Frick Park, Pittsburgh

I was able to go to Frick Park last week. It is located on the east end of Pittsburgh. I was told it is the second largest urban park in the world (but maybe just the US), the first being Central Park in New York. The park has many playgrounds, tennis courts, fields, and walking paths. And all in between are patches of forest. Children could play forever in those woods and never get bored. They could let their imaginations run wild as they too run through the wild. I hope you enjoy some of the photos that I took.

I was able to do some open space and playscape design in a previous course, but I never really considered a  forest as a playground until very recently. Frick Park is an excellent example of how it works. The picture above shows a field that I came across after walking on a foot path for sometime. The forest just opened up and there was this secret playing field. I was told that there were probably several more similar to this throughout the park.

There was at least one stream flowing through the park where I was walking. The park wraps around much of the nearby canyons so there were probably more streams like it. 

Along the perimeter of the park there were several playgrounds, baseball fields, tennis courts, and probably much much more. 

It was a neat experience, especially the forested areas, and it made me want to add more nature in any future open space designs that I might do. 

Embodied Energy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXzYoKtRqPg

A quick definition of embodied energy is the energy required for an entire lifecycle of that item. This includes material extractions, transport, manufacture, assembly, and deconstruction.

I'll use a brick as a brief (and no way complete) example:

Extraction:

• A tractor scoops up the raw clay material
• That tractor is made of and uses metal, wires, gasoline, etc
• Labors
• A driver must operate the tractor
• The driver ate breakfast that morning
• Trucks carry the clay to the factory (possibly hundreds of miles)
• Truck material, labors, roads, etc

Manufacture:

• Processes the clay
• mixed with straw and other materials
• straw grew in a field
• sun gave light, photosynthesis occurred, etc
• put into mold
• mold was designed, calculated, etc
• Fires the brick
• Electric furnace heats the bricks
• electricity came from grid
• runs off of coal burning power plant
• transmission lose 
• scrubbers needed to clean the smoke stacks
• heat lose, dissipated energy 
• Moves bricks to warehouse 
• semi-truck or train

Assembly:

• Bricks stored on wooden palette
• wooden palette came from a tree: extracted, processed, assembled, etc (I think you get the idea)
• Inventoried, cataloged, bar coded
• Purchased and moved to construction site
• labors begin laying brick for a building, one by one
• labors eat breakfast, drank coffee, drove to work, etc
• Coffe has embodied energy too
• coffee beans came from Columbia, shipped by boat,

Deconstruction:

• Building is removed
• bricks can possibly be used in another location

Transport:

• All along the way there were roads for the tractors, trucks, and other vehicles
• Vehicles run on gas or diesel
• create pollution in the air

Clearly a lot of energy is embodied in everything around us. Even something as everyday as a single brick, has energy tied to it. That is one reason why recycling old materials is so important. If it can be reused it should, otherwise all (or most of) that embodied energy would be lost.

Concrete and CO2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LhST0dKMwY8

http://calera.com/index.php/

These are some examples of ways to use things like concrete - something that normally produces CO2 - and engineer it so that uses CO2 as a building material.

Brent said that for every one ton of portland cement produces one ton of CO2. It inspired him to look for solutions elsewhere and he found it in nature - in the coral reef.

Calera makes materials that sequester the CO2 from the atmosphere; cementitous materials that could replace the typical portland cement.

Plat of Zion

Urban designers in Salt Lake City praise innovations of the ‘Mormon Grid’

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/56386379-90/lake-salt-duany-blocks.html.csp

Salt Lake City's large grid has some potential benefits. I like the idea of a ring of buildings - high density, mixed-use, green development around the perimeter of the 10 acre blocks with a "block of agriculture" in the center. It is important to keep the buildings facing the street interesting and vibrant. Furthermore, the streets should not be so large as they are now (which is roughly 140 ft of Right-of-Way).

Social Sustainability (Part 2)

Here is a short article about the strengths of urban cores as apposed to sprawl.

http://unews.utah.edu/news_releases/strong-urban-cores-promote-socializing-in-the-city/

In the future I plan on taking about social interactions and the relation with innovation/ creativity.

Nature as design guidelines and blueprints

Sadly, I have to admit that the idea of using nature as a guide and blueprint for solving problems had not dawned on me til very recently. I can say with high levels of confidence that the civil engineering courses that I participated in did not promote this idea. It was more important to get the math right than to design the solution correctly.

Nature has been solving the same problems that we (humans) face each and every day. For instance, how do I build a durable shelter from the elements while still remaining cool in the summer and warm in the winter? How does one purify water? How is solar radiation harvested for power?

Some people, however, have figured out how to follow nature's blueprints.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/packaging-you-can-eat.html

Fruit often comes in an "edible packaging" and people like David Edwards are developing the same thing for other foods.

Janine Benyus gets it. She talks about biomimicry - a new discipline that learns and takes design advice from the planet.

http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.html

Clothesline Paradox

The idea of the "clothesline paradox" which was explained by solar architect Steve Baer (and possibly others) is basically as follows:

Oil is drilled from the earth, say in Alaska. It is then piped hundreds of miles to be refined and shipped throughout the country. The oil is then burned to produce electricity. The electricity is then pushed through wires, undergoing transmission loss along the way, and eventually sent out onto the grid. From there the electricity powers a clothes dryer - turning the drum, heating the coil and ultimately allowing the clothes within to dry.

On the other hand, the clothes could have been put on a string and hung out to dry on a clothesline.