Hortitecture

Hortitecture

Author: Almut Grüntuch-Ernst

Publisher: Jovis Verlag

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13:

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HORTITECTURE explores synergies combining architecture and vital plant material - taking plants off the ground into a new conceptual and spatial context. - WorldCat.


Botanical Architecture

Botanical Architecture

Author: Paul Dobraszczyk

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2024-11-12

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1789149649

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An original call to reorient architecture around our relationship to plants. When we look at trees, we see a form of natural architecture, and yet we have seemingly always exploited trees to make new buildings of our own. Whereas a tree creates its own structure, humans generally destroy other things to build, with increasingly disastrous consequences. In Botanical Architecture, Paul Dobraszczyk looks closely at how elements of plants—seeds, roots, trunks, branches, leaves, flowers, and canopies—compare with and constitute human-made buildings. Given the omnipresence of plant life in and around our structures, Dobraszczyk argues that we ought to build as much for plants as for ourselves, understanding that our lives are always totally dependent on theirs. Botanical Architecture offers a provocative and original take on the relationship between ecology and architecture.


Gaia's Web

Gaia's Web

Author: Karen Bakker

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-04-16

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0262048752

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A riveting exploration of one of the most important dilemmas of our time: will digital technology accelerate environmental degradation, or could it play a role in ecological regeneration? At the uncanny edge of the scientific frontier, Gaia’s Web explores the promise and pitfalls the Digital Age holds for the future of our planet. Instead of the Internet of Things, environmental scientist and tech entrepreneur Karen Bakker asks, why not consider the Internet of Living Things? At the surprising and inspiring confluence of our digital and ecological futures, Bakker explores how the tools of the Digital Age could be mobilized to address our most pressing environmental challenges, from climate change to biodiversity loss. Interspersed with ten elegiac, enigmatic parables, each of which is based on an existing technology, Gaia’s Web evokes the conundrums we face as the World Wide Web intertwines with the Web of Life. A new generation of innovators is deploying digital technology to come to the aid of the planet, using spy satellites to track down environmental criminals, inviting animals to the Metaverse, and biohacking Frankenstein-like biobots as environmental sentinels. But will they end up doing more harm than good? In an engaging take on conservation technology, Bakker looks at the digital tech applications to environmental issues from predatory harvesting of environmental data to human bycatch and eco-surveillance capitalism. If we address these issues and mobilize digitally mediated forms of citizen science, she argues, digital tech could help reverse environmental harms and advance environmental sustainability. And in the process, Big Tech might be transformed for the better. With its uniquely broad scope—combining insights from computer science, ecology, engineering, environmental science, and environmental law—Gaia’s Web introduces profoundly novel ways of addressing our most pressing environmental challenges—mitigating climate change, protecting endangered species—and creating new possibilities for ecological justice by empowering nonhumans to participate in environmental regulation.


Building Biology

Building Biology

Author: Nurgül Ece

Publisher: Birkhäuser

Published: 2018-03-19

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 3035610401

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Health and environmental compatibility are key topics in contemporary society. The book shows how the built environment can be aesthetically pleasing, modern and, at the same time, healthy and environmentally friendly. It makes the link between architecture as a design task and a building biology approach to design. Building biology teaches us about the holistic interaction between people and their built environment. It combines building culture with ecology and disciplines such as chemistry, biology, geology, and psychology. Using the building of the Institute of Building Biology + Sustainability (IBN) as a model, building biology criteria and approaches are explained in detail. Numerous additional current projects illustrate how these are implemented in responsible, healthy, and hence sustainable architecture.


Conceptual Joining

Conceptual Joining

Author: Lukas Allner

Publisher: Birkhäuser

Published: 2021-11-22

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 3035624372

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Dieses Buch untersucht experimentelle Ansätze für Entwurf und Umsetzung von Holzstrukturen in der Architektur und präsentiert zugleich die Resultate eines künstlerischen Forschungsprojekts. Durch den Einsatz digitaler Werkzeuge wird die Anatomie des Holzes als entwurfsbestimmendes Prinzip für Raumgefüge genutzt, das Potenzial traditioneller Handwerkskunst erforscht und daraus eine materialorientierte Architekturpraxis abgeleitet. Strukturen werden hier nicht für eine bestimmte Nutzung entworfen, sondern eröffnen aufgrund ihrer spezifischen räumlichen und geometrischen Eigenschaften unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten der Bespielung. Die Dokumentation gibt Einblick in einen ergebnisoffenen Forschungsprozess. Gastbeiträge reflektieren die zugrunde liegenden Konzepte und damit die zukünftige Relevanz des Baustoffs Holz.


Conceptual Landscapes

Conceptual Landscapes

Author: Simon M. Bussiere

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-15

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1000854574

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Conceptual Landscapes explores the dilemma faced in the early moments of design thinking through a gradient of work in landscape and environmental design media by both emerging and well-established designers and educators of landscape architecture. It questions where and, more importantly, how the process of design starts. The book deconstructs the steps of conceptualizing design in order to reignite pedagogical discussions about timing and design fundamentals, and to reveal how the spark of an idea happens – from a range of unique perspectives. Through a careful arrangement of visual essays that integrate analog, digital, and mixed-media works and processes, the book highlights differences between diverse techniques and triggers debate between design, representation, technology, and creative culture in the field. Taken together, the book’s visual investigation of the conceptual design process serves as a learning tool for aspiring designers and seasoned professionals alike. By situating student work alongside that of experienced teachers and landscape architects, the book also demystifies outdated notions of individual genius and sheds new light on the nearly universally messy process of discovery, bridged across years and diverse creative vocabularies in the conceptual design process. Lavishly illustrated with over 210 full color images, this book is a must-read for students and instructors in landscape architecture.


Green Obsession

Green Obsession

Author: Stefano Boeri Architetti

Publisher: Actar D, Inc.

Published: 2021-12-09

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 163840819X

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Green Obsession traces the long path that architect Stefano Boeri and his studio - Stefano Boeri Architetti - have followed in the last fifteen years of practice, aiming at the redefinition of the relationship between city and nature. The book follows a discursive thread, alternating dialogues and scientific essays by some of the main protagonists who have contributed to widening the perspective on this subject, helping to raise awareness while protecting the world and its biodiversity. Cities have contributed for centuries to the promotion of some of humanity’s greatest ideas, we must now urgently include them as among the principal players in the environmental debate and at the forefront of any policy tackling and countering – possibly reversing - climate change. Nevertheless, even today one of the most significant technologies capable of absorbing CO2 and restoring our environment is photosynthesis. Planting trees, in addition to protecting existing natural areas and biodiversity, together with de-carbonization, renewable energies, digitalization, smart mobility and the circular economy could be the set of strategies necessary to tackle climate change. Today the effects of the Anthropocene age are ever more visible, changing our environment and affecting every species that lives within it. Green Obsession offers a path to be taken, a hard but still necessary paradigm shift – even for architecture and urbanism – that aims to give a voice to this much needed ecological transition. This book aims to unveil the processes and the complexity involved in the search for a new kind of urbanism, while raising questions and opening old wounds related to the relationship between the human species and Nature and finally putting these fragments together to create a portrait of our era. We need to conceive cities as new green catalysts. Now more than ever, it is essential to act together as separate individuals and professionals, joining the cause as members of the global community with a shared environmental strategy. We all have to open the era of a new alliance between Nature and City. With Contributions from Emanuele Coccia, Jane Goodall, Paul Hawken, Cecil Konijnendijk, David Miller, Harini Nagendra, Giuseppe Sala and Giorgio Vacchiano."


The Exhausted of the Earth

The Exhausted of the Earth

Author: Ajay Singh Chaudhary

Publisher: Watkins Media Limited

Published: 2024-02-13

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1915672120

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Climate change is not only about the exhaustion of the planet, it's about the exhaustion of so many of us, our lives, our worlds, even our minds. So, what is to be done? To answer this question, Ajay Singh Chaudhary brings together both the science and the politics of climate change. He shows how a new politics particular to the climate catastrophe demands a bitter struggle between those attached to the power, wealth, and security of "business-as-usual" and all of us, those exhausted, in every sense of the word, by the status quo. Replacing Promethean, romantic, and apocalyptic fairytales with a new story for every exhausted inhabitant of this exhausted world, The Exhausted of the Earth outlines the politics and the power needed to alter the course of our burning world far beyond, far better than, mere survival.