Archive for the ‘sustainability’ Category

Tweet Below is my conversation with Carol Johnson, the Planning Manager at the City of Phoenix about what’s next in terms of codes, walkability and making our city more livable on the whole: Blooming Rock: What’s your position in the city? Carol Johnson: My title is Planning Manager.  I oversee our long range planning division, that includes the planners that staff that Village Planning Committees.  We have 15 Village Planning Committees which are like mini Planning Commissions throughout the city to help break it up into more manageable pieces because we’re over 500 square miles.  There used to be one…

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Tweet Yesterday, I posted part I of my conversation with Phoenix’s Urban Laureate for 2010, Kevin Kellogg.  Make sure to check it out if you missed it.  Today, let’s continue with part II: Kevin on why historic preservation is important: Obviously I think we should be preserving our historic buildings.  It’s a travesty what’s happened so far.  It just never ends.  Something’s older than 10 years old and we just tear it down.  It really makes it hard to be unique.  We just don’t have the mentality, it’s a throw-away society.  If we’re going to save buildings it’s because we…

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Tweet Last week, I had the pleasure of talking with Phoenix’s urban laureate for the year, Kevin Kellogg, about all sorts of things about Phoenix.  He’s a native of Arizona, went to ASU’s School of Architecture, later traveled the world for six years, went to Harvard for graduate school and came back to be a faculty member and an urban designer with the Joint Urban Design Program at ASU.  While at ASU in the early 90s, Kevin was a part of some pretty major visioning projects in the Valley that have now come to fruition such as the design charrettes…

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July 06, 2010

What the Sari Teaches us about Good Design

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet This 4th of July weekend along with the independence of our country, I celebrated my niece’s wedding.  My family is originally Indian and this wedding celebration was a chance to dress up in beautiful traditional clothing over the several occasions of the wedding. On one occasion, I wore a sari for the first time.  This may surprise some of you that it was only my first time wearing a sari.  But the sari is an interesting piece of clothing and to be honest with you, there is an art to wearing it.  It’s not something you just throw on…

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Tweet “Beginning in the early 1930’s, Chicago architects Fred and William Keck began a decade-long investigation of south-facing windows in residences that became the first to be called ‘solar houses’.  During this same period, two internationally reknowned modern architects, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breur, both applied climatic analysis as major design determinants, as evidenced by generous south-facing and properly shaded windows.  Frank Lloyd Wright in his Usonian house designs in Wisconsin and simultaneously in his design of Taliesen West in Arizona, all executed in the late 1930s, ingeniously and appropriately applied climatic design elements to diverse and contrasting climates, giving…

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Tweet I was very excited when I got invited to an open house by Sunday Studio a couple of weeks ago to check out the eco-flip they did on McKinley and 16th St. in the Garfield Neighborhood.  The photo of the end product was gorgeous and it intrigued me.  I was duly impressed when I got a tour, it was a house that any downtown resident would be proud to call their home.  When I saw the slide-show of the before and after pictures of the house, I knew we had a visionary on our hands, a person who cared…

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Tweet I met Jerry Ufnal while volunteering for the Greenbuild conference last year.  He was the chair of the media and public relations committee for the local effort behind the national conference.  Jerry is a leader in the green building community and is a wealth of information when it comes to energy efficiency.  He was kind enough to write a guest post about his experience with a new trend in the green building industry,  Home Energy Assessments: ____________________________________________________________________________ Mornings are still pleasant in Phoenix, so I leave the door open in my office for fresh air as I wait for…

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Tweet What I love about the After Hours building is that it is sustainable because it is well-designed.  In fact, it’s an example that good design and green design are actually synonymous. The merzproject is the architecture firm behind this building and they deserve a great deal of credit for getting lots of little things right.  They deserve even more credit for getting the BIG things right though.  But before I go any further I want to give the owners of After Hours, Russ Haan and Mike Oleskow the bulk of the credit for this incredible project.  Without their vision…

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June 01, 2010

Phoenix – Let’s get on the Solar Highway!

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet As you know, we probably live in the sunniest place in the country.  This may become a frustrating thing in the coming months when we might be praying for an occasional cloudy day in July, but it’s what we have to deal with here in the Valley of the Sun.  Our constant companion, the sun, is actually a blessing if we consider that Phoenix is supposed to become a ‘solar city’ according to Mayor Phil Gordon’s Green Phoenix plan. (Currently Phoenix has received a $25 Mil grant from federal stimulus funds for the Green Phoenix plan and will be…

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Tweet Green building is all about solar panels, smart thermostats and fancy gray water plumbing right? Well, not really.  Those things are components of green building, but they’re not the entire story.  Far from it. The most effective green building happens when ancient wisdom is combined with new technology.  Unfortunately, this ancient wisdom is not as sexy as new technology can be and hence it rarely gets much press. Some examples of ancient wisdom are orienting your building for passive solar design, using the least amount of materials to build, using local materials, and reusing what is usable. Today I…

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