Building Skin Developed That Could Cool Our Cities

© Harunori Noda

The urban heat island effect - the hot, overwhelming temperatures that a city’s concrete produces – has a huge impact on livability and comfort within the city. Now, an elegant cooling system has been designed that not only reduces energy usage, but – should it be installed on multiple buildings – could even lower the overall temperature of a city itself. Learn more, after the break.

Designed by Nikken Sekkei, The Sony City Osaki Building, which recently won the 2014 Tall Building Innovation Award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), features an innovative new cooling system: a skin of water-filled ceramic pipes known as BioSkin. BioSkin reduces the surface temperature of a building up to 12°C, and can even lower the micro-climate surrounding the building 2°C. The CTBUH explains how:

“The simplicity of the system is elegant. The BioSkin tubes are made of extruded aluminum cores, with a highly water-retentive terra-cotta shell attached to the aluminum core using an elastic adhesive. When rainwater collects on the rooftop, it is then drained to a subsurface storage tank, where it is filtered and sterilized. This water is then pumped up and circulated through the pipes, which in the live test case were incorporated as balcony railings on a Tokyo office building, reminiscent of the horizontal screens seen throughout Japan and known as sudare. Rainwater penetrates outward through the porous ceramic, evaporating from the pipe’s surface, cooling the surrounding air. Excess water is then drained down to the soil of the premises to the extent possible, normalizing the water cycle and reducing the load on sewage infrastructure.”

 Cite: Galloway, Andrew. "Building Skin Developed That Could Cool Our Cities" 21 Jul 2014. ArchDaily. Accessed 11 Aug 2014. <http://www.archdaily.com/?p=529486>

The World Without Landscape Architects!

Lush vegetative planting at the Floating Gardens; credit: Turenscape

Alan Reisman’s gripping book “The World Without Us” details what would occur after a sudden vanishing of human life from the Earth. Nature would reclaim the built environment through processes that would begin within hours of the end of human intervention. But what if there were a world without “us,” as in those of us who guide change in the landscape, both throughout history and going forward? Here we will explore how things would have been different, as well as potential consequences going forward if the world was without landscape architects!

Urban Design

The idea of a “central park” is not unique to New York City. Many other cities of all shapes and sizes have developed around a communal green space that provides people with an area of respite away from the hustle and bustle of city life. Without landscape architects, what would have taken the place of parks? Government centers, massive transit hubs, and superstructures may have become the centerpieces to urban form. Without parks and public spaces as integral parts of daily life, perhaps people would have fled cities altogether in search of less claustrophobic surroundings.

Access to Nature

Landscape architects have played a crucial role in the planning of hiking trails, bikeways, and jogging paths that provide humans with a means of connectivity and recreation. Given the option, many people have opted to make a scenic bike ride to work a relaxing part of their day. On a larger scale, design has allowed for a wider audience to experience wonders of nature that were previously off limits or difficult to get to. By creating environmentally sensitive plans for state and national parks and other natural areas of interest, there is now incredible accessibility for all to take in the sights and sounds of the world’s most pristine places.

Ecology

The development of urban, rural, and suburban areas has reduced biodiversity at varying levels, but would have been much worse without ecologically minded people as part of the design team. By selecting native plantings and advocating for the removal of invasive species, we have prevented the total destruction of many of the Earth’s unique ecosystems. Just the existence of plants in cities helps filter air pollution and maintains a healthy air quality for urban inhabitants. On the fringes, strategic preservation and planting have saved species of plants and animals alike from extinction. Many of these are essential parts of biological cycles that provide food and medicine that we rely on heavily.

Erosion

  

The erosion of riverbanks and cliffs is a natural process, but the rate at which it occurs has been accelerated by human activities. Many rivers were dammed, widened, and dredged, leading to higher volumes of water. Although the speed of the water was slowed, the new barriers were not nearly as durable as the previous, naturally occurring edge conditions. Because of this, a large portion of landscape architectural work over the past century has been to stabilize riparian zones to prevent rivers from becoming too wide and subjecting developed areas to constant flooding.

Flooding

Stormwater management has been the hot button sustainability issue of late, but without the less flashy water solutions of the past, we would be in some serious trouble. Flooding would be rampant in areas with no natural drainage solutions, where we would have to rely on retention and detention ponds designed to function in different storm events. The loss of wetlands reduces the amount of absorbent surface in the landscape. Incorporating floodable marshes and riverside buffers into master plans has prevented overflow and instituted diverse ecosystems. In the city, bio swales and rain gardens are assisting and replacing crumbling sewer infrastructure. If these sustainable methods of water catchment were to suddenly disappear, the rise in global urbanization would quickly overwhelm existing systems.

Granted, landscape architects weren’t the only ones involved in these innovations. Ecologists, horticulturalists, civil engineers, and architects have all played a role in the process. We have certainly taken the lead on bringing everyone to the table, and should continue to so. Can you think of other situations that would be very different without the presence of landscape architects?

Article written by Peter Salmon

http://landarchs.com/world-without-landscape-architects/

Unique Chameleon Woody Vine Discovered in Chile!!!

Move over, Sherlock Holmes. There is a new master of disguise—and it’s a plant. Camouflage and mimicry are usually reserved for the animal realm. The hawk moth caterpillar scares away predators by resembling a snake. Myrmarachne jumping spiders imitate ants as they creep up on unsuspecting insects—fangs ready. Fewer examples of mimicry—or crypsis—are known for plants. But as in some mistletoe species in Australia, all of these imposters copy only one other species. That’s not the case with the woody vine Boquila trifoliolata, which transforms its leaves to copy a variety of host trees. Native to Chile and Argentina, B. trifoliolata is the first plant shown to imitate several hosts. It is a rare quality—known as a mimetic polymorphism—that was previously observed only in butterflies, according to this study, published today in Current Biology. When the vine climbs onto a tree’s branches, its versatile leaves (inset) can change their size, shape, color, orientation, and even the vein patterns to match the surrounding foliage (middle panel; the red arrow points to the vine, while the blue arrow indicates the host plant). If the vine crosses over to a second tree, it changes, even if the new host leaves are 10 times bigger with a contrasting shape (right panel). The deceit serves as a defense against plant-eating herbivores like weevils and leaf beetles, according the researchers. They compared the charlatan leaves hanging on branches with the leaves on vines still crawling on the forest floor in search of a tree or scaling leafless trunks. Herbivory was 33% and 100% worse for the vines on the ground and on tree trunks, respectively. It is unclear how B. trifoliolata vines discern the identity of individual trees and shape-shift accordingly. The vines could read cues hidden in odors, or chemicals secreted by trees or microbes may transport gene-activating signals between the fraud and the host, the researchers say.

Source: Science Magazine

Paper or Plastic?

As a landscape architect, I am always thinking about how the natural world can play a larger role in our urban environments. Obviously trees and parks are the primary methods that come to mind.  But I recently came across an article in Architect Magazine that examined the role cellulose could potentially play in our urban environments...that is, in the role we currently see played by conventional plastics.

Conventional plastics are inexpensive and can be found everywhere.  Site furniture, play structures, and decking are just a few of the items I immediately think about with practical use in landscape architecture.  If these items were replaced with an 'environmentally persistent compound' that provided ecological benefit, there could be vast improvements concerning the vitality of our urban environments.

This new product, created by Zeoform, is made of nothing more than recycled paper waste and water. Zeoform mimics the characteristics of plastic and wood and can be molded, routed, sanded, engraved, and laser-cut into about any shape you could imagine.


Image courtesy of Zeoform.

There are a few questions I have been thinking about.  With this material being biodegradable and made of cellulose and water, is there a high potential for the material to loose its structural qualities and acquire mold? The product is "a combination of fiber entanglement and hydroxyl bonding" but how will this hold up to the everyday wear and tear in the urban environment?

I am excited to see how this product will play out.  Like Ecovative Design's Mushroom Materials (see past blog post), These are the types of innovations we like to see here at The Sharp End of the Green Stick!

Rate of Tree Carbon Accumulation Increases Continuously with Tree Size

Forests are major components of the global carbon cycle, providing substantial feedback to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations1. Our ability to understand and predict changes in the forest carbon cycle—particularly net primary productivity and carbon storage—increasingly relies on models that represent biological processes across several scales of biological organization, from tree leaves to forest stands. Yet, despite advances in our understanding of productivity at the scales of leaves and stands, no consensus exists about the nature of productivity at the scale of the individual tree, in part because we lack a broad empirical assessment of whether rates of absolute tree mass growth (and thus carbon accumulation) decrease, remain constant, or increase as trees increase in size and age.

A global analysis of 403 tropical and temperate tree species, shows that for most species mass growth rate increases continuously with tree size. Thus, large, old trees do not act simply as senescent carbon reservoirs but actively fix large amounts of carbon compared to smaller trees; at the extreme, a single big tree can add the same amount of carbon to the forest within a year as is contained in an entire mid-sized tree. The apparent paradoxes of individual tree growth increasing with tree size despite declining leaf-level and stand-leve productivity can be explained, respectively, by increases in a tree’s total leaf area that outpace declines in productivity per unit of leaf area and, among other factors, age-related reductions in population density.

Results resolve conflicting assumptions about the nature of tree growth, inform efforts to undertand and model forest carbon dynamics, and have additional implications for theories of resource allocation and plant senescence.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12914.html

Filtering dirty water with plant xylem!

Tree pores (red and blue) located within the sapwood filter bacteria (green) in dirty water.photo credit: Boutilier et al.

To turn dirty lakewater into drinkable H2O, peel away the bark from a nearby tree branch and slowly pour water through the wood. According to new research, this neat, low-tech trick ought to trap any bacteria, leaving you with uncontaminated water. 

 

Okay, time for a little tree physiology. To get water and minerals up a tree, wood is comprised of xylem, porous tissue arranged in tubes for conducing sap from the roots upwards through a system of vessels and pores. Xylem tissue is found in sapwood, the younger wood that lies in concentric circles between the central heartwood and the bark. Tiny pores called pit membranes are scattered throughout the walls of the vessels, allowing sap to flow from one vessel to another, feeding various structures along a tree’s length. 

 

Turns out, the same tissue that evolved to transport sap up the length of a tree also has exactly the right-sized pores to allow water through while blocking bacteria. Additionally, the pores also trap air bubbles, which could kill a tree if spread in the xylem. “Plants have had to figure out how to filter out bubbles but allow easy flow of sap,” study author Rohit Karnik from MIT says in a news release. “It’s the same problem with water filtration where we want to filter out microbes but maintain a high flow rate. So it’s a nice coincidence that the problems are similar.” 

 

As Karnik’s team finds, a small piece of sapwood can filter out more than 99 percent of the E. coli from water, at the rate of several liters per day.

 

To study sapwood’s water-filtering potential, the team collected white pine branches and stripped off their outer bark. They attached inch-long sections of sapwood to plastic tubing, then sealed it with epoxy and secured it with clamps.

They tested their improvised filter using water mixed with particles ranging in size. They found that while sapwood naturally filters out particles bigger than 70 nanometers, it wasn’t able to separate out 20-nanometer particles. 

 

When they poured water contaminated with inactivated E. coli through the sapwood filter, they saw how bacteria had accumulated around the pores in the first few millimeters of the wood. In the false-color electron microscope image above, (green) bacteria are trapped over pit membranes (red and blue). 

 

Existing water-purification technologies that use chlorine treatments and membranes with nano-scale pores are expensive. Even boiling water requires fuel for heat. Here, just take some wood and make a filter of it -- it’s low-cost, efficient, and readily accessible for rural communities as well as dehydrated campers in the Northeast. “Ideally, a filter would be a thin slice of wood you could use for a few days, then throw it away and replace at almost no cost,” Karnik explains. 

 

The group is looking into the filtering potential of other types of sapwood. Flowering trees, for example, tend to have smaller pores than coniferous trees and may be able to filter out even smaller particles, like viruses. 

The question now is how does this science become a game changer for underdeveloped nations who need it the most?  What materials will the most effective filter need and are there specific species of trees that will filter more effectively. Future studies will only empower nature-loving enthusiasts. Until then, let's plant some trees!

 

The work was published in PLOS ONE last week. 

Watch 63 Years of Climate Change in one Horrifying GIF

Global warming is still the topic of much debate, but a short video posted recently by NASA is fairly convincing. The 15-second animation, which was posted by NASA last week and picked up on Tuesday by Co.Exist, shows a view of the entire globe with an overlay that details climate change. NASA scientists analyzed data collected over the past 63 years by 1,000 meteorological stations from around the world, and the animation they compiled shows just how rapidly the Earth’s climate is changing.

The GIF is a consolidated version of NASA’s full animation that helps illustrate just how drastic the change has been since 1950. Temperatures in some regions have swung by as much as 4 degrees Celsius in the past 60 years alone.

“Long-term trends in surface temperatures are unusual and 2013 adds to the evidence for ongoing climate change,” GISS climatologist Gavin Schmidt said with regard to NASA’s findings. “While one year or one season can be affected by random weather events, this analysis shows the necessity for continued, long-term monitoring.”

According to the report, the average global temperature in 2013 was 58.3 degrees; Fahrenheit. That’s 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the mid-20th century baseline temperature.

“Last year, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed levels of 400 parts per million, the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide reached a higher point than it had at any time in the last 800,000 years,” Sydney Brownstone noted.

NASA’s full animation follows below.



http://bgr.com/2014/01/29/global-warming-gif-video/