Baby in a Hazmat Suit!

In an article in the NY Times Home section called "Is It Safe to Play Yet? Going to Extreme Lengths to Purge Household Toxins". Good article, great picture.

Cows Are Important

Americans are eating less meat, and this is incredibly good news for a number of reasons. It means that fewer natural resources are being consumed in order to produce more meat, and it also hopefully means that people are making healthier eating choices (the article suggests that health is the main reason people are making the switch, but I have a suspicion that the cost of meat is a large factor as well). But a 12% drop in the last five years? That's pretty remarkable.

As a pesco-vegetarian (pescartarian?) for the last 15+ years, it heartens me to think that people are taking something like Meatless Mondays seriously. And I hope that Meatless Mondays can eventually become meatless weekends or weekdays for whole groups of people. Veggies are delicious, and cows are important -- don't ever forget that! Oh, and this: Eating red meat is associated with a sharply increased risk of death from cancer and heart disease, according to a new study. Just saying!

Sara Caples, Architect

I thought that Sara Caples, of Caples Jefferson Architects, had many interesting things to say about sustainable design when she came to speak at our research seminar. She talked about how it relates to both residences as well as institutions like museums and other cultural spaces. I took four main points away from her talk:

Having more goals results in a “richer product.” The more stated goals that a particular project has will undoubtedly produce a building that is “richer” in the sense that each stated goal brings with it a set of standards which must be met in order to foster a particular end result. The marriage of multiple goals, especially when they encompass things like building community-based initiatives into projects or utilizing modern fabrication techniques to consume less energy, leads directly to a finished project which benefits from a wealth of positive intentions.

The forgotten dimension of time. Designers are often too focused on the three dimensions of space, where length, width and depth exist in a state of relative stasis without the interaction of time, the fourth dimension. One way to include time into projects is to maximize daylight, which allows the inhabitants of a given space to experience the passage of time through the movement of sunlight. Bringing sunlight down into the bowels of an otherwise windowless office allows the occupants to connect to the outside environment and enjoy the benefits that this connection fosters.

Marrying sustainable design objectives to spiritual and social aspects. Emotions are also an important factor in successful design, and incorporating spiritual, social and cultural aspects into a project allows the end users of a space to connect to it on a deeper level. It is when a building can effectively “speak” to its inhabitants that something above and beyond design has occurred, and this is an effective way to incorporate sustainability by making the space indispensable and meaningful to its occupants.

Local climates are important in sustainable design. Without specifically saying so, many points that Ms. Caples made about local connections to climate and culture seem to fall under the concept of “bioregionalism,” a theory which states that humans inevitably interact with and are affected by the specific location which they inhabit. It’s this complex relationship between human culture, governmental bodies and the natural world which can be seen to impact local architecture and design to the extent that historical practices are often “best practices” and an area’s specific ecology can almost always suggest solutions that are both practical as well as sustainable.

Questions on the Readings

Glass, I., Updike, N., Spiegel, A., & Snyder, J. (Producers). (1998, September 4). Mapping [Episode 110]. This American Life Podcast. Podcast retrieved from http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/110/mapping

A perfect example of This American Life at its best: a thoughtful collection of essays built around a simple, straightforward topic. Although I felt like they started to run out of steam a bit by the end, the first several entries were remarkably strong and incredibly interesting. At first I was most fascinated by the guy who makes maps of all sorts of things, and his contention that "there isn't anything you can't map."

But then I got to the part about mapping sound, and I started to get a bit uncomfortable when the interviewee began explaining how different chords are associated with different moods and how the Catholic church, among others, has decided what different sounds "mean." As the narrator explained:

Now that I can't stop hearing it, I wonder if every exercise in mapping is really such a good thing. When I sat at my keyboard composing these lines, the computer hum and fan were droning a minor third at me, an interval associated with sorrow. Before Columbus's day, the old maps simply showed an arrow pointing to the mysterious West, and then the words, "there dragons be." Maybe not every terra incognita needs discovering. But, of course, this is America. We don't just explore, we profit. Any day now, I expect a house tuner to be ringing my doorbell, some failed telemarketer who'll promise to harmonize the whir of my toaster with the flush of the toilet, and thereby guarantee me an inner peace worthy of the millennium.

To which the interviewee replies, "And you could obviously select from -- like you might select from paint chips -- from a variety of different house moods, happy, sad, active anguish in a context of flux." Funnily enough, I had already started thinking about paint colors before he said this, because while a lot has been written about how painting a room different colors can affect mood, a lot of the more recent research on this topic has shown that this is almost purely contextual -- that reaction to color has more to do with individual differences and less to do with overarching generalities. So my question is this: can we ever successfully generalize how things like color, light or sound make people feel?

  

Childress, H. (2010). “Noun, Verb, Motive, Context: Research Methods for the Rest of Us.” Unpublished Manuscript, Boston, MA.

I have more of a comment than a question here, mainly about his point that "research extends what we know." Surely this is true, but I would go one step further and say that "research extends both what we know and what we don't know." That is, all research isn't going to produce the answers we're expecting or, for that matter, any answers at all. But not getting any answers to a question can be as informative as getting a bunch of them, possibly more so. And it isn't necessarily because we looked in the wrong place, or asked the wrong question, or deduced an incorrect motive -- maybe there's no answer because of wicked problems. Childress, while mentioning them, doesn't really address how they could end up causing an impasse (though, admittedly, this isn't the point of his article). Would a de facto conclusion be that any research question which attempts to address wicked problems is doomed from the start? This is where he loses me a little bit.

Greenwashing

Here's a humorous (and ultimately kind of depressing) little something I found on my Facebook wall - it's a couple of years old, but there are some choice quotes. What's your favorite? Mine's "Look, dolphins!"