Pedagogical Hydrology: Towards a more Empathic (and Emphatic) Green Infrastructure

In previous posts, we have explored how green infrastructure, urban water systems, tidal cycles, and building performance visualizations can be made more engaging, interactive, and sensuous, using ideas from Joan Nassauer, David Orr, Giancarlo Magnone, and others. Designers like Studio Dreiseitl and Stacy Levy have shown us how the physical form of water infrastructure can be inflected to tell urban residents a story about where their water comes from and where it is going, engaging all five of their senses. This month, one of the authors had an opportunity to put these lessons into practice in a brief exercise done in collaboration with a team of stormwater engineering students on a project for the US EPA’s Rainworks Challenge.

Framing the View to Nature: Windows as Empathic Mediators between Indoor and Outdoor Ecology

 

in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana house, windows based on Sumac branching patterns serve as a bridge between the geometry of the interior and the plant life outdoors.

In previous posts, we have already discussed the importance of the threshold condition, proposed new designs for resource flow interfaces, and presented ways architects have charged the nature-architecture interface with meaning. American Prairie School masters provide stunning examples of this, as in Louis Sullivan’s ornament at the Carson Pirie Scott building, which injects natural rhythms and forms into the liminal space of the window reveal, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Sumac window in the Dana house, which frames a view of vegetation through panes based on a geometric interpretation of that same vegetation. Today’s post takes a deeper dive into windows as mediators and framing devices. How can the design of the windows of a building change our empathic relationship with what is on the other side? How do the shape, material quality, and sensory aspects of a window affect how we perceive nature in relationship to our own bodies? Are there ways that windows can communicate more information than immediately meets the eye, becoming translation devices between natural and built environments? To answer these questions, this post takes a ramble through architectural history, from medieval stained-glass window sundials to high-tech responsive glazing.

The Kroon Hall Metabolic Ornament Project: An Ecoempathic Approach to Expressing a Building’s Resource Consumption

Can a building be designed in a way that allows its inhabitants to understand its metabolism and their role within it? As we try to make buildings more dynamic and responsive while abating their resource needs, the communicative aspect of green building, especially when it comes to guiding building users’ decisions, becomes increasingly crucial.  This post explores the ways in which architecture, the language of ornament, and the flow analyses of industrial ecology can fuse into a new kind of device for rendering legible the metabolism of a building through an applied case study for Kroon Hall at Yale University in New Haven, CT.

This is the first in a series of write-ups about this project for the Yale Office of Sustainability; look out for a more developed version of this design in an upcoming post!

Kroon Hall at Yale University

Kroon Hall, the Yale School of Forestry’s home, was built with the intention of creating a real-world demonstration of the latest green building technologies and biophilic principles. The design by Hopkins and Centerbrook Architects features natural ventilation, solar electricity and hot water, and beautiful glue-laminated timber arches. The building accommodates an unexpected degree of occupant-directed flexibility; most rooms feature operable windows, modifiable lights, and adjustable thermostats, and indicator lights in public areas announce when outdoor temperatures are favorable for natural ventilation. Despite the inclusion of a numerically-focused building dashboard at the entrance, however, there is no real way in which occupants of the building are made aware of the resource flows needed to sustain Kroon Hall’s operations, or made to see the consequences of their decisions within the building. Besides a distributed electronic “user guide” and periodic green building tours, there are no permanent reminders within the building of the kinds of systems that sustain it. 

Ornament and Ecology: Developing a Visual Language around Urban Salamanders

One question that becomes more prominent as we continue explorations involving design and ecology is what language we should utilize to fluidly communicate nature to urban dwellers. This post explores the power of ornament to mediate and explicate natural systems. In what follows, we hope show our thinking process as we explore answers to this question.

In a brief thinking exercise we undertook with two collaborators, including ornament theoretician Kent Bloomer, we explored a hypothetical site that had a few key elements: a surrounding urban area, a natural terrestrial and seasonal aquatic habitat for native plants and animals, a potential for constructed ecological experiments (mesocosms), and a need for demarcating hierarchies of spaces ranging from public to protected.

Storytelling through Empathic Form: Stacy Levy’s Translation of Urban Nature into Art

Rain Ravine, Levy’s Rainwater-powered Water Feature at the Frick Environmental Center

An important aspect of Ecoempathic design is the translation of natural processes in buildings into a form that humans can physiologically connect with. This is precisely what Pennsylvania-based eco-artist Stacy Levy has been exploring through a series of installations, sculptures, fountains, and integrated architectural elements for the last several decades. As the artist explains,

“my work and research gives visual form to natural processes that would otherwise remain invisible. To build these visual metaphors, I mesh the clarity of diagrams, the beauty of natural forms and the visceral sense of the site. My practice is motivated by imaging what is too small to be seen, too invisible to be considered or too vast to be understood. “

For Levy, art becomes a vehicle for translation, a way to allow “the built environment to tell its ecological story to the people that inhabit it.” (1) This post takes a deep dive into Levy’s impressive portfolio, paying particular attention to the way that the artist develops project-specific visual languages that connect smaller elements into a larger ecological narrative.

Animating Hydrology: Studio Dreiseitl’s Ecoempathic Approach to On-Site Water Management

This Moroccan fountain celebrates water through the use of geometric and vegetal ornament. The water creates a blossoming of life in what is otherwise a somewhat harsh and protective architecture.

The history of architecture and urbanism is full of magnificent examples of water features designed to celebrate the power and significance of this precious resource. Indeed, in the days before indoor plumbing, fountains, springs, and wells, as the source of water in cities, possessed a special cultural status. In Moroccan fountains, for instance, water spouts, as sources of life, and important aspects of Islamic ritual, become the holders of rich geometric ornament. The fountains of Rome, each grander than the next, are set up to glorify the immense power of nature–and of the popes who commissioned them.

Rome’s Trevi Fountain: here, the gushing forth of water causes a classical facade to morph into a natural landscape of boulders and pools.

The interface between the rigid Classical architecture of the facade and the abstraction of nature is most fascinating. Here, a pilaster begins to crumble into a jagged rock. The appearance of water is able to inflect not just the fountain but also the architecture around it, reasserting its importance and power.

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the 20th century, however, as technologies allowed for water infrastructure to be hidden out of sight, the infrastructural aspect of urban water features was lost. Today, we stand at a critical juncture: new ideas and advances are allowing water to once again emerge as a functional element of cities as part of new green infrastructure projects. This post, through the framework of Visual Ecology, investigates how designers can use the form of urban water features to create empathic and sensorial connections between urban dwellers and water, using Studio Dreiseitl’s work as a case study.

Encoding Ecoempathy: How Existing Building Rating Systems Parameterize the Human-Nature Connection

Living Building Challenge’s Biophilic Environment Imperative, part of the Health & Happiness Petal

The criticisms of LEED, arguably the world’s most successful green building rating system, are many: it is too focused on mechanical performance and metrics and not enough on the building’s effect on its occupants; its “points” system is unable to catch architectural nuances; its rules quickly evolve into yet another set of requirements on top of building codes that weaken the authority of the architect and necessitate the hiring of yet another consultant. Yet despite these drawbacks, in our metrics-obsessed, rules-driven age, building rating systems undoubtedly have an important part to play in shaping the built environment, which explains their proliferation in the last few decades. Today’s post asks how existing green building rating systems might begin to codify some of the aspects of Ecoempathy. As defined in this blog’s inaugural post, “ecoempathic design translates ecological processes and natural features into a more legible architectural form, encouraging a deeper emotional and physiological connection to nature,” based on the idea that we use “empathic cues–conscious or subconscious–to comprehend and navigate our human habitat.” While this mission certainly aligns with recent efforts to advance Biophilia and Topophilia (see our earlier post on place) in buildings, Ecoempathy pushes further by asking how all aspects of a building can serve an ecological and pedagogical role. The principles of Ecoempathy, Ecodynamism, Ecomorphism, and Ecointegration push architects to not just add nature to buildings but to incorporate it into the holistic evolution of the design.

David Buckley Borden: Using Art to Foster Ecological Literacy

In today’s post, we take a deep dive into the work of David Buckley Borden, a Cambridge-based landscape architect-turned-ecological artist who operates, as he explains, “at the intersection of landscape, creativity, and cultural event.” David’s work explores a question that resonates strongly with the mission of the Ecoempathy Project: ““How can art and design support science communication to foster cultural cohesion around ecological issues and help inform ecology-minded decision making?” Previous Ecoempathy posts have suggested that we need a new architectural language for translating and communicating ecological messages to the public through form. Buckley Borden’s work suggests a precedent in the graphic design tradition: he is an expert at taking vernacular graphic design tropes and landscape elements and adapting (some might say “subverting”) them to communicate broader stories about ecology.

The Aesthetics of Engagement: An Empathic Approach to Resource Conservation in Buildings

a generic energy dashboard for a dorm building

Although “green” buildings are arguably becoming more and more automated, their performance on a host of metrics still depends in no small part on the decisions made by their occupants. Many buildings are installing energy dashboards in prominent public areas that make users aware of the buildings’ energy or water consumption, or small displays next to energy-generating turbines or solar panels that show off their energy production.

Ornamented cistern meant to tell the story of water recycling, design by Misha Semenov

 

While these boards may be informative to those engaged enough to stop by and decipher them, they are not always the most direct way to communicate the impact of, and actually have an effect on, individual decisions, especially when they are filled with abstracted numbers and figures. Where are the resources used in the building actually coming from? How do our choices impact not just the performance of our building but a larger social and natural ecosystem? This post explores effective approaches to empathic occupant engagement, and probes the possibilities for integrating these into architectural form itself.

The Urban Canopy: An Ecoempathic Design Interlude

**UPDATE: We won the competition and are now in the process of building this parklet in the Fair Haven neighborhood of New Haven, CT.

You can read an update on our project here: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/11/29/tree-canopy-park-wins-elm-city-prize/

The last week has found us both busy with a project that has diverted our attention from the Ecoempathy blog and to a proposal that puts some of our thinking into action. We are working on a design for a parklet that connects New Haven residents to their street trees, and are excited to share our progress with you below! Read about our intitial pitch in the New Haven Independent: http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/parklets_/

Excerpts from the project description are below: