Hello friends. This is the second in hopefully a longer string of dispatches. This is Randy from Expedition Works, you’ve signed up to receive this semi-regular dispatch of design.
Welcome to the end of Week 30; we hope that the last few weeks of you July will treat you well. We want to share with you some thoughts about how architects have apparently forgotten about the sun, share some items of note, share some interesting employment opportunities, and share some interesting tactics from Tactical Democracy and from Toolkit.supply.
Did Architects forget about the sun?
Of course they didn’t. Yet it’s hard to look around at a majority of buildings being built and come away with the illusion that architects have forgotten about the big yellow sun. It’s almost worse: without being a mind reader, it seems that architects know about the sun, but choose not to do anything about it; or choose to create buildings which are completely ignoring solar energy which comes from the sun.
How else do we explain the many buildings being built which all four exposures are equally designed? Buildings being built act as if the north side of the building gets exactly the same type of sun than the south. They don’t of course: the north side is great for wide open windows, the kind of beautiful light which artists yearn for, while the southern side of the building is a boiling furnace of direct sunlight.
Take these two skyscrapers in Long Island City: on the left is the recently completed Skyline Tower designed by Hill West Architects, and on the right is One Court Square (formerly Citigroup Building) designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 1990. Take a look at them, please.
Thirty years go by, and it seems nothing has been learned. All four facades are the same, there’s no external shading or device on the south sides to shade the glass from the sun’s glare. But see those lower brick buildings? The one in the foreground built 80 years ago has mass from all those bricks, which slow down the heat before it passes through to the inside, later in the day. The brick building on the far right background is newer, built in the last 5 years, and the brick is mostly for rain screening and decoration; hopefully there’s plenty of insulation behind that one with of bricks to keep the cold and heat at bay.
We are building our buildings with thinner walls, sometimes with higher performing materials and constructions. But in the end physics wins, and the Matter Battle doesn’t stop after the city signs off on your certificate of occupancy.
Now, I believe that we need density in our cities – sometimes the density of Manhattan, sometimes the density of Los Angeles, and sometimes the density of Seaside, Florida. And the bulk square footage that these two skyscrapers provide is needed to reduce our housing shortage in key cities such as the Bay Area, LA, NYC, and Washington DC; building bulkier also reduces our overall carbon footprint through tighter and more compact living, and when the land is as expensive as in NYC, provide services for the neighborhood. At least these two buildings sit on top of four subway lines, and a block away from a LIRR station.
But, these two buildings are locking us into a higher-than-need-be carbon and energy load for the lifetime of these buildings. Which hopefully is in the range of 50-80 years. The added heat gain caused by the window-to-ceiling glass means more air conditioning, and more energy use when we already have the technology and competence to design facades to manage the sun.
The pushback I’ve gotten is generally technological: we can oversize the AC, our curtain wall systems are way more efficient now, and we have shades. Look to the first photo, the Lake Point Tower (1968): look at all the internal shades which are pulled to fight the sun. Inside shades, which are less than effective since they have already let in the solar gain. And you can’t make it out, but contractors have been replacing the gaskets on the curtainwall at One Court Square for a better part of a year, after their apparent 30 year duty-cycle was up. All of thee points are excuses for wanting your way as the designer, and wanting a signature building.
There isn’t a technical problem blocking architects from implementing external solar shading. There’s all sorts of ways to do it, from glass louvers to adaptive facades to static blades to horizontal louver to, to, to. I personally designed shading systems for a project at UC 20 years ago. The massive glass curtain wall is north facing, and we created external shading for the south face ribbon windows with a deep wall, and the east & west facades to control light.
We can do better.
Project Stoa Update
Interviews for our project on redesigning resident input continue. We also are joining every feedback session we can find in NYC, and in other places we feel we can offer true and constructive feedback. If you are interested in giving feedback or being interviewed, please fill out this google form and we’ll contact you shortly.
Items of Note
Public.digital released their report on Open source in government: creating the conditions for success (PDF)
Cards for Humanity - very similar to the Listening Room cards we designed for NYCLU
RE:NEW YORK CITY – 250 Ideas from New Yorkers to Revive NYC's Economy, Spark Good Jobs, and Build a More Equitable City
Interesting Jobs
City of Boston, Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics is looking for a Community Technologist for the Public Realm: Job Description & application
Civilla is looking for a Design Director to join their team
Hope Lab has a call for Equitable Design Fellow
Tactical Democracy: Fill in the Blanks
Remember filling out those Madlibs when you were a kid? Well, they are a powerful way to gain structured feedback from people quickly. Learn how to use them.
Toolkit.supply: VA Customer Experience Cookbook
A Collection of Key Ingredients & Recipes for Embedding Customer Experience in Federal Services. Check out the cookbook here.
Check us out at the following usual places:
You look nice today. Treat yourself to some ice creme, or a walk around the block, or give yourself a pass on that thing you did.