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Amazon selects New York & Arlington, VA for HQ2 ・people, mass transit, sustainability

Amazon has selected New York City (the Long Island City neighborhood of the borough of Queens) and Arlington,Virginia (the Crystal City neighborhood, across the Potomac from Washington, DC) for its HQ2.

In agreements with the local and state governments, Amazon stipulates that the two locations will house at least 25,000 employees each. The new sites will require $5 billion in construction and other investments.

Direct access to rail, train, subway/metro, bus routes (mass transit) at site has been a core preference of Amazon, stipulated in the Amazon HQ2 RFP.

Significantly, Amazon’s HQ2 RFP stipulates that it will develop HQ2 with a dedication to sustainability:

Sustainability: Amazon is committed to sustainability efforts. Amazon’s buildings in its current Seattle campus are sustainable and energy efficient. The buildings’ interiors feature salvaged and locally sourced woods, energy efficient lighting, composting and recycling alternatives as well as public plazas and pockets of green space. Twenty of the buildings in our Seattle campus were built using LEED standards. Additionally, Amazon’s newest buildings use a ‘District Energy’ system that utilizes recycled heat from a nearby non-Amazon data center to heat millions of square feet of office space – a system that is about 4x more efficient than traditional heating. This system is designed to allow Amazon to warm just over 4 million square feet of office space on Amazon’s four-block campus, saving 80 million kilowatt hours over 20 years, or about 4 million kilowatt-hours a year. We also invest in large solar and wind operations and were the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the U.S. in 2016.

Amazon will develop HQ2 with a dedication to sustainability.

Of the cities selected, Emily Badger of The New York Times observes:

“Tech companies feed on highly educated and specialized workers, specifically dense clusters of them where workers and companies interacting with one another are more likely to produce new ideas. Washington and New York, as it turns out, are two of the most highly educated regions in the country, with already large pools of tech workers.

“Drop a big Amazon headquarters into Washington or New York, and economists expect the 50,000 workers there to be more productive than if the same 50,000 jobs were dropped into Indianapolis. Simply putting them in New York, near so many other tech workers, increases the likelihood that Amazon invents more services, connects to more markets, makes more money.

“Those added benefits are so strong, economists say, that it’s worth it to companies like Amazon to pay more — a lot more — for office space and employee salaries in New York City.

“‘If you are in the business of making new things — whether it’s a new product, or a new way of delivering things, or a new service — and it’s something that is unique, and it keeps changing and it needs updating, the most important factor of all is human capital,” said Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s not like making soap, or like making textiles.’”

See:

Amazon HQ2 RFP

“Amazon Announces New York and Virginia as HQ2 Picks,” Karen Weise, Technology | The New York Times, 13 November 2018

“In Superstar Cities, the Rich Get Richer, and They Get Amazon,” Emily Badger, The New York Times, 7 November 2018

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HouseZero ・retrofitting a 1924-era wood-frame house

Harvard University’s Center for Green Buildings and Cities, in collaboration with international architecture and design firm Snøhetta, is retrofitting a wood frame house built in 1924 in what is now an historic district of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The house now serves as the Center’s headquarters.

The retrofit is intended to fulfill multiple objectives:

A focus on inefficient existing buildings. In the United States, buildings consume around 40% of energy produced annually. This equates to more than $230 billion spent annually by property owners heating, cooling, and powering the nation’s 123.6 million homes. Housing consumes 18-23% of that.

A focus on using current technologies together with better design.

The use of zero energy for heating and cooling. A retrofitted building that produces more energy than it consumes.

100% natural ventilation and daylight autonomy

Zero CO2 emissions, including embodied energy in materials

A positive rather than a negative impact on the surrounding environment. A house conducive to occupant health, encouraging productivity and creativity.

Use of self-generated data that will allow the building to self-adjust. The house will adjust itself seasonally and daily to achieve thermal comfort targets.

The development of ideas and a working model that can be used by homeowners as they seek to renovate existing houses towards significant energy and carbon use improvements without costly or wasteful tear-downs.

The Center for Green Buildings and Cities will not seek any kind of independent certification, such as USGBC LEED, WELL, or Living Building certification. The intent is, rather, to exceed those standards’ criteria.

The renovation, says Ali Malkawi, professor of architectural technology and founding director of the CGBC, is guided not only by the goal of net zero energy consumption with 100% natural light and ventilation but also by the understanding that a green building is “a sustainable building, which means it has the lowest impact on its surrounding environment as possible. It might have a positive effect on its environment—the surrounding as well as the global.” Such a building is, furthermore, “healthy for its occupants” and encourages productivity and creativity.

See:

“Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities unveils HouseZero project, an ambitious retrofit of its Cambridge headquarters” | Travis Dagenais, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 25 May 2017

“Harvard’s ‘HouseZero’” | Alisha Ukani, Harvard Magazine, 3 August 2017

“Future Home: HouseZero” | Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities”

#architecture #architecturaltechnology #buildingtechnology #technology #design #engineering #netzero #energy #resilience #CO2 #home #luxury #smartluxury #retrofit #homeownership #realestate #commercialrealestate #culturalrealestate #culturalheritage #art #collectionsmanagement #museums #galleries #snøhetta #harvard #harvardcenterforgreenbuildingsandcities #Cambridge #data #health #wellness #family

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Downtown San Diego | early morning vistas

Early morning vistas.

San Diego is, indeed, beautiful and has what is widely acknowledged as one of the best, if not the best, micro-climate in the United States. Very Mediterranean.

Why “tech”, that I appear to mention so often and that is taking root in the downtown San Diego economic eco-system?

“Tech,” in my mind, is no more than information gathering, processing, analyzing, reporting, and using, with certain questions asked (by people), the questions usually having to do with certain industries (art, finance, transport, design, building and construction, chemistry, physics, aerospace engineering, entertainment, etc.).

Sort of like groups of individual Marines gathering, processing and using information, on steroids.

Why pay attention to tech in downtown San Diego? Some of these companies have just appeared downtown, willy nilly, not according to the city plan. People in the tech industry generally speaking make more money than those working in the hospitality industry (housekeeping, serving tables, etc.). It is money generated here rather than earned elsewhere and brought here by visitors, tourists, and buyers of second or third homes.

 

#SanDiego #downtownSanDiego #realestate #resilience #art #tech #technology #finance #urbanliving #urbanluxury

 

 

 

 

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Benchmarks | the movingly beautiful tracings of El Anatsui’s work

Now on exhibit at London’s October Gallery, Benchmarks are a testament to the richness and elegance of El Anatsui’s creative genius.

A graduate of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, El Anatsui not only believes that, as an artist, he must work ‘with whatever his environment throws up,’ he is passionately curious about the physical history of the materials themselves, the stories they contain and the journeys that bring them into his hands.

The journey countless numbers of bottle tops, several bags of which were eventually discarded by a local liquor shop and happened upon by El Anatsui, have taken along the ways of West African trade inspired his iconic and elegant bottle-top installations and hangings.

Made from thousands of aluminium bottle-tops wired together with copper, the humble materials from which the cloth-like metallic masterpieces are made are embedded with multiple cultural, historical, and socio-political histories. El Anatsui draws out and reframes the stories and journeys behind these histories with the incredible skill, mastery, and grace of a master storyteller and creative genius.

Turning his attention to the tables and smaller flats of wood on which these  countless numbers of bottle tops were pounded, crushed, folded, and pierced as they journeyed and were transformed into works of art, El Anatsui has created the prints which he has, in one of his many moments of genius, entitled “Benchmarks”.

The tables and flats, that after so much pounding manifest a landscape of textured relief, were brought to the studio of Factum Arte, a team of artists, technicians and conservators based in Madrid, London, and Milan. Well known for its synergy of past, present and future techniques, Factum Arte is dedicated to digital mediation – both in the production of works for contemporary artists and in the production of facsimiles as part of a coherent approach to preservation and dissemination, and, much like El Anatsui artistically investigating the journeys and histories of local materials, pushes the boundaries between technology and craft.

At Factum Arte, the tables and flats were

3-D scanned at a very high resolution, routed onto aluminium plates and then printed through an etching press. Black ink was used to access the textural information held both in the intaglio and on the surface; others were worked upon in colour, while others still with chine collé laminates. The artist played with endless combinations and permutations of the resulting prints to create the syntheses

that he calls “Benchmarks” and are now on exhibit at October Gallery.

For one particularly direct work, coloured ink was laboriously dabbed onto dampened Japanese paper overlaying a large and highly textured tabletop, producing a detailed relief print that bears witness to many years of accumulated mark-making.

Genius at work at the interface and interactions of culture, histories, materials, science, technology, trade, media, work, art, and craft. So moving and so amazingly beautiful.

See:

“El Anatsui’s Landmark ‘Benchmark’ Prints at October Gallery” | Nicholas Forrest, BlouinArtinfo, 27 April 2017

Benchmarks: New Prints by El Anatsui | Exhibition at October Gallery, London, 6 May – 13 April 2017

Factum Arte

#ElAnatsui #OctoberGallery #art #materialsscience #technology #FactumArte #prints #bottletops #Japanesepaper #3Dscans