In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises, Walled and Lofty

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/arts/design/26masdar.html?hp

by jsm386 • 16 years ago

66 41 16 years ago

Mz6• 16 years ago

Excerpt:

He began with a meticulous study of old Arab settlements, including the ancient citadel of Aleppo in Syria and the mud-brick apartment towers of Shibam in Yemen, which date from the 16th century. “The point,” he said in an interview in New York, “was to go back and understand the fundamentals,” how these communities had been made livable in a region where the air can feel as hot as 150 degrees.

Among the findings his office made was that settlements were often built on high ground, not only for defensive reasons but also to take advantage of the stronger winds. Some also used tall, hollow “wind towers” to funnel air down to street level. And the narrowness of the streets — which were almost always at an angle to the sun’s east-west trajectory, to maximize shade — accelerated airflow through the city.

zalew• 16 years ago

Wind towers are part of Middle East heritage and I always wonder why they've gone into building all those a/c energy wasting offices, malls and homes, instead of simply adopting this technology from the start.

Second of all I'm waiting until someone counts how much inefficient energy resources will be used to build these 'green' cities in UAE or China.

Mz6• 16 years ago

America is a young country. I think that contributes to how short-sighted Americans can be about some things. And America is essentially the "alpha male" of the world, so a lot of what gets done here gets exported, for better or worse. America tends to see new technologies as "better" across the board. In some cases, there is merit to that idea. (I am thinking of how popular cell phones are in some parts of the world, like China, where they have no plans to try to play catch-up with putting in landlines.) But, in other cases, it clearly misses the mark.

maigret2• 16 years ago

That's exactly the most interesting point in that article. Not the "green town BS" I expected. Rather a "folks, let's return to the basics". And what if we applied the same in Europe by rebuilding a medieval town model with modern technologies? It's already happening in Germany, where medieval houses get renovated with better isolation etc. You'll never see these houses for sale on any agency or newspapers because it's all sold to friends or family - the demand for these is just too high because of the incredible quality of life and the feeling to live in a special place.

gbog• 16 years ago

They are just doing exactly this in Beijing, rebuilding those square houses around courtyards called siheyuan, in alleys called hutong. They progressively renew blocks one after another, imposing strict architectural rules. I live in one of them, I get traditional Chinese village life, but with Internet connection, cars and toilets inside the houses (for some of them).

prodigal_erik• 16 years ago

Reminds me of a few things I've read about how fancy new houses in the southern US have omitted design features which cleverly deal with heat in the absence of air conditioning, so an energy crisis is going to put those homeowners in hell. It's important architectural technology to preserve.

CapitalistCartr• 16 years ago

I live in Florida, and yes, we switched to the modern American style after WWII. That is, build any box we want, and let the central heat and air make it livable.

The old cracker houses here are substantially different. They are wood frame, 2-3 feet up on masonry pillars, with a shotgun floor layout. They have high ceilings with ceiling fans, large porches, roof of sheet metal roofing with large roof overhangs and high slopes, and are usually sited under the shade of live oaks.

The difference is dramatic.

billswift2• 16 years ago

There are two problems there: first, most of the features that make a house comfortable in hot weather without AC, like huge windows for good air circulation, make it more expensive to cool with AC. Second, while the various features make a house more comfortable than many houses without them, they are still nowhere near as comfortable as an air conditioned house.

wazoox• 16 years ago

You know, still today a ridiculously small proportion of houses have A/C in Europe, including hot places like Italy or Spain. You just don't f*cking need it.

Avshalom• 16 years ago

Depends, inland Florida, Georgia, high humidity locations in general yeah, there's only so much you can do.

Down here in New Mexico and Arizona, on the other hand, you can get really really far with passive design. In a desert shade and a stiff breeze will keep you nicely comfortable even when it hits 40 in the sun. Combined with good insulation and high thermal mass and a house can stay under 25 even in the dead of summer.

Of course in a desert even if you can't swing shade and a breeze you can use swamp coolers instead of ac which are so nice.

tehgawdo• 16 years ago

Orgrimmar in Durotar anyone?

davidmathers• 16 years ago

I see this column is called Critic's Notebook, but I was mildly irritated by the author's relentless and pointless negativity.

Other than that, fascinating.

exit• 16 years ago

pointless negativity? you don't think there are genuine social issues at stake here?

phugoid• 16 years ago

I heard a radio interview about this about a year ago in Dubai.

This is the land of SUVs with tinted windows, maids to do anything that remotely resembles domestic work, and wretchedly excessive bling. When asked about who would want to live in this experimental community (there ain't no hippies down here), the developer said that it would start with the employees of the companies who get the contracts to build out the town.

Now that's what I call synergy.

rajat• 16 years ago

Do you value the various Chinatowns in cities like New York and San Francisco. To me, these unplanned, spontaneous developments is what makes a city worthwhile. Modern urban planners seem to want to make such spontaneity impossible, and will end up as sterile and uninviting as a strip mall.

dopkew• 16 years ago

We could have empty places interspersed in the city in which people living in the city could use as their spontaneity desires. It would also leave some room for upgrading etc

alextp2• 16 years ago

But these places arise precisely from the fact that they're not empty. Most chinatowns/koreatowns are in places where, back when the immigration wave was happenning, there was cheap housing that was close enough to local commerce. As soon as one or two immigrants went there, friends and family followed, and soon there was a powerful support network for immigrants, and the community thrived. You can't build that in an empty space.

And upgrading is handled well enough today by (a) knocking down old buildings and build new, bigger ones (except this doesn't sit well with planning) and (b) expanding the city to a different direction that can be developed according to market values and needs, which also undercuts planning (since these new areas won't at first have the infrastructure of an urban center).

yason• 16 years ago

A city, by traditional definition, doesn't contain empty spaces. The outside of a city is where the empty space lies.

Empty spaces degrade the city because it takes time to walk through an empty space just to get somewhere. And a city is meant to be walked around.

A traditional piazza or a square is fine because they occupy one city block, blocks are traditionally small, and they're surrounded by dense array of buildings: shops and apartments.

houseabsolute2• 16 years ago

It seems like there is an entire industry that's been built up in this country selling rich oil barons things they don't need, paid for with money that doesn't really belong to them.

seldo• 16 years ago

Who does the money belong to?

alextp2• 16 years ago

This is not a trivial question when you touch on mining-related issues. One can only become that rich by an artificial scarcity that is created when one person/company "owns" a part of land it bought way below value (since the true value should include all the billions of mined material). Also, anyone could mine the land, so it's not like farming, where skill really matters.

I don't think there can be a trivial answer to this question of who has the money that, in practice, is just lying there for the taking

mahmud3• 16 years ago

A) It's not "something they don't need"; they can easily write it off as a business expense doing PR for their country and attracting more outside investors keen to discover this 'green' oasis in Arabia (please ignore the Dubai behind the curtain, move along, nothing to see here ..)

B) The money belongs to them. They don't even advertise their crack; people go out of their way to seek it, pay for it dearly, and sometimes even mount belligerent invasions to get it :-) Only thing worse than a dealer is an armed crackhead.

houseabsolute2• 16 years ago

I would say it belongs more to the people and less to the sheiks; that was the point I was trying to make.

albertcardona• 16 years ago

... and the rest generated by incinerating waste (which produces far less carbon than piling it up in dumps)

Anybody care to explain how is that possible?

ajb• 16 years ago

Methane.

jackfoxy2• 16 years ago

Methane can be captured and used as fuel for power generation, as many modern landfills do.

jackfoxy2• 16 years ago

This article lacks a summary of the capital and maintenance costs per resident. With the government as landlord it will be an elite enclave as long as the right people in the government are interested. When interest is lost, watch out for deterioration in the "custom" infrastructure (e.g. the personal electric vehicle infrastructure).

In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises, Walled and Lofty

Related Stories