CLIMATE CHANGE AND DESIGN PRACTICES: THE ROLE OF ARCHITECTURE IN MITIGATING CLIMATE VARIABILITY TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF LIFE
Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA)
88th Annual Convention - Los Angeles - Saturday, March 11, 2000
HETEROTOPOLIS: Immigration, Ethnicity, and the American City
Moderators:
Casey Coates Danson, Global Possibilities and Jean Gardner, The Earth Group
INTRODUCTION TO THE WORKSHOP AND BACKGROUND OF MODERATORS
Jean Gardner, Senior Faculty member at Parsons School of Design and Casey Coates Danson, President and Founder of Global Possibilities have been working together for the last three years developing material and hosting conferences pertaining to design practices and architectural education. Jean is located in New York City and Casey in Los Angeles where she has lived for over 20 years, making her a migrant and a citizen.
Casey came here from somewhere else, like everyone in Los Angeles. She has lived here long enough to understand what the city is about and has spent much of that time concerned about issues that now fit under the rubric of Climate - issues having to do with the livability of Los Angeles in every dimension. Casey is currently Chairman of the Board of the Environmental Media Association (EMA) and a new member on the board of the American Solar Energy Society (ASES), and has been on the board of SCI-Arc. Ms. Danson is focusing on what most of us think of when we think of Los Angeles - the great media center - by leading them toward more awareness of exactly how important the issue of the environment is in programming and informing audiences. Now is the time for the media to use their influence.
Casey Coates Danson graduated from Parsons School of Design with a degree in Environmental Design in 1975 when solar and renewables were a very real hot topic and the curriculum was absolutely perfectly about sustainability. Learning the whole process, it became a part of her and also became her passion. Her concern is the human impact on the environment. Casey co-founded American Oceans Campaign in 1987.
In 1996, she founded Global Possibilities with the mission to promote the use of solar and renewables to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels to mitigate climate change. At this point the big issue is mitigating climate change because if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, the planet is not going to be liveable.
The first project that Global Possibilities and the Earth Group collaborated on was the National Education Initiative, convening conferences and meetings with university deans and chairs of architectural departments from all over the United States supported with regional climate change information. When you look at the state of design, it is really important to determine what weather conditions you are dealing with on a regional level.
REAL ESTATE
Global Possibilities also creates symposiums for the Real Estate industry - developers and building managers are responsible for most of the work in the built environment - and they are a large part of the problem.
HOLLYWOOD
Another major project is media outreach. Global Possibilities is working with the Environmental Media Association on briefings for TV and film writers to educate them on climate change so that they can integrate information in their scripts that says something about the environment. The goal is to seriously weave environmental messages into their scripts in a way that does not trivialize the subject.
MOST IMPORTANT - ARCHITECTURE IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
Most important is the architecture in the built environment. Global climate change is real, very dangerous and probably the greatest economic threat facing the world today. In this country alone we use 2/3 of our energy in the built environment - the way we build it, the way we fuel, and the energy going into the built environment is in turn creating at least 1/4 to a 1/3 of carbon dioxide emissions causing global climate change. So we can have the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time if we begin with the built environment and how we design and build. We need to start building sustainably.
DESERT INTO FARMS
Casey remembers driving through the San Fernando Valley and discovering this incredible soil and her neighbor saying, "this is the valley and these were all orchards, but before that, Los Angeles was basically a desert." An engineer named Mulholland brought in water from mountain towns so Los Angeles could survive and it is now a verdant, tropical paradise. People have lost sight of the fact that we are living on a desert and that water is as important an issue as is the population and the demographics of Los Angeles. The migration and immigration issues are such that we all have to work together.
AS BUILDERS, WHATEVER WE DO, WE CHANGE THE CLIMATE
What can the architectural profession do? Whether you agree that the globe is actually warming, I think we all have to realize that as builders, whatever we do changes the climate. Los Angeles with its extraordinary concentration of modern buildings is a suburban environment with an ethnic population. People are being drawn to this city partly because of the proximity to Latin America, partly because of the ocean.
LOS ANGELES - THE CITY OF THE FUTURE - ETHNIC DIVERSITY
All these immigration and migration groups are not only bringing their cultural behavior, but they are also bringing their architecture, ethnic and cultural diversity. The question is, in our case; do any of these cultural traditions offer us ways out of the impasse of climate change? Highways: Los Angeles has been talked about as the city of the future. The ethnic diversity, the architecture, the impact of the automobile, and as mentioned earlier, the environment is totally created. So Los Angeles is a desert city, the second largest desert city in the world, the other one is Cairo. So it's completely artificial. We are in a situation where the climate is changing. In some areas the climate is completely artificial, as in the case of Los Angeles, which depends on a water supply that is miles away. In this case, the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, one of the first dams built in 1905 on the Owens River. Six percent of the habitable land in California is here in the Los Angeles basin. Forty-five percent of the population lives here and the only surface water in the basin is six-hundredth of a percent in the state of California. So that means that the water for this artificial environment is coming from outside of this area.
LOS ANGELES' ENERGY SOURCE - IMPORTED FROM FOUR STATES
Los Angeles' energy does not come from anywhere close. It is brought in from Four Corners - Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. An area on sacred Native American Indian land where coal is burned to power this city and which is seriously impacting ground water for the Navajo and Hopi Nations.
CASE STUDY MODEL
This is a model of what you can investigate and identify wherever your city is located. What's the original climate? How has the climate changed because of human presence? What are the absolute sources of what it takes to maintain that environment - in this case, water and energy. What is the architectural tradition?
LOS ANGELES MODEL
When the water started coming into Los Angeles in 1905, there already was a tradition of building suited to the climate. The architecture of the Mexican, Spanish, and Indian indigenious population built before the United States took over California obviously did not have any air conditioning or any heating. Their building design utilized methods to cut down on energy use. This vernacular architecture did not need artificial support systems.
CLIMATE RELATED ISSUES ARE DESIGN ISSUES
To accommodate the growing population, some extraordinary buildings in the Canonical tradition of architecture have really interesting efforts to deal with climate in terms of design. From the point of view of architects, the Greene Brothers designed highly valued buildings. They had spent time on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and were very aware of the hazards of unventilated buildings.
GAMBLE HOUSE
The Gamble House in Pasadena can be looked at from so many points of view as an incredible integration of ventilation as part of design, not as an added-on extra system. These Los Angeles houses were built before the availability of mechanical means of climate control. The buildings' architecture worked with climate to create an environment that modulated between the interior and exterior space; not to radically create an environment inside in opposition to the one outside.
DODGE HOUSE
The Dodge House, which unfortunately no longer stands, was built by Irving Gill in 1915 and fits what the Department of Energy is recommending for all city buildings today - white - because cities are becoming heat islands. Its cubistic blocks contain the coolness through the thick walls and the flat roofs are painted white. These buildings are so important from the point of view of design because there is a tendency to think that climate related issues are not design issues.
GILL HOUSE
In the case of the Gill House the attached courts and overhanging patios are outdoor rooms - places where you don't need any artificial cooling but are instead cooled by their architectural features.
MALLARD HOUSE
Frank Lloyd Wright, in the 1923 Mallard House, used white, cubistic design and completely covered the house with vegetation so that photographs are not able to show the whole building. Significantly, the Department of Energy is today saying - vegetation, vegetation, vegetation. This is how you can cool heat islands, which basically should happen in all of our cities.
SCHINDLER HOUSE
Wright worked with the architect, R. M. Schindler on the 1921 Schindler house, which is recognized as the first architecture in this area which tried to work with the climate to create a new kind of architecture. Schindler, an Austrian architect envisioned his house like a campsite, romanticizing about the West and the United States. It combined a very innovative concrete wall system with a system of wood and canvas. The house is basically closed to the street. The other side has rooms with no doors but canvas sliding panels. The patio areas are integrated into the body of the house. He saw outdoor rooms leading into covered rooms like the patio leading into his wife's room. He had no heating and obviously no air conditioning. In 1921 he could have had heating. He reduced the bedrooms down to sleeping porches so they are just a place to sleep in the cool evening air.
Schindler is credited with the interior design concept where the separation between concrete blocks is mimicking adobe pueblo bricks - cooling and keeping the interior shaded. They are perforated and act as light sources and also air sources. Understanding that windows aren't a sufficient supply of natural air because they only cool and ventilate what is exactly at the height and bottom of the window, the room doesn't get cooled at the upper parts because the windows are at the lower. His solution is separating ventilation from view and redefining what a window is.
SCHINDLER'S HEALTH HOUSE
He carried it even further in the house he built for Dr. Philip M. Lovell in Newport Beach. Schindler actually called it a "Health House" and it is healthy by working with climate, which in terms of working with architecture is an extraordinarily exciting idea. The beach comes in right below the oceanside of the house and the second floor has a fantastic view out to the ocean. On the third floor are outside sleeping porches with a small area for dressing in back. The interior has what he called a "basketweave" space. His design features are integral, not added on. Analyzing the space, he made the room, the decoration, ventilation, heating and lighting into architectural elements. For example, having openings in the corners where light never goes. The light for reading is right next to the chair where you would sit to read.
When he was developing this house, Schindler wrote a series of 6 articles for Dr. Lovell's "Care of the Body" column in the 1926 Los Angeles Times: Sunday Magazine on how architecture can create and support health (excerpted articles follow).
TODAY'S CHALLENGE - HOW CAN A BUILDING BE AN ENERGY SOURCE
Vernacular architecture provides a lot of information about building design before the mechanization of the climate - with air conditioning and heating. Today we have enormous scale buildings, accommodating the size and concentration of the population. Obviously we don't have a naturally ventilated skyscraper, even in Los Angeles. Architects are fighting against this prominence of the sealed up building. There's got to be artificial sources of air. The question is - how to do it technologically so it is still a design solution? The solution is often outside of architecture. The challenge for today is - why can't the building be an energy source?
HIGH TECH AND REGULATIONS
A water policeman in Los Angeles checking that no one is watering their lawn during a drought. That's been another solution - high tech and regulations. Today's challenge is - how to add architecture as a solution to dealing with climate. A tremendous amount of water runoff goes right through the city of Los Angeles out to the ocean.
Checking the City of Los Angeles website, there were a number of sites on water conservation tips but not a single one was an architectural solution. Not a single one had anything to do with the buildings catching water. When you think of the gargoyles of Notre Dame you think about what architects have done in other times with water and their buildings. Today, what is being proposed in Los Angeles, from the point of view of architecture, is the idea that we should not be going outside of a geographical region for energy or water. Like in any city, we need to get the energy, the water, and the fresh air for the 16 million people who live in Los Angeles, from the city, not from over the mountains or importing from somewhere else.
Editors Note:
Andy Lipkis, President of TreePeople an environmental organization with a mission to re-forest the city of Los Angeles is now tackling this issue of water reclamation. His solution is a system of cisterns throughout the city with the goal of reducing water imports by 50%. See Resource List.
A BUILDING AS A NATURAL SYSTEM
Today's idea is that a building is actually a natural system. The Natural House details in a wonderful combination of graphics and basic information how ecological systems work. Architecture has basically treated those systems of air, water, and energy materials - going in and going out - as waste. Today's challenge in design, design education and developing curriculums, is to not just offer a course on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, but how the focus of design can best realize the idea of using what you have which reaches through all cultures.
CULTURAL EXAMPLE IN LOS ANGELES
In South Central Los Angeles there is the gallery and home of John Outerbridge who is Mabel Wilson's uncle from South Carolina from an area in the tidewaters, that has some of the earliest Afro-American architecture and Penn Center, the first black school in the U.S. Outerbridge came to Los Angeles practicing a building tradition of making do with what you have. This was the background of Afro-Americans in the South. He used an existing warehouse, took materials he found on the streets, and made his home. He fashioned his identity in what is called a "home-site" - an example of local populations solving cultural problems with architecture.
REGENERATING DESIGN SYSTEMS
The Center for Regenerative Studies at University of California at Pomona is a good example of a school whose architecture regards the climate as well as the regenerative natural systems. So, yes, we can mitigate against climate change; we can perhaps impede it, but what about regenerating? Probably one of the few educational programs and it Is very regional. So it is not just the buildings, it is working in relationship to the ecological systems around it.
EXHIBITION BUILDINGS
An exhibition building that is an icon of Modernism is made out of the most elegant materials, traditional and nontraditional, steel as well as marble, water as well as glass, and it is completely as all of Mies van der Rohe buildings, totally designed irrelevant to climate. It had a one-time function that was created for the Japanese Emperor being greeted by the King of Spain.
In comparison, the Kiss and Cathcart exhibition building of comparable purpose only made for a one-time function like Mies' building is a glass building totally generating its own energy. In other words, what looks like glass walls are actually photovoltaics.
