We spent yesterday and today at the Venice Biennale (both the Giardini and the Arsenale). I really enjoyed it and I’m glad that I was finally able to attend. One of my favorite exhibits was Bahrain’s. It is called “Sweating Assets”, and it’s a demonstration of how air conditioning condensate might be harnessed from the country’s significant cooling infrastructure.
Here’s a video of it in action:
In the middle of the exhibit is a big glass box. This is meant to represent a ubiquitous conditioned space. And as the humid Venice air hits this glass box, condensation is created. This water is then channeled to various soil deposits, where greenery is already starting to grow. And presumably it will continue to grow over the life of the exhibit.
They were careful not to come across as encouraging excessive air conditioning. This was not the point. Instead, the message was: Air conditioning is already an omnipresent necessity in the country, and here is how something that is mostly ignored today — AC condensate — could be turned into a meaningful asset.
I thought it was clever. And they also gave out a nice book for free.
3D printing, or additive manufacturing, is often referred to as the next industrial revolution. And we are certainly seeing it creep into the mainstream economy in meaningful ways. You can soon buy a 3D-printed home for under $99,000, and already you can buy a home in the world's largest 3D-printed community. We also now make bridges using additive manufacturing, which in this case in Amsterdam, was prefabricated off site and craned in.
Many of the architects we work with also use 3D-printed models to rapidly prototype, which I am guessing is disruptive to the whole unpaid architectural intern thing. But what has been missing, for me at least, is a comfortable pair of 3D-printed shoes from the future. Thankfully, Denmark-based RAINS (in collaboration with Zellerfeld) announced their first 3D-printed pair at Paris Fashion Week earlier in the year.
Maybe you like the look of these, or maybe you don't. I would definitely wear them. But what's interesting is that they're 100% recyclable; they're printed upon order (so no excess supply); and they're made using a fully automated production process -- meaning there's little to no labor component and there's no overseas factory. This sounds like something!
I mean, presumably this completely changes where shoes want to be made. Previously you wanted an overseas factory where labor was cheapest. But if labor is no longer a meaningful input, do you now just want to produce these things closer to where your customers actually live and reduce shipping costs? From what I have read, Zellerfeld's factory is in Hamburg and it currently takes something like 40 hours to print one pair of shoes.
Decentralization was always one of the great promises of 3D printing. And to be honest, it's not hard to imagine a world where you walk into a store, have your feet scanned for optimal sizing (already the company lets you do this online with your phone's front camera), and then you get a new pair of shoes printed for you right on the spot. Maybe you even get to play with the design a little so that no two shoes are ever exactly the same.
Of course, along with this, you'd also get an NFT version of your shoes indicating where you printed/minted them. This would be your decentralized blockchain record for your decentralized physical shoes. This sounds weird and consumers won't necessarily think of it in this way, but it'll be what's happening behind the scenes. What consumers will care about is being able to flex their new shoes both offline and online.
On that note, let's get back to the basics here: Would you ever order/wear these shoes?
Kelly Alvarez Doran shared this article with me on Twitter earlier today. It talks about some of the work that his design studios are doing at the University of Toronto around embodied carbon. More specifically though, his studios are being tasked with figuring out how to halve the carbon emissions generated by new buildings during this decade.
And one of the big findings from his studio is exactly the title of this post: our buildings have become carbon icebergs. Here in Toronto, we tend to build a lot of below-grade parking. We recently got rid of parking minimums (which obviously needed to happen), but the market still demands it in certain areas and for certain projects. So we continue to build it.
What the above section drawings are showing is the percentage of carbon emissions resulting from the below-grade construction component in each project. And as you can see, the numbers are significant, particularly in the case of smaller mid-rise buildings where you don't have a lot of above-grade area to grow the denominator.
Looking at 2803 Dundas Street West, which is just down the street from our Junction House project, the number is 50%! And sadly, I would guess that our project is probably only marginally better; we're a bit taller up top, but we also have a raft slab foundation and a watertight below-grade.
This is one of the reasons why I recently tried to make the case for above-grade parking. A big part of my argument was that if we want parking that can be adapted to other uses in the future, and if we want to reduce the embodied carbon in our buildings, then we should be building "unwrapped" above-grade parking. That is, parking which isn't hidden behind other uses.
But this is often frowned upon in planning circles and it's not going to be feasible in smaller mid-rise buildings like the ones shown here. We're also just talking about what is less bad. What we really ought to be doing is trying to build our cities so that people don't need to rely so heavily on cars to get around.
