williambraham.net | ecology, technology, and design

In November, the Department of Architecture announced the offering of an advanced, one-year Master in Environmental Building Design (MEBD) for architects seeking new skills and competitive advantage in the growing field of sustainable design.

With the renewed urgency of environmental issues-from global climate change to resource shortages and “net-zero” design-architects are faced with demands for new [...]

Integrative Thinking About Life Cycle Analysis:  Promises & Limitations
March 27 & 28, 2009
Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership (IGEL) Penn/Wharton
Second Annual Conference-Workshop
Registration Info: environment@wharton.upenn.edu
Keynote Talk: W. Braham, University of Pennsylvania, Sustainability and Carbon Action Planning, Life Cycle Methods

Penn Environmental Group (PEG): Green Week
Symposium: Ecology of Architecture
January 27, 6-7:30
Presentations-Panelists:
William Braham, Penn Architecture
Muscoe Martin, M2-Architecture
Scott Kelly, ReVision Architecture
Tim McDonald, OnionFlats Architecture
I gave a brief presentation on the problem of style and definitions. Ecological architecture is not a particular style or technique, but a way of looking at architecture. Every building is located somewhere in [...]

New Article:  Places.DesignObserver.com
“How much does your house weigh?” This was the question Buckminster Fuller used to ask when marketing his prefabricated, lightweight Dymaxion house in the 1920s. [1] The same question should be asked about today’s buildings — for environmental reasons, since each additional pound of material requires more energy and resources to manufacture, transport [...]

In September, 2009, President Amy Gutmann formally announced the adoption of the Climate Action Plan.
The Climate Action Plan lays out the strategies that will be adopted by the University of Pennsylvania to achieve the ACUPCC goals, as well as the means to track and communicate progress to the Penn community and external audiences.
The Climate Action [...]

Response to article in Wall Street Journal, 12/30/2008, “Green Goal of ‘Carbon Neutrality’ Hits Limit.”
I have appreciated the recent series of articles by Jeffrey Ball questioning the claims of companies like Dell and Apple about the pursuit of climate neutrality, or “greenness” more generally, but think they miss some basic issues. Climate neutrality is, [...]

“Emergy” means waste, it also means value, and so poses a fundamental question for environmental accounting.

Emergy is Howard Odum’s neologism for embodied energy or energy memory, the total energy used in the production or preparation of a product or process, whether natural or artificial. Put the other way, it accounts for all the energy transformations [...]

It is all about POWER.
One of Howard Odum’s most compelling ideas concerns the cascade of energy (food) that develop in established ecosystems.The diagram by Thomas Abel illustrates the classic example: the large amount of photosynthesizing plants required to support a smaller population of herbivores, who in turn support a smaller population of carnivores, and so [...]

Kiesler’s definition of the term was succinct: ‘the term “correalism” expressed the dynamics of continual interaction between man and his natural and technological environments’ (1939).
In Kiesler’s view, the interaction between tools, needs, and environment was continual and as he repeatedly explained, ‘no tool exists in isolation. Every technological device is coreal: its existence is conditioned [...]

In the history of technology, buildings can be viewed as direct descendants of clothing, as elaborate devices for personal protection (and personal expression). In a lineage diagram they would have developed from the coverings of plants or skins, and then in Semper’s view, the development of the first fabricated coverings, textiles of one kind or [...]

My work draws on theories of ecological design and on the history and philosophy of technology to examine the complex interaction between the built and natural environments. To rethink ecological design at the beginning of the twenty-first century means reconsidering the strong claims made about technology – utopian and dystopian – through the twentieth century, [...]

Malcolm Wells, the original prophet of underground or earth-sheltered architecture, died on November 27, 2009.
I still remember reading about his architectural office in Cherry Hill in the early 1970s, a startlingly light filled room beneath a meadow that restored the suburban site to its natural condition.
That ethic became the basis of his gentle architecture, for [...]

Is sustainable design, or ecological architecture more specifically, a kind of avant-garde?
I don’t mean to ask if it is fashionable, which it certainly is, but whether sustainable design is understood only in terms of new advances or breakthroughs, according to the military metaphor that has come to define the arts more generally?
What I mean more [...]

An summary of the items explored in this blog and the outline of a possible book. organized in descending scales.
Scale.
Everything is connected to everything else, but not equally (Simon).
Systems (or communities or populations…) divide into parts and sub-systems at many different scales, with their own distinct forms or behaviors. Herbert Simon argues that sub-systems the [...]