The collaboration between BIG Architects of Copenhagen, Denmark, and NOD Landscape Architects of Stockholm, Sweden, provides not only a solution to Slussen, one of Scandinavia’s busiest intersections but most importantly privileges the pedestrian and cyclist.
When the Stockholm City Council invited BIG and NOD to act as design consultants on Slussen, the direction given was to create a proposal that reconnects the historic Gamla Stan with Södermalm. Understanding the long legacy of previous attempts to solve Slussen’s traffic chaos, the team set out to create a single form within which the different modes of traffic are layered. The proposal touches the waters surrounding Gamla Stan and slowly terrace up using ascending and descending ramps to create a new, coherent area focusing on providing an attractive and functional setting for both movement and rest.

Currently considered inaccessible to pedestrians and cyclists, Slussen is a black hole in the heart of Stockholm. It is no wonder then that Danish-Swedish collaboration has made sure to offer cyclists as well as pedestrians easy access to and through the area. The proposal turns Slussen into an urban recreational area assuring easy movement for the citizens and tourists of Stockholm. Slussen will gain a whole new kind of urban space unlike any other in the world, where artwork, a summer’s midnight stroll and outdoor theatre can cohabitate with the need to move cars, buses, trains, metro, and boats. The strength of Slussen lies in its continual and varied movement which the proposed ramped landscape only underscores. The heavy traffic of cars and buses is carefully immersed under the rising hillside. Suddenly due to the submersed traffic, large areas have been freed and are made attractive to the entire city to enjoy. As a result, new opportunities for urban life are created.

The basic traffic system has already been developed by Nyrens Arkitektkontor as part of an architectural competition, with soft traffic and a public program on the top and with heavy traffic at ground floor level, storing away boats, buses, metro, cars and trains. But instead of separating the different levels, connected only by stairs and elevators in a traditional way, we propose to integrate all public, accessible areas around Slussen by interweaving the levels using descending and ascending ramps as this will allow people to move freely between the levels.

Pedestrian zones are designed to connect the already existing promenades and road crossings, and all areas of the new Slussen are as such accessible to pedestrians. The bicycle lanes follow the road as well as the promenade along the waterfront, and are pulled away only where the curvy bays of the new Slussen are created to leave space for pedestrians to enjoy the waterfront.

Today Slussen does not take advantage of its rising topography. Seeking to utilize its unique setting the proposal uses the terraced hillside to house kiosks, shops, and tourist information stands accessible through the network of ramps. In this way, a new and active urban area is created. In addition to the landscaped contours and pathways characterising BIG and NOD’s proposal, the dispersion of light has been instrumental in developing the site and the various levels. By day, natural light will pierce through circle shaped skylights into the lower levels. By night, the skylights will be illuminated from below. The expression will thus vary from dusk till dawn, from season to season and depending on the weather. This dynamic process and the continual hum of traffic will serve as the backdrop to a new urban form and regenerate life into the surrounding neighbourhoods.

There is an animation showing the complete program as well. I will put it up in a separate post as well.

Ping Intressant.se

Andra bloggar om: slussen, stockholm, kultur, arkitektur landskapsarkitektur, bjarke ingels, stadsbyggnad

Here is an animation of the proposal for Slussen in Stockholm by BIG Architects of Copenhagen, Denmark, and NOD Landscape Architects of Stockholm, Sweden. By moving the public program towards the most attractive place, and integrating the heavy traffic under the cover of a public square, it is possible to regain the waterfront, and at the same time connect the city parts around Slussen. The edge towards the water is terraced to provide day light to the public and commercial spaces behind.

See the original post about the Slussen project.

Andra bloggar om: arkitektur, stockholm, slussen, stadsplanering, bjarke ingels

The concerns about their system that I have are: The use of wood as the primary building material is not generally sustainable in this day of lost forests. With the double envelope design, you are practically building two houses to end up with one. Relying on wood as a thermal mass material compromises the potential thermal performance because wood does not serve this function nearly as well as traditional masonry thermal mass materials. So, I guess what I am saying is that a more sustainable and less costly design can be accomplished in more traditional ways.

1. Solid wood envelope. They seem to be using the old “mass enhanced R-value” argument for why solid wood walls perform well thermally. I think it’s well established that this is true only in very specific climatic situations. Touting solid southern yellow pine walls in comparison to solid white pine walls is like saying a Chevy Suburban gets better gas mileage than a Hummer…that’s not really a useful statistic.
2. Energy without oil. The presentation intimates that this is a completely passive design. For example, no heating system is mentioned. That simply isn’t credible for most climates using the technology they are describing.
3. Passive means local. You simply can’t create a design that relies heavily on passive techniques and generalize it across climates. In my area where we have high humidity, I’d wonder about this convective loop through the attic and basement, for example.

I could go on. I’m a passive design freak, so I’m all for the basic concepts they are dealing with. However, I don’t see anything really new here, but see marketing claims touting what they are doing as a major breakthrough and “the answer”. That always makes me nervous."

David Eisenberg, of www.dcat.net wrote, "After a skimming around their website, I see that they sell kits and their base prices don't include a lot of things - some of which are enumerated:

Because of this history of military and flood control, the use of sandbags has generally been associated with the construction of temporary structures or barriers. Using sandbags to actually build houses or permanent structures has been a relatively recent innovation.

It was an Iranian-born architect named Nader Khalili who has popularized the notion of building permanent structures with bags filled with earthen materials. Actually his first concept was to fill the bags with moon dust! Attending a 1984 NASA symposium for brainstorming ways to build shelters on the moon, Khalili coupled the old sandbag idea with the ancient adobe dome and arch construction methods from his homeland in the Middle East. He realized that bags filled with lunar “dirt” could be stacked into domes or vaults to provide shelter.

Khalili came up with a further refinement on this building concept on Earth: for a more permanent, shock-resistant structure, why not place strands of barbed wire between the courses of bags, thus unifying the shell into a more monolithic structure?

At first Khalili was filling his experimental bags with desert sand, but then he evolved his idea of “superadobe,” where bags or long tubes of polypropylene bag material would be filled with a moistened adobe soil that would dry into large adobe blocks. In this case the original bag material was merely the initial form and would not necessarily be an integral part of the eventual structure.

Soon after these first experiments, Khalili began publicizing his work through newspaper and magazine articles and conducting workshops and seminars on the techniques that he was perfecting. Many people who read about his work, visited his compound in Hesperia, California, or studied with him there, decided to go ahead with their own experiments with his ideas.

Among these “early adopters” were Joe Kennedy, Paulina Wojciechowska, Kaki Hunter and Doni Kiffmeyer, Akio Inoue, and Kelly Hart. I believe that it was Joe Kennedy who coined the more general term “earthbag” to suggest that the bag could contain a variety of earthen materials.

Paulina Wojciechowska was the first to write an entire book on the topic of earthbag building: Building with Earth: A Guide to Flexible-Form Earthbag Construction was published in 2001. This featured some of her early experiments done at Khalili’s CalEarth, along with several other case histories.

Akio Inoue, from Tenri University in Japan, has done extensive experimentation with earthbag construction, both on the campus of the University and in India and Africa where many other domes have been built for assistance programs.

Kaki Hunter and Doni Kiffmeyer (a couple) became enamored with earthbag construction after studying with Khalili, and worked on a variety of projects, both for themselves and for clients. In 2004 they wrote and got published another book, Earthbag Building: the Tools, Tricks and Techniques, based on their particular experience.

Kelly Hart (the author of this article) first began experimenting with earthbag building in 1997, after being exposed to the concept while producing his video program, A Sampler of Alternative Homes: Approaching Sustainable Architecture. He later documented his experience in actually building his own home in another program titled Building with Bags: How We Made Our Experimental Earthbag/Papercrete Home. Both of these programs are now available as DVD’s.

In the meantime, Nader Khalili was continuing the promotion of his “Superadobe” technique and eventually decided to patent the idea, which he obtained in the U. S. in 1999, using very general terms that cover using bags made of any material being filled with virtually any material, and combining these with barbed wired between the courses. While having made many public statements that this concept was his gift to humanity, he obviously wanted to capitalize on the potential economic reward.

Many of us who had been engaged in promoting earthbag building on our own were contacted by Khalili and asked to enter into contracts with him in order to continue our work. It didn’t take much research to discover that his patent could easily be disqualified because he had been publicizing his techniques through various media for at least four years before he even applied for his patent. Patent law clearly states that such publicity occurring prior to one year before the patent application would disqualify it for consideration.

So now the door is wide open for anyone to take this concept and run with it, and more people are doing so all the time, all over the world. While Khalili (and most of his students) have focused primarily on using the bags to form large adobe blocks, others have tried filling the bags with a variety of other materials, such as crushed volcanic rock, crushed coral, non-adobe soils, gravel, and rice hulls.

Earthbag building is unique among all other building technologies in that it can be either insulation or thermal mass, depending on what the bags are filled with. This is a very important distinction, because these characteristics of a wall greatly influence how comfortable, economical, and ecological any given system will be.

Safety is of prime concern with all building technologies, and much experimentation and testing has been done to establish guidelines for many ways of building. Khalili has established a relationship with the building department in Hesperia, California where CalEarth is located, an area where earthquakes are naturally a great danger. In 1993 live-load tests to simulate seismic, snow and wind loads were performed on a number of domed earthbag structures at CalEarth and these exceeded code requirements by 200%.

In 1995 dynamic and static load tests were performed on several prototypes for a planned Hesperia Museum and Nature Center to be constructed using Khalili’s Superadobe concepts with both dome and vault shapes. All of these tests exceeded ICBO and City of Hesperia requirements.

In 2006, at the request of Dr. Owen Geiger of the Geiger Research Institute of Sustainable Building, the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point conducted several controlled and computer-monitored tests to determine the ability of polypropylene earthbags filled with sand, local soil, and rubble to withstand vertical loads. Their written report concluded that “overall, the earthbags show promise as a low cost building alternative. Very cheap, and easy to construct, they have proven durable under loads that will be seen in a single story residential home. More testing should prove the reliability and usefulness of earthbags.”

Despite the success of these tests, earthbag building concepts have yet to be incorporated into the International Residential Building Code. Obviously more enlightened acceptance of the demonstrated viability of earthbag building needs to occur!

It is difficult to know how many residences and other earthbag structures have been made at this point, probably hundreds if not thousands. Many of us have been promoting the technique for use as emergency shelters, and certainly some have been built for this reason. It is easy for folks to accept this way of building temporary shelters because it fits the historical model of sandbag use.

But many of us have also built substantial homes using earthbags, and in the process realized how truly versatile and sustainable the technique is. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of these earthbag homes are still standing long after their conventional counterparts built contemporaneously have disintegrated.

Chile is exporting a lot more than a mean pisco these days. The XVI Chilean Architecture Biennial, a celebration of great Chilean architecture, recently wrapped this week in Santiago where the main theme was an exploration of architecture that cares for the earth. Hosted at the Contemporary Art Museum of Forestal Park, there was literally too much talent for the conventional structure to contain and the Biennial exploded out into the public eye in form of a completely sustainable, modern temporary pavilion designed by Assadi + Pulido, a young Santiago-based design studio with a modern, edgy and recognizable style.

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