When you include the four Joint Case Study Pavilions and the dozen free-standing city pavilions, there are too many for me to give a run-down of each case study in this post (though they will appear in the document summarizing my opinions on Expo that will be posted sometime this year—its publication has been delayed by a busy schedule!). So instead, I will highlight some trends that I observed in the Urban Best Practices Area (UBPA) and what I believe the lessons to be learned are from the UBPA.
Let me start with the concept of creating a more sustainable residential space. This was perhaps the most exciting for me considering that it was what I had gone to Expo seeking, and here I had finally found it. There were many good examples of sustainable residences in the UBPA, mostly in the free-standing case study pavilions. Many of these were selected because of the representative city’s commitment to sustainability and especially sustainable housing. Therefore projects like the Hamburg House and London ZED (Zero Energy Development) home were exhibited with nice walk-through tutorials about the architectural features and integrated design that helped to achieve better environmental performance compared to typical houses. For example, both the ZED and Hamburg pavilions showed off elements of passive design meant to increase daylight penetration while using smart glass selection and shading to reduce heat gain from the windows.
Hamburg
London
Typically, heat gained through windows is one of the largest energy drains on a building, but with smart materials choices, the benefits of windows can be retained without the negative benefits. The projects also explained how insulation, a simple change severely lacking in Shanghai buildings, could help improve the energy performance of housing substantially with little added cost. Such displays may not be educational to architects and designers, but to the general public here in China, they can go a long way to advancing sustainability.
In this regard, the Shanghai case study house may have had the greatest opportunity to educate. My guess is that most visitors would be drawn to this pavilion of any in the UBPA simply because it is from Shanghai (the fact that they claim to have received over 9 million visitors to the Shanghai pavilion while the other case study houses have not gotten near that mark supports this, though I find the numbers questionable personally).
This house too incorporates some excellent passive design features including a large atrium which acts as a natural chimney, drawing in air from the lower levels with the assistance of two great fans outside the entrance and funneling the hot summer air out the roof. Thermal massing is demonstrated too in this pavilion through the use of stone pathways and walls which help regulate the interior temperature year-round. Glass is also used with interior gardens to allow in light but exclude some heat. A similar technique was employed in the Rhone-Alpes Case Study Pavilion, which utilized natural bamboo on the exterior of the façade to act as shading. The locally sourced, rapidly renewable material has many environmental benefits, looks nice, and helps save energy inside the pavilion as well.
The Rhone-Alpes Pavilion should also be commended for highlighting one of the biggest issues involving sustainability of structures—modularity and adaptation to future uses. Many buildings only are used for their intended purpose for a short amount of their lifetime. Over time the use evolves until renovation is required to adapt the structure to its new use. While this is still better environmentally than embedding more emissions into a brand new building, it would be better not to have to renovate at all, but this requires foresight for the designer to create a building for the intended program and future programs. Well, in some ways, the Rhone-Alpes Pavilion does just this. By incorporating from the outset extensive network coverage of power, lighting, and space conditioning such that the overall energy consumption is still low, the Pavilion can have its interior partitions moved and easily reconfigured while still maintaining good lighting density, temperature control, and services provision to its occupants. This forethought could obviate the need for costly and high-emissions renovations later in the building’s lifetime, thereby making the overall structure much more environmentally friendly and sustainable.
Beyond these passive design strategies, the case study houses showed off the potential of more active design strategies for saving energy and water. One very interesting house was the Alsace Pavilion which featured novel cladding whereby water flowed down the exterior of the pavilion, creating a shimmering, moving exterior that also served to heat the water for use inside the pavilion and cool the interior naturally thus reducing the air conditioning load. Heat was prevented from entering non-glass portions of the building by vertical gardens draping the exterior of the walls.
I consider the water an active technology since a pump is required which does use some energy, though a minimal amount compared to what is saved from the water absorbing heat that otherwise would pass into the building. In times when the interior is too cold, the water can be shut off to allow the heat to pass through the glass into the structure.
Active technologies about in the London and Shanghai case studies as well, especially in the renewable energy departments. However unlike with some developments which are built around these flashy technologies and tend to ignore the passive design, the two case study houses integrated the active technologies within the passive framework in a smart way. Both used a combination of wind and solar either hidden from the ground level or tastefully placed to accent the architecture trying to show that renewables can be attractive and environmental, stifling the common critique that turbines and solar panels are ugly. Geothermal heat pumps were also employed by the pavilions to heat and cool the space and though these are inherently invisible technologies, displays on the benefits and operation of geothermal heat pumps helped to document to visitors the benefits that these offer. For those who are unaware with the technology, the principle is that if you dig down into the earth a relatively shallow amount, maybe 10-50 meters, the temperature becomes stable—it varies very little with the seasons. That means that in winter, the ground at these depths is warm and in summer it is cool. If you then place pipe down to these depths and back up, if you pump air through the pipe it will exchange heat with the ground, either cooling or heating according to the season and reaching this nice stable temperature. It then can be pumped back into the house and used to condition the space at very little electrical expenditure. Such pumps are very efficient and very minimal in what the consume—far less than conventional radiative heating or chiller air-conditioning systems. Solar heating works by a similar principle except that air is passed through a network of tubes made of heat-absorbing material (like black piping) again using just a simple pump or fan.
Another highlight of the UBPA residential spaces was the focus on greener materials. I touched on this a bit in my description of the Rhone-Alpes case study and its use of bamboo, but I think the winner in this department was the Vancouver case study. This pavilion had an extensive use of Canadian wood and a very informative display on the benefits of wood as a building material. It covered everything from the renewable aspects of wood (you can always plant more!) to the fact that wood as it grows sequesters carbon from the environment thereby making it low-carbon from a life cycle standpoint. It even discussed the safety benefits of wood. Since the material is less brittle than cement and steel, the claim was that it is less likely to snap, crack, and collapse in earthquakes than its inorganic counterparts. And of course, the beauty of wood compared to concrete and steel was played up, though I know a handful of designers and architects who would disagree that these more industrial materials are ugly.
Finally, before I switch topics away from residential housing here, I want to highlight one more interesting case, and that is the Portugal house. This small pavilion was not even on the map, but provided what I thought was an interesting answer to the question of overcrowding and urban housing. The pavilion was a tiny three story structure that was designed to be a small house for a bachelor. The kitchen was on the ground floor and up a narrow staircase was a small but comfortable living/work area topped by a bedroom and bathroom on the third floor. Though very small, the space managed to be comfortable and liveable—just don’t bring too many possessions as it is about the size of a couple dorm rooms and no more in total (including kitchen and bath).
In total, the residential housing technologies that were demonstrated in the UBPA provided a positive message of what a more sustainable city could look like. Carrying the dual mission of demonstration and education, the houses and pavilions that were exhibited collectively showed a number of architectural and technical approaches to reducing waste, emissions, and energy use in residential dwellings. While to those in the field there was very little really innovative technology on display, for the general public, these pavilions provided an awesome spectacle and a glimpse into what the future of cities should look like. Furthermore, they provided a great educational opportunity to learn about passive design and active solutions.
Another trend in the UBPA that impressed me was the wide variety of topics which were covered under the theme of “Better City, Better Life.” I’ll highlight just a few examples to show what I mean—to highlight all would be time intensive (plus that will come later when my summary document is finished). In one of the Joint Pavilions resided the Sao Paulo, Brazil, case study which focused on revitalizing the downtown district by stripping away the advertising which had become a plague on the city. Through regulation and renovation, the city removed ads which literally covered every inch of exposed façade in the city, limited the size of signage allowed by building owners, and discovered that they had a wealth of architectural history that had been hidden away. The result was a livelier downtown and a more pleasant living environment for people that was beautified just by uncovering what already existed. The lesson here is clear—don’t take for granted the architecture and buildings you have. Understand that they are valuable and beautiful in their own right and don’t seek to cover them for the sake of advertising and economics. Part of a “better city” is creating spaces that make people want to linger and promote social interaction, and the visual surroundings are a big part of that psychologically. Ads alienate people whereas beautiful buildings that serve as a backdrop to city life are inviting.
The Hong Kong case study pavilion took another approach to addressing “Better City, Better Life.” On display here was a method for expediting the movements of people in the city to give residents moments of their life back. By efficiently moving people where they needed to go and providing a convenient way to pay for transit, call elevators for your office, and pay for groceries, you could have more time to do the little things in life that matter. Here, they were demonstrating the use of RFID tags embedded in wristbands or cards to create a single account per person that served as ID, credit card, employee badge, metro pass, and even an elevator card that calls the fastest elevator to your floor when you need to move in your building. The use of technology was pretty cool, though I have to say I personally would have some reservations about that much information being stored in one place—what if you lose the card? Still, the idea of simplifying things to just one device to eliminate the need to carry other cards, forms of payment, etc. is a cool idea and would be much more convenient.
In the technology vein, Taiwan was present showing off its widespread wireless network and presenting its plan to increase penetration of wireless across the city. The benefits here include reaching out to those confined to home as well as eventually leveraging the coverage to provide services such as traffic monitoring, emergency response, and health care monitoring to all citizens. The case study really showed how leveraging technology in a positive way could help improve city infrastructure and bring internet access to many currently without it. Too often we focus on the negatives of internet (especially in China where social networking, blogging, and even news can be considered subversive), and here is an example of how ubiquitous connectivity can help alleviate many of the problems we face on a daily basis.
Switching to an environmental theme, the city of Tangshan, China, showed off its rehabilitation of an area both devastated by coal mining and destroyed by an earthquake. By cleaning up a former mining area, turning the excavated pit into a lake, and replanting the banks of the new lake to prevent erosion, the city turned this blight into one of the most popular areas for residents to relax and enjoy a summer day. The rehabilitated area now sports a lake walk, a small amusement park, and developing residential and commercial areas in an eco-city plan. The hostess who gladly toured me around the pavilion could not give me details on the eco-city, so I can’t report on the actual environmental qualifications of the development (it could just mean that it is being built around the green area—the definition of eco-city can mean many different things, but I will save a full discussion of that for a later post). However if the rehabilitation of this space is as good as she made it sound, this is a great example for China to follow in performing some of its environmental clean-up and improvement. I say “if” because again, through the limited English of my hostess I was unable to ascertain the level of degradation from mining tailings on the land and what sort of clean-up had actually been accomplished. If the land was a brownfield as I suspect and proper clean-up was not followed, than this development should not be lauded but rather taken as a learning tool for improving future rehabilitations.
A similar rehab project was advanced by the Montreal case study pavilion which showed in a very cool film projected onto moving blocks the story of an old quarry turned landfill turned park. For the past 20 years, this former blight on the city has been undergoing a transformation through soil remediation, installation of a methane-burning power plant, and eventual replanting and creation of a lake on a subsided area of the landfill. Combined with residential and commercial development around the park, a community center and sports field, and numerous trails, the once disdained area is now a vibrant city center. And since this project documented its rehabilitation of the brownfield to acceptable environmental standards, I can say that this is a project from which other cities can learn about how to deal well with former industrial sites in the middle of a city fabric. Repurposing these open spaces can turn around an area and prevent issues of environmental injustice and degradation from becoming a bigger drain on a city. Montreal should be applauded for this project and the example it sets.
A third theme that came out of my time in the UBPA was the penchant for the Chinese hosts of the Expo to throw in as many “case studies” from their own country as they possibly could whether or not these actually had valuable lessons to teach. One such example was the Xi’an case study pavilion which really was just an advertisement for the World Horticultural Exposition that will take place there in 2011 (I didn’t know they had that until I arrived in China). Under the guise of representing a city integrating modernity and history, the pavilion was a movie that only shows 4 times daily (so I didn’t see it) and a TV looping advertisements for Xi’an Expo 2011 inside a replica of ancient Chinese architecture. The Suzhou and Hangzhou case studies also discussed mixing ancient cultures with modern scientific development, but in my opinion left a lot to be desired in terms of actual lessons for the future. They were more advertisements for the cities and their home-grown industries. They did not give lessons or best practices as other pavilions did. Finally, I think my favorite of the Chinese pavilions for its lake of information was the Chengdu case study. After searching for the pavilion for a good 10 minutes, I finally realized that it was the garden at which I had been staring, thinking it was just a nice centerpiece for the UBPA. No panels or information was present to alert me to the pavilion’s presence, and I really couldn’t interpret what the pavilion was supposed to be at all. The Expo website claims it is a “water-themed urban ecological park” which collects rainwater (it has a lake—of course it collects rain water) and “[inspires] people to cherish water resources.” I missed that whole theme, and I was looking for it. In short, aside from Shanghai, the Chinese case study pavilions were characterized by low budgets, few lessons that can be extended to other cities or cases, and an overall feeling that they were put there to make China look as though it had a lot to teach other societies when in reality, it did not.
The final pavilion I want to highlight was one that was not even on the map. Heading to the Tangshan case study (which I had to be directed to because the map did not show where it was clearly) I happened to notice a door inside of which was hidden the pavilion “A Low-Carbon City: World Expo in Practice.” Here was a collection of live displays of how much energy the solar panels on the China National and Theme Pavilions were producing as well as totals of how much energy had been produced throughout Expo. Displays also showed the energy offset compared to conventional A/C from using the Broad non-electric A/C, electric buses, and geothermal heat pumps for some of the pavilions.
This was perhaps the most interesting pavilion to me as it showed the infrastructural network of the Expo site and explained clearly how the whole of Expo was contributing in some way to the “Better City, Better Life” theme. It did not touch the issue at all of the destruction, construction, and destruction of the buildings on the Expo site and the associated environmental impacts, but it did show how the Expo at least was being a much more responsible city than the rest of Shanghai. In this way, it was documenting how smart planning and smart technological application on a neighborhood or city scale could be achieved to save energy and offset carbon emissions.
However, I do want to note out of curiosity that one of the displays had a CO2 sensor providing live data from atop the Theme Pavilion which at the time of my visit was reading 582.6 ppm. For some that will mean a lot and floor you perhaps; for the rest, let me explain. The historical level of CO2 was about 280 ppm (parts per million) meaning that for every one million molecules of gas in the atmosphere, 280 were carbon dioxide. After the industrial revolution and the 20th century, that number had jumped to 380. Today, the world average was 387.18 according to CO2now.org. Some scientists believe that 350 is the stable level and we have already eclipsed that. Given our current trajectory, levels of 500 ppm may become realistic, but many agree that this will lock us into 2 degrees Celsius of global warming or more—the estimates are not entirely sure. The point is though that the local levels in China may be indicative (as if we didn’t know) that China is doing its part to pump CO2 into the atmosphere—just another reason why Expo is needed.
So with these noticed trends in the UBPA, what was my overall take on the area? Frankly, I think this was, as I said, the best example of the theme that Expo could have put on. The area was full of examples of sustainability environmentally and socially and in many cases had lessons that could be extrapolated to areas worldwide. I’m a big believer that sustainable solutions have principles that are universal but must be carefully tailored to local areas, and the UBPA did a good job of illustrating specific examples from which visitors could discern the broader trends. That China’s case studies left something to be desired does not surprise me—I frankly have not seen as much innovation in the sustainability sector in China as I had hoped I would find, though I imagine it will come—like many things here it may just be lagging behind and will surge with the whole country’s development. Overall though what disappointed me most was the lack of visitors to the UBPA. While not as flashy as the country pavilions, this area had the best nuggets of wisdom and lessons to be learned in the whole Expo, and it was being ignored by the majority of guests. It didn’t help that it was shoved to the worst location in the site rather than being prominently displayed integrated with the countries—that perhaps would have been better. Even so, that people did not seek it out shows that the average visitor was not going to Expo seeking knowledge on the theme but instead to see the fun shows and lights and be able to say they went to the big countries about which they’ve heard so much. I don’t want to place the blame too much on the Chinese population though for being ignorant—in fact it may have been a sign of the lack of knowledge among the population about countries outside their own that they were so enthralled with the country pavilions rather than sustainability. The government here doesn’t allow a lot of knowledge about systems of government and civil society outside their own, so perhaps Expo was a way for information-starved citizens, especially from outside the major cities, to glimpse a window of what other countries are like. Perhaps this was the only chance that they had to learn about these nations. Given that perspective, I frankly would choose the countries over sustainability too. After all, you have to know about the world to appreciate it.
A couple of last notes before I put my Expo analysis to bed. First, I want to commend some of the corporate pavilions. On my third day I visited a few more of these too and want to add Broad, State Grid, and the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion to my list of commendations. All of these highlighted in an educational manner strategies for improving the city fabric. Broad showcased a number of smart building materials through demos and exhibits and highlighted how prefabrication could make lower waste, lower-emissions buildings which were safe and attractive. State Grid had numerous educational displays on renewable energy technologies and smart grids and explained how these could improve life in Shanghai and throughout China while also acknowledging the roles consumers can play and discussing the difficulties with achieving a smart grid nationwide. It was a good, balanced, and optimistic look at what China can do to improve its grid and thus its environment. The Shanghai Corporate Pavilion also showed what Shanghai could become, drawing first on how it had already grown and leveraging this rapid growth to paint a vision of the future that was greener and cleaner than the past. It did give itself over to gimmicks to show that by working together we can harness our collective energy to change the world, but this aside, it had a good, clear message and was a winner for its message. Coming from a home company (or set of companies rather), I think this is important. My only disappointment here, like with the UBPA, is that visitors to the corporate area were more taken with the new or cool technologies than the pavilions with important messages. The Oil Pavilion inevitably had a long wait for its 4-D movie, while the Coca-Cola Pavilion too was always blocked by the line snaking back and forth so visitors could get their free Coke at the end of the journey.
My last note is on the China National Pavilion. As I said, after braving the early morning in Shanghai and navigating the buses in the dark to get to Expo, I obtained a reservation for the China National Pavilion and so finally got to see this “crown jewel” of the Expo. I must say, the pavilion was better than I expected, offering real examples of solutions for environmental challenges rather than just hyping the ideas of scientific development and harmonious society that I have come to hear everywhere here in China. After waiting in line to ride up a train-themed elevator, you arrive at an enormous movie hall to watch a film about China’s growth that reads as a combination of brief history and an advertisement for its industries—coal, manufacturing, and eventually services. Following this, you move into my favorite part of the Pavilion—a giant wall with an animated ancient painting of a city. The figures move as night turns to day and vice versa, seasons pass, and you glimpse the world of an ancient Chinese village. Alongside this are some interesting artifacts from China’s long history including one of the bronze cart and horse sets from Xi’an. Moving past this, you enter an abstract world of gardens and forests followed by a hall of children’s art depicting their ideas for the future of the world. Some of these drawings were very practical and very much in line with “Better City, Better Life,” while others featured aliens, monsters, or other crazy ideas, but hey, they’re kids—the fact that they have such creativity is great. It makes you smile to walk through this hall. Move through another abstract representation of architecture and environmental principles, and you come to the floor with examples of sustainable practices ranging from better packaging to more efficient transit, cars, and light bulbs. The focus is on consumer awareness and action and not as much about planning, policies, or design, but still, it had more concrete examples than I expected and overall I was impressed with the pavilion. Was it worth waking up at the ungodly hour of 3 am to get to Expo by 5:30? Maybe, maybe not, but I’m glad I did it!
Well, that’s it—the end of my reporting on Expo. I did go a fourth day to play tour guide for Jamie and her friends Devin and Joe who made their way down from Beijing for the second to last day of Expo, and I will mention that a bit in my last post on Shanghai, but since I was there for fun more than research, this here will be my last dedicated Expo post. I hope you’ve enjoyed my perspectives and commentary. If you’re curious to know more about my Expo experience or thoughts, I’m happy to answer questions. I made it to a lot more pavilions that those about which I’ve written, and I promise that sometime later this year I will post a pdf with some thoughts on all the pavilions I visited, but it will take a while to finish that long document. So until then, enjoy these posts and feel free to follow up on any more you want to know!
There are some great ideas here that can help improve cities - thank you for sharing them!
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