Entrants should develop design strategies for a low/no carbon emissions building complex completed in 2012. Projecting beyond 2012 and recognizing that radical changes to the energy market and policy will not be made in the short term, entrants should define possible scenarios that will move net carbon emissions toward zero.
Sustainable development is a process fairly well designed at the policy level. At the ground level, urban development factors that contribute to a sustainable built environment, social & economic enterprise, strategic & sustainable use of natural capital, and an urban policy framework must be delineated with metrics and relationships.
Renderings and drawings will provide visual evidence of the architecture and systems that support entrants’ proposals. This vision will be used to activate existing stakeholders and engage new ones. As a distillation of complex ideas and strategies, the vision will be used to help us overcome the “fast no’s” and move mountains.
Society has made incredible progress on the backs of specialists working in narrowly focused disciplines. But today we face complex problems with no single owner or discipline capable of providing comprehensive solutions. “Not unlike cooking, the solution today is not in any one ingredient, but in the mix.”*
In their proposals, teams should declare the best ingredients for sustainable development, and illustrate how they will be mixed over time. The goal: to achieve a low carbon building complex and urban district that will transition to a no carbon complex as the energy context improves. This idea of transition underpins the Low2No competition title.
We are interested in three broad categories of outcomes for the competition. Entrants must:
Solutions for the above outcomes should address these questions: What is a sustainable development framework that is both replicable and adaptable to our site needs? What is the design solution for our site? What is a robust indicator useful for evaluating the sustainability performance of our solution? How can it have large-scale applicability? What kind of change can it trigger?
More than a design, we are looking for a credible strategic framework for change, and the principals upon which the framework was built.
*Marco Steinberg; from the Stroke Pathways Project, Harvard Design School