Pavilion Volunteer Schedule

Sunday 5/23: Organize planting in Closter, New Jersey

Meet for pick up at 10:30am at the GW Bridge bus terminal, on Fort Washington btw 178-179th Sts under the overpass, http://www.ny.com/transportation/gw_bridge_bus.html. Or arrange own transportation to Closter. The architect will pick us up, and drop off again at this point afterwards. check!

Wednesday 5/26: Move plants from Closter, New Jersey to Governors Island
Three volunteers requested to meet for pick up at 9:30am at the GW Bridge bus terminal, on Fort Washington btw 178-179th Sts under the overpass, http://www.ny.com/transportation/gw_bridge_bus.html. Or arrange own transportation to Closter.

One volunteer needed to meet foreperson (Daniela) to pick up the UHaul and drive together to Closter. Details to come.

Thursday 5/27 - Friday 5/28:
Planting on Governors Island, 9am to 5pm. Come for full or half days. 48 hour advance notice required to get your name on the ferry list.

Tuesday 6/1 - Sunday 6/6
Continue planting as necessary and start assembly of pavilion, 9am to 5pm. Come for full or half days. 48 hour advance notice required to get your name on the ferry list on Tues-Thurs. On Friday and through the weekend island is open to the public.

Monday 6/7 - Thursday 6/10
Finishing everything up, we'll see where we're at.

Various times to be arranged Tuesday 5/25 into week of 5/31
CNC work in Long Island City. The work will be to monitor the CNC router, mount and dismount the plywood, and do some assembly of the parts after they have been cut. We strongly prefer someone with woodshop/CNC experience. 


Figment is Friday 6/11 - Sunday 6/13, Pavilion needs to be done!

Open Call for Figment Pavilion Volunteers

Hello,

This is Daniela, Foreperson for the City of Dreams Pavilion that is being built for Figment and will remain up on Governors Island all summer. We are looking for crew members to help build this project starting next week. This is a very exciting new part of Figment that scales up the idea of participatory sculpture to the architectural scale. It is a living structure made out of plants and milk crates that was selected by jury out of 50 entries.

We need help planting and assembling. No experience is necessary. It's a big job and time is short, so your help is critical. Construction is happening on the Island during daytime weekday hours. This is a very good opportunity for someone unemployed or otherwise with free time on their hands to be part of a project with a lot of cultural currency that's already gotten tons of press. Plus we can spend some time in the sun together on a quiet island making something cool happen, and that is going to be fun.

Please email me at danisemesterblog(at)gmail.com if you're interested. For more information on the pavilion itself see:
http://figmentproject.org/2010/long-term-exhibitions/living-pavilion/
and
http://www.architizer.com/en_us/projects/view/figmentenyaseaony-city-of-dreams-pavilion-competition/3524/

Best,
Daniela

Hydro-Fracking Update: NYS Imposing Stricter Regulations

According to today's New York Times, New York State in imposing stricter regulations on hydro-fracking in our watershed. This is good news as far as New York City's water supply is concerned, but does not by any means close the door on the environmental problems of natural gas mining, which is still in the works. The National Resources Defense Council does not consider greater regulation a victory, claiming that nothing short of a ban will protect our water source. The Independent oil and Gas Association of new York says the regulations are excessive, but claims that the watershed is not really the spot they care about right now anyway compared to prospects in surrounding areas.

Natural gas is considered "clean" energy because using it releases fewer C02 emissions. But natural gas is itself a greenhouse gas, and extraction can be brutal on the environment. Needless to say, our relationship to energy and the environment is frustrating. Constant nay-saying without alternative solutions does not get us very far. Energy on earth comes from the sun, but in order to concentrate that energy into electricity and fuel, material from the earth is required--whether that's natural gas, petroleum, and coal or the silicone and other minerals needed to make photovoltaic panels. Identifying and extracting resources is one problem. Cultural norms, the calcification of urban forms, and systematic reliance on energy-intensive systems of distribution for food and water are another.

An alternative energy future is going to have to focus on a diversity of means to productively recoup waste rather than resigning ourselves to an unworkable duality of ecological mess on one side and a return to primitivism on the other. It will mean changes to lifestyle, but that's a bigger cultural question about maturing as human society and not one to beat ourselves up about as individuals--though we should always remain conscientious of our decisions. As far as today is concerned, I'm glad our government is prioritizing the watershed and hope that policies affecting the sustenance of vast numbers of people will continue to be ecologically sound and scientifically considered.

Hydro-Fracking: Sounds Gross Because it Is

Dr. Theo Colborn presenting Hydro-Fracking for Natural Gas at the Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design, 4/15/10. Photo of pollution-filled evaporation ponds in Colorado. In New York it is too humid for evaporation to be effective, so polluted water will be reinjected into the ground or tranported somewhere else.

Hopefully you've heard of hydro-fracking by now. This is a process of natural gas extraction that involves drilling down into shale and shaking things up to release gas. They are planning on doing this to the Marcellus Shale, creating the nation's largest gas field across four states, including the Catskill/Delaware Watershed where New York City gets its fresh drinking water from.

My original reaction without knowing too much about it was that futzing with our water supply is probably a bad idea. Last night I went to a very detailed lecture on the subject which enumerated many reasons why this is an environmentally disastrous procedure. This includes the numerous dangerous chemicals that get pumped into the ground in the process, the huge quantities of water required to run the operation, and the serious air pollution that forms when diesel fumes from the trucks and machines at the surface interact with volatile organic compounds released from underground, forming ground-level ozone. 

Drinking water is fundamental, more important to sustaining life then concentrated energy. Let's keep our eyes on this issue. For information see:

TEDX: The Endocrine Disruption Exchange

NoFracking.com

NY H20

Sliding Assumptions

Photo: Aroid

My colleagues and I have been giving a lot of presentations this semester. New developments in our visual languages meant to manifest complex data comparisons in an easily digestible format is required on a weekly basis, as is the compilation, generation, and interpretation of that data. Often presentation happens via projection from a laptop, usually of digitally created graphics. Lately however we have been drawing with Sharpies and grease pencils on 11 x 17 pieces of printer paper.

The result of this has been a large pixelated array of doodles on our studio wall that is eventually a step back to either a more polished projected presentation or some kind of book. It's been a little tough, the digital has infected us enormously. So much so, in fact, that those pieces of paper are repeatedly referred to by many of us as "slides".

It is hilarious to refer to a piece of paper as a slide. This word transformation comes from PowerPoint (aka PDF in our case) via the ubiquitous mid-century slide projector, which is a technological extension of the earlier magic lantern that Wikipedia pegs to the 17th century. So an outmoded technology of sliding a physical transparency in front of a light source gives us terminology that fits gracefully into the newest digital tools that become so habituated as to stand in now even for the ancient technology of paper.

It's worth noting these linguistic transformations as we chart the field of architecture into new territory. The most exciting digital technology will still be pegged to less complex precursors. This becomes very important to remember when using things like CAD drawings and energy modeling software to propose architectural systems which produce and run on non-concentrated energy most beautifully typified by Nature. One goal of our work this semester is to consider how high technology can concentrate passive energy flows to sustain our cultural speed without polluting the ecosystem. Assumptions are important. So when paper becomes a slide we know we're forging ahead with gusto.

The Shape of Sunlight's Heavy Lifting

I had the pleasure last week of helping my CASE colleagues prepare and transfer a prototype of the Integrated Concentrated (IC) Solar Facade system to the Syracuse Center of Excellence which officially opened on Friday. The machine is aesthetically and scientifically striking. Solar radiation is focused through a tracking Fresnel lens onto a PV cell, combined with a water flow heat sink. The energy effect is the generation of accessible electricity and hot water; the visual effect is both a focusing and a diffusing of sunlight combined with a pattern of dissolved inverted imagery through the lensed pyramids alternating with a simple view through the window. 

IC Solar is envisioned as an integrated building component. As such the value judgements about energy use are worn boldly in view. Cultural statements about our relationship with fuel combined with workable approaches will be part of our generation's architectural heritage. As we use technology in attempts to deal with environmental problems created by technology, the visual element will be a constructive tool in stoking the polemic.

Sunlight feels so clean but concentrating it is still a grimy business. For me, the heavy lifting was a welcome change from sitting in front of a computer every day, and the afternoons spent wielding solder guns and screw drivers were satisfying. It was amusing after my recent amateur electronics kick to be handed an LED display to put together, and driving a 20 foot Ryder truck through winding mountain roads in the middle of the night with precious cargo is a thrill despite the exhaustion and discomfort. This project has been many years in the making and I can only claim three days of wrapping up loose ends on the current version, but it's inspiring to see something so complex take real shape.

Roy G. Biv

The new Center for Excellence in Syracuse spares no opportunity to express that it is "green". It officially opens this afternoon. During prototype set up phase--I was there on installation duty for something I'm not allowed to write about before its officially unveiled at 2pm but will tell you about later--that greenness felt freshest before all the partnership logos went up. Features like lights in the bathroom that turn on when you enter the stall were not activated yet in the morning, but were in the afternoon. Likewise for the automatic flush. Interior finishes, bare concrete floor aside, are all either white, which is gorgeous except for the tops of the exposed ductwork will always be dusty; and green, which is gorgeous except when it is reflecting in perfect daylighting off human flesh tones.

It turns out that scientifically, green is the wavelength that looks brightest on the Commission Internationale de l'Eclarirage (CIE)'s famous chart of visual perception. Thus the brightest walks softest on the earth. Green is smack dab in the center of the visible spectrum. It's a word that can sound trite with repetition in popular design culture that nonetheless has a phenomenological spine.