Seattle Architectural Photography

Agile Architecture Means Happier People, Fewer Cars: Manuela Hoelterhoff

Visiting a yoga retreat, James S. Russell, Bloomberg’s architecture critic since 2005, approvingly contemplates the natural sewage filtration system.

It’s a typically engaging moment. His new book, “ The Agile City : Building Well-being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change ,” also takes us to a recycled shopping mall, sky trains, a window factory in the Empire State Building, and Hamburg’s Hafencity for examples of smart money investing in green.

We talked at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York City.

Hoelterhoff: Buildings, I was surprised to read, account for 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a big number.

Russell: Conservation gets treated condescendingly in the climate change debate, lumped in with solar and wind, which are more expensive.

But reducing lighting, heating and cooling can bring the energy number down by 50 percent or more with today’s technology.

Hoelterhoff: Dockside Green on Vancouver Island sounds great. I might want to move.

Russell: It shows what you can do on the community level. It not only has low-energy buildings, but it connects to bus lines, to a little ferry line. There’s a bike route, a car- sharing program. People can walk to things they want to do.

This is how people save huge amounts of energy yet get to have a very nice life.

Hoelterhoff: Why is a place like Dockside so hard to reproduce?

Russell: Because of the habitual way we finance real estate, the brain-dead way we do transportation -- autos only -- and the dysfunctional way we provide and deal with water. We pretend it’s free and it isn’t.

Hoelterhoff: Speaking of water, I liked those pictures of grass and narrow garden strips lining streets.

Russell: That’s the future: not letting rain and runoff flow into overburdened sewage-treatment plants. It’s a less expensive way of dealing with all the floods we’re having.

Hoelterhoff: And yet, it seems anything that isn’t an outsized house with a yard near a highway remains pretty hard to finance. That hasn’t changed since the mortgage meltdown?

Russell: All the perverse incentives that caused the mortgage meltdown remain in place, along with most of the crooks.

Multifamily housing, for example, is harder to finance.

Hoelterhoff: You write about what you call the “megaburbs,” with those highway strips that seem designed to kill pedestrians on sight.

Pope John Paul II, statue, Seattle « Architectural Photography

On April 2, 2005 at 9:37 p.m. Pope John Paul II died. In April of 2009 his beloved successor, Pope Benedict XVI, told Pilgrims gathered in Rome “With you, I pray for the gift of beatification”.  That prayer has been answered.  Friday, January 14, 2011 the Holy See released the “Decree for the Beatification of the Servant of God John Paul II.”

This new (May 2011) statue at St, Margaret’s in Seattle was built from stainless steel, welded and hammered by Polish artist Wiktor Szostalo. It was photographed here after dark with about 45 exposures of painted light from hand held spot lights.

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