We left Denver early one morning and headed for Boulder. Boulder is a strange mash of outlying suburb, college town, liberal mecca and playground for the ultra-wealthy. The good weather and topography make this a surprisingly cozy community. The latte sippers take their leisure side by side with bums, mediocre artists, two-bit street performers, and obnoxious students.
Plopped at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, the local range is the Flatirons. Residents take full advantage of the wilderness parks that sit within walking distance of the city. The location of Boulder Mountain Park was more a stroke of good luck than a well thought out plan to provide nearby recreational space, but it is a critical element of Boulder and cities in general.
Most urbanized places today are totally under the control of humans. Places of decay would be the exception, and they work in the same way as wilderness areas. Cities are full of intentional space. Some of this space is draining and some of it restorative, but all of it is designed or otherwise crafted by humans. Upon occasion, you'll see a small "nature preserve" within a city, but they are typically too small to become immersed in. This keeps people from being able to forget about the intentionality of the unintentional.
Large swaths of wilderness--or in the Rust Belt, decay--provide unintentional space for people to explore. I'm convinced that not everybody needs these spaces, a dichotomy that leaves some loving big successful cities while others can't stand them.
Some people like discovery. They like to find things that someone else didn't build. They like to exercise a part of their brain that is a bit different than the rest. Boulder accommodates these people, other cities should too.
The eco-agitators have left their mark in Boulder. It has one of the most highly developed bicycle networks of any city. Above is a shot of just one of the dozens of bicycle highways that connect the various developments of the city. They didn't just stick to this high-tech (expensive) approach; Boulder was the first city where I saw signage encouraging cyclists to get off the shoulder and take up a whole lane of the road. In an auto centric city, bicycles are a good but insufficient solution to the mobility problem. Some people use them, some don't.
The bicycle highways are interesting, but I think a city with a well connected street grid does just as well without all the extra construction. For cities full of twisty, dead-end suburban streets and frantic collector roads, they make a lot of sense.
In their latest act of crazed environmentalism, Boulder County just instituted the most stringent residential building code in the country. Boulder County is plagued by incredibly rich people. They live out in the sticks and build enormous mansions. The new building code is based around the HERS rating system from Energy Star. The bigger the house, the more stringent the energy requirements are. Built homes actually need to be tested for their energy usage before they receive final approval.
Energy isn't everything that goes into sustainability, but it's a big piece. Forcing these mansion builders to be a bit more responsible is a step in the right direction. Boulder county is far and away the most progressive leader on energy issues. It's a model that doesn't necessarily merit copying in other places; not every place has the same economic and weather conditions as Boulder.
The HERS scale does offer enormous benefits though and forcing built energy inspections is a good idea. Adding an energy inspection to any standard forces contractors to be a bit more careful when they do their work so they can avoid costly fixes. When it comes to making a house incrementally more efficient, the little things add up.
At the heart of downtown Boulder lies the Pearl Street Pedestrian Mall. The Pearl Street Mall is an old place, agitations for it began in the 1960s and it was constructed over 30 years ago. Four consecutive blocks of Pearl Street were closed to vehicular traffic as a way of competing with suburban malls. Most shops along the stretch are independent though many corporate tenants have begun to creep in.
The space was originally designed for the enormous space needs of the horse and buggy. Merely closing the street to automotive traffic would have left the vast expanse between the buildings empty except during major events. The Boulder solution was to fill the space with brick, trees, playgrounds, benches and public art. Aside from the bums and buskers, the street doesn't look so much different than a walkway in an indoor mall.
Boulder has taken an effective but expensive approach to preserving a chunk of downtown vitality. The area surrounding the mall is somewhat stark compared to the rest of the downtown area. The enormous amount of parking needed for such a large pedestrian free area has mostly been housed in large structures, but overflow and budget conscious shoppers have gobbled up street parking on neighboring streets. This effect has caused many nearby businesses to use surface lots.
The Boulder Pedestrian Mall is modeled on suburban malls, and the result is the same as suburban malls. The area surrounding the mall doesn't get any boost from its presence. Instead, these places of excessive single use act as vitality vacuums. In the early morning or at night, they are almost completely empty. During the day, the surrounding area is swamped with cars.
The fact that it exists at all is a testament to the ability of Boulder residents to affect their space. The project took 15 years to accomplish, but the empowerment of a community is one of the best things a city can offer its citizens.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Thoughts on Boulder
Friday, January 30, 2009
Thoughts on Denver
After a week of sub-zero temperatures and seemingly endless driving through the Great Plains, we were really looking forward to this bastion of civilization in the endless expanse of middle America. We were a good 30 miles away from any area marked as "urbanized" by the map were were using when the corn fields and high density feed lots gave way to cookie cutter suburbs.
Denver is an enormous city in an unlikely place. Its population is considered extremely health conscious and as far as we could tell, people were more active in this city than in any we had visited (we were in town during unseasonably warm weather...). This former cattle town's population has tripled over the last 50 years. The accommodations built for the new residence have shaped the entire city.
The Great Plains stretch endless to the North, South and East. To the West, the towering Rocky Mountains beckon. It's quite a view, especially to a couple saddle sore midwesterners. It seemed like every place in the city enjoyed some nice views of the mountains, from the swankiest condos to the parking lots of big box stores.
Denver (and Colorado in general) is a colorful place. The older buildings seem very much influenced by the southwestern building tradition. Many employ stucco and a handsome brickwork that is often painted with great detail. The pre-WWII developments are laid out in the typical pseudo-suburb pattern that planners of the time would have referred to as "best practice". Some of the homes are nice, some are less so and they all sit in quiet neighborhoods with little pockets of commercial activity.
The newer buildings are unremarkable and aside for some scale differences (i.e. double left turn lanes, six lane roads...etc), much of Denver is indecipherable from the suburb I grew up in outside Lansing. The downtown is packed with towering office buidings. Perhaps the architects in the area were attempting to convey the endlessness of the Great Plains when they designed these giants.
Downtown Denver is very much the central business district advertised on the transit maps. A couple buildings stood out though, holdovers from another era.
We were surprised to find street cars in Denver. They are oriented towards the downtown area and it seems like they were intended to reduce highway congestion during rush hour. In no way do these street cars attempt to increase the mobility of Denver residents or allow any person to get by without a car. The Denver bus system is incredibly highly developed, but since the development blocks are so large, multiple transfers--and lots of time--are needed to get around on the public transit system.
Denver has a very highly regarded transit system. In my totally amateur yet critical opinion, the only reason anybody would use it is fluke route placement or economic necessity. Forcing under-privileged people onto an inconvenient and time consuming bus system only makes it harder for them to get a leg up in the world. This is an issue of social justice and as a society, we need to address it as such.
Denver is essentially in a desert, but you wouldn't really know it. It was astonishing the waste that is tolerated in a place that has such scarce water resources. They also make recycling practically impossibly for most residents. The critical concepts laid out in the "Reduce, Reuse and Recycle" slogan don't seem like they've caught on here.
Denver does take an interesting approach to bicycle transportation, one that we've seen repeated in other places across the west. There is enough space in cities of this sort that bicycles don't always need to share road space, instead they have their own rights of way where they hurtle over clean asphalt complete with on and off ramps. More on this in the Boulder piece.
We didn't see all of Denver, and allegedly we missed some interesting parts of it. Even so, I have no problem leaving the place thinking that rapid growth usually ends up being unsustainable growth.
It's a difficult challenge for a city to accommodate a burgeoning population. Most would argue this was the challenge that lead to the field of planning in the first place. From observation, the first 100 years of planning practice has accomplished much, but left even more to be desired.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Chat with Adam Stenftenagel
In America, we spend our energy in three broad categories, making products, moving around, and occupying buildings. The building construction and occupation pieces of the pie have been targeted through a number of organizations and standards including USGBC, Energy Star, LEED and HERS. These groups have gradually reduced the occupational and constructive impact of buildings. Later in this post, we'll see just how advanced these buildings have become.
One of the most interesting standards is the Passiv Haus standard being developed in Germany (New York Times article here). A German ex-pat living in the Denver area was so enamored with the idea that he decided he would build an entirely new development based on the Passiv Haus standard just to show us Americans how easy it can be to build well. The development is called GEOS and I was lucky enough to talk about the project and other things with Adam Stenftenagel who runs an energy modeling company called Sustainably Built out of Boulder, Colorado.
The green building movement has begun to coalesce around the slogan "build tight, ventilate right" for good reason. Energy modeling shows that restricting infiltration is by far the best way to reduce energy usage. Standard building codes require a maximum air exchange of 0.35 air switches per hour and a good builder will tighten up a building to 0.1 exchange per hour. To eliminate energy usage entirely, you need to go as low as 0.04 per hours or only one exchange per day.
In addition, buildings in the GEOS development will utilize passive solar heating. The land covenant specifies that no house may cast a shadow on another during the Winter solstice. In a suburban development like GEOS, that means a somewhat unusual checkerboard pattern.
The southern walls of the buildings are full of windows. Carefully placed awnings let in the winter sun for warmth but block out the searing summer rays. The walls and roofs are heavily insulated, R-24 for the total wall systems and R-40 for the roofs.
"Tight" houses have been around for years but suffered from mold problems and stale air due to their insufficient ventilation. The GEOS homes solve the problem elegantly. Low speed fans run constantly, sucking 110 cubic feet or air per second from the bathrooms and kitchen. That air is used to condition outside air being brought into the house in a small heat exchanger located in the basement. That way, very little energy is used to heat or cool incoming air to the desired temperature. In addition, by the time the outside air makes it to the heat exchanger, it has already passed through shallow geothermal tubes running around the foundation, making the heating and cooling processes even more efficient.
These homes are designed to be net-zero energy. That means a somewhat conscious household will have no energy bills over the course of a year. Colorado's generous rebates and sunny weather make solar panels an amazing option. No gas lines will be run and electrical lines will connect the homes to the grid for storage.
In the end, the GEOS development is still a suburb, but it is a vast improvement over standard practice. Their work on the heat exchanger units will likely lead to the development of American Passiv Haus systems comparable to the excellent German ones.
If you are thinking about building a new home/building, it would certainly be worth it to check out some of these innovative homes starting to spring up across the county for ideas. And if you're tired of rising energy bills, it might not be a bad idea to look into the Passive House (into English now...) concepts for the next remodeling project. This page is a must. Depending on your location, you may be able to get financing at a rate that will offset your energy payments and leave you with a more comfortable and sustainable home.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Chat with Christopher O'Hara
I finished my master's degree in structural engineering in December and the lack of "green" oriented jobs in the field is one of the reasons I'm on this cross country trek. It was with great surprise and delight that I stumbled across Studio NYL Structural Engineers in Boulder, Colorado.
Studio NYL is a small firm that specializes in sustainable structural design. None of my coursework even touched on the subject so I knew I had to find out more. I was fortunate enough to speak with Studio NYL co-founder, Christopher O'Hara, to get a bit of illumination on the subject.
Structural engineers are typically brought into the design process after the global decisions about a building are already made. We are compelled to follow a building code that sets design requirements for the parts of the building that keep it standing. We don't typically have much say beyond the structural details of a project and even then, it's a crap-shoot.
From the Studio NYL point of view, structural engineers can't do much, but they can do something. They focus on reducing material use. Christopher told me, "Using 10% recycled materials is great, but reducing material use by 20% is even better." Achieving that reduction means designing with modular materials in their natural increments, utilizing the most efficient structural systems and creating elegant structural forms that don't need to be covered up. Much of this takes early coordination with architects and the monetary savings from reduced material usage is mostly erased by increased labor costs.
Studio NYL is in an interesting position. There is no incentive (such as LEED certification) to reduce structural material use so the market is in no way crowded with sustainable structural design firms. Only builders who are genuinely interested in being sustainable will take the time to hire Studio NYL. That means the builder will have certainly hired a "green-minded" architect who is willing to cooperate. Breaking down the barrier between architects and engineers--or form and function--is what gives Studio NYL the ability to affect critical design decisions.
For a structural engineering office, operating as a sustainable firm makes a whole lot of sense. It means playing a greater role in the design process and locking in a more receptive clientele. For some reason, this hasn't really caught on. Christopher couldn't name another small firm doing the same sort of work.
I think this sort of firm will begin to multiply in the very near future. Green building is arguably (I'll prove it in the next post) the most advanced branch of the "green" movement and all of the green builders will soon be looking for ways to green the gaps in the design process.
As an added perk, the folks at Studio NYL were very well abreast with the most advanced developments in the structural engineering world. If you're interested in some cutting edge stuff, check out these links on carbon fiber retro-fits and bio-mimicking 3-D trusses.
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