Net Zero Energy Architecture: TED Talks - Sustainability by Design

Below are some quotes and my informal notes from listing to a wonderful set of TED Talks: Sustainability by design (7 talks).

1. Catherine Mohr builds green

2. Kamal Meattle: How to grow fresh air

THREE basic common green plants which we can grow all the fresh air we need indoors to keep us healthy. We have also found that you can reduce the fresh air requirements into the building while maintaining industrial indoor air quality standards.

2.1 Areca Palm "The living room plant" (Chrysalidocarpus lutescens)

2.2 Mother-in-law's Tongue "The bedroom plant" (Sansevieria trifasciata

2.3 Money Plant "The specialist plant" (Epipremnum aureum)

Additional notes

With these three plants you can grow all the fresh air you need, even if you were in a bottle.
Tried and tested these plants for 15 years at:
Paharpur Business Centre and Software Technology Incubator Park, New Delhi, India.
It is a 20 year old, 50,000 sq. ft. building.
Over 1,200 plants for 300 building occupants.
Their studies found there is a 42% probability that one’s blood oxygen going up by 1% if one stays in this building for 10 hours. Reduced eye irritation by 52%. Respiratory system by 34%. Headaches by 24%. Lung impairment by 12%. Asthma by 9%. Increased productivity 20%. Reduction in building energy requirements by 15%.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world” said Gandhi.

3. Mike Biddle: We can recycle plastic

4. Eben Bayer: Are mushrooms the new plastic?

5. Mitchell Joachim: Don't build your home, grow it!

TED Fellow and urban designer Mitchell Joachim presents his vision for sustainable, organic architecture: eco-friendly abodes grown from plants and -- wait for it – meat
Why? Because we can!
Pleatching or grafting trees together – a fab tree hab.
Sustainable organic architecture.
What if architecture and biology became one?

6. Anupam Mishra: The ancient ingenuity of water harvesting

Perhaps we should move quickly to the desert?
Welcome to India’s golden desert.
40 different names of clouds, though there are not many clouds in that area.
Structures that harvest rain collects 100,000 litters pure (0b) drinking water in one season – superior to modern commercial water megaprojects.
Every roof collects rain water.

7. Dan Phillips: Creative houses from reclaimed stuff

7.1 The First Cause of Waste is probably buried in our DNA

"Human beings have a need for maintaining consistency of the apperceptive mass. Meaning is “that for every perception that we have, it needs to tally with the one like it before or we do not have continuity and we become a little bit disoriented”.
“Rattles the expected pattern in unity of structural features”.
“Gestalt psychology emphasizes the recognized of pattern over parts that comprise a pattern”.
"That serves me everyday. Repetition creates pattern”.
Throwing away things that are not perfect causes a lot of waste in the building industry.

7.2 Friedrich Nietzsche 1885 “The Birth of Tragedy”

“Cultures tend to swing between one of two perspectives:
Apollonian perspective “Crisp, premeditated, intellectualized, and perfect.”
- versus -
Dionysian perspective “passion, intuition, tolerant of organic texture and human gesture.”
I feature blemish!
I feature organize process!
Apollonian mindset creates mountains of waste.

7.3 The industrial revolution ...

... has created gizmos that will do anything, that we up to that point had to do by hand. Now we have standardized materials. Well trees don’t grow 2 inches by 4 inches, 8, 10, and 12 feet tall. We create mountains of waste. Trees are doing a good job in the forest working the byproduct of their industry.
“But it does no good to be responsible at the point of harvest if consumers are wasting the harvest at the point of consumption”.

7.4 Labor is disproportionately more expensive that materials (myth).

Jim was digging through the trash to find header material. “If you were paying me $300 an hour I can see how you might say that but right now I am saving you $5 a minute. Do the math.

7.5 Maybe after 2,500 years Plato was still having his way with us with this notion of perfect forms.

He said we have in our noggin the perfect idea of what we want and we force environmental resources to accommodate that – the perfect house, the American dream. The problem is that we can’t afford it, so we have the American dream look-alike which is a mobile home - now there is a blight on the plant.

7.6 Jean-Paul Sartre "Being and Nothingness"

It’s a quick read – you can snap through it in maybe two years reading 8 hours a day.
Sartre discusses “The divided self” – human beings act differently when they know they are alone compared to when they know somebody else is around.
“So when you come into the room, I am fulfilling your expectations of how I should live my life”. I feel that expectation. Subdivisions look the same. Gated communities, a formalized expectation!

7.7 Gregariousness

Human beings are a social species - we hang together in groups – we do what that group does, that we are trying to identify with!
We have confused Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and have shoved vanity at the base of our needs and values.
“Our housing has become a commodity”.
“It takes a little bit of nerve to dive into those primal terrifying parts of ourselves and make our own decisions”. And not make our housing a commodity”
“If failure destroys you, then you can do this”.
Some people say to us, that is really not going to work.
We are tempted to say, go such an egg.
“We may have invented excess, but the problem with waste is world-wide”.
“We clearly are in trouble”.
Try something new. If it does not work, take it down - that’s OK!
“What we need to do is reconnect with who we really primal parts of ourselves, and that’s thrilling indeed”.

Net Zero Energy Architecture