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Tag archives for architecture

Architect students go wild in Alingsås

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Alingsas

The central square of Alingsås. Sometimes a busy vegetable market, sometimes a parking space. Photo: Satish Jeswani.

Well, the headline may be a bit exaggerated, but from my old hometown Alingsås I get reports about frantic activity on the sustainability front. Not just from the transition group, that I visited earlier this autumn, but now also in the form of a class of eager architect student from Chalmers University of Technology, who have come to apply their new knowledge about sustainability on a real life local society.

chalmers-students

Representatives from the local transition group together with Chalmers students from Indonesia, France and Sweden. Photo: Ylva Lundin.

25 students from all over the world at the Master Programme “Design for sustainable development” have been assigned the task of finding strategies for this town to go from fossil dependance to sustainability in all its senses.

During the first phase of this project they stayed at the local youth hostel for one week, and met inhabitants, politicians, civil servants and others working in Alingsås in order to know more about local needs and conditions. To get the discussion going they have also started a blog (in Swedish only) about their work.

It’s fun to follow their ambitious project, exploring what people do in the evenings to see how Alingsås could be made a place where everyone feel secure or going to a school football game to speak to the students about their view of their home town. They also take a look at how Alingsås could be affected by climate change and reflect on how to create spots where people can meet without having to consume.

This is really excellent work. I wish every city and town had a team of architects and city planners like that, and look forward to seeing the final results of the group’s work in the beginning of next year.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

November 8, 2010

A resilient university campus

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Albano-campus

One of the ideas of what a sustainable campus could look like. Image: KIT-arkitektur and Hanna Erixon

Sweden might be the first country in the world with a university campus built according to resilience principles. When Stockholm university realised that it will need more space for their activities, they asked researchers from Stockholm Environment Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology to lay their heads together with a group of architects to create a vision of a campus that can serve as a model for sustainable urban development.

In a world where about five billion people are believed to be city dwellers by 2030, city planners face enormous challenges. Somehow they must try to balance the urban development and people’s wellbeing with the stress that a city puts on ecosystem services such as water, storm protection, flood mitigation and biodiversity.
– We need new models and perspectives in order to face these challenges, where the cities interact better with crucial ecosystems, says Stephan Barth, who is researcher at Stockholm Environment Institute.
He also says that this area, which is called Albano, can become an important piece in a social-ecological system, where animals and ecosystems have the space and accessibility equal to that of humans.

I’d be most eager to visit this campus right away. But a quick phone call to one of the architects involved in the work reveals that actual building plans are still about five or ten years away. The visionary images give a nice idea, though, of mixing different activities (I love the idea of community gardens in the middle of everything) and types of nature. More images can be seen at KIT-architecture’s web page.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

August 12, 2010

Making city life more sustainable

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The rooftop terrace of Kungsbrohuset.

One of the big challenges on the bumpy road towards a more sustainable world are the cities. Today about 80 percent of global CO2 emissions come from cities (in Sweden 60 percent). With more and more people moving into urban areas – according to UN about 70 percent of the World’s population will be city dwellers by year 2050 – cities will have to change in many ways if they are to be both environmentally and socially sustainable.

This issue occupies a lot of brains all over the world, resulting in some interesting projects that can work as pieces in this immense puzzle. One of them is Kungsbrohuset, an office building next to the central station of Stockholm, which will be inaugurated this week. It tries to gather most of the existing knowledge of how to make a building more environmentally conscious.
For example the excess body heat of the 200 000 travellers rushing through the adjacent Central Station of Stockholm will be used to at least partially heat Kungsbrohuset. Energy efficient windows allow the daylight to enter, lowering energy use for lighting, but shuts the summer heat out. Fiber optics are used to lead sunlight into darker areas of the house.

But constructing a more sustainable building doesn’t only mean using the latest technology. Another important thing is making it easier for people to make better choices. One way is offering those working in the building access to safe parking spaces for their bicycles, the possibility to take a shower and also facilities to repair their bikes.

After having fixed a punctured bike tire on my own office floor a few weeks ago, I know I would appreciate a repair shop like that a lot…

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

May 3, 2010