We have been designing a "shared use" project on 14th St. in Boulder for Element Properties and it has hit the press! The project was submitted to the City of Boulder for review with a tentative public hearing of late January 2014.
http://www.bcbr.com/article/20131125/NEWS/131129917
Here is a link to a blog post by Victor Olgay of the the Rocky Mountain Institute. He is a principal there and was a recent juror at the US DOE annual Solar Decathlon competition. We also share time at the University of Colorado Design Review Board His thoughts about the competition I believe extend more broadly to be a very powerful statement about how architecture should be practiced today. I taught a design studio at CU Boulder that was the beginning of the first CU entry (which ultimately won that year!) It has come a long way.
Please have a read:
http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2013_
It is great to see the office for Applied Broadband taking shape. A banal building is slowly being transformed to something special. The next phase will be really interesting - seeing the finishes starting to add a new feeling to the space. 
I am back in China with the graduate students studying urban design. On our visit to the Great Wall we found a side of the road little restaurant in. Initially unremarkable, the place slowly revealed its treasures. Yes, the ponds had fish and yes that is what we ordered. The vegetables came out of the garden, the chicken came form the pen and the rabbit came from the hills. All eaten under a lovely little trellis overlooking the built and natural ponds, a stream and the hills. Food can not get fresher or more local - likely organic bu un-advertised. The students ate with a smile on their face about the unexpected pleasures of China. Sometimes very special gifts come in very plain wrapping!
Last week I took a one day adventure to Williston, North Dakota - ground zero in the new fracking boom. With prices that rival Manhattan and exceed Boulder, it is a surreal combination of man camps, a classic mid-western downtown, beautiful prairie landscape with bluffs and the Missouri River and the ubiquitous pick-up truck as a modern necessity to take on the roads. The contrasts are extreme - with new 3-4 story apartment buildings on the fringe, rows of trailers, repetitious houses, and remnants of the last boom. We are tasked with "Quality Control": how can we bring a bit of design quality to a place where people work 7 days a week and 18 hours a day. What does a sense of place mean hear? How can the design of buildings, streets, and public space add to the good life here. We will be exploring these questions in the coming months to try and understand what 'quality' means in this curious place.
Here are a few interesting articles about Zero Energy and the opportunities at the district scale. We must begin to think bigger than the individual buildings. As we think of clusters, blocks, districts, and cities new opportunities emerge. It can affect how we think of planning and design to consider the big picture - nut just in the creation of connected places but also environmental systems!
We had another interesting Salon at ULI Boulder where Andy Knudtsen of EPS explored some of the economic factors that affect place. Sometimes we know what we think will make a great place from a design perspective but the economics of supply and demand, getting financing, justifying the investment, risk and reward all are as integral to the design. These factors become important layers to achieving a sense of vibrancy beauty and vitality. It seems that this is what we are looking for but having a harder time achieving. Here is a good article from ULI LAND on the subject.
One way to think about activity andhow we live our lives.
Thursday night was the second ULI Boulder Salon at Shine. Martha Roskowski of Bikes Belong presented a fantastic overview of the bike situation - from Copenhagen and Amsterdam to New York and Chicago to Boulder. What lessons can we learn? How can we intensely increase our biking in what many consider biking nirvana - except in the Downtown and east of Folsom and Broadway and so many other palaces. while the off street network is great and always getting better, the on-street network is largely an add-on that makes people not really feel safe (28th Street anyone?) 1% biking in the US, 10% in Boulder compared to 50% in Copenhagen!! Well we still have a way to go. And to get to 25% here by 2020 is a radical goal. There was a great discussion but the transition to a truly bike centric town from the American suburban nation that is much of Boulder will be an interesting challenge!
I just saw the very powerful film "Chasing Ice" that documents the disappearanceof the glaciers in the far north - indisputable evidence of global warming and
the profound changes that are happening on our earth. It is another warm 
December (!!!) day in Boulder and it makes you think. Superstor Sandy,
the decimation of the beautiful forests in the west thanks to the pine beetle
and forest fires and the rest!!! The film provides stunning photography and
clear physical evidence of the changes on one key part of our planet. It
is amazing to me that there are still deniers out there but this should
help put that to rest!
See the movie!!! Visit the site: www.chasingice.com Get the app.
And it may help move us out of our complacency to take action. And what can you do? what can I do?
Design a new way of living: low carbon buildings and places
that create a new paradigm - linked to the past and the future.
Create places of lasting beauty and value - that bring meaning
to our lives and consider how using less can create MORE.
ULI (Urban Land Institute) Fall Meeting was last week in Denver. There is always such a huge array of offerings at large conferences and I am but one person but a few trends seemed to emerge from my observations and discussions with others: - Enrique Penalosa spoke of a radical re-thinking of the city and especially the suburbs. This is based on an intense introduction of open space, pedestrian-only spaces, transit, and density. He rightly suggests that the backward looking approach of New Urbanism is not equipped to deal with the opportunities and challenges of the present and future. New ideas about water, energy, biophilia, food, community, resources, transit, and culture make the traditional city need a substantial re-thinking.
- Many sessions, culiminating in the Bulder Urban Agriculture Tour in Boulder on Saturday highlighted the new opportunities to integrate agriculture directly into our cities and towns. Medians, left-over spaces, yards, and open space all become chances to bring food closer to where we live, create fresh local and affordable food and create a strong sense of community. It is a new definition of mixed use and provides a new way to think about space, place, and food. And it is the new amenity in communities: out with the golf courses, in with the gardens!!
-Health is the new gold standard of sustainability. This reminds us again that the ultimate purpose of the built environment is for people and to foster health on many levels. Current design practice and the planning of our cities can create disease especially obesity and diabetes brought about by inactivity. The best neighborhoods promote health by making movement mandatory and enjoyable - a natural part of daily living. And integrate local healthy food, And community.
Make sure you get your 10,000 steps a day. It keeps the doctor away.
Thanks to xkcd:
Banksy uses graffiti to comment on the city and society. Check it out. http://www.banksy.co.uk/
If you are in the Boulder/Denver region please come to the first Salon series of ULI Colorado | Boulder. It will be at Shine at 2027 13th Street in Boulder from 5-6:30 on October 4th. This is the first in a series of semi-monthly events to look at issues that impact Boulder titled: "Re-envisioning our City". I will be giving the first talk which will explore what would change about the form of Boulder if it were to become a truly low carbon emission city. Lessons from Europe, China, the UAE and beyond will be explored. Then applications to Boulder will be considered. This will be a short talk with a follow-up discussion. $5 Admission covers the room fee. Food and drink are available for purchase. Come listen, discuss, and connect with others interested in the future of the city. And drink, eat, and be merry!
I got the opportunity to visit one of Pritzker Prize winner Wang Shu’s buildings in Hangzhou. Really more than a building, this large complex houses the College of Art and Architecture of which he is the dean. What an opportunity to both design a massive new multi-building campus including housing from scratch and then lead the school!
The audacity and scale seemed emblematic of contemporary China. Wang Shu embraced this challenge and used it to explore a new fusion of architectural ideas from western and Chinese traditions. After traveling through a number of cities, towns, and villages in China and seeing the difficulty of this fusion, it was inspiring to see this approach so directly addressed. In earlier posts about authenticity, it often seems like an either/or proposition: the new glass mall or the fake pagoda or the concrete housing block perched uncomfortably in the center of this dialectic.
Western architects practicing in China seem to primarily provide approaches that are overtly expressive or flamboyant or direct translations of buildings we know in the West. There is often very little direct engagement with the cultural context - the buildings could be in Dubai, New York, or Barcelona. Except maybe it looks like a dragon.
The Hangzhou Art and Architecture Building is so intensely Chinese - it would be out of place anywhere else. It is also directly engaged with the site, framing views and embracing the unique topographic and climatic conditions. But finally, it is also a profoundly contemporary building that is both inventive and reflective of recent Western innovations.
In an earlier post, I wrote of visiting the Carpenter Center of Visual Arts at Harvard by Le Corbusier, his only American building. In that building (and so many others) he explores the ideas of movement in space - the architectural promenade. This building expands on that idea to create architecture as movement and unfolding experience. And material. And culture. And landscape.
The most distinctive feature is the walkways that wrap the outside of each of the buildings. They allow movement independent of the buildings, a walk-by that creates selective engagement with the spaces within. They provide a baseline from which all experience emerges. One can then move into and through the buildings and get lost a bit or continue to go around them. Everything is connected through bridges to ensure the continuity of this experience. Numerous surprises are encountered: courtyards intriguing elements, waterways, amphitheater nooks, a textural brick wall made of reu-used materials ... These make this experience an endless process of discovery.
I have not seen as inventive a building in a while. It provides a new perspective on culture, but also about modernity, craft, and experience. This is about all you can ask of a new building!
This is why we do not need parking for cars but people!
These are interesting art piece that plays with the idea of perception - what we think we see, what are the implications of perspective, how is a view constructed. Don't just look at the image but try to understand how he did the artwork:
http://www.varini.org/02indc/
And you can then translate the idea into super graphics to create a whole new way of getting information in space!!
