The Council for Sustainability at SCAD

SCAD architecture professor and Council on Sustainability member Ming Tang’s students have been keeping blogs about their work in his Urban Design Seminar course. According to Tang, “sustainable design issues and LEED for urban design are covered in this course.” Links to the students’ blogs are listed below:

Terri Cornelius

Nicholas M Currer

Leana Galiel

Malorie Y Hepner

Natalie B Johnson

Kevin R Likins

As many of you no doubt know, the raising of cattle accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than automobiles. This has led many greens to go vegan. However, as I detailed in a post on another blog, despite popular misconceptions, 100% veganism is likely to result in negative health effects. So, I decided to do some further investigating. I am well aware that most cows are corn fed their entire lives. Corn is an unnatural diet for cows and is the main reason commercial beef is so unhealthy (also discussed in my earlier post). Since one of the main reasons raising cattle leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions is their methane emissions, I immediately wondered if cows on their natural diet of grass would fare differently. According to the Institute for Environmental Research and Education, “Although an animal raised on pasture actually produces more methane…the pasture itself reduces the CO2 in the air through a process called ‘carbon sequestration.’” This sequestration is no small thing. According to a new study from Duke University: (more…)

I heard a rumor recently that James Howard Kunstler may be in Savannah this Winter. For those of you have not heard of him, he is most well known for his controversial book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century. In this book, Kunstler makes the case that we are facing a coming energy crisis of unprecedented proportions. He does not believe any new technology will be developed quickly enough to offset this, particularly because the economy that drives such innovation is still heavily dependent on dwindling fossil fuels. He postulates that the automobile will become less and less a part of modern life, as will our dependence on food and products shipped from far-off places (like California and Mexico, much less China). He offers a recipe by which to survive the catastrophe, but none to avoid it.

Having grown up in the information age, I tend to be a technological optimist. If we put our minds to it, we can overcome any challenges. Now, with Barack Obama elected president, we can expect a lot of resources to be devoted to developing a green economy. But, is it too little too late? Should we be wasting precious resources on pipe dreams like cars that run on algae? Does it even make sense to keep try to keep the suburban American dream alive? Is there a better way to use our time and effort, especially when we are talking about money our government does not have. Well, a recent panel in the Freakonomics blog at The New York Times asked just that question: (more…)

By Scott Boylston

It was encouraging to see so much attention lavished on sustainable design at the most recent AIGA Educating Designers Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. (http://socialstudiesconference.org/about).

Hosted by MICA (Maryland Institute, College of Art), the conference was entitled ‘Social Studies: Educating Designers in a Connected World,’ and featured categories such as Activism, Community Service, Social Media, and Crossing Cultures. But the main auditorium of the conference was dedicated to sessions on Sustainability, and large audiences gathered for each session. (more…)

By Ming Tang

After a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck central China last May, killing 69,000 people, injuring hundreds of thousands and leaving millions homeless, the government is planning an extensive reconstruction project that includes building more than 1.5 million temporary homes, which are expected to last two or three years. The central feature of our project is the development of a temporary shelter for the homeless people, a kinetic structure that exhibits characteristics of umbrella and folded fans, with the potential of arranging themselves into various contexts and dwelling requirements. We named it as Bamboo + Paper House, a self reconstructive structure for instant installations, which, according to the changing internal requirements and site topography, can produce potentially infinite scenarios.

The folded house is transported to site and modified by the social, economic and culture requirements of the user. Composed of paper fibers, water and cement, it can be used for a variety of construction applications. The light weight paper house can be pre-assembled in the factory, folded into a small package, loaded into a truck for transportation. Bamboo + Paper House has been featured on Web sites such as Tree Hugger, Arch Daily, Urban Promoter, and others.