War on Suburbia?

I just got through reading a point/ counter-point on the war on suburbia that New Urbanists like myself are propagating...

Um, no.

I believe that the single family home and suburbia is here to stay. With the distribution of jobs outside the usual central city cores growing - the distribution of housing is here to stay. Suburbs are an ideal, and a good one for *many* *many* people.

The war us New Urbanists are waging is upon the condo's that offer nothing more than the single family house. I believe that condos could be so much more than the parking lot with row houses model currently built by the lowest bidder.

If we make our denser building options better than the single family house we meet a demand that is only growing as people become disillusioned by their 30 year houses. Quality found in a single family home can be truly bad.

New urbanists are targeting the craptacular options we have now for density. Apartments, condos, and high-rises.

Deliberate Communities

So, in a effort to bring the cost of the Gaiaship Project down to something approaching 'reasonable' levels, I've been exploring how *small* a self 'sustainable' group of people could be without insane overhead. Remember, the ideal is that the system supports itself with on site power generation, a high percentage of water recycling; advanced waste management systems and even retail.

I've latched onto a burgeoning trend: Co-Housing. Co-housing is the concept of a deliberate community. A group of people who come together on purpose to build a shared living space. Every time I say something like that - people think Commune or Cult. While I can't dismiss those extreme instances of this concept, Co-housing is more that a group of people come together to design a condo complex where the clubhouse happens to be extra spiffy. Meals are shared regularly in the big common kitchen. Multiple large rooms offer entertainment options and gathering spaces that the condo's themselves just cannot offer. Everyone lives their own lives; but the 'Home owners association' is particularly active and participation and volunteering in community activities and upkeep is expected, or even required.

Since I was very very young; I've been envisioning places like this. From the first concept, which I can still remember, of a ring of stand alone houses - just like you find on any suburban lot connected by tunnels (remember - I was *young* and tunnels just seemed like the most awesome solution) to a semi-subterranean shared living space, galley & bomb shelter. Yup, like most boys I wanted a fort... though I took a more modern view and thought about where we would store the guns and whether the central bunker could withstand nuclear war, Mayan calendars and major natural disasters.

While I haven't given up my tendency to think beyond the fold of normal everyday living; I've tempered my survivalist with the pragmatist that says that it's freaking expensive to harden against the _insert doomsday prediction here_ and I'll just settle for high levels of resistance to natural and social disasters... say like New Orleans and Haiti could have used. Food generation on-site is a big part of that and you probably can see from my other discussions of the Gaiaship how the Vertical Farm would likely work out.

Bringing it back to the small scale - what's a condo complex look like that is sustainable? Lets churn through the major Ideas and see what comes out.

Solid Waste management is the biggest and probably first thing to go. I just don't see a functional waste disposal system scaling down to the 20 or so living units this probably entails. Municipal waste disposal and all it's ills would be necessary.

Retail onsite? Possible. There should be a central shipping & receiving area for internet based purchases to make it easier on the delivery men. A bit of retail space at the edge of the property run by several of the members might also be feasible and be able to bring in income and convenience for the housing complex. Think coffee shop, perhaps a convenience store.

Fluid and organic waste on the other hand could probably scale well to the low levels a complex like this would put out. The major solids like food waste sent down sink disposals along with poo and its associated tissue paper could be relatively quickly processed into an organic fertilizer like Dillo Dirt. So much would likely be generated that it would need to either be disposed of or sold. Some could be used in the on-site gardens but the inputs to this system would be much greater than the demands any garden complex could put on it. Add a couple of big filters and you could recycle grey and even black water to some significant degree.

Power - no brainer. A decent grid tied solar panel system could supply all the power the complex needs. The burning of waste gas from the waste stream could possibly be used... but I'd guess that local municipal rules against things like this would be hard to overcome for a small complex. Throw in a couple of small wind turbines for those cold, cloudy windy days and nights and you'd have a solid renewable supplement.

So far it looks like a retail and significant warehouse like component would be necessary to make this a reality. Do-able, especially if you stack living arrangements above them; and the gardens on the rooftops.

It's not as good sustainable wise - but perhaps it might be a bit more do-able finance wise.

Yes, yes YES! BIM 3.5

John Tobin is an architect at EYP Architecture & Engineering PC. An article he wrote was recently forwarded to a BIM linked in group I follow. In it he talks about how BIM is evolving. He talks about how Architects, contractors and others are converging on what I would consider to be true BIM - fully functional virtual models that translate directly into construction ready documents and orders. He even talked about an online collaboration between the Architects / Designers, Engineers and the Contractors / Builders to create these virtual buildings.

He calls this BIM 3.0.

But that's where he stopped! He didn't take the interesting and logical next step. Once you have this model - you can reuse it. In a similar manner to the digital revolution in other media... 3D/4D/5D building models can be broken apart and reused in other buildings. Doors, windows and wiring systems in this building are 'plug-and-play' bits for the next building. But what happens when you want to say... copy the entire south wing and attach a new east wing to fit a new site. It's this ability and re-useability that will define the popular and dare I say it, wealthy designers & model owners of the next century. If you need another high-rise; you copy the core components from one you already have and add a new skin to give it a new look. You've just cut *months* of hard design work out of the loop. The cost of your new buildings drops which allows for better margins, cheaper re-sales and a distinct competitive advantage for the builders.

Then combine that re-use with the ability for these bigger models to be broken into manufacturable parts and you again save tons of money.

I call this BIM++.

Everything you ever wanted to know...

About the Future of Building Information Modeling

http://www.larsonobrien.com/blog/index.php/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-future-of-bim/08/27/2009/

Most important bit I saw: 160% increase in the use of BIM in only 4 years. This is where the productivity improvements for the construction industry are going to come from in the next decade.

A couple of key bits from the post - read it! It's enlightening.

What’s So Great About BIM?

The benefits may be too numerous to expand upon in length, but here are ten to start with:

1. Shortened design and development phases
2. Increased interoperability for all project team members
3. Clash detection for building systems
4. Increased ability for prefabrication off of the job site
5. Shortened construction schedule
6. Measurable ROI for users
7. Reducing time spent on contract documents
8. Integration of other software for scheduling, materials, costs, energy consumption, etc.
9. Potential for easing LEED project submittals with calculations and energy estimates
10. Use of the BIM object after design and construction

BIM for Product Manufacturers

Many architectural product manufacturers are having their entire catalog “BIMed” so that they can remain competitive. Manufacturers recognize that BIM as a building process is becoming more common and that their products won’t be specified if they don’t offer a BIM object to put into the building model. BIM objects offered by manufacturers make the design and specification of products easier for architects designing in a BIM environment. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sweets-type BIM catalog is created in the future. If you’re a manufacturer and you don’t currently offer BIM objects, put it in your budget for 2010 and every year after that.

Change can be daunting, but investment in the future of your career is imperative to success in that field. Like former Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki said, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

BIM in Texas

The Texas Facilities Commission - the folks who contract out the construction of Texas State Buildings recently announced their adoption of BIM as a state-wide requirement. They are coming out with specifications and guidelines for state funded projects.

Special thanks to (BIM) x for pointing at this video.

Big Problems

Speaking of tackling a big problem...

The Gaiaship design is addressing the issues that cause 20% of the total Carbon dioxide emmissions and about 2% of the methane emmissions. (2005 numbers)

Roads, Residential and commercial buildings for CO2 and the land-fill & waste-water contribution to methane.

What's your plan to save the world :)

Baby boom - Population distribution

I've made several references to the likely growth in multi-family & senior housing. This graph at calculatedriskblog.com shows the baby boom crowd as they move through the years. We're at the point where they are in the range of 45-55 and the demand for suburban housing reflects this. Soon though, many of these aging suburban dwellers will want more aminities, healthier living and want less home-maintainence demands. The ideal answer for many will likely be a more urban, walkable lifestyle.

The projections show them dying off and the curve smoothing out - but then we get this huge population spike in 20+ years of +80 folks. These folks will require somewhere to live - and that somewhere will likely NOT include driving themselves places.

The GaiaShip design can easily be used to build 'Sun City' like places for all these folks.

Reburbia

My blogroll exploded recently with the results from the Reburbia contest at Dwell.

Austin Contrarian posted about it when it first came out and my comments then revolved around rebuilding the commercial spaces rather than attempting to actually get around the NIMBY's to do weird things to the neighborhoods themselves. The Dwell submissions has some of that - but I also found things pointing to how we can add on/rebuild large lot suburbia and McMansions into higher density.

The winner - Frog's Dream: McMansions turned into biofilter water treatment plants.

http://www.re-burbia.com/2009/08/05/the-frogs-dream-suburban-eco-water-management/

AKA - turn a wasteful use of space into a suburban swamp. Not bad in theory - until you think about what it's going to actually look like. I hope you've got plenty of mosquitofish and flowers to keep that from being just the fenced in lot at the end of the block where we dump our shower water. I can just imagine this stinking to high heaven, looking like a mud pit and providing the local kids a place to get really dirty. It's why when I've proposed bio-remediation for the Gaiaship; I've enclosed it; tied it to bio-gas harvesting and algae growth for bio-fuels. At least even the judges think the idea is "poetic, not practical".

Second place is the suburban farm. Again - neat idea; I've even thought about building the empty lot at the end of my street into something like this but as my green thumb is more than a little brown, I'd need the right team and I don't know many farmers personally. Other aspects of this idea are re-building a couple of the suburban lots into walk-up lounges/restaurants. That would be excellent if the density around them would support it. But without the density to start with - you're having to pull outside the 1/2 mile walk limits usually cited by urban designers and you defeat the purpose of having it on a cul-de-sac. You have to provide for parking and all of a sudden you're back to the common strip mall.

Third place brings a real smile to my face. Turning the big-box building back into the farm it likely built over. This is a take-off of the vertical urban farm concept as some of the commenter's have noted. Using the large in-door spaces and parking lots to grow local produce & food. Good idea all around and one of the most viable options for actual use today.

Other notables are neat; some totally wonky; but most are interesting takes on small aspects of the larger sustainability problem. The Big-Box Biofuel generator; Hyper Localized water purification in old swimming pools; Farming in the wasted spaces next to the road (pollution!?)

I note that any of the ones that strike me as viable are already incorporated into the GaiaShip Design. That's possibly a bias on my part. I can't help but wonder if once we start advertising the design of the Gaiaship to the world how many front page articles will it generate? How many design magazines will have full page spreads? How many people will sign up to own?

NREL Submission - Product

Product

Function and Benefit: A complete virtual model of an eco-city campus, called a GaiaShip, allows for rapid site design and customization, exact resource and cost estimates, and hyper accurate construction schedules. The integration of municipal services like waste recycling and renewable power generation provide highly desirable selling points for both the municipalities and the end-users. Buildings that provide net positive power to the local grid and only barely rely on existing municipal waste and water treatment systems will be quickly approved by cash strapped municipal governments. Environmentally friendly housing with walkable retail, office and transportation systems integrated in them are highly attractive to an aging suburban populace, young high tech students and workers, families and New-Urban enthusiasts. Building a GaiaShip is dramatically cheaper due to the elimination of waste from the construction process and the dramatic compression of time from ground breaking to ribbon-cutting. Selling a GaiaShip to a management company is also correspondingly easier than normal. It has built in revenue streams from surplus power generation and a highly marketable product for end-users and home-owners. Development Stage: Stage 1: Engineering and model development (Current); Stage 2: manufacturing system design. Stage 3: marketing and sales Future Needs: Prototype campus with a forward thinking Land Developer and Builder

I crammed a ton of information into the above blurb; let's dissect it a bit.

The model is the key. And we're not talking here about a simple three dimensional 1/20th scale thing that you display in the lobby to wow your visitors. We're talking about a fully detailed virtual building. Running water, power generation, wires & pipes all integrated into the structure.

What's the benefit of that!? Well, the most common complaint a construction company has is the architectural plans are pretty - but not possible because of x,y and don't forget Z!! With a full function building with all it's pipes laid out, it's wires run, it's duct work in place there is *never* a need for a change order. No more need to say 'Oh shit - lets move this wall over a bit', or 'how are we possibly going to get a pipe over there!?' Change orders are the bane of a construction time-line and one of the major cost-sinks. Some of this is addressed by simply having extremely detailed plans, 3d drawings and a really good set of engineers engaged early in the design phase of the project. This gets us through the first 3D's.

The last 2 D's time and cost fall into the bucket of the module construction. With a BIM model you can fairly easily define blocks, panels and other components to be constructed in a factory or multiple factories. With a manufacturing line to back those modules up; you can now *much* more accurately forecast the time it's going to take to build pieces. You have no weather delays and are able to set working hours reliably. You can also begin to take advantage of supply chain management and other advantages of a factory... like multiple trailers at the job-site, machines and robots that cannot be deployed at a construction site, air conditioning for your workers and security for your supplies.

So the product we're putting together here isn't just the structure: how you put the blocks together, wire the walls and pipe the floors; we're integrating manufacturing specifications. Most module manufacturers will be outsourced partnerships to help control the supply line and allow for redundancy, site location flexibility and liability distribution. Manufacturers could sign up to be mass-producers for the wall panels; or custom artisan shops for art-deco interiors. Both would configure to our structural specifications so that their modules would snap in (and out - deconstruction rather than demolition). I anticipate artisan shops being created in clusters, even on-site of these mixed use communities and provide long term localization and customization for folks looking to re-do and upgrade their interiors.

So the question becomes - why not just build models of the blocks - why focus on the Gaia-Ship as the model - it's HUGE!?.

We have to have *something* we can show people on how it all can fit together. Everyone and everything in the pool so to speak. We need to be able to show a facility that can play host to ten thousand people, be a net positive energy producer; sip a the local water supply only when necessary; provide it's own food, jobs, retail, walking parks, etc. We have to show what you can DO with the blocks for people to begin to see the value of the blocks themselves. By it's very nature and scale, it will garner significant media and public attention. It's a marketing ploy and excellent exercise even if we never actually build a single, complete GaiaShip community.

And then, once we've proven the virtual model works (wind tunnels & number crunching galore) we tweak it; miniaturize it and bring it down in scale to broaden the market reach. Since we're doing this with pre-made blocks and manufacturing it's a matter of simple assembly. This is the aspect I plan to 'open-source'. We provide the blocks & standards and we encourage, allow and promote the social development of new structures; building shapes and configurations. The popular ones get chosen by a construction firm. We develop the complete BIM 5D model and charge our 20%. Foundations start getting poured and module factories all kick into gear. The construction company finishes their button-up and sells it to the highest bidder. The bank gets paid and the public gets another 'Deep-Green' option when they look for their next home.

Let's talk a brief bit about this new buzzword - "Deep Green" Green has become pretty ubiquitous; so much so that it's impact is being blunted. When you are aiming to allow 10 thousand people to live sustainably then you can start looking at 'Deep Green' as a classification. This level of sustainability is usually reserved for amazonian tribes that don't wear clothes and haven't learned to burn the forest around them to graze their cattle. People who have been doing the same things for generations without count, able to live in harmony with the earth and their surroundings. Now, I'm not claiming that we can totally turn around the culture that spawned movies like Super-Size me and An Inconvenient Truth; but I am saying that when you have people able to take advantage of high-tech green living features like on-site food production; waste management; space age water recycling; and walking to the store in a built environment that doesn't inconvenience them ...

if you build it - they will come.

NREL Submission - Business & Resources

Inception: Looking at American apartments, suburbia, and urban lifestyles and contrasting them with the concepts of sustainability.Found a dramatic dissonance. Current Structure: Brian Drake, Entrepreneur Management Team: TBD Intellectual Property: 5D (3D plus Time, and Cost) building models with integrated energy co-generation, bio-digestion; coupled with manufacturing processes for rapid, cost effective construction. Tangible Assets: Building Information Models (BIMs), System of mass-customization modular construction.

I started this back in the winter of 2007. My process improvement mind finally connected a bunch of dots when I realised - I can't stand apartment complexes. Not that I actually hate them - but they represent to me all that is wrong with modern dense living. They have buildings that have pavement between them creating a pedestrian hell where the best you can hope for is to not be assaulted by some stranger as you hurry to your car. If you live in a 'Luxury' apartment complex you get a gate, which does nothing, really it just looks more upscale. If you are willing to spend real money - you can get a garage so you don't have to worry any more about the neighbors.

But at no time are you encouraged to socialize. Your porches are screened for privacy and they are too far apart or pointed awkwardly. If you're headed to your car you're likely headed somewhere else and are not going to stop and say hi. And you are always headed somewhere else because we've segregated all the things we do into separate compartments - living over here - retail over here - industry tucked away near the freeway. To go to work - we drive. To go to the store - we drive. To do ANYTHING outside the home... we drive. Apartments have become the red-headed stepchild of suburban style zoning

These same issues apply to suburbia; but at least there you might be able to find sidewalks and yards. People walking by are by definition *not* headed out to run errands and the opportunity to get to know your neighbors exists. But we still have the problem that suburbia and apartments alike encourage inherently wasteful ways of life and in that suburbia easily trumps the apartment just due to keeping the yard green.

So... my process improvement brain said "There has to be a better way." An idea formed that perhaps... just perhaps with the right technology and design specifications we could do better for dense living.

Enter the GaiaShip. I'm not one to think small; and my passion for science fiction and technology told me nothing was really out of reach. I wanted it all - luxury; green; friendly; and high technology.

Over the last year I formed an LLC to be prepared. I knew from past experience with start-ups of my own that LLC's were ideal for investors. At the moment - with all the funding coming from my own wallet - I own it 100%. I fully anticipate giving up some of that stake once the right money is found.

But I'm not alone. I know I can't do this solo. I plied my network and found Mike Schoenfeld of DH Investment Company, a local land developer. What he tells me highlights the challenges faced by pursuing such a BIG problem, that there's a real market for pre-done engineering and is willing to join the team when I secure funding.

You may have noticed that I've been pointing at Michelle Kaufman's modular designs. In a recent communique she too wants to be on-board for this effort... once funding is secure.

With a Land Developer and the perfect Architect on board we fill two of my major experience gaps. My history is with technology, manufacturing and process engineering - typically automating processes that take humans a long time to do but computers can do in seconds. Over the course of my 10 year career at Dell, the projects I implemented or was a major contributor to cumulatively were saving Dell over $16 million per year. Most of that in pure time savings. With my expertise as an Entrepreneur (this is my 4th and largest startup) and my skills in technology, knowledge management, marketing, project management and even a little bit of sales; I'm ideally suited to manage the people and technology for the engineering firm that can make this happen.

I have yet to find the Soul Mate that Guy Kawasaki claims is necessary in Art of the Start but I'm open to any interested applicants. I would love to have someone as passionate about making a difference as I am. Someone to talk to, plan with and keep my feet planted firmly on terra firma.

About the company itself; the assets the company would command would be the model, the computers to run them on, and a social media site for publishing and interacting with the customers, the public at large, open source design contributors, students and the average Joe who wants to configure his dream condo. I liken this aspect of the site to the Dell.com computer configurator. So many times I've specked out my dream machine just to see how much it would cost. A configurator for a home should prove to be more attractive to the prospective home buyer than the computer one is for self-professed geeks.

I've talked a bit about the benefits of open sourcing parts of the model. Most of that revolves around the 3D structural design and surfaces. What the building is constructed out of: concrete, wood and steel. How it's all shaped and how it fits together to fit in a modular fashion. Any input from the public on these 'wigits' and how to build them would be welcome additions.

Key to maintaining a strong IP position though is keeping some of it back. What exactly is kept back will be a decision for down the road. However, I'm already thinking the integration of the municipal functions would be critical to keep secret (for security reasons too); the database and web site integration with sources & contractors that enable true fifth dimensional project planning... cost and time; and finally the knowledge of the manufacturing lines and processes to use for construction of the key structural components & wet-walls.

I've got a company, key players, a short and long term plan and a strong set of IP. I just need the funding to make it all come together.