A “traffic agent” was killed last Friday in Toronto, hit by a big dump truck carrying dirt for Metrolinx, a government agency building a subway line. I wondered what a traffic agent was; according to the City’s press release from when they first took to the streets:

“The City’s Traffic Agents program is a congestion management strategy that places Traffic Agents employed by the City at key intersections during the morning and afternoon peak traffic periods. Traffic Agents ensure all road users comply with traffic laws and regulations, helping to reduce congestion and increase road safety.”

Everybody is very sad about this.

The policeman says, “This is a heartbreaking incident and our thoughts are with the victim's family, loved ones and colleagues during this incredibly difficult time.” The union president says, “our condolences first and foremost to the family members of the deceased.” The Mayor, Olivia Chow, is “heartbroken" to hear of the traffic agent's death and that the city stands with their loved ones during "this unimaginable loss."

And Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who banned speed cameras, ripped out bike lanes and increased speed limits, who I have said will have blood on his hands and is trying to kill us, says, "It's a sober reminder of the sacrifices and risks traffic agents face every day while keeping our communities safe."

Nobody is outraged that giant dump trucks are running around our cities at high speed and kill cyclists and pedestrians on a regular basis. I know I should say “driver, not dump truck,” but these big Kenworths that are so often involved in these murders have terrible visibility. They were built for the open road, not for cities. They are design failures that may well be as responsible as the driver.

Drivers and owners prefer them to “cab-over” designs because they are easier to maintain, easier to climb into, and the drivers feel safer with a big engine between them and anything they hit. And of course, the truck has no side guards because they aren't required in Canada. I don’t know what happened in this crash, but the photo at the top of this story has the cops looking at the rear wheels. Getting crushed under the rear wheels is what side guards are designed to prevent.

In 2011, when Olivia Chow was a Member of Parliament, she introduced a motion to require them, saying,

“Every year, Canadian cyclists and pedestrians die needlessly when they are sucked under the back wheels of large trucks. Twenty-five years ago in Europe, truck side guards were made mandatory.”

A federal Parliamentary Secretary, Colin Currie, in a 2014 debate about side guards, actually said it was not their problem:

“Municipalities also have the responsibility to ensure their infrastructure accommodates for the safe transportation of all road users. For example, it is up to municipalities where to design for bike lanes and wider streets where there is a demonstrated need.”

Except municipalities don’t have the power to design for bike lanes; Doug Ford took it away and ripped them out. He holds the cards, and Olivia Chow is powerless. And Currie continued (12 years ago!)

“Collision investigations have shown that a significant factor in pedestrian and cyclist fatalities involving heavy trucks has been poor driver visibility. There are blind spots around these heavy vehicles, and due to this, truck drivers sometimes simply do not see these cyclists and pedestrians.”

A dozen years, and nothing has been done to fix the problem. Another murder by bad design and useless governments, and nobody is outraged.

The last time I called this murder, a reader complained, “Calling an accident murder is not helpful…. Perfection is not an option. Resources of the community are limited. It is a bit cold but it is a simple reality that we need to make choices about where to invest those resources and part of that calculation has to be bang for buck.”

This is why there is no outrage when people are killed by drivers. Everyone has convinced themselves that speed and the economy are worth more than the occasional death. Not enough bang for the buck in saving lives.

The Mayor of London has the power to legislate that every dump truck be cab-over design with cameras, blind spot sensors and side guards, but the Mayor of Toronto can’t do anything but hire people to wear yellow vests (which once again proved their effectiveness) and stand in the road to yell at drivers, and get killed in the process. Look at their job description:

As Special Constables, Traffic Agents:

• ensure people driving obey traffic laws, such as speed limits, stop signs, and traffic signals, and prevent people from stopping to pick up or drop off passengers along key intersection approaches

• prevent vehicles from stopping in the intersection after the signal has changed, which prevents oncoming traffic from travelling through (known as “blocking the box”)

Traffic agents shouldn’t even be there, risking their lives because drivers ignore the law. (The driver in this case has been charged with dangerous driving causing death) They shouldn’t die because of bad road or vehicle design. We should not just be saddened or heartbroken; we should be outraged at this needless death.

In a previous post with another dump truck murder, I concluded:

The truck driver will get his wrists slapped, but there is so much blame to spread around. There are the engineers who designed this road; the construction industry that’s always in a hurry and whose vehicles are disproportionately responsible for so many deaths on the road; there are the provincial and federal ministries of transportation, which refuse even to make sideguards mandatory, let alone regulate truck design; I suppose you could even blame John A. Macdonald and Pierre Trudeau for designing constitutions which make cities powerless “creatures of the Province.”

And the only thing we can be sure of is that nothing will change, and more pedestrians, cyclists, and crossing guards will die.

The only thing that actually has changed is that we have added traffic agents to the list.

The Passivhaus Portugal Conference is supported by exhibitors; this year, there were seventy booths, mostly the usual windows and heat recovery ventilators, but there is always something weird and wonderful. This year’s treat was Triqbriq, a small timber block made up of even smaller pieces of wood, all held together with beech dowels.

The blocks are easy for a human to lift and assemble, a sort of wooden LEGO. You then just hammer in a dowel and it is all locked together. Knock out the dowel and it is just as easy to disassemble.

One reason that the blocks are built up from such small pieces of wood is that they use what they call “calamity timber”- industrial, salvage and reclaimed wood. There is a lot of this around- when I toured lumber mills near Algonquin Park in Ontario last spring, I learned that most of the harvest goes to industrial uses. There is also a lot of salvaged and reclaimed wood that is burned because it is not graded or suitable for reuse.

As the subtitled German video notes, the wood can be “weak, old, and used.” It is also glue-free; nothing to outgas. It is cut and assembled with sophisticated robotic tools into manageable blocks that even I could lift.

My first thought was that this is a lot of wood to build a wall, but I reconsidered after looking at these blocks with the flaws and discolouration from what looks like beetle damage- this is not wood that would normally get used. And more importantly, it is so easily demountable. The word “circular” is thrown around a lot but this truly is, both in the sourcing of the wood and in the ability to use it again. (Read about the difference between “circular” and “circular-ish”) They claim it is fast and easy:

“With TRIQBRIQ, we focus on fast construction processes and streamlined logistics. Thanks to its lightweight design and well-thought-out system, no complex specialized equipment is required. This makes assembly particularly straightforward and allows it to be carried out quickly and efficiently.”

This product would be very useful in Toronto, where temporary enclosures are used around outdoor seating in summer, often made of the very clever Gripblock system. Triqbriq would likely go together and come apart even more quickly and cleanly.

Or you could build a cute garden office or accessory dwelling unit.

I had a bit of sticker shock when I saw that it costs about 35 Euros per block, making it about US$30 per square foot of wall, but I am out of touch on what materials cost, and believe that is cheaper than Cross-Laminated Timber. According to the company:

“Our innovation enables the use of industrial timber, timber from natural disasters and reclaimed timber. This is why we are more cost-effective than other solid timber construction systems. A further financial advantage of the TRIQBRIQ timber construction system lies in the acceleration of the construction process thanks to the simple stacking principle and the patented dowel system, which does not require any artificial binding agents such as glue. This leads to a significant reduction in labour time and, consequently, in costs.”

I doubt that it makes any sense to import it from Germany, but someone in North America should licence this. It is one of the first products that I have seen that is truly circular, and it’s so simple, I believe even I could actually put a little building together without screwing it up.

More at Triqbriq’s main site.

I recently returned from Aveiro, Portugal, where I spoke at the Portugal Passivhaus Conference. It was my third time presenting there in person; I keep getting invited back, but I thought this would be my last time. I have been writing less often about Passive House and wasn't sure I had anything new and interesting to say. But I did have a last message I wanted to deliver: that Passive House is not enough anymore. Here is a summary of my presentation:

A decade ago, my pitch for Passive House was that it was all about comfort. Over the years, however, my definition of comfort evolved. In “Mechanization Takes Command,” Siegfried Giedion wrote that comfort originally meant strength and security.

“The word ‘comfort’ in its Latin origin meant ‘to strengthen.’ The West, after the eighteenth century, identified comfort with ‘convenience’:

Susanne Shelton noted in her 2022 survey, “What is Home?” that the definition had changed:

“Safety and security aren’t just important – they’re the primary way we define comfort. In other words, we can’t feel comfortable in a home if we don’t feel safe and secure in it.”

These days, we need a lot more safety and security. In Portugal alone, in the last year, they have faced heat waves, wildfires, droughts and power blackouts. Their homes and their bodies can’t cope.

In 2019, I wrote about how a Passive House can help survive in a polar vortex, and concluded:

“Every building should have a proven level of insulation, airtightness, and window quality so that people are comfortable in all kinds of weather, even when the power goes out. This is because our houses have become lifeboats, and leaks may well be fatal.”

Bettina of the Green Building Learning Zone liked it so much she put it on the wall of her booth. But I have learned since that just having a lifeboat isn’t enough.

In my post on Jessica Wildfire’s survival handbook, I noted, “Even in a lifeboat, you need to worry about more than leaks; we have to think about food, water, and everything else you need to survive.”

However, we cannot just think about ourselves; we have to consider how we are contributing to the problems by busting through planetary boundaries. While I have been preoccupied with carbon emissions and climate change, there are also crises of water, land use change, biosphere integrity and “novel entities”- those new threats like PFAS and other chemicals we keep coming up with. We have to live within Kate Raworth’s doughnut, the safe and just space for humanity.

That’s where design for low-energy, low-carbon, and sufficiency comes into play.

One reason I admire Passive House Portugal is that the people behind it, João Marcelino and João Gavião, have been thinking about these issues for years. They have gone beyond Passive and are developing “wefi building” - water, energy, food, almost independent building. Capturing water, planting gardens, solar panels and batteries all become part of the package.

And that’s before we even consider the disasters that await.

I also got in a pitch for longevity design, which has been on my mind lately- how we have to design for flexibility and adaptability; needs can change more rapidly than you can imagine. I will be writing a lot more about this, but it is particularly relevant in this nation without handrails.

Thinking about survival is not just conjecture anymore; it is becoming policy. Just last week the government in the UK told citizens to lay in a minimum of three days’ supply of water, food, cash, first aid, and radios. It’s Jessica Wildfire Lite, but it’s real and happening now. The defence secretary says:

“It’s really important that we ask households and businesses, are they prepared? Are they ready? Do they know how they would respond in the event of everyday challenges that might manifest themselves?”

I covered the work of a group I was part of last year at the Reimagine Buildings Collective, where we discussed survivability in the climate crisis. When we started, it was called “passive survivability,” but we renamed it “active survivability” because we realized passive measures alone were no longer enough.

For example, many in Europe have traditionally relied on diurnal cooling- opening up at night to cool the home, then closing the shutters in the morning to keep the heat out and the cool in. But if it doesn’t cool down at night, then air conditioning is almost inevitable. Or if the air is contaminated with wildfire smoke, you need filters on the heat recovery ventilator and backup power to keep it running. I concluded with our group’s findings:

• Resilience means more than efficiency — Passive survivability is about maintaining habitable, safe indoor conditions during power outages or environmental extremes, not just saving energy.

• Heat is the bigger threat — Over the past 30 years, extreme heat has caused more deaths than any other weather event, making summer overheating and humidity control critical priorities.

• Passive only goes so far — Superior insulation and airtightness help, but without ventilation, dehumidification, or backup power, survivability in heat, smoke, or long outages is limited.

• Optimization strengthens resilience — Smart passive design (shading, form, fire-safe detailing, low embodied carbon) paired with right-sized, all-electric systems and backup energy makes buildings both survivable and part of the climate solution.

It used to be enough to say that “Pass­ive House stands for com­fort, health, sus­tain­ab­il­ity and sav­ings in our build­ings.” It’s not enough anymore. Our homes have to be resilient and secure. They have to keep us healthy and safe over the long term and short. And all within planetary boundaries.

It’s a lot to ask, but I am not sure that we have a choice anymore.

I have turned off comments.

I am fascinated by “the New Stone Age”- the architects, engineers and masons using stone as a structural material. I have previously quoted Steve Webb of Webb Yates Engineers, who points out the silliness of mining limestone, grinding it up and cooking it at 1450°C, only to mix it with more stone and water to turn it back into… stone. “Not only is it perverse to do this, but the carbon footprint of concrete is 250% higher than stone for a material with only 25% of the strength.”

I have written before about his work and, on my recent trip to London, asked to tour his latest project, Petra Heights, designed by Amin Taha’s Groupwork, which I will be writing about for Passive House Plus magazine.

I also visited The Stone Demonstrator, “a low-carbon construction prototype, which puts pre-tensioned stone building techniques to the test.” It is from The Future Observatory, the Design Museum’s national research programme. The logic behind it:

“Nearly 40% of global carbon emissions are created by the built environment, with 11% coming from the construction of new buildings. Natural stone is an extremely low-carbon material. The Stone Demonstrator is a prototype of an alternative way to build that reduces carbon emissions by approximately 70% compared to a reinforced concrete frame, and 90% compared to a steel frame.”

Amin Taha tells Dezeen: “Its purpose is not to promote stone for sentimental reasons but as an ultra-low-carbon alternative to reinforced concrete and steel structures clad in fired clay bricks.”

It’s an extraordinary little structure, demonstrating the different ways stone can be used to replace concrete and steel. That thin slab that looks like concrete is, in fact, pre-tensioned stone, supported by stone beams held together by steel tendons or cables. The floor above is a hybrid of glulam beams and stone invented by Webb Yates, which is significantly lighter than concrete or stone on its own. The roof level is dowel-laminated timber (DLT).

The supporting frame seems so light, no bigger than an enclosed steel or concrete column might be. I look at it and wonder- this stuff is all around us, why aren’t we using it?

Stone structures might be a hard sell, but this is almost a no-brainer: stone cut up to traditional brick dimensions. The façade is self-supporting and has 90% lower emissions than standard fired clay bricks. We could be doing this in Canada- we have lots of stone.

Foundations are one part of a building that everyone just assumes have to be concrete, but this building sits on recycled stone footings. It’s all stone, mass timber, and a tiny bit of steel for tendons and connections.

In her criticism of stone, British architect Natalia Petkova told Dezeen that “dependence on uniform, highly processed building materials in the industry today is leading to a large amount of stone being wasted. In many quarries, a stone that varies too much in colour or veining is discarded.” But this made it much less expensive, and the variations made it more interesting.

Many skeptics have questioned the so-called stone revolution. Some are worried about consistency and the lack of grading; who knows what’s going on inside a block of stone. Modern X-ray tech can handle that. Others worry about availability of skilled trades or whether it can scale. Brian Potter of Construction Physics is surprisingly positive, but worries about the bureaucracy:

“Getting a novel building system adopted (and structural stone is “novel” in modern construction despite its long historic use) requires an enormous amount of effort sustained over years to move the wheels of the various bureaucracies. A novel building system needs a building code pathway that makes it possible to use it, and building officials willing to sign off on projects that use it.”

I suggest Potter take a trip to Finchley Road, where Groupwork and Webb Yates are just completing their stone tower. They pulled it off, the first building to go through the new post-Grenfell complicated approval processes.

I don’t know how long The Stone Demonstrator will be left in place, but I hope they keep it for a while; there is a lot to learn from it. For those who cannot make it to London, a smaller version, “The Long Reach: Carbon Balance,” has been installed on the Paul Oberman Belvedere in front of the Daniels Building in Toronto. “The project demonstrates the strength and versatility of stone and underscores its potential as a defining building material of the 21st century.”

The Serpentine Gallery’s “annual architectural commission showcases new temporary buildings by international architects.” I have seen a few of them, and have questioned the value of investing so much money and carbon in such a temporary building. The 2021 Pavilion was particularly egregious, with 85 tonnes of concrete in its foundation and its designers claiming that the whole project was “carbon negative.” I wrote “How the Serpentine Pavilion Can Save The Planet“- just build enough of them to suck up all the excess CO2.

This year’s pavilion designed by LANZA Atelier of Mexico is a very different beast. It is based on “the English architectural feature known as a serpentine, or crinkle-crankle, wall.” The wall is only one wythe thick, but is strong and stable because of the curves. It’s not exactly English; it was evidently imported from the Dutch and was common in Latin America, where the master of curvy brick was the Uruguayan architect Eladio Dieste.

It is a beautiful wall, held together by threaded rods running through the bricks, and easily dismounted at the end of the exhibition. Catherine Slessor of the Guardian wrote, “As the archetypal building block, used for millennia, but still fitting into a human hand, it seems only right that after 25 years, brick’s Serpentine time has finally come.”

Even the columns holding up the roof are only single bricks stacked on each other, given strength and stability by the threaded rods running through them. They support “a translucent roof allows light and air to permeate the space, softening the boundary between enclosure and openness. The roof rests lightly on brick columns which evoke a grove of trees.” One critic thought the roof looked like a gas station and I didn’t see a grove of trees, but admired the engineering.

It takes a lot of natural gas to fire clay bricks, and a few million dollars from Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg and Rolex to pay for it all. But at least this pavilion looks like it could be dismantled and reassembled somewhere where it might have a long and useful life. Many of these pavilions have been silly throwaways, but this one’s a keeper.

Walking back to the tube from the pavilion, I passed the Victoria and Albert Museum and thought I would have a quick look at my favourite things; I don’t know when I will be back again. I wandered past the Great Bed of Ware, which I wrote about a few years ago as an interesting concept we should reconsider in modern times. As we understand more about the importance of air quality, light and sound, the four-poster bed might be more appropriate than ever.

Two years ago, after Laura Fenton of Living Small wrote about how she loved Costco, I complained: “How does anyone who doesn’t live in a big house with a big car and a big garage even cope?” Laura replied, “I think you may have missed my point, which was to say that you *can* shop there without living in a big house or over-consuming.”

Perhaps you can, but I am not sure that many people do. Instead, we have a culture of big people living in big houses filling big kitchens and big fridges from big cars after driving down big highways to big stores. And to make it even easier, we have a new architectural feature: the Costco Door. It’s defined by Jenny Singer in the Washington Post:

“Named for their popularity among fans of the bulk warehouse, these miniature doors connect a garage to a pantry or kitchen so that shoppers can deadlift 25-pound bags of jasmine rice and liters of Kirkland Signature olive oil directly from the trunks of their vehicles into their homes rather than transport them in multiple trips like pack mules.”

Most Costco doors are short, because garage floors are often a few steps down from the main floor; they are for stuff, not people. A fan in Ontario, Canada designed her house around “her most expensive hobby": Costco.

A doctor explains some of the benefits:

“From an ergonomics perspective, they have the potential to reduce the physical work associated with unloading groceries from a vehicle by reducing the number of steps and the duration of the carrying tasks,” said Steve Lavender, a professor of orthopedics at the College of Medicine at Ohio State University. If you put a 30-pack of seltzer through a Costco door, you’ll still get a workout.

So again, we need a car big enough to carry a 30-pack of fizzy water and the real estate to store it along with the “The Costco toilet paper, paper towels, laundry detergent,” all of which come in huge packages.

I have never been a fan of big box stores. For years, I pushed the idea, learned from architect Donald Chong, that small fridges make good cities, where "people are out in their community every day, buy what is seasonal and fresh, buy as much as they need, responding to the marketplace, the baker, vegetable store and neighborhood vendor.” People in Italy, France or Japan often pick ingredients for dinner on the way home from work. They often live in walkup apartments and can’t carry 30 bottles of seltzer or a 7-pound gouda up the stairs. Their fridges are tiny.

On the other hand, they live in a thousand square feet. They don’t have to feed a giant SUV. They don’t have to give up their evening or weekend to go to the big box store. They don’t waste nearly as much food, and they are healthier for doing a farmer’s carry of small packages rather than a deadlift of giant cheese wheels.

But I was wrong about small fridges making good cities; You have to get the city and the neighbourhood right first, one that is walkable and shoppable, where you can find the butcher and the baker and the grocery store. It turns out that good cities make small fridges.

It is impossible for a small urban store to compete with the low prices of the big boxes; the price they pay wholesale is probably higher than the retail cost at Costco. My daughter is raising two kids, and she drives to Costco; the discount No-Frills grocery in walking distance is still probably twice as expensive, and its owners are exploitative.

Costco is known for treating its employees well and for an admirable corporate culture. My daughter has bought stuff for us, and the quality is excellent. But like all the big boxes, it still contributes to the decline of our main streets in cities and towns. If you are old, poor, or don’t drive, you are not their customer. You are dragging your bundle buggy up to the No Frills.

The Costco Door next to the giant kitchen and pantry is a logical progression in an economic system designed to move the most stuff at the lowest cost and with the least effort. I wonder if instead we shouldn’t just slow down a bit, pay a bit more, support our local greengrocer, and maybe save money on the car.

I wrote years ago: “The big fridge, the big car, and the big grocery store are all part of one economic machine; in a sense, you cannot have one without the other two.” Now I will add the Costco door to the mix.

Fridtjof Nansen’s 165th birthday is tomorrow, 10 October. The Norwegian explorer spent three years drifting in the ice while trying to reach the North Pole in the Fram, a boat that he had specially designed for the expedition. One of my proudest possessions is a signed copy of his book, “Farthest North,” describing the journey.

Nansen was already famous for the first crossing of Greenland in 1888, so he was able to raise funds for what others called “an illogical scheme of self-destruction”- since it was known that the Arctic ice drifted, he planned to build a ship strong enough to get stuck in the ice, and then “to make our way into the current on that side of the Pole where it flows northward, and by its help to penetrate into those regions which all who have hitherto worked against [the current] have sought in vain to reach.”

It was almost a given that Arctic missions involved extreme cold, malnutrition, discomfort, and often scurvy. Ships were often crushed in the ice. Naval architect Colin Archer (the son of Scottish immigrants to Norway) designed Fram to be as small as possible (more likely to pop up in the ice) but still accommodate a dozen men for up to five years. Nansen writes, “and thus she was built more attention being paid to making her a safe and warm stronghold, while drifting in the ice, than to endowing her with speed or good sailing qualities.”

We think of cross-laminated timber as being a recent invention, but Nansen and Archer were laminating wood 140 years ago. They built the frame of the ship from oak that had been grown to curved shapes for the Norwegian Navy before it switched to steel 30 years before. For the exterior:

“The outside planking consists of three layers. The inner one is oak, 3 inches thick,... outside this another oak sheathing, 4 inches thick fastened through with bolts, and outside these comes the iceskin of greenheart..at the waterline it is 6 inches thick, gradually diminishing towards the bottom to 3 inches.”

This was in fact, a kind of sacrificial layer of wood:

“It is fastened with nails and jagged bolts, and not with through bolts, so that if the ice had stripped off the whole of the ice sheathing the hull of the ship would not have suffered much damage. The total thickness of the ship’s sides is therefore from 24 to 28 inches of solid, watertight wood.”

Nansen understood heat flow and moisture management better than a lot of builders and architects today. It’s pure Passive House; it had insulation:

“The sides of the ship were lined with tarred felt, then came a space with cork padding, next a deal panelling, then a thick layer of felt, next air-tight linoleum, and last of all an inner panelling. To form the floor of the saloon, cork padding, 6 or 7 inches thick, was laid on the deck planks on this a thick wooden floor, and above all linoleum.”

It had air-tightness:

“The ceiling, floors and walls were covered with several thick coatings of non-conducting material, the surface layer, in touch with the heat of the cabin, consisting of air-tight linoleum, to prevent the warm, damp air from penetrating to the other side and depositing moisture, which would soon turn to ice.”

Like Passive House designers today, he understood the importance of triple-glazing:

“The skylight, which was most exposed to the cold, was protected by three panes of glass, one within the other, and in various other ways.”

It all worked very well.

“One of the greatest difficulties of live on board ship with former Arctic expeditions had to contend with was that moisture collecting on the cold outside walls either froze at once or ran down in streams into the berths and onto the floor. Thus it was not unusual to find the mattresses converted more or less solid masses of ice. We, however, by these arrangements entirely avoided such an unpleasant state of things, and when the fire was lighted in the saloon there was not a trace of moisture on the walls, even in the sleeping cabins.”

Nansen knew that they were going to be stuck inside this ship for close to eight months at a time while it drifted with the ice. It had to be comfortable, had to keep them warm and dry in all that time. Humans (and cooking) put out a lot of moisture; if a building or a boat isn’t well sealed and insulated, then it can become a disaster in short order. The Fram worked perfectly and like a Passive House, barely needed heating:

Whether the thermometer stands at 22° above zero or at 22° below it, we have no fire in the stove. The ventilation is excellent, especially since we rigged up the air sail, which sends a whole winter‘s cold in through the ventilator; yet in spite of this we sit here warm and comfortable, with only a lamp burning. I am thinking of having the stove removed altogether; it is only in the way.

So we have advances in wood construction, Passive House levels of insulation and air-tightness, and it even has renewable energy.

“It may be mentioned as an improvement on former expeditions that the Fram was furnished with an electric light installation . The dynamo was to be driven by the engine when we were under steam; while the intention was to drive it partly by means of the wind, partly by hand power during our sojourn in the ice. For this purpose, we took a windmill with us, and also a “horse-mill” to be worked by ourselves. I had anticipated that the latter might have been useful in giving us exercise in the long polar night. We found, however, that there were plenty of other things to do, and we never used it; on the other hand, the windmill proved extremely serviceable.”

In his biography of Nansen, Roland Huntford describes the first time they unfolded the wind turbine and turned on the electric lights, which were only invented in the previous decade and had never been used on a ship before:

“It was, in Nansen’s words, ‘an eerie atmosphere - civilization suddenly intruding into this frozen spirit world. But when the lights came on, there was ‘such pleasure, declared Nordahl, ‘that at dinner skåls were drunk to me and the light’. There was another skål for Baron Oscar Dickson, who had paid for the lighting equipment and made this near-miracle possible. The light, said Nansen, raised everyone’s spirits like a glass of good wine’.”

Anyone who has read the horror stories about Arctic exploration, about Scott, Franklin or Mawson knows of hardship, cold, disease and death. Nansen is embarrassed by how well it all works:

“I am almost ashamed of the life we lead with none of those darkly painted sufferings of the long winter night, which are indispensable to a properly exciting Arctic expedition. We shall have nothing to write about when we get home. I may say the same of my comrades, and I have said of myself. They all look healthy, fat, and in good condition; none of the traditional, pale, hollow faces, no low spirits. Anyone hearing the laughter that goes on in the saloon would be in no doubt about this, but how indeed should there be any illness with the best of food of every kind, as much of it as we want, constant varieties so that even the most fastidious cannot tire of it, good shelter, good clothing, good ventilation.”

After the Farthest North journey, Fram went on to greater glory; Nansen lent it to Roald Amundsen, who sailed it to Antarctica and was the first to reach the South Pole. It is now on view in a museum in Oslo.

Nansen is famous for many things, including the Nobel Prize for his later humanitarian work, and also, according to a recent book, for sending seriously NSFW photos to his mistress. In Norway, if you send a revealing photo of yourself, you are “Doing a Nansen.”

There are so many lessons to be learned from this mission and from Nansen and the Fram- it is essentially a floating Passive House designed for the climate and the icebound environment, with wind-powered lighting and a treadmill generator to keep everyone fit, and supplied with enough resources to survive anything. I have been writing recently about passive survivability, how we have to worry about food, water and power; Nansen did it all. This is so far ahead of its time that it is still ahead of our time.

Dr. Wolfgang Feist closed the 2026 International Passive House conference with a history of the Passive House movement and included Dr. Fritjof Nansen’s “Fram” as a Passive House precedent, quoting from Nansen’s book, “Farthest North.” I am glad it got the recognition.

Kelly and I went out for dinner on Saturday night to celebrate our freedom from babysitting the grandchildren, trying out a new neighbourhood restaurant with a new storefront. I stepped inside and turned right to enter, and BANG! smashed my forehead over my right eye and my nose into a glass door. I am not going to show you a photo of my big black eye (changed my mind, I do later) just the smudges on the door where I hit it.

And of course, I am going to turn it into a post about demographics, aging baby boomers, and why this kind of event is going to happen more often.

First of all, the door should have had something to make it more visible. The Ontario Building Code is clear:

3.3.1.18. Transparent doors and panels

(1) Except for dwelling units and as permitted by Sentence (4), a glass or transparent door shall be designed and constructed so that the existence and position of the door is readily apparent, by attaching non-transparent hardware, bars or other permanent fixtures to it.

In the UK, regulations require visible markings on glazing, typically two bands at 850 to 1,000 mm and 1,400 to 1,600 mm.

But why was I the first person to crash into this door? Probably because I am older, and our eyes and brains change as we age.

Contrast sensitivity, or the ability to pick out faint edges or reflections, starts declining in our 40s and 50s. According to a 2021 study:

“Contrast sensitivity is one of the most fundamental functions of the human visual system. It is the ability to detect spatial contrast (e.g., achromatic luminance difference between areas). Many activities of our daily life, such as finding an object, seeing stairs, and noticing a moving object, rely on this ability.”

The useful field of view (the area from which information can be extracted with one glance) decreases. A 1988 study found that older adults have one-third the UFOV of twenty-year-olds. This is apparently a function of how our brain processes information, and it means I might not even have noticed the doorframe.

Older eyes take longer to adapt to darkness. It was light outside (we eat early, it’s an aging boomer thing) and I stepped inside into a darker vestibule. According to a study, Aging and dark adaptation,

“These results demonstrate that older adults experience substantial delays in adapting to darkness. For older adults in their 70s, the transition point in the dark at which the rod system takes over is delayed almost 2 1/2 minutes, as compared to those in their 20s.”

A 2016 review article, Vision and Aging by Cynthia Owsley, summed it all up:

1. Spatial contrast sensitivity impairment is a common and almost inevitable part of aging.

2. Contrast sensitivity deficits caused by cataract increase motor vehicle collision and fall risk, hamper postural stability, and reduce reading rate and accessibility.

3. Older adults exhibit visual dysfunction at night and under low luminance conditions, including a loss of steady-state light sensitivity under scotopic conditions and a delay in rod-mediated dark adaptation.

4. Older adults with serious delays in dark adaptation are at increased risk for age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of irreversible vision impairment in older adults.

5. Slowed visual processing speed is a common problem in older adults, even when visual sensory status and cognitive status are normal.

6. Slowed visual processing speed in older adults is associated with increased risk for motor vehicle collision involvement, falls, and problems in performing everyday activities in a time-sensitive fashion.

As noted earlier, the door should have had some kind of markings, as required by the Ontario Building Code. New buildings in Toronto have a grid of dots to make them visible to birds; humans deserve at least the same consideration.

And while this could have happened to anyone of any age, it is more likely to happen to someone older, and the damage is likely to be more severe. The risk from every problem, from missing handrails to insufficient lighting to trip hazards, is magnified for older people, and there are thousands more of us every day, and thousands of us are killed and injured every year in mostly preventable falls.

I wasn’t going to show my selfie, but here it is, because nobody wants to talk about these issues or consider the consequences. I just have an ugly bruise, but a fall almost killed my mom. I am going to be talking about this a lot more.

I visited the Fall Home Show in Toronto over the weekend to talk countertops with kitchen suppliers and renovation contractors. I wanted to know their thoughts about the dangers of Quartz engineered stone countertops, a subject I have written about before. A recent exposé in Bloomberg summarizes what happens when workers inhale respirable crystalline silica (RCS), the dust released when cutting quartz artificial stone:

As they pile up, RCS particles gradually destroy your lungs, inflaming them, scarring them, shrinking them, hardening them. Along the way, the silica dust can also cause lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, autoimmune disorders and kidney failure. “My patients with silicosis, I wish they only had lung cancer,” says University of California at Los Angeles pulmonologist Jane Fazio, who’s been studying a new surge of US cases. “Lung cancer can be cut out.”

I expected excuses like “my clients really want it” or “the shop we get it from uses proper safe equipment to cut it.” What I got was a lot of blank stares- they did not know what I was talking about.

The issue is on the radar in the USA because California is considering a ban on the fabrication of any engineered stone with more than 1% crystalline silica (quartz is over 90% silica). After 31 deaths and 58 lung transplants, they recognized, as they did in Australia, that trying to regulate the work practices of every little fabricator is almost impossible.

The biggest American manufacturer, Cambria, is spending millions to fight the California ban, and as noted in the previous post, even sponsored federal legislation to ban lawsuits from victims. According to Bloomberg, it’s all political.

“Republicans at the hearing argued that the silicosis problem was really about California’s failure to crack down on fabrication sweatshops exploiting illegal labor, that the lawsuits were endangering US manufacturing jobs and that Cambria, in particular, was being picked on because of its owner’s support for Trump.”

US Congressman Darrell Issa actually stood up in Congress, licked a chunk of Cambria quartz, and said: “I’ll be touching it, I’ll be holding it, and I will have no fear.” Indeed, customers should have no fear; that’s not where the problem is. From the customer’s point of view, it is a terrific product; Cambria even claims that it saves lives because it is so easy to disinfect. It’s lawyer claimed, “We all cut chicken on our countertops, and we all have kids who eat off the countertops sometimes. It’s safer for us.”

Customers love it, blissfully unaware of the danger to the workers cutting the stuff back in the shop. And as my trip to the home show indicated, the vendors and designers are also oblivious. Given the attention this issue gets here, this is unsurprising.

In Ontario, where I live, the danger of silica is recognized, but they have only one paragraph acknowledging that engineered stone might be more dangerous than natural stone.

“There is a growing worldwide concern that worker exposure to crystalline silica when working with stone countertops can rapidly lead to silicosis, an incurable, disabling and often fatal lung disease. Symptoms of silicosis can include shortness of breath, cough and fatigue. The risk of developing severe silicosis is especially high for those workers who use hand-held tools to cut or grind engineered stone because of its much higher silica content (up to 95%) than many of the natural stones, such as marble and granite.”

A recent article from British Columbia, “Silicosis and emerging risks to patients working with engineered stone," is stronger stuff, but the title belies the content by mentioning engineered stone as a new hazard.

“Silicosis has long been associated with occupational exposure in the mining and quarrying industries. However, new sources of RCS exposure are emerging, leading to earlier onset of silicosis. Individuals who work with silica-based materials in construction or manufacturing—particularly installing or manufacturing engineered stone materials, such as countertops—may be at risk of developing accelerated silicosis.”

It’s no wonder nobody at the Home Show was concerned; the issue is barely on the radar in Canada. And even when designers and specifiers know about the risks, many suggest it is not their problem or that the worries are premature. And of course, there is the cost of housing! One designer tells the Architect’s Newspaper that alternatives cost more. “If you’re saying we’re going to make housing even less affordable to certain markets, that’s also not a positive societal effect.”

I wish everyone could read the Bloomberg article, ‘Death Sentences’: Crafting America’s Favorite Countertops Is Killing Workers; they have a killer paywall, and this should be a public service. It has paragraphs like this:

“ One artificial stone countertop worker with silicosis says he’s constantly exhausted but loses sleep at night thinking about death. Another can’t put on his socks without taking a break in between, but he can’t qualify for a lung transplant because of a brain infection. A third was traumatized by a hellish transplant: Hallucinating because of his meds, he tried to tear out the tubes that were stitched into his skin to help clean his blood. The hospital tied him down and then, when that wasn’t enough, tied gloves to his hands to restrain his fingers. He tried to scream, but no sound came out because of the hole doctors had cut for a breathing tube in his neck. Like many of his counterparts, he lives with an artificial stone countertop he fabricated himself. It sits at his home under images of the Last Supper and the Virgin Mary. He says he knows it can’t hurt him anymore.”

There is a good New York Times article which I believe is outside of their paywall Quartz Cutters Are Falling Ill. Countertop Makers Want Protection From Congress.

There are alternatives, which I wrote about earlier. Caesarstone and Cosentino sell versions with ground glass that have zero silica. But if nobody knows about the problem, nothing will change.

I used to work the Home Shows back when I was in the prefab biz, and I know how they operate; the poor saps working the booths on the weekend aren't going to be on top of the latest health and safety issues. It was silly of me to think that I would get anything but blank stares.

But the professionals should know better. A dozen years ago, the late Zaha Hadid was vilified for dismissing the deaths of workers building a stadium she designed in Qatar:

"I have nothing to do with the workers. I think that's an issue the government – if there's a problem – should pick up."

Everyone was shocked and appalled, but anyone who understands the issues surrounding engineered stone and still specifies it is no different from Zaha. Our choices are killing people.

“What words do you use to mean "the built landscape"? Sometimes I say "architecture," but that doesn't feel broad enough. Sometimes I say "housing" but that doesn't quite span to all the urban situations I was to talk and write about. Sometimes I say "the city" but really I mean downs and all urban areas too. Sometimes I say "the urban realm" but WTF is that? It feels like all of us who work in city making or place or urbanism or architecture are somewhat hamstrung by not having a good word to describe our sector in broad terms.”

This has bothered me for a few years; I alluded to the problem in a recent post on the British One Built Environment report. However, to address Harper’s question more directly, I am republishing my 2021 post from Treehugger, and then I am going to lie down and recover- I had forgotten how much work kids are.

During Transportation Day at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), all the discussion was about electric cars. There was barely a peep about bikes or that much more efficient electric vehicle (EV), the e-bike. Treehugger reported on a letter from 64 bicycle organizations complaining that bikes could be part of the solution to the problem of carbon emissions, and much more quickly than trying to convert the fleet of gas cars to electric. They made a number of suggestions in their letter for fixing this, that all had to do with bike infrastructure, incentives, and “mobility solutions for a multimodal ecosystem capable of covering all user needs without relying on a private car.”

But the real problem comes down to the idea of having a transportation day at all, of separating transportation from other sources of emissions. Everybody does this, with neat pie charts showing that buildings are responsible for 39% and transport 23%, or some variation of this. But they are not. They are both what I will call “Built Environment Emissions,” picking up on the work of Built Environment Declares, which writes that the carbon story goes way beyond just buildings:

“If we are to reduce and eventually reverse the environmental damage we are causing, we will need to re-imagine our buildings, cities and infrastructures as indivisible components of a larger, constantly regenerating and self-sustaining system.”

Some of these graphs are more detailed than others, but end up in the same place: Transport is unrelated to building and construction. When researching my book, “Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle,” my sources listed housing and mobility as two separate topics, two separate sources of carbon emissions. But in fact, they are deeply connected. I wrote:

“Years ago, the environmental thinker Alex Steffen wrote a brilliant article titled “My Other Car Is a Bright Green City” that profoundly influenced me. he wrote: “There is a direct relationship between the kinds of places we live, the transportation choices we have, and how much we drive. The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the car but eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go.”

This may seem obvious, but people continue to think of transportation as being separate from the built form but they are not. Transportation consultant Jarrett Walker nailed it in a tweet: “Land use and transportation are the same thing described in different languages.”

As I wrote in my book:

“It is not a chicken-and-egg, a which came first thing. It is a single entity or system that has evolved and expanded over the years through the changes in the form of energy available, and in particular the ever-increasing availability and reduction in the cost of fossil fuels.”

In the conclusion to my book, I reiterated this:

“How we live and how we get around are not two separate issues; they are two sides of the same coin, the same thing in different languages. It’s much easier to live a low-carbon life if you live in a place designed before the car took over, be it a small town or an older city. But for the people who don’t do that, the problems are immense.”

This is why whenever I write about the benefits of e-bikes I get comments like: “It would be nice if everyone could super-lightweight their ride right away but not everybody works in an office nearby with ample shopping also nearby. It requires work to make a car-optional society.”

Indeed it does. That’s why we have to stop looking at transportation as a separate category from buildings and have to change our zoning and building regulations to promote the kind of development that makes being car-optional easier. The first change would be to eliminate restrictions on building densities. As American futurist Alex Steffen wrote:

“We know that density reduces driving. We know that we’re capable of building really dense new neighborhoods and even of using good design, infill development and infrastructure investments to transform existing medium-low density neighborhoods into walkable compact communities... It is within our power to go much farther: to build whole metropolitan regions where the vast majority of residents live in communities that eliminate the need for daily driving and make it possible for many people to live without private cars altogether.”

The illogic of separating transportation from buildings is everywhere. take steel; its production is responsible for 7% of carbon emissions. Fully half of it is going into tall buildings that house people working, and 13% of it is going into cars to drive people from their homes to the tall buildings. Concrete is probably a similar story.

You can look at it another way with the Livermore Lab’s Sankey Graph showing where energy in the U.S. goes. Using pre-pandemic 2019 numbers, in which the total consumption conveniently hits 100.2 quadrillion BTUs, buildings are sucking up 21 quads directly, transportation 28.2, and let’s say 63% of industrial is going into making buildings and cars, the same ratio as the steel industry. That totals 67.1 quads, roughly 67% of all energy used in the U.S.

So if instead of looking at every sector on its own, if you take a consumption-based view of where all this stuff goes into, and where all the carbon emissions come from, the vast majority of emissions from energy are coming from operating our buildings, driving our cars, or making the materials to build our buildings and our cars. You almost end up with agriculture and aviation as being the two largest categories that don’t fit into Built Environment Emissions. By this standard, Built Environment Emissions might be as high as 75%.

It is an issue that comes up again and again when you look at the world through the lens of production, rather than consumption. Outside of governments buying F35s and aircraft carriers, all of this energy use and greenhouse gas emissions are coming from making stuff that people buy. If they don’t have to buy it, then consumption and emissions go down. If people had available options, they might change their lifestyle choices. The biggest problem is that they often do not have options.

There are ways to fix this. If we all lived in Professor Carlos Moreno’s 15-minute city, this would not be a problem. The C40 Mayors noted this is a matter of zoning and building design.

“The presence of nearby amenities, such as healthcare, schools, parks, food outlets and restaurants, essential retail and offices, as well as the digitalisation of some services, will enable this transition. In order to achieve this in our cities, we must create a regulatory environment that encourages inclusive zoning, mixed-use development and flexible buildings and spaces.”

Other groups, like the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy(ITDP) have proposed a Transit Oriented Development pattern that I thought was misnamed because it also prioritized other forms of transport.

“The TOD Standard sums up the new priorities for contemporary urban development. They reflect a fundamental shift from the old, unsustainable paradigm of car-oriented urbanism toward a new paradigm where urban forms and land uses are closely integrated with efficient, low-impact, and people-oriented urban travel modes: walking, cycling, and transit.”

But they also get that this is an issue of land use and urban form, not transportation technology.

It is easy to see why e-cars (I am not calling electric cars EVs anymore because e-bikes are EVs) are such a popular approach with the politicians at COP26. As Carlton Reid notes in Forbes, they are a convenient way of maintaining the status quo. He quotes Lord Tony Berkeley, patron of the United Kingdom’s Parliamentary Group on Cycling and Walking:

“Encouraging people to continue to use private vehicles helps perpetuate the kind of thinking that has led us to our problematic car-dominated society. Electric vehicles provide an attractive option because they require little behavior change. The reality is that we all need to make large and wide-ranging changes to our lifestyle.”

But making lifestyle changes doesn’t have to be hard or unpleasant; if you live in the kind of place where you can walk or bike to shop, it’s rather pleasant. I live in a duplex in a “streetcar suburb” in Toronto, designed just before the car took over, and it is all very convenient. This is because of a built environment that encourages travel by bike or foot.

This is why the list of demands presented to COP26 and prepared by the 64 cycling organizations is incomplete. One of their suggestions of “Building synergies with public transport and foster combined mobility solutions for a multimodal ecosystem capable of covering all user needs without relying on a private car” gets close, but they should be sitting down with Architects Declareor the Architects Climate Action Network and add a few more points which could also apply in North America:

• Ban single-family zoning and permit small multi-family developments everywhere. Change the building codes to make those little buildings easier and more economical to construct.

• Put a carbon tax on building materials to promote low-carbon construction and the reduction or elimination of underground parking.

• Eliminate sprawl by legislating that all new development, commercial or residential must be within a 20-minute walking distance of decent transit running dedicated rights of way, essentially Transit-Oriented Development.

• Ensure that safe and secure bicycle parking is provided in every building.

Those are just a few thoughts about ways to encourage the kind of development that can get people out of cars. It can be a hard sell; even in places that were designed before the car, such as much of London, the drivers are enraged at every Low Traffic Neighborhood. In New York City, they are complaining about losing parking to outdoor dining.

But the main point of this article is that we have to stop talking about transportation emissions as something detached from building emissions. What we design and build determines how we get around (and vice versa) and you cannot separate the two. They are all Built Environment Emissions, and we have to deal with them together.

A few years ago, after a polar vortex event, I wrote about the benefits of building resilient housing, concluding:

“Every building should have a proven level of insulation, airtightness, and window quality so that people are comfortable in all kinds of weather, even when the power goes out. This is because our houses have become lifeboats, and leaks may well be fatal.”

I have been thinking and writing about lifeboats ever since, and last year I was part of the Reimagine Buildings Collective workshop studying “Passive Survivability,” defined as “the ability to maintain safe thermal conditions during an extended power outage or loss of critical services.” We quickly realized that passive survivability is no longer enough- it’s active. Even in a lifeboat, you need to worry about more than leaks; we have to think about food, water, and everything else you need to survive.

Old urban baby boomers like me aren't going to throw a bug-out bag into the back of the pickup truck and head for the hills. We must consider what we can do where we live, in our cities and suburbs. I have been looking for resources and have been following a number of writers who cover this beat; one who stood out goes by the name of Jessica Wildfire. She just released a free 200-page guide, Survival Illustrated, which is the best I have seen since my Whole Earth Catalogue.

Jessica W. describes herself as a former tenured academic who spent three years putting the guide together. “I did this while raising a kid and holding down two jobs, three if you include the countless hours spent learning how to build sustainable survival systems.”

It’s illustrated with what I assume are self-portraits of Jessica and her handy raccoon helper. It’s a work in progress, and it’s not for preppers;

“The guide will always feel incomplete. It’s a growing guide, meant to reflect a lifetime of learning, a lifetime of reclaiming the forgotten skills that weren’t passed down to me from older generations. No, not horseback riding. No, not trapping game. These aren’t solutions for most of us. They’re distractions.”

Instead, we get two hundred pages of doable stuff- if you are seriously handy. All of the things I worry about are here: how to store water. How to grow food. How to store food. Even “how to make an affordable composting setup for basic sanitation during a long-term emergency… in the suburbs.”

I am not going to set up a composting toilet at home; our sewer system runs on gravity, and I am not worried about it. But it is a subject I know something about, and her directions are thorough, right down to the aesthetics- using a standard 95-gallon trash bin to store the poopy compost that “will blend into the suburban landscape.”

Most of us can’t run off to Montana or Alberta and go off-grid; this is written for people who live in cities, suburbs, and apartments. There are bicycles instead of pickup trucks. Jessica also gets that we are part of a community.

If more people were invested in changing their surroundings, working together, cooperating, instead of just paying lip service to those ideas, then perhaps half the country wouldn’t be on track to become uninhabitable. The idea of simply leaving or abandoning a place once it becomes too difficult is, in fact, one of the primary reasons things have gotten so awful. People leave this or that city. They leave this or that country. They take all of their assumptions and entitlements with them, thinking that they weren’t part of the reason everything went to hell in the first place. Well, you know what they say: “Wherever you go, there you are.” My guide isn’t about fleeing. It’s about staying put.

I am not going to do much of this stuff. We don’t have much room. We have two hundred jars of tomatoes in the garage, but that’s it. But I noted in a previous post that my generation is particularly unprepared and is willfully blind to the events happening around us; this guide is a shock to the system.

This is edited- too many commenters suggest that if I’m worried about intruders I need a gun, not 3” screws. I included it as an example of Jessica’s suggestions that don’t cost much and are easy to do. It’s just one example of the useful information that is on every page, and I should have picked a better one.

Grounded

I’m Never Going to Finish My Survival Guide

Last year, something occurred to me…

Read more

2 months ago · 163 likes · 68 comments · Jessica

Read more about Jessica and download the Survival Guide. In another post, The Supply Disruptions Are Finally Here she explains:

“It’s free. It covers food storage. It covers rain harvesting. It covers foraging and growing food. We specifically wrote this for people who don’t live on farms or homesteads. Maybe you can’t do all of it, but you can do some of it. I’m not just trying to plug a book. When threats emerge, this is my advice to you on what to do about them. You need more than just a list of foods to store. You need an entire system for survival.”

I previously wrote about the dreadful term “sleepmaxxing,” where “Through metrics that track quality and recovery, rest is no longer just experienced, but is measured, analyzed, and optimized via wearable sleep trackers.” They throw all kinds of technology at the problem of sleep, but the solutions may be simpler; in a new study, doctors prescribe blackout curtains. This is where Marcel Proust comes into the story;

His bedroom was fully reconstructed at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris’s Marais neighbourhood. It is described in The Paris Review:

“There’s no bric-a-brac, true, but the chamber isn’t what you’d call monastic. There’s a pretty rug on the floor; the tightly drawn curtains are blue satin. The room is dark—a single green-shaded lamp provides the only source of light, and presumably the Chinese painted folding screen could have provided still more privacy and dark. The narrow bed had belonged to Proust since childhood. The cork on the walls was intended not just to soundproof but to prevent pollen and dust from aggravating Proust’s allergies and asthma. The result was somewhat tomblike.”

In my previous post, I concluded that if you are serious about sleep, you don’t need technology or kiwi fruit; you need:

• Controlled ventilation to keep CO2 levels below 750 ppm;

• Noise levels below 30db;

• Warm lighting that eliminates ~480 nm blue light in the evening.

But now, Nikki Hunt points to research which concludes that exposure to any kind of light at night might be a potential risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD). The study followed 11,000 people in the UK who wore fitness trackers that also measured light levels.

“After adjustment for other factors, they established a clear dose-dependent link: any increase in light exposure above 3 lux during a person’s five least-active nighttime hours was associated with measurable, subtle cardiac damage. Compared with those sleeping in the darkest rooms, participants in the highest light exposure group had a 2.4% larger left ventricle after adjusting for height, walls that were 1.5% thicker on average, and a 1.9% drop in contractile function.”

One lux, by definition, is the light from a candle one meter away. Full moonlight is about a lux. It’s not a lot of light. The study is not without issues and limitations; the watches measured brightness but not colour temperature, and we have discussed the negative effects of blue light. “Blue-heavy LED light drives the global rise in light pollution, and can even penetrate the closed eyelid, the photopic sensor probably underestimates the true biological dose received.”

The authors are dragging the bedroom into consideration as a cardiovascular risk factor “alongside smoking, hypertension, and physical inactivity.” They remind us of the problems outside our bedrooms- light pollution from too-blue streetlights- but suggest that we can fix what is inside relatively affordably:

The advice is simple and inexpensive: blackout curtains, warm-coloured bedside lighting, and covering the small standby LEDs on household electronics.

One problem is that many people of a certain age need to get up in the middle of the night to pee; an additional cost might be motion-sensitive red night lights. The authors of an editorial analysis of the study conclude:

“Ultimately, this study is more than an interesting observation. It provides a crucial link between what satellites already show us, i.e. a planet glowing ever brighter at night, and the clinical reality unfolding inside our chests: hearts that are becoming stiffer, weaker, and less efficient. The relationship is biologically coherent, the effect sizes are clinically meaningful, and the dose–response is unambiguous: more light, worse outcomes. The takeaway is clear: darkness deserves recognition as a vital sign, as essential to cardiovascular health as blood pressure control and clean air.”

Proust’s bedroom was quiet as a tomb thanks to the cork-lined walls. Tightly drawn curtains kept out the light. He had a notebook, not an iPad, and a warm incandescent light rather than a blue LED. He had problems with pollen and dust, but we now have mechanical ventilation that delivers clean, filtered air and keeps CO2 levels down.

Proust wrote, “A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds.” We should learn from him and his bedroom.

I previously wrote about the dreadful term “sleepmaxxing,” where “Through metrics that track quality and recovery, rest is no longer just experienced, but is measured, analyzed, and optimized via wearable sleep trackers.” They throw all kinds of technology at the problem of sleep, but the solutions may be simpler; in a new study, doctors prescribe blackout curtains. This is where Marcel Proust comes into the story;

His bedroom was fully reconstructed at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris’s Marais neighbourhood. It is described in The Paris Review:

“There’s no bric-a-brac, true, but the chamber isn’t what you’d call monastic. There’s a pretty rug on the floor; the tightly drawn curtains are blue satin. The room is dark—a single green-shaded lamp provides the only source of light, and presumably the Chinese painted folding screen could have provided still more privacy and dark. The narrow bed had belonged to Proust since childhood. The cork on the walls was intended not just to soundproof but to prevent pollen and dust from aggravating Proust’s allergies and asthma. The result was somewhat tomblike.”

In my previous post, I concluded that if you are serious about sleep, you don’t need technology or kiwi fruit; you need:

• Controlled ventilation to keep CO2 levels below 750 ppm;

• Noise levels below 30db;

• Warm lighting that eliminates ~480 nm blue light in the evening.

But now, Nikki Hunt points to research which concludes that exposure to any kind of light at night might be a potential risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD). The study followed 11,000 people in the UK who wore fitness trackers that also measured light levels.

“After adjustment for other factors, they established a clear dose-dependent link: any increase in light exposure above 3 lux during a person’s five least-active nighttime hours was associated with measurable, subtle cardiac damage. Compared with those sleeping in the darkest rooms, participants in the highest light exposure group had a 2.4% larger left ventricle after adjusting for height, walls that were 1.5% thicker on average, and a 1.9% drop in contractile function.”

One lux, by definition, is the light from a candle one meter away. Full moonlight is about a lux. It’s not a lot of light. The study is not without issues and limitations; the watches measured brightness but not colour temperature, and we have discussed the negative effects of blue light. “Blue-heavy LED light drives the global rise in light pollution, and can even penetrate the closed eyelid, the photopic sensor probably underestimates the true biological dose received.”

The authors are dragging the bedroom into consideration as a cardiovascular risk factor “alongside smoking, hypertension, and physical inactivity.” They remind us of the problems outside our bedrooms- light pollution from too-blue streetlights- but suggest that we can fix what is inside relatively affordably:

The advice is simple and inexpensive: blackout curtains, warm-coloured bedside lighting, and covering the small standby LEDs on household electronics.

One problem is that many people of a certain age need to get up in the middle of the night to pee; an additional cost might be motion-sensitive red night lights. The authors of an editorial analysis of the study conclude:

“Ultimately, this study is more than an interesting observation. It provides a crucial link between what satellites already show us, i.e. a planet glowing ever brighter at night, and the clinical reality unfolding inside our chests: hearts that are becoming stiffer, weaker, and less efficient. The relationship is biologically coherent, the effect sizes are clinically meaningful, and the dose–response is unambiguous: more light, worse outcomes. The takeaway is clear: darkness deserves recognition as a vital sign, as essential to cardiovascular health as blood pressure control and clean air.”

Proust’s bedroom was quiet as a tomb thanks to the cork-lined walls. Tightly drawn curtains kept out the light. He had a notebook, not an iPad, and a warm incandescent light rather than a blue LED. He had problems with pollen and dust, but we now have mechanical ventilation that delivers clean, filtered air and keeps CO2 levels down.

Proust wrote, “A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds.” We should learn from him and his bedroom.

A decade ago, everybody wanted a standing desk. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic said, “Sitting is the new smoking.” (Though he denies having said it) Peak standing desk was probably around 2015 when Fast Company published Kill Your Chair! The Standing Desk Explosion of 2015. I was a big prostletyzer at Treehugger, and we were all building them out of Kleenex boxes and IKEA hacks.

Now the Economist questions their value in an article, “Why standing at your desk may be little better than sitting.” It quotes a series of studies that found standing at a desk burned almost no more calories. “Participants stood about 1.3 hours more a day and were followed for roughly four months. Body fat and blood-sugar control improved slightly, but blood pressure, insulin, cholesterol and triglycerides did not.”

I have a dog in this fight, having been an early adopter and having written about standing desks for years, and I can tell you that nothing in the Economist is news. I wrote in MNN in 2015 in a deleted post that “Sitting is not the new smoking. It's not even the new chewing gum.” I also complained that everyone was buying electric adjustable sit-stand desks, but I suspected people would tend to use them for sitting rather than standing if making a choice was so easy.

I was proven right about this; A 2018 study found that only 30.4% were daily users, 37.5% were monthly/weekly users, and 32.1% were non-users at all; among the monthly/weekly group, 88% most frequently reported that they forgot to use the standing option, and only 13.6% used it at consistent, regular intervals. Make it easy for people to sit, and that’s what they will do.

The Economist, after damning standing desks, writes, “What matters far more is movement. A study of nearly 482,000 Taiwanese adults in 2024 found that just 15–30 minutes of extra daily exercise could erase most of the excess mortality risk associated with sitting at work.” This is also not news; the author of 2015 research noted:

“Our study overturns current thinking on the health risks of sitting and indicates that the problem lies in the absence of movement rather than the time spent sitting itself. Any stationary posture where energy expenditure is low may be detrimental to health, be it sitting or standing.”

In fact, if you look at the history of standing desks, they were not really about standing at all, but about moving.

In 1964, Robert Probst of Herman Miller developed the standing desk as part of the “action office,” and the key word was action. Nikil Saval wrote in Cubed:

“Propst found himself constantly in motion, moving from one working area to another, standing to sitting. All this activity made him feel more productive, alert, vital.”

He and George Nelson developed the Action Office so that workers would be moving around rather than sitting still. It wasn’t just a set of furniture; it was a way of life.

When I designed my office in 2014, I based it on the ideas of the action office: one place to stand, a shallow, wide desk with the computer because I could move sideways easily. I had a separate place to sit, at a 1954 Herman Miller desk designed by George Nelson. If I was putting thoughts together, I often just turned around and walked down the corridor. It is much easier to move if you are already standing.

Now I am a dozen years older, and I still hate the concrete block walls. (I didn’t like drywall, but I should have used a nicer architectural block; this just screams basement) I still have my favourite kitchen debate coffee mug, but it’s moved from the standing desk to the sitting desk, as has the computer. I am spending a lot more time sitting rather than standing now; it could be because I am older and more sedentary. A study shows that people 65+ average 9.4 to 10.5 sedentary hours per day, and it is tied to sarcopenia, or age-related muscle loss- another good reason to stand and move.

I like to think it’s because I am going to the gym and doing “activity compensation,” discussed in a study which found “when physical activity is increased or decreased in one domain, there will be a compensatory change in another domain, in order to maintain an overall stable level of physical activity or energy expenditure over time.”

Or it could just be because I have a computer at the sitting desk; I take the lazy way out, even though I have a bigger monitor and a better keyboard when I am standing. I may reconsider my hardware layout.

As the 1964 ad notes, “when you think about it, the sit-down desk is one of the dreariest and unhealthiest things ever created. Think about Action Office.” Sixty-two years later, the Economist concludes: “There does seem to be a lesson here: the real distinction is not between sitting and standing, but between remaining still and moving.” The message hasn’t changed.

I received an email this morning from Nick McKeogh, CEO of the NLA (I think it's short for New London Architecture; it’s hard to pin down), regarding the One Built Environment Declaration, which calls on the British Government to recognize that “everyone who plans, designs, funds, builds, manages and renews the UK's built environment” is really part of one industry.

“Housing, planning, transport, infrastructure, energy and regeneration aren't separate problems — they're one industry, hiding in plain sight. Right now, government sees us in fragments, split across departments and funding streams. That fragmentation costs growth, jobs and investment every single month.”

It’s based on a 2025 report, The Built Environment Sector, and discusses the professions in the UK, but the concept is relevant everywhere.

“The UK’s built environment is made up of the human-made spaces and infrastructure within which we all live our lives. This includes the homes we live in, the roads we move on, the public spaces we gather in and the shops, hospitals and schools we rely on. It houses the offices, data centres, logistics hubs and research laboratories that power the modern economy. The built environment includes not just buildings and what we see at ground level but also the infrastructure that services them, much of which runs through intricate, largely unseen networks below and above us.”

This is an issue that I have complained about for years- the separation of everything into separate silos. I was originally inspired by Jarrett Walker’s tweet (one of the three most influential tweets I ever saw back when you saw such things on Twitter) that crystallized the idea that you couldn’t talk about buildings separately from transportation or, for that matter, sewers and electric lines; we are all talking about the same thing.

I concluded my book, Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle, paraphrasing Walker:

"How we live and how we get around are not two separate issues; they are two sides of the same coin, the same thing in different languages. It’s much easier to live a low-carbon life if you live in a place designed before the car took over, be it a small town or an older city. But for the people who don’t do that, the problems are immense."

I was primarily concerned with carbon emissions, and thought they should all be considered together as coming from one source- why separate transport, building, or industry when we are making steel and concrete to make roads and cars to drive between buildings? It all connects. The NLA takes the relationships much further:

“Our lives are deeply interwoven with the built environment in countless ways. People in the UK spend between 80-90% of their time indoors, in homes, schools, workplaces, other public spaces and on transport. The quality of these spaces and places matters. Availability of public transit, social infrastructure, or green space can impact health, wellbeing and economic prospects. Pensions are often invested in the built environment, meaning the financial performance of buildings and infrastructure impacts a pensioner’s ability to enjoy their retirement. The built environment shapes access to opportunity, with the location of affordable housing, schools, and jobs either reinforcing or reducing social inequality. It reflects cultural values, influencing whether people feel a sense of belonging or exclusion. And it will play a pivotal role in how well the world will adapt to a changing climate.”

When I started in real estate development in the 90’s during a recession, I asked another successful developer how he spent his days. He told me, “In the morning, I fight with the trades. In the afternoon, I fight with the banks. In the evening, I fight with my purchasers.” This is after he has finished fighting with City Hall and paying for infrastructure and marketing. Everything is connected; everyone in every bubble in the built environment ecosystem.

So many bubbles. Even pensions; I hadn’t thought of this, but where I live, the Canada Pension Plan owns the toll Highway 407 that everybody hates, and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan owns Cadillac Fairview, the biggest and best real estate developer in the country. It is all more connected than I thought.

Yet government policy is all over the map. Different ministries, from finance to housing to education, are going in different directions. For example, in Canada, one department might support renovation and restoration of existing buildings, while another cuts education programs for training workers in heritage trades. Hospitals get moved to suburbs without transit. Nobody thinks about carbon emissions. The NLA writes:

“While those working within the built environment sector understand its immense value, it lacks a clear and cohesive definition. It can at times feel fragmented: in terms of how public investment and policy are conceived and implemented, in how professionals are educated, accredited, and represented and, perhaps most subtly, even in the professional identities many in the sector have constructed for themselves.”

The declaration’s final point is a call for government and industry to work together:

Build a long term strategy with us. Co-develop a regionally led Built Environment Industrial and Investment Strategy — one that lets places use devolved taxes to raise capital, backs national supply chains, creates skilled jobs, and grows exports.

The NLA is not the first to note that we are not separate silos but part of a bigger Built Environment Industry. While there are Architects Declare and Engineers Declare groups,

“BUILT ENVIRONMENT DECLARES is a global petition uniting all strands of construction and the built environment. It is both a public declaration of our planet’s environmental crises and a commitment to take positive action in response to climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse.”

Once again, everything connects.

“For everyone working in construction and the built environment, meeting the needs of our societies without breaching the earth’s ecological boundaries will demand a paradigm shift in our behaviour. If we are to reduce and eventually reverse the environmental damage we are causing, we will need to re-imagine our buildings, cities and infrastructures as indivisible components of a larger, constantly regenerating and self-sustaining system.”

When we are fragmented and do not recognize the larger connected systems, nobody is talking about decisions, from expanding airports to ripping out bike lanes, in terms of their larger impacts and their longer-term implications. They are building highways instead of imagining a world with fewer cars.

When I looked at this question a few years ago, I complained about the ridiculous divisions of emission sources in pie charts.

“Instead of looking at every sector on its own, if you take a consumption-based view of where all this stuff goes into, and where all the carbon emissions come from, the vast majority of emissions are coming from operating our buildings, driving our cars between our buildings, or making the materials to build our buildings and our cars. You almost end up with agriculture and aviation as being the two largest categories that don't fit into Built Environment Emissions. By this standard, Built Environment Emissions might be as high as 75%.”

The NLA report goes much further than anything I have seen to demonstrate how economically dominant the Built Environment Sector is. Others and I have tried to point out how it also dominates emissions. It’s time we all recognized that unless we all work together, all those red and green and gold and blue bubbles on that Built Environment Employment Ecosystem chart, we are never going to solve our economic or environmental problems in time.

I usually write my posts for Monday on the weekend, but I had trouble getting started on my choice for today- a critical look at an article in The European titled ‘The new asbestos’ – UCL researchers warn LED lighting may be damaging our health. It discusses how LED bulbs don’t emit any near-infrared light, which is evidently needed for mitochondrial health. So while LEDs may save energy,

This shining beacon of sustainability, however, may have a dark side. Professor Glen Jeffery, a neuroscientist at University College London, certainly thinks so. He believes that modern LED lighting may pose a serious and largely overlooked health risk. In fact, he goes so far as to call it the “new asbestos”.

I was outraged by this, given that asbestos is directly killing 200,000 people a year, often 50 years after they were exposed to it. Meanwhile, a deficiency of infrared light can be cured by walking your dog outside for fifteen minutes a day.

I worried that I had written about this earlier but couldn’t find anything. However, there was an article in the RIBA journal in 2023, White LEDs threaten health, reveals UCL study I didn’t think it merited a post, but I complained at the time on LinkedIn:

Now I am not a lighting engineer; I am an architect, but I have been writing about LEDs since they were invented, and this RIBA journal article is outrageous. "So could white LEDs be the new asbestos – ubiquitous and consequential? Jeffrey has grave concerns about their proliferation: ‘We're sitting on a ticking health time bomb which is going to start to hit in 20 years time,’ he says." But what is a "white" LED? A mix of phosphors excited by a UV LED source, which is exactly what a fluorescent bulb is. We have been sitting under the same light for 60 years. Don't call LED lights the new asbestos, retract this.

So there is nothing new to the claim, which didn't get much traction the first time around. I am posting about it again only because I worry that the wellness crowd and the conspiracy theorists will grab onto it and start telling people to go back to incandescent bulbs.

Asbestos isn’t the only scary analogy used in the story.

In Jeffery and Fosbury’s view, by ditching the incandescent and halogen lighting of yesteryear for more energy-efficient counterparts, we have unwittingly created an unseen environment of chronic light deficiency. Fosbury continued: “We call it 21st Century scurvy. The disease develops on the same kind of time scale as scurvy, when ancient sailors gradually suffered from a lack of Vitamin C.”

This is perhaps a more reasonable analogy. It turned out that all it took to prevent scurvy was a teaspoon of lime juice- once we understood the science, it was easy and cheap to solve. It’s the same with lighting.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. As I noted in an earlier post, the real answer to the problem of the lack of infrared light or the wrong colour temperature messing with our circadian rhythms is to just get outside. “Daylight is a drug, and nature is the dispensing physician.”

We can offer solutions. We should give people decent windows and a nice, safe place to walk in the fresh air and sunshine. Throw in some trees for a little biophilia. We can explain circadian rhythms and tell people to turn down the blue in the evening. We can sell them better bulbs.

We should not be scaring people with asbestos and scurvy and feeding the conspiracy theorists.

It’s PARK(ing) Day in Toronto and around the world- a day when we take back the streets and make space for people, not cars.

“Park(ing) Day is a global, public, participatory art project that takes place annually on the third weekend of September. Around the world, people temporarily repurpose on-street, boulevard or lot parking spaces and convert them into tiny parks and places for art, play, and activism.”

It started as a one-off in 2005 when Matt Passmore and his team at Rebar, a San Francisco design studio, bought two hours of time from a parking meter, rolled out some sod, installed a bench and a tree, and wrote:

The mission of PARK(ing) Day is to call attention to the need for more urban open space, to generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated, and to improve the quality of urban human habitat ... at least until the meter runs out!

The image went viral, as these things do, and Rebar got numerous requests for information from people in cities worldwide. Rebar produced an open-source manual, and in 2006, twenty years ago, there were PARK(ing) Day installations all over the world. As the U of T School of Cities notes,

The ethos of Park(ing) Day is to celebrate the use of urban public space for people and challenge the dominance of the automobile in cities. The event draws attention to the need for improving access and quantity of public open spaces in densely populated urban areas as well as the need for these spaces to provide social and environmental engagement.”

I should note a Canadian precedent from Hamilton, Ontario, in 2001, celebrated on Car-Free Day in July. The call to action:

“Bring some grass (the kind you sit on), a lawnchair, food, drums, soap bubbles, boombox ,sidewalk chalk, and your sense of adventure as we reclaim some prime downtown street space in smoggy, noisy, car-infested Hamilton. We will supply the quarters for parking spaces, which will magically transform into liberated car-free spaces.”

Their goal was promoting “a breathable, liveable future of sustainable transportation.” But Hamilton isn’t San Francisco, and it didn’t catch on the way PARK(ing) Day did a few years later.

In some ways, PARK(ing) Day is a bit of a relic of an earlier time. Twenty years ago, it was an act of what Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia described as “tactical urbanism, -an approach to neighbourhood building and activation using short-term, low-cost, scalable interventions and policies.” Over time, these activities that began as guerrilla interventions become sanctioned.

So what was once radical has become accepted, particularly since the Pandemic, when giving up parking spaces for people became common. What used to be considered tactical urbanism is now institutionalized, bureaucratized and commercialized, and now you have to pay to play.

That’s why PARK(ing) Day is so wonderful; it is still free. It’s an exercise in creativity, not commerce. I thought it had almost disappeared, but in Toronto it is still going strong, coordinated by Dubbeldam Architecture + Design. With partners Arup, KPMB, Gow Hastings, and Fast+Epp, they have a grant programme to help activate PARK(ing) spaces. Kevin McIntosh and Heather Dubbeldam, co-founders of Park(ing) Day Toronto, have rustled up fifteen installations for this year’s event. That’s remarkable, given that the Global Parking Day map shows only ten sites in the entire United States.

Many of the installations offer much more than just seating- last year there were books, beaches, and art installations. This year I am looking forward to “Strangers Calling” with a “bright pink vintage telephone that rings intermittently. Passersby are invited to pick up the phone and discover who—or what—is on the other end.” I might pass on “Meter Rex” with “an inflatable dinosaur, a cardboard parking meter and a 30-second invitation to dance into one on-street parking space.”

You don’t have to buy a coffee to use the space, because, as Enrique Peñalosa has noted,

"Public space is for living, doing business, kissing, and playing. Its value can't be measured with economics or mathematics; it must be felt with the soul."

You can see all of the Toronto locations at Parking Day Toronto. I am going to be on my bike doing the rounds today. Jan Gehl wrote: “A good city is like a good party — people stay longer than really necessary because they are enjoying themselves." Let’s all get out and party this PARK(ing) Day and weekend.

Writers of a certain age (like me) often see things happening today and whine, “I predicted that 20 years ago!” Readers of a certain age may remember Faith Popcorn (yes, her real name, legally changed from Plotkin). She is a futurist and marketing consultant who invented the word “cocooning” in 1982, describing it as “a desire to protect oneself from the harsh realities of the outside world” and has been making predictions ever since.

She is 83 now and is having an “I told you so!” moment after reading an article in AD titled This Is Your Home on GLP-1s, about how the drugs are changing the design of our homes- it is subheaded “As GLP-1s reshape American life, they’re also sparking a surprising behind-the-scenes transformation of our homes, from med-station bathrooms to ghost-town kitchens”

In 1996, Popcorn predicted drugs that fool our appetites, and in 2001 wrote that “the kitchen becomes increasingly vestigial.” And here we are, 30 years later, and the big kitchens with monster islands that I always complain about might be going away, because the way many people eat is changing due to appetite-suppressing GLP-1 drugs. Will this change the way our homes are designed? Interior Designer Elizabeth Valkovics tells AD:

“I think we’re going to be moving away from the big, big kitchens,” Valkovics says. “The kitchen may transition to a secondary space rather than the social hub or heart of the home.” Her clients tell her they want spaces oriented around simple, everyday cooking; “performative” kitchens built for splashy holiday meals are no longer the aspiration.

I am having a similar “I told you so!” moment too, complaining for years that the kitchen was turning into a large closet with small appliances, variously called messy kitchens or now scullery kitchens, to hide the microwaves and the Kuerigs, where you toast your Eggos or unpack the Uber Eats, with big open kitchens there for hobbyists or for show. But what happens if nobody has an appetite anymore, what’s the point? Who wants to invest in all that equipment or real estate? Who wants to look at it?

According to another design strategist:

With broader GLP-1 adoption, she foresees kitchens becoming “lighter-use spaces that prioritize speed, efficiency, and small-scale preparation over high-volume cooking.” Users need nutrient-dense food, and they want it quickly and informally. “Demand is shifting toward compact appliances, prep-to-serve tools, modular fridge storage, and a smaller-format tabletop.”

The kitchen is becoming, as I predicted, an “enhanced pantry space” for targeted food prep. Our strategist continues:

“These are specific, designated areas to create foods that are important on a day-to-day basis,” she says. It might take the form of a dedicated smoothie station, such as a blender, an under-counter refrigerated drawer for yogurt or fruit, and a cabinet for supplements and protein powder, all consolidated within arm’s reach rather than scattered across a sprawling kitchen.”

22% of households now have at least one person on GLP-1 drugs, and the users skew rich, with 40% earning more than $100K. They are the ones who used to covet the big, sprawling kitchen; now I suspect many are losing interest in it.

Then there’s another demographic trend: more people living alone, rising from 13% in 1960 to 29% today and expected to hit 35% by 2050. Then there is the appification of eating: according to the USDA, Americans now spend more money eating out than eating in. Even when we cook at home, what we eat has changed. According to a Circana study,

“Speed shapes daily eating. Half of all meals now take less than five minutes to prepare, a share that has climbed since 2021. This includes 65% of breakfasts, 56% of lunches, and 35% of dinners.”

Popcorn’s prediction for 2030: “The six-burner range becomes a period piece, and in some homes the wet bar is the only kitchen.” My prediction from 2019: “I suspect that the big range with oven is on its way out, and small, moveable and storable appliances will take over.”

I once wrote that the kitchen was going the way of the sewing machine- a hobby enjoyed by a few. There will always be people (like spouse Kelly) who love to cook, just as there will always be people (like daughter Emma) who love to sew. But I see so many trends pushing the other way:

• The increase in the number of people living alone;

• The demographic time bomb, with “the anorexia of aging” becoming more common- older people lose interest in eating.

• The rise of app-driven food delivery and takeout;

• The return to the office and loss of free time;

• And now, the rise of appetite-depressing GLP-1 drugs.

Faith Popcorn sees the kitchen of the future as an elaborate wet bar. She predicts that “GLP-1s will make meals fewer and smaller, but the change does not stop at the body. It empties the pantry, shrinks the range, and moves the refrigerator into the bedroom.”

Changes are coming not only to the kitchen, but to every room in the home. People are drinking less but are evidently entertaining more; living rooms may become games rooms. As people shrink, so might their furniture, although the TVs might get bigger.

Much of the action moves to the bathroom; fridges become important for storing everything from peptides to GLP-1 shots. Sharps disposal is also an issue. The bathroom is also turning into a “wellness hub,”

“I’ve found that once people are on the GLPs and losing weight, it often kick-starts a deeper dive into wellness in general,” says [designer] Rummerfield. “People want to build on the improvements they’re seeing.” Some of the easiest wellness upgrades to make involve the bathroom, where she’s incorporating more wellness features than ever. “Everybody wants a steam shower now,” she says. “And we’re always hearing the word ‘hammam.’”

This is one of my “I told you so!” moments, where I go back to Le Corbusier’s Manual of the Dwelling. He wrote in 1924:

“Demand a bathroom looking south, one of the largest rooms in the house or flat, the old drawing-room for instance. One wall to be entirely glazed, opening if possible on to a balcony for sun baths; the most up-to-date fittings with a shower-bath and gymnastic appliances.”

It was truly a wellness hub, except for the toilet, which he hid in a tiny closet. Elyse Moody in AD notes that designers are specifying more soaking tubs and saunas; I suspect we will see more gym equipment here.

Others worry about this trend. Writing in ADpro, Architect Chinmay Misra is concerned about the changing focus.

“What unsettles me is the possibility that our homes are beginning to reorganize themselves around pharmaceuticals rather than around people. A century ago the hearth defined the home. Today the kitchen island has become its social successor. Tomorrow will it be the refrigerated medicine drawer?”

Faith Popcorn has a great insight: “Behavior comes first, and construction follows.”

A hundred years ago, with Aalto, Neutra, and Le Corbusier, modern design was organized around the fear of tuberculosis and the idea of fighting disease with design. Much of this was forgotten or ignored when we got antibiotics, but then we got a pandemic, and air quality, health and wellness became a concern.

I wrote recently that longevity architecture has become a thing, and now we have GLP-1 drugs. People are changing their behaviour, focusing on staying healthier longer. Popcorn is right; design and construction will follow.

Diana Lind of The New Urban Order and I had an epistolary exchange of letters discussing green roofs, which we are both publishing on our sites. She asked me if I thought green roofs were no longer a thing. Diana starts:

Diana Lind: The Philadelphia’s 76ers just shared first some renderings of their proposed new stadium in South Philadelphia.

When I saw the design, it made me think of the Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn. (The stadium is supposed to remind people of Philadelphia’s old Spectrum stadium, but since I’m a native New Yorker, that’s what happened.)

But the Barclays Center is a product of its time --2004 design, 2012 construction-- and has a green roof on top. This new stadium does not. It punctuated a thought I’ve occasionally had: I think we’re done with green roofs. You rarely ever see them as part of new designs anymore. Are green roofs over?

Lloyd Alter: To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of their deaths have been greatly exaggerated. For example, the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art by Ma Yansong is covered in one.

However, they certainly are not all the rage like they used to be. The Barclays Center is an extreme example of the problem: They built a massive truss roof over the existing building and covered it with an extensive (lightweight) sedum green roof to help market the apartments looking over it (the white roof was really ugly) and muffle sound from the area. I wrote at the time (when we were just learning about embodied energy, later to be known as embodied carbon)

They are essentially building a bridge to hold up a “flocked” pattern of sedum trays. The carbon footprint and embodied energy of so much steel far outweighs the environmental benefits of any green roof, let alone this one. The whole thing, from start to finish is a multimillion dollar environmental negative.

Diana Lind: One of the big reasons I think green roofs were so popular 15 years ago is that there were once strict EPA regulations and lawsuits against cities to address climate change in the early 2000s. That concern over what happens to rainwater and how to outdated sewer systems was a big driver of that early phase of work. Those regulations are now gone and so there’s no regulatory incentive anymore.

I also wonder if green roofs were also fashionable as a physical symbol of a commitment to sustainability. The need or desire to prove how green you are has declined a lot over the past decade. Do you think that companies and governments no longer need to demonstrate their eco-cred?

Lloyd Alter: Green roofs were seen as ways to reduce heat island effects and provide bird and bee habitats, and as an employee benefit on a corporate campus. But one of the main uses of them was for greenwashing during the approval stage. One never used to see renderings of buildings from above, because all you would see was a roof and mechanical equipment. But once green roofs were possible, you could sell an obnoxious building by putting a green roof on it and doing the rendering from above, so you could barely see the building.

One of the first and most egregious examples was in Singapore, where Kenzo Tange designed the campus master plan with a park in the middle as the “green lung.”

To put a building in the green lung, they put a green roof on it and made it ramp down to grade, making it, as I wrote in 2009:

a “non-building building,” as CPG director Hoong Bee Lok puts it, that would allow it to build on the central green space without taking away from it. So if you want to put a building in a park, wrap it in grass. I wonder what Tange would have said.

I considered it to be dangerous trend and called it “greenwrapping.” I wrote an article (long deleted at treehugger, but somehow stolen by Inhabitat where I just found it) noting:

At some point, a few of these are going to get built, and people are going to realize that green roofs are being used as the new equivalent of mirrored glass; Architects used to show renderings of towers reflecting birds and clouds to somehow make it disappear and be more palatable to residents and planning officials. In the end, people got a big box covered in mirrors. We should be careful that we don’t get sold a whole lot of big boxes with green boxtops, always shown from above. When you are at street level, it will be a very different picture.

Diana Lind: At the same time, I think green roofs might be dead in part because of the current state of commercial real estate. Green roofs have always been expensive to create and equally expensive to maintain. When the pro forma for commercial real estate is becoming harder to pencil, who wants to add a green roof as a budget line? No one.

Lloyd Alter: The two strikes against them are the weight, which means more structure and more upfront carbon emissions, which many jurisdictions are beginning to consider seriously, and the competition for rooftop real estate with solar panels.

And of course, the rolling back of any environmental regulations. This is not just in the USA; in Toronto, there was a strong green roof bylaw, and the Trumpy premier of the province just outlawed green bylaws that were tougher than the province’s rules, saying it added cost and confusion.

Yet even the dopey new Science Centre that he is building on the waterfront (after stealing the real estate from the existing science centre) shows green roofs and solar panels.

Diana Lind: Maybe the future of green roofs is in residential properties. I just read a piece in the New York Times this past weekend showing a homeowner that built a green roof on her garage mostly for the aesthetic value.

Likewise, the small green roof might be the appropriate scale for a personal commitment to sustainability or enjoyment of green space. As companies and governments focus on addressing climate change, they are looking at a much, much bigger scale than, say, 10,000 square feet of green roof. For example, how many green roofs would match the environmental impact of data centers? When you think on that scale, you realize how inadequate a solution green roofs are.

Lloyd Alter: I believe the future is food. The roof of the building where I taught last year has a rooftop farm which feeds the students downstairs. As the climate crisis worsens, we have to shorten our food chain. We could turn the roofs of our buildings into allotment gardens or larger commercial farms. In the second world war, parks and yards were turned into victory gardens; in the climate war, we could build victory roofs.

I have not been feeling well since we returned to Toronto on Wednesday, so today’s post will be short and will mostly be archival material.

A recent Globe and Mail editorial reminds us that cities need seating, not just for older people but for everyone:

“There are plenty of reasons why people might want to sit down in the middle of a city. Chatting with a friend, taking a look around, reading a book or maybe just having a rest on a hot summer day. Without good public seating, these options disappear. That turns cities into places merely to move through rather than to stop and enjoy. And in an aging society, cities without places to sit are effectively closed to older pedestrians.”

Cities spend a lot of money on expensive things, but this one is simple and affordable. The Globe notes: “this is not rocket science. Install simple benches in large numbers, more than seem necessary. Put them in places where people will want to sit. And then stop them falling into disrepair.”

The Globe also noted how moveable seating is preferred to the awful, hostile benches we see everywhere. I saw it in Paris years ago and was shocked. People facing each other! Having fun! Drinking a beer with friends in a park! How is this possible?

“Urbanist and social observer William Whyte noticed a half-century ago that people liked the autonomy offered by movable seats. As he wrote in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, this sort of seating allowed people to shift into the shade or under the sun, close to a friend or away from the guy with the boom box.”

I have long complained that cities need to provide a minimum of services for roughly half of the population who don’t drive and who are usually ignored. The three big ones are:

• Decent, well-maintained sidewalks;

• Clean and safe public washrooms;

• And as the Globe and Mail editors note, a place to sit down.

And those seats don’t have to be hostile and uncomfortable; as the Globe concludes: “Assuming the best of people, rather than the worst, can sometimes pay off.” More, from the archives, on hostile design:

Hostile design doesn’t work for any age group

I have written about this before. From the 2018 MNN archives:

Many people were outraged when they heard about the bird spikes some cities had put in trees to discourage birds from perching there. But in fact, the people versions of bird spikes are far more prevalent — and far more annoying.

This is known as hostile architecture, defined by Cara Chellew as “a type of persuasive design used to guide behavior in urban space by designing out specified uses of street furniture or the built environment as a form of crime prevention or protection of property.” (Chellew is a research administrator for the Global Suburbanisms Project at York University who writes about the politics of public space.)

It’s easy to understand the motivation; there are lots of homeless people looking for a place to lie down. But rather than deal with the issue of homelessness, it’s easier for cities to deal with the symptoms and make it impossible for anyone to lie down.

That means our street furniture is designed for discomfort — for everyone — and that’s a problem. On the one hand, we want people to get out there and move, to get exercise, to get outside. But as we get older, it’s not just nice to be able to sit down; it’s essential.

William H. Whyte wrote in “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces”:

Ideally, sitting should be physically comfortable — benches with backrests, well-contoured chairs. It’s more important, however, that it be socially comfortable. This means choice: sitting up front, in back, to the side, in the sun, in the shade, in groups, off alone.

You can sit on some of these benches that Chellow shows, but you certainly can’t get comfortable. In fact, that’s the point of the designs.

The designer of the lump of concrete that is the Camden bench, one of the most blatant and offensive bits of hostile architecture, tells CNN that it met a need.

When we designed the Camden bench, we were given an extensive list of requirements, on a fairly small budget. We didn’t have time to address why any of those problems existed. We just came at it from a fairly blunt angle. (The council required that people) couldn’t sleep on it, stash drugs in it, or skate on it. When you level all those things up, it comes out as a pretty defensive piece of furniture, but in fact, all we’re doing is enabling it to be used as a piece of furniture — so people could walk into town and take a rest on it.

Often these things are done because people complain that they don’t have a place to sit, that all the benches are taken up by what they call “rough sleepers” in the U.K. But there are other approaches to take; perhaps more benches, more housing for the homeless, or even a bunch of chairs.

If you go to a park in Paris, you see a different approach. They actually have loose chairs that you can move around and arrange in social groups. Yes, it’s more expensive; they have someone come and lock up the park every night. They also invest a lot of money in social housing so that you don’t see that many homeless people on the street or on the benches. But there are people of all ages and all walks of life, enjoying themselves in the park and sitting in comfortable chairs.

We have noted that 30 minutes of doing just about anything will extend your life, and that exercise keeps your brain young. If we want our aging population to get out there and do it, we need good, safe walking infrastructure, decent public toilets and comfortable places to sit. These hostile designs just get in the way.