Our guest blogger Jeremy Jacquot ( From www.treehugger.com) attended the Hammer Conversations with Ray Kappe and Shigeru Ban on Oct 18 on behalf of Club of Pioneers. Here is his report on the event.
As somewhat of a Ray Kappe Luddite – having looked up some of his recent projects only a few days beforehand – I wasn't sure what to expect when I arrived at the HAMMER Museum to sit in on his conversation with Shigeru Ban. It didn't take long for me to realize just how little I knew about the man – and the incredible portfolio of work he had managed to amass over the past few decades. While I had already been familiar with the ongoing projects he was doing with Steve Glenn of LivingHomes and the guiding role he had played in founding SCI-Arc, it was only during the event that I learned that he gave Shigeru Ban his first big break, that he had worked on several state-level commissions and that he was widely considered to be the chief patriarch of Los Angeles architecture. Even if I had not figured this out, another sign of Kappe's crossover appeal lay, of course, in the sheer volume and diversity of the audience that had assembled to hear him speak. Encompassing a wide range of age groups and professional backgrounds – including students, designers, architects and business executives (just to name a few) – the audience seemed to share more in common with the typical legions of rabid groupies found at sold-out concerts than the staid, respectful crowd I had expected to see. Indeed, were it not for my reserved ticket, I doubt I could've gotten in – the line easily stretching past the length of the building. Whispered mentions of “seeing my first Kappe” flitted all across the room as we patiently waited for the conversation to begin.Following a few brief introductions by Frances Anderton, the moderator for the event and host of KCRW's DnA program, we dived right into the meat of the conversation – Kappe's relationship with Ban, their influences and their views on the emerging prefab/sustainable architecture movement. Having given Ban his first opportunity to take a crack at architecture by accepting him into SCI-Arc, Kappe was visibly emotional as he described their long history and the pride he felt at seeing how far he had come. For his part, Ban credited Kappe for introducing him to the concept of prefab and for instilling in him an appreciation for the type of elegant, simple and minimal architecture he has now become associated with. What struck me was Ban's negative perception of the concept of “green” architecture. He almost seemed to go out of his way to bat down any suggestion that his work constituted what's been widely dubbed “sustainable architecture”. That's not to say he's against building green in principle; anyone even remotely familiar with some of the structures he's built – notably the shelters he helped build in Sri Lanka after the tsunami and those he built following Hurricane Katrina – will know that he only uses fully recyclable, cradle-to-cradle material and that he places a particular emphasis on minimalism. To him, architecture – by definition – should embrace the tenets of sustainability and environmental friendliness, so attempting to typecast or label them as such seemed ridiculous.

Shigeru BanKappe took a more nuanced approach, crediting the growing environmental consciousness for having pushed “green” and sustainability to the fore of design and architecture – a welcome development to a man who'd tried (often unsuccessfully) to incorporate these elements into his buildings in the past – while also knocking the media's fixation with all things “eco-friendly”. He concluded the talk by describing his long-held vision of bringing affordable, sustainable architecture to the masses – criticizing the political climate for having made it almost impossible to achieve – stating that he hoped to continue focusing on prefab housing as a way to eventually bring it to fruition. As the entire audience rose to give him a much-deserved standing ovation – following a few heartfelt tributes from architects (and former students) Michael Rotundi and Thom Mayne – Kappe could only sit and grin, visibly stunned by the level of adulatory praise. Reflecting on the significance of his 80th birthday, Kappe distilled the essence of his life's work into a simple: “It's been fun”.
Jeremy JacquotJeremy recently decided to dump a career in dentistry after realizing that he missed his undergraduate coursework, which focused primarily on marine biology and natural conservation, too much. Having made the full conversion to a green way of living, he's now decided to reorient his studies towards environmental science and will be attending the University of Southern California to obtain a Ph.D. in Marine Environmental Biology, with an emphasis on environmental policy and sustainable management. On his downtime, he enjoys reading about everything business, politics, science and technology and sometimes moonlights as a pundit/op-ed writer.

Yep, being green is confusing. And when you try to be green sometimes, it turns out you're just making things worse. Take for example biofuels. Sounds like the thing to put in your motor, no? Maybe not. Treehugger has a post about their concerns for certain types of biofuels:

Treehugger has complained about biofuels from corn or palm oil for years, and taken some abuse for it; the main argument is "don't worry, all of these ethanol plants will run on algae or switchgrass in a couple of years, corn is just an interim measure" or the Palm Oil Truth Foundation sends another dozen emails about the glories of clearing the rainforest to grow fuel. The subsidies keep growing and the forests keep getting ploughed over.

Craig Mackintosh at Celsias writes about "the obstinate pushing of ethanol from corn, sugar, soy, and palm oils in the face of their overwhelming detrimental effect on people’s lives, and on the environment. It is where big industry, desperate to retain consumer dollars, is influencing government - who are in turn pandering to very destructive whims."

Meanwhile, an article on Bloomberg suggests that Cuba's Castro is taking the Treehugger line in his first signed article since his recent surgery:

In the article titled ``More Than 3 Billion People in the World Condemned to Premature Death From Hunger and Thirst,'' the 80-year-old Cuban president attacked Bush's promotion of alternative fuels such as ethanol, made mainly from corn and aimed at reducing U.S. dependence on oil imports. Castro objected to the use of farmland for fuel production instead of food.

Castro wrote, ``you need 320 million tons of corn to produce 35 billion gallons of ethanol,'' and that it is dangerous to offer financial incentives to ``poor countries'' to produce ethanol from corn. The ``sinister idea'' of converting food into fuel has been ``definitively established as the economic line of U.S. foreign policy,'' Castro said in the article.

``Apply this idea to Third World countries and you will see how many people among the hungry masses of this planet stop eating corn,'' Castro wrote.

In keeping with my last post about variety in transportation, it's fitting that I write this while traveling at over 170mph on a high speed AVE train in Spain. I'll be in Sevilla less than 2 1/2 hours after leaving Madrid - a distance of more than 300 miles or roughly the same as traveling from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Doing the latter would take about 6 hours in a car, or 1 hour and 15 minutes by plane - and with airport hassles, the door to door time by plane would be about the same as this miraculous train I'm riding on. Throw in a nicer seats, a cafe car and the freedom to roam about, and the train is a no brainer in terms of anyone's preference.It's also arguably a great deal greener than either of the other two methods of travel. The train is electric and has no emissions at all. It takes up far less space on the ground than airports and highways, and travels strait into downtown areas without encouraging suburban sprawl. Obviously its power comes from somewhere but even if the train's power were derived 100% from coal it still works out as more efficient than the other two options in terms of pollutants emitted. Why is it that nothing like this exists in the United States? Excellent high and medium speed trains are available almost everywhere in Europe and Japan. Granted the Acela Amtrak service on the east coast comes close, but is still a far cry from France's TGV or the Japanese Shinkansen.The answer is twofold: Massive infrastructure costs, and historic neglect. In the case of Acela (the high speed Amtrak service from Washington to Boston), the track is too curvy for the train to stay at full speed for very long. Straightening the track would require an eminent domain adventure of epic proportions. Elsewhere in the country, there are less expensive potential routes such as San Francisco to Los Angeles, the so-called Texas Triangle, and spurs radiating from Chicago. Saying these are less expensive still means they'll cost billions to upgrade to high speed, but every year spent doing nothing means the price tag only rises. Almost any two cities that are less than 350 miles apart have a golden opportunity to build high speed rail that will make train travel easier and faster than flying or driving. Despite the high cost of such projects, they would improve economies by making transportation easier, free up space at congested airports for longer trips, improve transportation security by offering more options, and cut our fossil fuel consumption and pollutants measurably. The United States has ignored inter city train travel for so long that the country is in a costly pickle, but only by starting projects now will we prevent this needed improvement from costing even more. It's time to bite the bullet on this one and get train travel, ahem, back on track - another solution that can be arrived at today, using existing technology, to buy us time to develop the needed innovation to truly rid ourselves of fossil fuel dependencies.