There’s a lot to talk about after Tuesday’s elections: urban planning, Keystone XL, and whether America is in a death spiral.

German magazine Der Spiegel holds up a mirror to the U.S. as it lies on its purported death bed.
Photo Credit: Der Spiegel

Der Spiegel doesn’t mince any Wörter

In a four-part analysis titled “Divided States of America,” German magazine Der Spiegel takes the U.S. to task for systemic divisions that have led to political gridlock, third-world infrastructure that is a constant disaster waiting to happen, utter inability to act to slow climate change, and a retrograde 20^th-century economy.

Even during Superstorm Sandy, the staff writes, “The only effective walls of sandbags that were built in the city on a larger scale did not appear around power plants, hospitals or tunnel entrances, but around the skyscraper of the prescient investment bank Goldman Sachs.”

Be prepared for searingly painful (and occasionally over-the-top) criticism. We’re interested to hear what you make of this view from Europe.

What Obama can do for cities

On a more optimistic note, Emily Badger and Sommer Mathis at The Atlantic Cities lay out “8 Urban Policy Ideas for Obama’s Second Term,” including a national infrastructure bank and reforms to the rail regulations that make our high-speed rail such an embarrassment (incidentally, one of Der Spiegel’s complaints).

Hurricane Sandy demonstrated the vulnerability of our dependence on automobiles; we need to become a lot more resilient.

Gas line in Woodbridge, New Jersey on November 1st. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: AP

By now we’ve all seen the photos of houses buried in sand along the Jersey Shore, burned-out homes in Queens, and submerged subway stations in Manhattan. Those spectacular images were in the first wave of news from Superstorm Sandy last week.

The secondary, lingering effects might not be as dramatic, but they are nonetheless highly significant. And they demonstrate, ever so clearly, our need for greater resilience. As of late-afternoon Sunday, November 4th, there were still 1.8 million customers without power, the vast majority of them in New York and New Jersey. That’s down from 8.5 million without power at the peak, but it still includes almost a quarter of New Jersey. In some places outages may last for weeks.

From the most shocking photos to the most piercing analysis, we look at some of the best Sandy coverage this week.

The Washington Post shows us before-and-after shots that somehow make the damage seem even worse.
Photo Credit: Richard Drew/AP

Before and after pix

Fahima Haque at the Washington Post brings us eleven stomach-twisting sets of Hurricane Sandy images, from New York City to Chincoteague. I’ll let the 22,000-word equivalent speak for itself.

Future pix?

Now imagine that flood would never recede—that the seawater infiltration is the new normal. That’s the kind of thing 3D maps from the Architecture 2030 report “Nation Under Siege” show us.

Jason Plautz at InsideClimate News talks about the striking similarity between images of post-Sandy NYC and the future reality of the city due to permanent sea-level rise. A long article but worth every minute. And check out 3D images of more cities on the Architecture 2030 website.

One of the cleanest and most efficient ways to burn wood is provided by high-mass masonry heaters.

A Tulikivi masonry heater made of soapstone with an integral bake oven and bench.
Photo Credit: Tulikivi

Over the past two weeks I’ve written about wood stoves and pellet heating. This week I’ll focus on another way to burn wood cleanly and efficiently: using a masonry heater.

A masonry heater, also called a masonry stove or Russian fireplace, is a wood-fired heating system that is fired intermittently at very high temperature to heat up the large quantity of thermal mass, which then radiates heat into the home. The heater has a circuitous path through which the flue gasses flow. Here, the heat is transferred to the stone, brick or other masonry elements of the heater.

Key benefits of masonry heaters

From an environmental standpoint, masonry heaters burn fuel very rapidly at a high temperature. This results in very complete combustion with little pollution generated. Except when first starting the fire, there should be no visible smoke.

Expensive callbacks and lawsuits can result when you don’t attend to the assembly details.

Directional drying is designed into high-performance buildings, and all three control layers must continuously manage water, air, and heat. Note how the air barrier is primarily accomplished at the interior and how difficult it is to prevent thermal bridging at structural framing if exterior rigid insulation is not used.
Photo Credit: Steve Baczek Architect

We’ve all heard the nightmare scenarios: water leaks that mar the finest architectural features of a new building; air leaks that cause hidden mold or rot inside the walls; thermal bridges that compromise occupant comfort and energy performance.

Money on the line

These scenarios have two things in common: first, they could all land you in court. Second, they are all preventable if you’re giving each building assembly detail the time and attention it deserves.

During a recession, most firms are already working with knifeblade-thin margins, so it can be tempting to cut corners. While the “extra” work required to get the details right might seem expensive in the short term, it’s a good long-term investment.

In this month’s EBN feature article, Peter Yost and I take a look at how industry leaders are changing the way they practice architecture in response to the increasing complexity of—and increasing demands on—our buildings and building assemblies.

A flying saucer lands on Grand Central Station, buildings are reclaimed after heinous murders, and we gape in horror at global warming skepticism.

Close encounters of the baffling kind.
Photo Credit: SOM

Historic preservation abducted by aliens

We love to talk about retrofits and building reuse around here, but the flying saucer of extravagance hovering over NYC's Grand Central Terminal has left me speechless. Just go look at Lloyd Alter’s slideshow of the SOM proposal and tell us what you think. (Use a synthesizer to express your opinions if necessary.)

How best to honor the dead through architecture?

Since when are coal-burning power plants “consumers”? A look at NSF’s dubious recycling definitions.

BioCel carpet backing replaces petroleum-based polymers with those made from soybeans and contains Celceram fly ash as recycled content.
Photo Credit: United Textile

Fly ash, a by-product of coal combustion, is considered “post-industrial” or “pre-consumer” recycled content by just about everyone…with the notable exception of NSF, which recently, and inexplicably, decided to label fly ash “post-consumer” for its NSF-140 carpet standard.

NSF justifies this labeling change—explored here by the Healthy Building Network’s Tom Lent—as follows:

“It is our contention that coal is consumed by the utility (the end consumer of the coal) in the process of production of electricity and that Celceram [Boral’s branded fly ash] is a product that can no longer be used for its intended purpose (i.e., the generation of heat to create steam) and would otherwise be sent to the waste stream.”

Hmm, industrial waste is now post-consumer recycled content? It is a dubious argument at best.

What to like and what not to like about pellet stoves and pellet boilers.

Our Quadrafire pellet stove, which we can operate even during a power outage. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

We have a sort-of love-hate relationship with our pellet stove. My wife leans more toward the latter, while I see the benefits outweighing the negatives. In this column I’ll outline the primary advantages and disadvantages of pellet heating.

Advantages of wood pellet heating

Regional fuel. The fuel is—or can be—local or regional in origin. At a minimum it’s not fuel that’s coming from places where they don’t like us—like the Middle East. When I’m buying pellets, the source is a significant consideration. I’m willing to pay slightly more to have my pellets come from nearby plants in Jaffrey, New Hampshire or Rutland, Vermont.

Carbon-neutral. The life-cycle of wood pellet production and use can—and should—be close to carbon-neutral. With natural gas, propane, or heating oil we’re taking carbon that was sequestered underground millions of years ago and releasing that as a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere (where it contributes to global warming). When we burn wood pellets we’re still releasing about the same amount of stored carbon into the atmosphere, but that carbon was sequestered in the wood fiber over just a few decades, and if we’re managing our woodlands properly (replacing harvested trees with new ones) the entire life cycle results in almost no net carbon emissions.

Sometimes bikers have to improvise where to leave their bikes, but many common bike racks may be worse than nothing.

Bikers need wheel benders like a fish needs a bike lock.
Photo Credit: forkergirl, October 28, 2002 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

Biking cross-country from San Francisco to Boston with a friend in 2010, I saw few showers, and had even fewer shaves. As we paused for rest at various cities, towns, and trees across America, we attracted a lot of attention for looking like we lived out of the packs on our bikes (probably because we did).

But while we were seeing a lot of our bicycles, a lot of places we visited seem to have been designed as if bikes had never been seen there. Truth be told, where to lean our bikes while we stopped for a snack was low on our list of concerns (did you know that Cameron Pass over the Rocky Mountains peaks at 10,276 feet?), but as someone who often bikes around cities, finding a secure place to lock my bike while I go grocery shopping is sometimes a major problem. (For more on the importance of biking in green and resilient design, check out Alex’s article on Resilient Communities here.)

Squeezing big box stores (and more people) into cities, living in a CO₂ fog, and tallying up the value of green homes.

The "Värm" home from Bensonwood's Unity Homes offshoot is inspired by Swedish design.
Photo Credit: Unity Homes

How much more dense can you get?

It turns out you can get pretty darn dense even without building mile-high skyscrapers, according to Lloyd Alter at Treehugger. He points out that Montreal has areas packed with three-story walkups and 11,000 people per square kilometer—and argues that the density-by-skyscraper philosophy just doesn’t work in most places, in part due to “losses for circulation, fire stairs, elevators and separating distances between buildings.”