I was in Williamsburg yesterday, because what better way to start a heat wave than a site visit at an unairconditioned building. In any case, that picture is the midtown skyline as seen from the Northside Williamsburg ferry dock. To give a sense of it, the East River here is about half a mile wide …
More on Wednesday’s topic… The concepts of embodied energy and embodied carbon don’t just affect how we look at new buildings, they can and should have a big influence on the question of whether to build or renovate. Simply put, it is possible, but not inevitable, that a focus on renovation rather than new construction …
About three years ago, I tried to describe some of the differences between expectations based on a rosy view of the future and realities based on…reality: The Star Trek Fallacies. Since that blog post, a new idea has come along that runs headlong into the fallacies about control, reliability, and repairability that I had described. …
They sound like buzzwords, but they’re serious: embodied energy and embodied carbon. It takes energy to produce structural materials, it generally releases carbon as well. So every piece of a building that we build has a physical cost in energy and released carbon as well as an economic cost. A good discussion of embodied carbon …
“‘We Cannot Save Everything’: A Historic Neighborhood Confronts Rising Seas” from yesterday’s Times hits a number of important points. Because of the history of settlement and travel in the US, a lot of old historic neighborhoods are near the ocean, bays, or sea-level portions of rivers. The buildings in those neighborhoods are increasingly vulnerable to …
