Award Winning Park: "Wade Oval"

Cleveland’s Wade Oval is just seven acres, but it is uniquely-situated amid many of the most important cultural institutions in the city, including the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Cleveland Botanical Garden, and Cleveland Art Museum. Located in the University Circle neighborhood that is home to Case Western Reserve University, the Oval is at the center of a neighborhood that draws tens of thousands of students, patients and visitors daily.
At the request of University Circle, Inc., a local nonprofit planning and development organization, PPS worked with citizens in University Circle, institutional stakeholders and internationally renowned architects and designers hired to expand several of these institutions, to help the Oval’s adjacent uses benefit from their unique location on the Oval, and transform the Oval itself – and the boulevard around it – to become more welcoming to both visitors and the local community, and enlivened by events and activities programmed by the rich array of partners around it.

PPS recommended a plan to connect the institutions to one another and to the park, partly through small changes to building facades and outdoor areas that reveal more information about what's going on inside these buildings. Using PPS’s conceptual plan, University Circle, Inc initiated a $1.4 million renovation of the Oval, which was completed in October of 2003, revealing such improvements as new walkways, pathway lighting, benches, lampposts, drinking fountains, and a performance stage that blends in with the surrounding landscape. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s architecture critic, Steve Litt, wrote of the revitalized Oval “The transformation though modest in cost is astonishing. UCI has turned the park into a postcard-perfect amenity worthy of any city in the world.”

Pitiousa- Human Scale Development

The design for the town of Pitiousa recognises that every context is a self-regulating, living system; that the basic elements of urbanism are the urban block, the street and the square; that buildings should never be as large as the commission; and that they should use well-tried constructional techniques and materials. Pitiousa also recognises that " Classicism is not a Style ", but a tradition that has evolved from and coexisted with the vernacular. It is a living tradition open to adaptation and interpretation, and responsive to region, climate and nature. "

-Demetri Porphyrios

" Unlike the currently marketed conception of tradition as the "peddling of antiques", the classical project does not aim at upholstering a spurious restoration. Instead, its aim has been to ferret out in existing society those traditional elements that could foster the new. The story of cities has been the story of endless innovation. But the new has never been a mere novelty. The new has always been the result of a process of knowledge and merit. the various phases of history are additive and the storing of new experience has been the law of mankind. The exclusive characteristic of civilised man has been his ability to record and to retrieve from memory. In that sense, Classicism and the Traditional City are less absorbed in the dialectic between an imagined future and a nostalgic past ( as many critics have claimed ), than in the search for realistic projects. The ultimate criterion in the design of cities ought to be the public well-being of their inhabitants. "

-Demetri Porphyrios

AIA Top 10 Green Winner

The Z6 House

Location: Santa Monica, Ca
Building type: Single-family residential
New construction
2,480 sq. feet (230 sq. meters)
Project scope: a single building
Urban setting
Completed August 2006
Rating: LEED for Homes v1 --Level: Platinum


The Z6 House is a single family residence that was added to a multi-family zoned lot with an existing duplex. The residence has 4 bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths., although the bedrooms open up to the rest of the house for added space when needed.

The house is constructed of factory built modules that were delivered to the site and erected on the site-built foundation over a period of 13 hours; the structural slab on grade serves as the finish floor for the first level. A roof deck takes advantage of views and a green roof with vegetation native to southern California.

This project was chosen as an AIA Committee on the Environment Top Ten Green Project for 2007. It was submitted by LivingHomes, in Santa Monica, California with Ray Kappe Architects, in Pacific Palisades, California. Additional project team members are listed on the "Process" screen.

Environmental Aspects
A commitment to minimizing the ecological footprint informed all aspects of the homes' design. The project team used the phrase "Six Zeroes" to describe the goals of the project: zero waste, zero energy, zero water, zero carbon, zero emissions, and zero ignorance.

The design maximizes the opportunities of the mild, marine climate with a passive cooling strategy using cross-ventilation and a thermal chimney. A 2.4-kilowatt photovoltaic array and a solar hot water collector take advantage of the sunny location, as does the daylighting strategy for the interior.

To create flexible interior spaces, all bedrooms have moveable wall partitions that can be opened to common areas for more space. Large exterior doors and large expanses of glass connect inside to outside and allow living space to expand to the outdoors.

The Ren Building

by Tylene

Architecture in China never ceases to amaze me—case in point—the REN Building. Copenhagen’s Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) proposed this eye-catching design over a year ago to coincide with Shanghai’s “Better City, Better Life” 2010 World Expo . The building takes its form from the Chinese character for person 人 (”ren”) and combines two buildings (one symbolic of mind and the other symbolic of body). We love the poetic inspiration that reflects both site and cultural sensitivity.

“The first building, emerging from the water, is devoted to the activities of the body, and houses the sports and water culture center. The second building emerging from land, is devoted to the spirit and enlightenment, and houses the conference center and meeting facilities. The two buildings meet in a 1000 room hotel, a building for living.”
It’ll be exciting to see if the plans for the project are approved. Check out more views and an animated fly-through of the project below.

Building the New Urbanism

by Erica Ryberg

Urban planners take a cue from pre-WWII cities and towns.

It takes Kiki Wallace one minute to get to work. It’s no accident. He built his neighborhood, Prospect New Town, to be walkable, with wide sidewalks, narrow streets and parks scattered throughout. Most notably, its town center is within five walking minutes of every home.

To create Prospect, the Longmont, Colorado, developer worked with star planners Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Since its construction, the town has attracted a great deal of interest in the planning community. “We have people from all over the state of Colorado and from other parts of the United States and internationally coming to look at it,” said Wallace. “They’re all wanting to emulate this type of development.”

Post-World War II-style suburban planning assumes that everyone has a car and wants to use it. This model, some urban planners believe, is what accounts for the growing epidemic f obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Now, a growing number of environmentalists, architects and urban planners, including Duany and Plater-Zyberk, are putting their minds together to create human-scale neighborhoods, where parks, shops and schools are all close enough to walk or bike to. They are part of the New Urbanist movement, the most coordinated effort in this country to create these kinds of neighborhoods. “New Urbanism is basically a set of principles to get to that holy grail of a mixed-use, mixed-income, fully socially integrated, non-automobile-dependent kind of place,” said Emily Talen, a professor of urban planning and author of New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures.

Planned down to the size of the numbers on the houses, New Urbanist communities have a striking regularity about them; the first town Duany and Plater-Zyberk created served as the picket-fenced, pastel-tinted backdrop of the dystopian film The Truman Show.

If, conversely, New Urbanism isn’t edgy enough, head to Arcosanti, architect Paolo Soleri's experimental town rising from the desert north of Phoenix, Arizona. To capitalize on space, Soleri took advantage of the city’s cliff-side location to minimize the use of streets and build in three dimensions. The result is an ultra-compact and contiguous sculptural mélange of tilt-up concrete slabs, high-density housing and work space, sidewalks and...bells. Lots of bells. The manufacture of bronze bells, tourism and workshops support the design interns who are the main workers and occupants of the still-nascent city. Despite Arcosanti’s acclaim as a visionary means of creating urban space (Soleri was honored in July at the White House for his work), it hasn’t yet caught on commercially.

New Urbanism emulates many of the qualities of pre-World War II developments, in part by tacking front porches onto its houses, detaching the garages and shrinking the lawns down to the size of postage stamps. For this reason the movement sometimes goes by the moniker neotraditionalism. That means the features New Urbanists lovingly include in their designs are also available in many older towns and cities across the country. Take, for instance, a city neighborhood such as Uptown, in Minneapolis, or small towns like Portland, Maine, Flagstaff, Arizona, or Madison Wisconsin. All have sidewalks, public transport and discernible centers - central characteristics of New Urbanism. “If it’s walkable and compact and diverse and so forth,” said Duany. “Insofar as it is that, then it’s New Urbanist.”

Sydney's Greenest Building

by Jorge

30 Bond
What’s more impressive than a building design that aims to reduce its greenhouse emissions to a 5 Star Australian Building Greenhouse Rating benchmark, which is the approximate equivalent to that of a Gold LEED greenhouse certification level? How about one which has proven to meet its target and improves on it. This is the case of the building known as 30 The Bond located at Hickson Road in Sydney.

When Lend Lease, its builder and current owner decided to create its new headquarters in Sydney it decided to hold numerous employee workshops to determine what they believed were the important priorities. Those priorities were reduction in pollutants, increase in environment quality, water management (as Australia has now been in what seems a permanent drought), waste management and a green area for them to enjoy. All of this resulted in an extremely well designed commercial building.

Built over the old contaminated gasworks site, which had to be restored, 30 The Bond was the first building in Australia to achieve the rating of 5 stars ABGR, with a certified emission that resulted in over a 20% reduction over the already stringent targets set by its initial 5 star design commitment, as well as receiving a 5 star Green Star - office as built rating from the Australian Green Building Council . It achieved this rating by using chilled beams (a first in Australia), wintergarden rooms and automatically controlled external shades to keep the heat out as well as providing external views to 60% of its occupants. It also contains low VOC carpets and paints, a roof garden with native plants and timber decking from sustainable sources. Water saving fittings as well as a sub-metering system to allow for any leak detection sealed the deal.

And while all of that is important, what we like here at Inhabitat is when we can achieve all this with style, and this building does it in droves. When entering the building you cannot help to notice the exposed four-storey sandstone wall that serves as one wall of the atrium. Aside from being a reminder of the site’s history, as it was originally cut by convicts early in Sydney’s history, it also serves as insulation as well as providing natural cooling to the atrium.
The 9 storey building was designed by PTW Architects (who we recentally raved about for their “Bubble Building”) in conjunction with WHO interior architecture and Bovis Lend Lease.

Award Winning Sustainable Design

by Evelyn

Collaborative Designworks in Houston, Texas proves that sustainable design practices can lead to award-winning architecture. Their 505 Housing was recently one of the 19 recipients of the American Institute of Architect’s (AIA) 2007 Housing Awards, winning 1st prize in the One-and Two-Family Production Homes category. Now in its seventh year, the award recognizes the best of the best in housing design while promoting the importance of housing as “a necessity of life, a sanctuary for the human spirit, and a valuable national resource.”

The 505 incorporates 4 units on a site eligible to hold 5, allowing space for yards and optimum utilization of daylight due to the reduction of shared walls. Each window was placed to maximize views, let in a considerable amount of daylight, maintain each unit’s individual privacy, and provide natural cross-ventilation. Other sustainable ideas deployed in the design of The 505 include permeable ground coverings, stack-vented rain-screens on the east and west facades, radiant barrier roofing, recycled/sustainable materials and finishes, tank-less water heaters, and high-efficiency appliances and equipment.