I spotted this article in Building Magazine about insurers threatening to pull cover for timber frame buildings.This, combined with highly publicized recent fires in London on building sites in Camberwell and Peckham. While investigations are ongoing, the whole thing seems a bit strange to me. Nearly all non-high rise apartment buildings in California are timber frame, due to the high seismic performance, low cost and environmental benefits of this form of construction. At the job I worked at prior to moving to London, I was did construction administration on a site composed of 15 timber-framed buildings in Oakland, California. Despite the its location in a statistically high-crime, urban area, nobody considered building in timber a high-risk proposition.
Why is there paranoia about fire on construction sites in the UK, whereas it is not a problem in California? I have a feeling it is because large construction sites in urban areas in California have security on the job site 24 hours a day. It is very common for large buildings to be constructed on tight urban sites up to five stories tall entirely out of timber. While arson may be more common in the UK, it seems that with proper alarm systems and supervision it is entirely possible to prevent these sort of incidents from happening. The benefits of timber construction seem too great to rule out the method due to poor implementation so far.The biggest part of the problem seems to be that timber is unfamiliar to many contractors, and proper precautions are not taken because the disconnect between timber frame contractors and the general contractor (on many jobs in the US, the lead contractor is responsible for the timber frame).
7 acres of Timber Frame construction at Tassafaronga Village, Oakland CA
Hopefully, many of these problems can be worked out. Interest in this type of construction in the UK is high in light of the desire to reduce CO2 in construction- it seemed that innovative methods of timber construction were everywhere at last week’s Ecobuild conference here in London.
Before Earth hour: Downtown San Francisco at 8:20pm
I attempted to “celebrate” Earth Hour last weekend by going to Dolores Park (down the street a few blocks from my house) to see if the lights would all shut off at 8:30, as was the idea behind the event. Never mind that I brought my digital camera, never mind that I brought my digital camera.
At around 8:30 the lights in the park went out and a few notable buildings shut off their lights- City Hall, a few towers downtown, and the Bay Bridge had most of its lights off. Overall, not too shockingly dark though:
During Earth Hour: downtown San Francisco at 8:35pm
I’m not sure how much this token gesture really helps, but maybe it makes people more concious of their electricity usage during the rest of the year. A friend pointed out that lots of extra power was probably used the hour before Earth Hour as people like me charged their digital cameras. Oh well.
One other thing. If you are looking at this in Internet Explorer, all the text is probably pushed against the left side of your browser window. My apologies. I am looking into this and hope to fix it soon. It’s a great time for you consider switching to Firefox or Google’s Chrome (my new favorite).
As much as I hope the “stimulus package” does work, I’m very pessimistic. Our entire idea of what “normal” is needs to be recalibrated. I don’t even know what to think about places like Detroit. After growing up in the Rust Belt (near Buffalo) and getting used to hearing about layoffs, declining populations and abandoned buildings, hearing this last hopeless statistic about Detroit is almost too much to bear (although conversely, Buffalo is doing well in comparsion right now).
The architectural excesses of the last decade and a half will not be returned to any time soon. Sam Jacob’s article on Parametricism in The Architect’s Journal lays this issue out succinctly by relating to not only the financial excesses of architecture but to the theoretical and formal ones as well. I agree. The way out of our current predicament is not going to look like this:
Just when you thought you’d heard about every imaginable type of holiday decoration, the North Baltimore (Ohio) police have decorated a tree with mugshots of convicted sex offenders. If you’re worried about missing the ornaments on the back of the tree, have no fear: the tree rotates.
Okay, I admit I’m posting this a bit late. I have been really busy and we actually had some hot weather for the first time in about a year last weekend, so I haven’t been blogging. Last week, Caltrans (the California department of transportation) threw a festive gathering in front of my office to celebrate the new overpass that has been under construction on the other side of the wall at my office for the last year. They call it the “West Approach” because it is the west approach to the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The Governator showed up, but nobody actually saw him. He pulled up in an SUV on the overpass, out of site of the party, and gave a speech the was telecast to people standing on the ground about 200 feet away. Following the speech he drove away. It was completely surreal. Then, they served really awful (free) food including vegetarian baked beans that tasted like wet packing peanuts. Oh, and cupcakes. Sweet, delicious blue and orange cupcakes. Unfortunately the frosting melted instantly in the sun. Special thanks to my friend Angela and her iPhone for the photos.
As you may be able to see in this blurry photo I borrowed from the CNN website (and they apparently got it from the local KRON4 helicopter) the infamous Olympic Torch struggled to make its way through San Francisco today. While thousands of people on all sides of the China issue were gathered at the baseball stadium and the waterfront downtown (the official route), the Torch was being secretly run through several of the most unsuspecting parts of the city accompanied by the Bay Quackers Bus. What is this bus, you ask? It is a duck-themed amphibious tour bus for tourists. Thank God they upheld the dignity of the Olympics. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to cancel the whole thing before it even started?
A documentary about slain San Francisco politician Harvey Milk is being filmed in my neighborhood this week. As part of the preparation for filming, Castro Street is getting redone to look like the 1970s (at least the hipsters with bad mustaches and tight jeans don’t ruin the look). One office has been redone as a record store, Wells Fargo Bank is masquerading as a plant store and old posters are tacked up on an empty storefront. With all the 1970s cars that were parked outside the other day, I almost felt like I was in a bad neighborhood in Buffalo!
I haven’t seen Gus Van Sant around yet, or Sean Penn (he’s playing Harvey Milk). Matt Damon (unfortunately) backed out of a role in the film a few months ago.
I read this article while I was at the gym today and was very impressed by the advances that have been made in recycling in recent years. While you often hear that it is inefficient to recycle and that it is actually worse for the environment than not recycling, this study by the Technical University of Denmark and the Danish Topic Centre on Waste refutes these claims by looking at an array of 55 life-cycle analyses and 200 scenarios to compare recycling with other disposal methods. They found that in 83% of all scenarios that included recycling, it was indeed better for the environment.
This article also explains how recyclables are sorted when they are all in the same bin and how aluminum is plucked out of the stream of trash despite it’s non-magnetivity. I always wondered about that (click on “read more” at the bottom to find out the secret).
I was thinking about the environment before I went to the gym because Monday is Blog Action Day, a day when bloggers around the world have pledged to write about the environment. Now I have to think of another topic for Monday because I couldn’t wait to post this one… read more | digg story
Perhaps you’ve heard of Park(ing) Day? It started in San Francisco by Rebar (an art collective focusing on public space/urban design etc) and has now caught on around the world. In a nutshell, people get together and create temporary parks on city streets by renting a parking space for the day (i.e. paying the meter). I helped my office (David Baker & Partners Architects) put together an urban croquet park in front of our building on 2nd Street.
Park(ing) Day was a big success, both in San Francisco and around the world. Make sure to check out the rest of those photos on Flickr so you don’t miss the Urban Chicken park!
Folsom Dore Apartments by David Baker & Partners Architects
On Sunday, I hosted tours at the Folsom Dore Apartments, a “green” (I hate that term) affordable housing project completed by my office in 2005. It was part of the “Build it Green” tour, which was a series of open houses at environmentally sustainable residential buildings ranging from some very small houses up to the Sunset Idea House (about four blocks from where I live) which bordered on grotesque in its lavish (and schizophrenic) furnishings and wasted space (Curbed had a great post yesterday about the Sunset house).
Most of the people on the tour were from outside San Francisco, were wearing fleece, and had a lot of money. At least as far as I could tell. It was quite amusing to see them touring an affordable apartment building as they struggled to figure out what to say about it. Many people raved about the carpeting, despite the fact that they drove to the tour in a car that probably cost significantly more than all the carpeting in the 98 unit building. One visitor told me about how she bought energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs “for all her Hispanic neighbors.”
In the end, most seemed impressed that it was affordable housing because it was much nicer than they expected it would be. It was also good to show people that “green” doesn’t have to mean expensive- which seems to be the impression many people have. While some of the other houses on the tour had more impressive displays of their sustainability (like the windmill at the Sunset Idea House or an entire forest’s worth of responsibly harvested wood at the Bole/Klingerstein Residence) the type of improvements at Folsom Dore are much more attainable to the average homeowner.
As for the rest of the them, each building was totally different- they represented the full spectrum of price levels and approaches to being sustainable. I was most amused by the giant banner hanging across 22nd Street from a condo building on the tour:
rough banner translation: “Enough with rich people and their condominiums”
Note that I took that photo through a rain screen made out of responsibly-harvested Ipe wood. For more photos of the home tour, visit my Flickr page (again!). There were also more urban chickens… who knew they were so popular?
As you may be able to see in this blurry photo I borrowed from the CNN website (and they apparently got it from the local KRON4 helicopter) the infamous Olympic Torch struggled to make its way through San Francisco today. While thousands of people on all sides of the China issue were gathered at the baseball stadium and the waterfront downtown (the official route), the Torch was being secretly run through several of the most unsuspecting parts of the city accompanied by the 
