Design4D Blog

Nik Hilton  //  www.design4d.co.uk
Young Architect of the Year Nominee 2009, 2010, 2011
Finalist in the British Homes Awards 2009
Finalist in the Design awards 2009

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Nov 26 / 1:07pm

The Sustainable City of Sensors

Meeting with a friend from Arup last night we discussed how there is still a large separation between the aspirations of a sustainable society and the quality of data available to achieve our goals. Below is a link to a noise monitoring project which is being used to affect the design of the urban realm.

Much modern city planning has forgotten the lessons of history where the street patterns were designed as part of a holistic environmental strategy. Street widths and orientations were designed to create the necessary positive and negative pressure to shade and draw cooling and ventilating air through the streets. Hopefully a 'City of Sensors' will enable us to regain this lost knowledge and generate masterplans once again based on sustainable principles.

http://tendernoise.movity.com/

Filed under  //  Arup   Sustainability   sensors   urban design   urban realm  
 
Nov 17 / 6:45pm

Achieving More with Less

For those that haven't seen it a superb talk by Lord Foster on Performance and Sustainability. What Foster and Rogers have achieved for architecture is truly phenomenal, both driven by the simple premise of trying to achieve more with less.

http://www.architecture.com/WhatsOn/Talks/VideoArchive/internationalDialogues2010.aspx#ad

Filed under  //  Architecture   Sustainability   urban realm  
 
Nov 15 / 1:09pm

Decentralisation is the answer to sustainability?

Attending a Climate Change Conference last week made me realise that although a lot is spoken about aspects of sustainability little is said about the big picture of how we become a more sustainable society. For me the word that seems to be missing is 'Decentralisation'. I raised this with Herbert Girardet one of the great thinkers and early advocates for sustainability who agreed with my point.

The last century has seen the growth of centralisation in order to enhance efficiencies and I believe this is the main reason our lives have become so unsustainable. By centralising systems we have intensified toxic by-products and have then pushed these problems out of sight and out of mind. Without the problems on our doorstep we have then blindly gone on to exaggerate these toxic problems to a completely unsustainable scale.

As the human population continues to explode it is inevitable that cities will expand. I believe to create more sustainable cities we must find ways to decentralise our power generation, waste treatment and even politics and integrate these systems locally into the urban realm. This means designing buildings that generate their own energy and don't block off their neighbour's access to the sun. It means integrating Living Machine wastewater treatment systems into parks and it means reducing big government and providing support to local councils who better understand the needs of their area.

The image below suggests that maybe there is a more sophisticated model to be considered, 'the distributed network' but I shall save that for another blog entry!

Image003

Filed under  //  Architecture   Sustainability   decentralisation   solar power   urban realm  
 
Oct 26 / 6:49pm

Artist JR wins TED prize for his stunning work

I have been following this artist's work for many years as he transforms the urban realm with oversized imagery usually with a political message. I expect to see this idea stepping into more permanent built form as architects look for ways to add texture and meaning to man made materials.

TED BLOG | 20 OCTOBER 2010
http://pulsene.ws/cBO5

Filed under  //  Art   JR   graffiti   urban realm