

As efficiency and new societal demands force the evolution of our infrastructural landscape we are consistently constructing new means to service our culture with its fundamental needs. In addition to energy and new virgin resources, the victims of this course of natural selection are often the preceding installations that have lived out their usefulness. The route of demolition and wholesale replacement may have a certain degree of ease when it comes to the planning process, but it creates a missed opportunity in not realizing and capitalizing on the latent energy and lifecycle costs of our existing, retired utilities.

Dubbed “Harlem Harvest”, this theoretical project was charged with exploring a new life for an existing waste transfer station in New York City. The design combines a new bike storage facility, a new kindergarten school and a vertical farming greenhouse, garnished by new floating community garden plots lining the coast. As our proficiency with mixed-use buildings develops we are becoming more aware that the ecology of programs (architect for “uses”) integrated together in a building is just as important as the series of systems needed to make the building function. Continue Reading…

Infrastructural 
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Philadelphia Wants a High Line

reading train high lineA growing contingent of Philadelphia locals are trying to raise a cry for transforming a retired, elevated viaduct into a gardened, pedestrian thoroughfare. Being almost universally regarded as a success, New York City’s High Line is the obvious case study for how the re-purposing of old, industrial relics can transform them into unique, local icons ingrained with authenticity. With clear sustainable advantages pointing to reuse rather than demolition, the urban proposal has important differences from one of New York’s most treasured parks that could make the road to realization long and arduous. Continue Reading…

Infrastructural 
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When Cities and Wetlands Collide

The integration of natural flora and fauna into the cities has been a challenge for architects and planners since the beginning of buildings. The task becomes even more difficult when the urban spaces in question are part of our country’s neglected, post-industrial landscape. The winning entry to the recent Gowanus Lowline Competition explores the process of mending broken pieces of aged, urban fabric while dealing with not only the vacancies created by absent industry, but sites riddled with the environmental scars of a previous era.

The scheme probes at the possibility of new urban spaces, utilizing both natural systems of remediation and the active density of a modern city. Wetlands and cityscape: two realities commonly assumed to be so diametrically opposed that their overlap is all but implausible. The former harnesses natural processes to provide an ecology with no net waste or squandered resources and supports a myriad of species in close proximity. The latter is the function of fabricated infrastructural systems that levy an indisputable tax on natural resources as it bleeds energy to support a single species in close proximity. The prospective benefits of synthesizing the accolades of both environments are far-reaching, but given their respective needs of space and circulation the question becomes, how can these ecologies co-exist without one decimating the function of the other? Continue Reading…

Urban Planning 
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Perceiving Sustainable Design

New York City Highline ParkPart of ensuring that sustainability is more than just a technological fix to supplement a wasteful lifestyle is using design to reveal processes and concepts to onlookers that result in actually imparting knowledge. This can make the jump from simply catching attention to raising awareness and understanding. Designers are often presented with opportunities to decide whether a sustainable component will only be a hidden part of the inner workings of a building and landscape or a feature that is incorporated into how the design is perceived and experienced. If the goal is to change the course of our culture to more sustainable ends then some of the most successful designs are the ones that can successfully allow people to interact with sustainability itself. Continue Reading…

Infrastructural 
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The Garden City vs. the Green City

Planted CityPop culture’s interpretation of “green” urban landscapes have a tendency to draw a literal representation of a more sustainable city. These “Garden City” visions can include plants growing from virtually every spatial nook and cranny possible. With flowing strands of climbing plants scaling facades and trees not only lining the streets, but poking out of sky gardens stories off of the ground, the idea of a more environmentally responsible cityscape is often presented to the public as being the result of the integration of flora and fauna.

While incorporating foliage and creating micro-climates carry a number of benefits, a truly green city has to revolve around the integration of systems to help it emulate a natural ecology. Plants should be treated as one component of a network of sustainable efforts in order to be properly utilized. This vision is not really “wrong” as much as incomplete and runs the risk of misleading people into thinking that making cities sustainable is as simple as adding plant life. There is no real solution that involves only planting our way to stewardship.

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Urban Planning