edifice magazine

S T R U C T U R E I N D E S I G N

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contents

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[ThInK] [gIZMO gReen?] [MInDSeT] [LOOKIng DIFFeRenT] [WWII] [MaRTIn gROhS] [IMMInenT] [cRaFT] [TheRMOPLaSTIc]

thinkeditor’s note

why what we bring you matters

architectural designgIZMO gReen?environmental house of the future equipped with the latest technology for a more sustainable tomorrow

graphic designMInDSeT

remember these ways to produce what you do best...design

fi rst archLOOKIng DIFFeRenT

a quick look at an architectural fi rm that designs on our terms

in historyWWII

streamlined design...an interesting blast from the past including two products to add to your list of needs.

foundMaRTIn gROhS

a quick look at a graphic designer you should be interested in...geared towards the environment

industrial designIMMInenT

reuse, reuse, reuse

interior designcRaFT

bringing it back to pure talent...a look at interiors you can create yourself

businessTheRMOPLaSTIc

a companies goal...axion international at a glance

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thinksusan s. szenasy —editor-in-chief, MeTROPOLIS—new york

m o r a l i t y

r e s p o n s i b i l i t y

o b l i g a t i o n

c o m m u n i t y

s o c i a l j u s t i c e

i n t e r - c o n n e c t e d n e s s :

words we once knew intimately, then proceeded to forget as we got lost in the pursuit of what we used to call

t o d a ywe ponder the meanings of wordslike

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T h I n K

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n enormous smoke cloud is seen hovering over the northeast united states. Its origin: fires burning somewhere in China. The dramatic image—with hundreds of others like it—is posted on NASA’s Earth

Science web site; here satellite cameras record the degradation of our home planet’s environment. Such graphic information is now routinely available to anyone with an Internet connection. We can see for ourselves how human actions in one part of the world effect human health in another, distant part.On the day of the smoke cloud many New Yorkers experienced breathing problems. Most of them probably blamed the difficulties on local pollution caused by automobile and bus exhaust and chemical clouds wafting across the Hudson from New Jersey. But China? That’s too far away! Well, as it turns out, you and I share one large breath with all human beings and other creatures living on this earth. We are closer to each other than we ever could have imagined. And now we have the science and the technology to document how interconnected we really are. The smoke cloud over the northeast United Sates is a powerful graphic communication. The NASA web site may not be designed to your liking, but it provides information that is very hard to ignore. And this is where ethics enters the picture. Continuing to act in a way that you know can have harmful consequences is irresponsible, unethical behavior. So, you didn’t start those fires in China, why should you be held responsible for polluting the environment?But I say that you—collectively, as graphic designers—are starting other fires, metaphorically speaking. You are responsible for helping to create 40% of North America’s solid waste; paper accounts for 81 million tons of waste annually, according to the Printers National Environmental Center. Furthermore, the pulp and paper industry is the third largest industrial buyer of elemental chlorine. Chlorine is used to whiten paper, a process which is linked to a proven cancer-causing chemical called dioxin.You know this, because you’ve been reading a little beige booklet in your conference packets. This booklet—No. 7—is part of the AIGA’s Design Business Ethics series and deals extensively with print design and environmental responsibility. It documents current knowledge on the subject and gives useful contact information. It is there for you to use. My health, your health, and your children’s health depend on how well you understand the information provided for you by the AIGA in booklet 7.I am a graphic design client and I, along with thousands of other clients, need for you to do the right thing. Here is my story: I am the editor of a design and architecture magazine called Metropolis. We print

around 60,000 issues 11 times a year at Brown Printing Company, in East Greenville, Pennsylvania. Brown’s giant web offset presses, perfect binders, and poly-wrappers produce some 500 titles, including elegant fashion catalogs and mass-market news magazines—all of them designed by someone, maybe some of you in this room.Brown is an efficient, noisy industrial plant with hazardous waste signs posted everywhere. The paper waste, just from our small print-run, is staggering: garbage cans are filled with off-color color proofs during the test-runs. As employees of a magazine that has a commitment to covering environmental issues that shape our designed environment, our editors and art directors live with constant guilt. We know that the processes that produce those beautiful color pages are highly toxic and wasteful.We have been assured that our paper comes from managed forests and that waste paper is recycled, but those assurances are not enough for us. We know more can be done, but it seems that we’re too small to make a difference. However, if every art director and every editor of every one of those 500 titles at Brown started asking questions about soy inks, recycled papers, safe press-clean-up procedures, chlorine content, and washable stock—the kind of paper that [William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s environmental manifesto] Cradle to Cradle is printed on—we might end up with a less toxic product and contribute less to the earth’s health problems. Now, to me, the choice is not to eliminate print because it’s dirty, but rather to clean up its production and then use print in ways that only print can provide. For instance, when Paula Scher redesigned Metropolis some four years ago, we decided to print the feature well on a different paper stock from the rest of the magazine—this to provide a distinct, non-commercial zone of uninterrupted reading, an experience signaled by the tactile and visual change in the paper.As we spend more time in the visual world of our computer screens, we search for multi-sensory experiences in our physical world. Paper technology, or polymer technology like Michael Braungart talks about, can satisfy some of our sensory needs, so we must figure out how to clean up paper technology and make it work better. It is the right thing to do. It is the ethical thing to do.For a while now, I’ve been talking about something called the Gross Designed Product, the GDP, and how it needs to push environmental change. Think about this for a moment: an interior designer will buy 1,200 ergonomic chairs for one job, while you and I may buy 12 chairs in a lifetime. If each interior designer demanded that the chairs they specify be designed for disassembly, made of non-toxic materials, and their parts not shipped from thousands of miles away where they might be made by semi-slave labor, the contract furniture industry would have to pay attention.Solid knowledge about your materials and processes can indeed be power—and this power is in the

numbers. Put these numbers together and you have an interior design community that can make positive change, at least the way furniture is made. And we’re talking about changing one industry at a time.Interior designers’ new buying habits can also change the way industrial designers think about their own work. Charged with making environmentally safe products, industrial designers would no longer by slaves to the annual style change in endless ergonomic chairs with slight differences for each brand. As a result, the designers might even design a whole new set of products that better suit our new ways of working.Some months ago, Santa Fe architect Ed Mazria sent us a paper he wrote, connecting architecture, its processes, and its materials, to global warming. We knew this, but didn’t have the facts to prove it. So, with me searching for the GDP’s environmental impact, and all our editors looking for designs that make a positive—and beautiful—contribution to a cleaner environment, Ed’s paper hit a nerve. It became the backbone of our October cover story—the cover itself being three rolls of blueprints emitting a huge black cloud of smoke, an image designed by Pentagram’s D.J. Stout—with the accusatory cover line: “Architects Pollute.”Ed reconfigured the old pie chart that depicts North America’s energy use showing that architects put in motion 48% of the fossil fuels that cause global warming. I think this may be a conservative estimate when we know what goes into buildings—such as interior furnishings, signage, and electronics—as well as all that paper your profession puts there. So the GDP is probably responsible for producing 80% or more of global warming gases. And make no mistake about it: global warming is here. It’s no longer discussed—except perhaps by Bush-the-Younger’s administration—as a remote possibility. The climate changes we’re experiencing are dramatic, we all know this first hand.So, is there any good news in all of this? Yes. And it has to do with design. Designers today stand on the brink of being seen by society as essential contributors to its health, safety, and welfare. If you—together with the other design professions—decide to examine the materials and processes endemic to your work, as well as demand that these materials and processes become environmentally safe, you will be the heroes of the 21st Century.Truly, when you get away from interdisciplinary squabbling and join forces with other design organizations—each organization is now making steps in this direction, by the way—you will have the kind of power-positive and life-affirming power that [Bauhaus founder and interdisciplinary designer] Walter Gropius couldn’t have imagined in his wildest dreams. Ethical decisions are personal. It is you—each one of us—who has to decide to do the right thing. Today we ponder the meanings of words like morality, responsibility, obligation, community, social justice, inter-connectedness: words we once knew intimately, then proceeded to forget as we got lost in the pursuit of what we used to call “the good life.”

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thinksusan s. szenasy —editor-in-chief, metropolis—new york

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We have observed the sorry spectacle of corporate executives in handcuffs, doing the perp-walk on the 6 o’clock news. These ethically flawed CEOs may still have their ill-gotten gains, but they don’t have the power that once quickened their heartbeats. And watching them, we began to understand that power without ethical standards can dissipate in a New York minute and cause a great deal of anguish all around.I am exceedingly hopeful about the future of design, and designers’ growing power in society. This hope comes from my students, and students I meet everywhere. The best of them know that they follow in the footsteps of the great, humanist designers of the 19th and 20th centuries.At Parsons, where I have been teaching design history for twelve years, I was asked to develop a course on ethics five years ago. I interpreted this request as a sign of the times, as a rising need for some sort of anchor in a world of great uncertainty, a kind of re-assertion of our complex humanity.We are much more than homo economicus and we know it.

C o n s u m p t i o n

isn’tour only value,

and we want to assert our interest in the life of the mind, in culture, art, science, and more. Yes, I thought, this request from Parsons was to be a search for values. I was sufficiently intrigued by it, but also puzzled by how I could pull it off. Do I build ethical arguments on such designer-issues as knock-offs or cutting and pasting without giving credit?Though important, these issues seemed paltry next to the big question that, five years ago, was focused on environmental ethics. But that, too, seemed to ghettoize the subject of ethics. Environmentalists by then were a boring lot, often-rabid zealots; when they were designers, they often made ugly things and buildings.Then I watched the 1991 film Mindwalk, based on Fritjof Capra’s writings, and realized that we needed to talk about a whole new world-view. I realized we needed to get away from the Cartesian, linear, mechanistic thinking that shaped modern humanity and gave us the Industrial Revolution (and with it amazing things like central heating and computers, as well as horrible things like over-flowing landfills and air pollution). I understood that we needed to start thinking of the world as a system, a cyclical system of interconnections,

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Consumption

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a web of connections—”The web of life,” as Capra says.We needed a comprehensive ecological world-view. And I also understood that this was a long-term project, not to be mistaken for a marketing trend like one furnishings manufacturer told us. (“Green?” he said. “Yes, well, we did that last year, but we’re doing something really exciting this year!”) In fact, green was only a part of it, a central part that must deal with environmentally benign materials and processes, restoration, recycling, reclaiming: all those things we have to do to remedy the damage we’ve done to the natural environment and to ourselves in it.Have you asked yourself why, for instance, is a mass media like TV running ads for cancer drugs? We must be in the midst of an epidemic. And the general population already knows that there are such things as chemical carcinogens: everyone remembers seeing the movie Erin Brockovich.So as I planned the course, it became clear to me that we needed to talk about the ethical implications of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum principle of a man centered universe and contrast it to a more communal, collaborative approach in which social justice is at least as important as individual well-being. This is where my students and I would find our ethical issue, and along the way also take part in building a new world-view.We don’t have a great summing-up of this world view yet—as cogito summed up the modern world. We now use awkward and hard-to-grasp words like “sustainability,” “eco-design,” “green design,” “green washing,” “biophilia,” “biomimicry,” “bioinspiration”; we even use “universal access” and “universal design,” since social justice is part of this new thinking.These are early days, but incredibly exciting ones. The last time that humanity was challenged to rethink the world, we came up with the Enlightenment, which served our kind very well up to now. So use whatever words you like, but understand that you are at the center of a revolution where an ethical compass is useful and even essential. This may be a time when intellectual pursuits become as important as financial and entertainment pursuits. For without understanding the new world taking shape around us, we will surely go the way of dinosaurs.So what can you do to be part of this eco revolution? I offer five quick suggestions.

1) You—designers—should get out of your darkened rooms with their big, flashy images and figure out how to talk about design in the sunlight. In fact, just try talking about design once in a while without showing anything. It astounds me how creative people can readily buy into the mind numbing, homogenizing visuals of corporate blandness.PowerPoint presentations have killed thinking in the late 20th Century. We’re living in new times now. Stop using PowerPoint for everything. Give others credit for being able to follow your argument without the

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have you asked yourself why, for instance,is a mass media like tv running ads for cancer drugs? we must be in the midst of an E P I D E M I C

photography textcinfa susan s. szenasy

s u s t a i n a b i l i t y e c o d e s i g n g r e e n d e s i g n g r e e n

w a s h i n g b i o p h i l i a b i o m i m i c r y b i o i n s p i r a t i o n

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aid of bullet points for every factoid you flash. Spend your time and our precious energy resources on creating truly inventive and persuasive presentations.Let’s cut back the time we spend looking at screens in mechanically cooled rooms that always hum with the powerful machines required to keep them a steady 70 degrees. Let’s design rooms that take advantage of the great and beautiful world outside with its shimmering waters and colorful foliage and cooling breezes.

2) This shift of world-views is a complex and serious business. It needs all kinds of expertise and it needs every one of you, and more. Many of you are already involved in education. Turn your involvement into something significant, relevant, and timely.Develop courses where collaboration, research, social justice, and scientific and cultural understanding are at the heart of the design problems being solved. Make universities—with their unique capacity for research and analysis—into the intellectual leaders of your profession, with you as their collaborator. We know what happens when the design professions—all of them, including architecture and graphic design—lead academia. That’s what we have now and everyone’s unhappy.

3) If you teach at a university where there’s a teachers’ college, infiltrate that teachers’ college with your design ideas by making friends with the professors there. While it’s great that some designers do wonderful programs with public schools, these efforts are few and far between. We have urgency here.It would be more productive to educate the educators. Help them figure out how to add your design methods to a more linear way of learning. This can lead to a better understanding of the designed environment by future grade-school and high-school teachers and their students.Such an understanding is crucial to a well-informed

citizenry. Nowhere was this need for design-informed citizens better demonstrated than during the so-called design debates about the schemes presented for rebuilding the World Trade Center site. Our esteemed architecture critic on our newspaper of record confused a planning and massing document with architecture; the architects—except for Daniel Libeskind—spoke in jargon that even they couldn’t penetrate; and the public had no idea what they were looking at and what the design debate was about.

4) Become citizen designers. When architect Beverly Willis and I launched our civic group, R.Dot, in those heartbreaking days after 9/11, we didn’t know we could attract politically savvy designers who’d want to attend regular meetings and work very hard pro bono. As it turns out a graphic designer, Roland Gebhardt; an industrial designer, Brent Oppenheimer; and an architect, Ron Schiffman, became the guiding lights behind several of our detailed and comprehensive position papers on managed streets, culture zones, and housing.Roland and Brent, for instance, used the kind of anthropological and anthropometric studies they learned as industrial designers and office planners to create a whole new system of maps. They called it experience mapping, which is a way to understand what works and what doesn’t work in neighborhoods by interviewing residents and visitors about how they use the neighborhoods. Experience maps are great graphic presentations of people’s everyday lives. They’re much more revealing than cold statistics.The citizen designer is on the ascendant, especially post 9/11. [Esteemed graphic design critic] Steve Heller even named one of his books after him and her.

5) Find collaborators in whatever area of expertise your project requires. Become a design detective, a forensic designer: the path has been cut for you by others, make it wider.

One of those pathfinders is Kirsten Childs, the interior design partner in the Croxton Collaborative, which has become a sought-after green architecture firm. But 15 years ago Kirsten just began looking for the ingredients of the chemical soup she was brewing with the furniture and furnishings she was specifying. So she hired a chemist. Together they started asking questions about the fibers, fiber-boards, finishes, and glues she was putting into offices—usually located in sealed buildings designed to control the temperature.Individual decisions. Personal, ethical choices. That’s what Kirsten started out with. Others in her field are flowing.She’s a good example for you, too. Thousands of these personal choices put together will make our world, as Bush the Elder so memorably hoped, a “kinder, gentler” place. But I’m also with Blanch Du Bois on this.

We need to start relying more on “the kindness of strangers.”

illustrationpeter arkle

textsusan s. szenasy

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01 Cinfa from Flickr with added type

02Peter Arkle Illustration from peterarkle.com

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gizmo green?

0 1 A r c h i t e c t u r a l City Scape Miami

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Diller Scofidio + Renfro— architecture magazine—new york times

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illustration—peter arkle, freelance illustrator—new york


p e t e r a r k l e . c o m

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iller Scofidio + Renfro have made a building out of a cloud of atomized lake water, designed a museum for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston that literally opens onto the harbor and devoted an entire multimedia exhibition to the American lawn. Their recent projects include remaking Lincoln

Center and transforming New York’s High Line — an abandoned elevated railroad line that runs from Midtown Manhattan to the meatpacking district — into a park. On this and the following pages, in collaboration with the environmental-design firm Atelier Ten, they imagine a guilt-free, sustainable luxury house that thrives on excess, and the couple, M. and J., who live in it.J. is an engineer for a software-development firm; M. is a consultant for an Internet marketing company. Their house, the Phantom House, sits on a two-acre lot overlooking a rapidly growing city in the American Southwest. Drawing on existing technologies and those that may come to be, it transforms redundancy into efficiency. An indoor, climate controlled house hovers over its outdoor double, so that different household tasks can be performed in- or outdoors, depending on the weather. Pleasure and sustainability converge: the inhabitants and the house form a feedback loop, in which energy produced in

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02Example of Diller + Renfro Blueprint

03Slightly altered illustration of Peter Arkle’s illustration against gadgets.

illustration textpeter arkle diller scofidio + Renfro

everyday activities can be banked and later used to power home systems, and the house can anticipate the inhabitants’ needs as they move from room to room. The Phantom House is a sophisticated desert dwelling that produces more energy than it consumes and gives back to the grid. PHANTOM HOUSENew York Times Magazine, May 2007. While the environmental movement focuses public consciousness to the delicate and vulnerable state of our environment, “green” architecture is hardening into a new orthodoxy characterized by a lifestyle of guilt and sacrifice. Green architecture often stands at odds with the American Dream and the promise that a lifetime of hard work will be rewarded with prosperity and material comforts. Do we have to accept a reversal of this dream to be good global citizens? The project for print, commissioned by the New York Times Magazine, proposes a green architecture that satisfies our quest for the good life while compensating for it. Conceived in collaboration with Atelier Ten, this single-family house sits on an elevated 2-acre lot overlooking a rapidly growing city in the southwest. It is a living, thinking organism; a sophisticated desert dweller that dynamically adapts to its harsh and variable environment. The house comprises twin domiciles, an indoor conditioned house that hovers above its outdoor counterpart. Function-for-function, the two levels mirror one

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gizmo green?

photography textdiller scofidio + Renfro diller scofidio + Renfro

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04 The Eco-House of the Future

05Early Morning 5am to 8 am

another. Redundancy is introduced as a new form of efficiency. The doubling of domestic functions allows for use and location to be determined according to climatic conditions, thus reducing the need for 24/7 climate control. A comfort shadow tracks the movements of inhabitants and anticipates their needs and preferences. Body and house becomes an intertwined single organism; energy salvaged from domestic activities is banked and used for domestic services as needed. The project assumes a “soft ownership” in which the home is connected to larger economic and ecological systems in a production-consumption cycle.


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gizmo green?


06Floor Plans: Level 1

08Mid-Morning 9am to 12pm


07Floor Plans: Level 2


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gizmo green?Diller Scofidio + Renfro— architecture magazine—new york times


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09Floor Plans A

10Floor Plans A continued

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11Early Afternoon 1pm to 4pm

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photographydiller scofidio + Renfro

12Floor Plans C

13Floor Plans A and B

14Early Afternoon 5pm to 8pm

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15Evening 9pm to 12pm

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mindseteric karjaluoto—project design—smashlab MIND

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change

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esigners are busy, and adding another large consideration to the mix seems daunting; nevertheless, sustainable practices are still just as necessary. “ Familiarize yourself with your government’s stance on climate change. Devote some time to reading and understanding the issues

surrounding sustainability. Engage your suppliers in your efforts by asking how they can help you become more “green”.

“Meet with your printer, tour their facilities, and learn about their environmental standards. Those you do business with reflect you as a designer.” Make a sustainable mindset second nature. Take the environment into account in all aspects of your studio’s decision making. Consider the complete cycle of the products you produce. Explore new ways that reduce your studio’s

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photography textprisma graphic eric karjaluoto

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mindseteric karjaluoto—project design—smashlab

01 Meet with your local printer

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R AW M AT E R I A L S

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mindset

negative impact and ask questions: Is the project necessary and effective? Are there other ways to achieve its goals? Put your knowledge to use in your daily work. Market your expertise instead of products. Use materials that are beset for the environment and strive to deliver zero-impact solutions. Work with local suppliers; minimize transport, recycle and use-recycled materials. Promote your studio as one that is environmentally conscious, but only if you are. Share information and build awareness for sustainability. Ask other designers to think sustainably and encourage them to take the Design Can Change pledge. Write or blog about your efforts to become sustainable and what you’re learning. Share your knowledge by presenting at a design school or local business event. Educate and encourage clients to embrace sustainable practices.

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eric karjaluoto—project design—smashlab

photography textmartin grohs eric karjaluoto

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e d i f i c e . c o mtexteric karjaluoto

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mindseteric karjaluoto—project design—smashlab

The Pledge: “In my professional practice, I will endeavor to: Learn: Engage in the topic and seek to understand the issue. Think: Make a sustainable mindset second nature. Act: Put my knowledge to use in my daily work. Inform: Share information and build awareness for sustainability. Unite: Spark change through collective strength.

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031931 Election Night

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first archmartin rauch & roger boltshauser—project design—rammed earth house in schilins (austria)

ith the construction of the rammed earth house by the company “lehm ton erde baukunst gmbh” (Soil Clay Earth Building Art Ltd.) the attempt has been made to visualize a sensible

cycle within an industrial framework. Comparing the value of human work with the use of energy and the value of materials in industrial construction methods that are rapidly spreading all over the world may prove an interesting object for further studies.The main theme of the project is an unpretentious earth house adapted to European demands and living standards. It is a realisation of the traditional earth house in its matter-of-course simplicity, its material-adequate use, the pure effect and genuineness of material, which meets the demand on modern living standards. The role of earthen architecture in Austria and economically similar European countries is essentially different from the one in low-wage countries. Whereas in the latter case rammed earth constructions are an economically attractive way of building, in Europe rammed earth is primarily interesting as a means of design. The reason for this is the difference in the economic systems, particularly in the value of human work as compared to energy. In building with earth the added value lies in the craftsmanship, not in the material or energy.

Project data:You can find the building in Schlins this is a small village in western Austria. The planning has been performed jointly by Architect Roger Boltshauser, Zürich & Martin Rauch, Schlins. The earth building has about 140 m2 living floor space with studios of 30 m2. The volume accounts for 120 m3 rammed earth, there are three storeys in load-bearing construction. The thickness of the walls is 45 cm plus 10 cm insulation, made of reed, on the inner side of the wall. The insulation is covered by 3 cm clay plastering which contains the heating pipes. The ceiling is stepped up with wooden beams. Regarding statics, in every floor there is a ring beam made of reinforced Trass lime (which is a historical and low energy consuming concrete) as is the lintel.Building technique and architectureOwing to the excellent composition of the local soil (i.e. weathered dolomite sedimentation) the excavated material could be used for building directly in its natural humid condition and without any further processing. Hence, the excavated material was only sieved and mixing was not necessary. So the excavation pit became a 100 per cent supplier of building material.Due to the high compaction rate of the material realised by means of an improved modern shuttering technique an increased static load-bearing capacity was achieved.Protection from humidity has supreme priority in earth construction. In this project also those parts that are in

contact with the natural soil (mainly the cellar) have been made of loam, sealed by a bitumen coating on the outside.Soil structures in our part of the world are often not visible as such from outside. Soil used to be covered by plastering or cladding, not only for protection against weathering, but also deliberately because of image reasons (“soil is the building material of the poor”). Nonetheless, it is well known that soil has excellent qualities regarding indoor climate regulation. It is becoming more important not only because of ecological reasons, but also due to the increasing demand for a healthy living environment. Ecological as well as aesthetic considerations are the determining factors for the use of the various loam construction techniques. Architectural principles concerning the materials used prescribe that loam houses should be noticeable and recognisable as a loam structure, even from the outside, notwithstanding its exposure to climate and weathering.Modern architectural language often calls for large window openings. This can be achieved in combination with concrete. A sensible combination of materials and their adequate use widens the architectural possibilities – each material for its best application. The appropriate combination of the two materials, based on their high friction values, increases the resistance of the building to earthquakes.

Wlooking “ ”

textmartin rauch & roger boltshauser

photographymartin rauch & roger boltshauser

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favorite among collectors, the fada bullet is also known as the “streamliner”. Made of cat Bakelite,

it came in a range of color combinations, that may have changed dramatically over time. This one was originally all translucent onix white, for instance. The knobs and the dial frame took slightly different hues from the rest of the cabinet. Radios like these can fetch four digit prices, specially when in rare and contrasting color combinations. This design was first produced in 1941 as the model 115, then released again after the war as the model 1000 with minute changes.The golden dial and the lens were made of celluloid, but the lens is a replacement.The radio is 26 cm wide.

Developed with materials contributing to a more sustainable

future.

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WWIIstreamlined design for “TIME”

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in historygerson lessa—plastic history

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01 The Fada Bullet

02 The Westclox c.1934

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e d i f i c e . c o mphotography textgerson lessa gerson lessa

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foundmartin grohs—graphic designer

martin grohs

leipzig germany 01

01 Self Portrait Martin Grohs

look up his work on flickr.

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imminent

photography textoleg moiseyenko collin dunn

illustrationpeter arkle

collin dunn —sass magazine—seattle, washington

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01Designing Green starts with simplicity.

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reen-minded, sustainable industrial design is certainly nothing new. Unfortunately, designers have gotten a bad rap from time to time for being unnecessarily wasteful and dreaming up ridiculous ideas and products

that have no practical application at all. I think we all remember the Rubix cube; need I say more? The same accusations are true in the fashion industry, certainly, but if anyone out there things that great, green things aren’t happening in fashion, go read about Johanna Hofring and eat crow. Industrial design is all around all of us, everywhere, and not all of it good.

But I have seen the future, my friends, and the future is good. I recently had the pleasure of visiting an industrial design class at the University of Washington as they presented

their final semester projects. Before I can tell you what I saw there, consider these products: used semi-truck brake pads, last Sunday’s New York Times, unused athletic shoe insoles, empty soda cans, and discarded paint chips. All of these things usually have a one-way ticket to either the trash can or the recycle bin, and in both places they eventually add to the collective pile of junk that is waste created by human beings living on this planet. Keep these items in the back of your mind, and ask yourself, “What would happen if...?”This is the question that each of the design students found themselves answering as they endeavored toward creating something useful from something they found in the garbage can. Professor Louise St. Pierre asks her students to consider alternative prospects for the products they found. “I want my students to be able to look at important questions from very divergent perspectives,” she says. She wants her students to be able to harmonize what humans need and what humans want; admittedly,

this is not an easy task, but in the end all came up with something that even MacGyver would be proud of. But how?Remember those brake pads, newspapers, insoles and cans? They all no longer exist in their original form. The brake pads have been redesigned into “Oki,” a bookshelf and a catch-all bowl, the brainchildren of Lauren Saint, Egan Metcalf and Christine Lee. The curve of the pad has been re-imagined and serves as both the edge of the bookcase and the basin for the “catch-all” bowl, a great place for keys, change, cell phones and the like. The simple shape and antiquated look gives the appearance of an artifact found in a New Delhi street market, though in truth, Oki is the most well-traveled bookcase you’ll ever find; it just comes by way of the long-haul trucker and not the Third World ceramics-maker.The newspapers, comics and all, were shredded, mixed with plaster, and molded into planters, complete with drainage holes and a wooden stand. Though not large enough to cultivate a summer watermelon or ear of corn,

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“But I have seen the future, my friends, and the future is good.”

photography textoleg moiseyenko collin dunn

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they are a perfect fit for urban windowsill gardening. A sleek, smooth design gives them a classic look and feel. The folks at IKEA would kill to get their hands on these planters, though team members Dylan Davis, Marcel Blabolil and Jean Lee might first want to come up with a more Swedish-sounding name than “Rinnova planters.”So what happens when the paint store down the street decides to stop carrying “Summer Peach” or “Lipstick Pink?” Usually, all of these paint chips go straight to the garbage or recycling bin, to make way for “Indian Summer Peach” and “Lip Gloss Pink,” but Terri Lee, Chuck Ely and Michael Nash turned them into “Hue” lights. With 1001 different color combination options, you can finally have a lamp that perfectly matches your “Canary Yellow” walls.The final project showcased an ingenious way to recycle pop culture: coasters made from aluminum soda cans. A flat metal coaster is a little on the thin side, so each coaster was padded with an unused athletic shoe insole, function

“reused brakepads?”

illustration textpeter arkle collin dunn

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discarded by the hundreds at your local shoe store when people insert their custom insoles. Framed by vinyl tubing to eliminate the dangerously-sharp edge of the cut aluminum, they fit perfectly inside tuna cans for a simple, unique and functional package to a nifty, fun product.The one common denominator with all of these projects is that aesthetics and the materials and resources used to make them are equally important. Professor St. Pierre stresses the need to view the world from many divergent perspectives; it isn’t just about creating a product that is beautiful. She says that beauty is innate, and all human cultures pay attention to beauty, thereby making beauty a human need. She reminded me that Buckminster Fuller once said,

“If I look at a design and it isn’t beautiful, it doesn’t work,” so while the beauty paradigm is an important one, industrial

design cannot be about beauty for beauty’s sake. She wants her students to reach beyond something that is just in good taste today; a product that has “enduring beauty” are ultimately the most successful, and the most sustainable.

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imminentcollin dunn —sass magazine—seattle, washington

e d i f i c e . c o millustration textpeter arkle collin dunn

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”04Peter Arkle Japanese Naked Festival for Time Asia

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craftvanessa coyler—styling—insideout

01 No manufacturing needed. Hand-made tea bags by Jessica Wilson

photography—jessica wilson, jek in the box—california


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Macramé, appliqué, cross stitch and crochet aren’t often linked with cutting-edge style, but the new technology and an appreciation of bespoke beauty have refueled interest in old-fashioned crafts.


he return to craft comes with a technological twist – from large mass produced designer tables that look they have been crocheted to small scale manufactured rolls of sticky tape with delicate, lace-like patterns. Patchwork, felting, crotchet and stitching – the resurgence of these crafts is not just about using traditional methods; the

finished items also soften the look of contemporary home wares with warm, tactile and personal touches. Contemporary craft is all about mixing detailing in unlikely ways – ceramics with a knitted look, pop-art-style with embroidered wall hangings – while also keeping the effect pared back. The idea is to make it simple yet striking. No longer just a wrapping essential, sticky tape has gone ‘designer’ and it now a star in its own right. If you’ve seen the work of artists Mark Khaisman (www.khaismanstudio.com) and Daniel Argyle (www.danielargyle.com), you’ll be aware of the creative heights tape can reach. You too, can approach the sticky business of art with flair and confidence. The point behind this form of design is just this–simple resources keep the manufacturing of these same products down. If you can knit a blanket, why purchase it? If you can build a table out of left over wood from another odd job, why not build it? These kinds of quesitons are what relate crafts, or “side projects”, to sustainability.

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02 Lace-like patterns and patchwork by Dottie Angel

03Jessica Wilson yarn supplies. Getting ready for a swatch.

photography textdottie angel vanessa coyler

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Interiors play an important role in the adoption of environmental ways of living. In as much as the shell of a building may enable the building to reduce the use of resources through insulation and renewable technologies - interiors can affect direct behavioural change, and compliment the aspirations of a building’s architectural ambitions.Beautiful eco interiors can reflect your environmental aspirations whilst creating spaces that reduce their use of resources (such as gas, water and electricity), make the most of sustainable materials, and encourage the use of recycled materials and recycling.

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04 Edifice of a Pillow

05Patched pillows, patterns mixed with modern furniture using old blankets and placemats

Craftivism is the practice of engaged creativity, especially regarding political or social causes. By using their creative energy to help make the world a better place, craftivists help bring about positive change via personalized activism. Craftivism allows practitioners to customize their particular skills to address particular causes.Craftivism is an idea whose time has come. Given the states of materialism and mass production, the rise of feminism, and the time spanned from the Industrial Revolution, the beginning of the 21st century was the right time for the evolution of such an idea. Instead of being a number in a march or mass protest, craftivists apply their creativity toward making a difference one person at a time.Through activities such as teaching knitting lessons, crocheting hats for the less fortunate, and sewing blankets for abandoned animals, craftivism allows for creativity to expand previous boundaries and enter the arena of activism. In the pre-Industrial Revolution era, craft skills were needed to clothe the family and maintain a working household. As mass production increased, there became no need to knit sweaters for winter warmth or weave baskets to hold vegetables. Crafts were bypassed by modernity.

The do-it-yourself spirit was stifled in the area of wardrobe creativity, and post-9/11, a rising sense of hopelessness to change anything in the world was unleashed. Feminism was still heavily rooted in theory and strength, but enough time had spanned between the economic and social disparities between women and men in the 1970s that women began to look again at domesticity as something to be valued instead of ignored. Wanting to conquer both a drill and a knitting needle, there was a return to home economics tinged with a hint of irony as well as a fond embracement.The term craftivism surfaced in the first few years of the 21st century and gained an online presence with the website Craftivism.com in 2003 to promote the symbiotic relationship between craft and activism. After craft skills such as knitting regained popularity, the idea emerged that instead of using solely one’s voice to advocate political viewpoints, one could use their creativity.By advocating the use of creativity for the improvement of the world, craftivists worldwide taught knitting lessons, sewed scarves for battered women’s shelters, and knitted hats for chemotherapy patients. In a world that was growing increasingly large and unfamiliar, craftivism fought to bring back the personal into our daily lives to replace some of the mass produced. In promoting the idea

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07Hanging up my supplies by Dottie Angel


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06A lamp mobile

that people can use their own creativity to improve the world, craftivism allows those who wish to voice their opinions and support their causes the chance to do just that...but without chanting or banner waving and at their own pace.

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thermoplasticaxion international—business—businesswire

xion international holdings, inc. (otcbb: axih), a next-generation technology innovator utilizing recycled plastic for high-load industrial products, today announced that demolition has begun of the current structures at the ft. eustis army transportation corp. military base in virginia

in order to replace those spans with two new railroad bridges made almost entirely from axion’s 100% recycled plastic structural products.the us army commissioned these bridges last year and construction is expected to last four months. Axion is providing all parts for the two Recycled Structural Composite (RSC) bridges, including pilings, I-beams for pile caps and main girders, and crossties/curbing. All parts of the bridges will be made from Axion products except the steel fasteners and bolts.“We are pleased to announce the Ft. Eustis project is underway as we demolish the existing wood spans and make way for two new bridges utilizing our patented thermoplastic technology,” stated Axion CEO, Jim Kerstein. “Being the first known structures of this kind able to support 130 tons is a milestone achievement considering the main components of these bridges are made entirely from 100% recycled consumer and industrial plastic. In fact, the only non-recycled plastic components of these bridges will be the steel connectors holding our Axion parts together and the rubber bearing pads that provide cushion between the main girders and pile caps.”Jim Kerstein went on to say, “By utilizing recycled plastic, not only will these bridges not rot, rust or corrode like traditional building materials, they will also help divert literally tons of recycled products that would normally be destined for landfills. This includes household items such as milk jugs, detergent bottles, and car bumpers.”The new Recycled Structural Composite (RSC) bridges will replace two wooden bridges that have been taken out of service and they will be completed faster and less expensively than could have been achieved using wood, steel or concrete. The new short span bridges will extend approximately 40 feet and 80 feet

A respectively. Each of these bridges are designed to achieve a high-load rating of 130 tons (i.e. 260,000 pounds) in order to transport locomotives and freight traffic for military movement and base exercises and achieve a Cooper E60 Rating.The design and engineering work is being supported by Virginia-based Centennial Contractors Enterprises, the prime job order contractor for the project, and Parsons Brinckerhoff, which has more than a century of experience in working on major complex bridges including such recent structures as the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge over the Potomac River outside Washington, D.C.; the Arthur Ravenel, Jr. Bridge over the Cooper River in Charleston, South Carolina; and the William Natcher Bridge over the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky. The demolition and construction activities are being performed by English Construction Company, Inc., a privately owned company, in existence for over 100 years and conducting operations in eight states throughout the mid-Atlantic and Southeast. Innovative Green Solutions, an Axion channel partner, introduced Axion to the Fort Eustis project and participated in the negotiation and development of the project.Fort Eustis is home to the US Army Transportation Corps, which is the branch of the US Army responsible for the movement of personnel and material by truck, rail, air, and sea. Officers and enlisted soldiers at Fort Eustis and its satellite installation, Fort Story, receive education and on-the-job training in all modes of transportation, aviation maintenance, logistics and deployment doctrine and research.Developed in conjunction with scientists at Rutgers University, Axion’s cutting edge technology has resulted in virtually 100% recycled plastic materials, Recycled Structural Composites (RSCs) that are the first known structural products of their kind that can support heavy loads. Compared to traditional infrastructure materials such as wood, steel or concrete, Axion’s innovative products are more durable and significantly longer lasting.

photography textaxion credit axion

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07Hanging up my supplies by Dottie Angel

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