ellen dunham-jones

Organizers of today’s TEDxAtlanta mini-conference at Unboundary in Midtown posed a timely theme for their speakers: “Re-purpose.”
It was especially appropriate for the three visionary architects who kicked off the conference. Yeah, I know. “Visionary” is an overused descriptor for architects. But in this case, it’s appropriate.
As in how can shipping containers be re-purposed for use as refugee housing, permanent homes and other buildings? How can the suburbs be re-purposed for a future (and present) with more limited resources and more complicated demographics? And how can whole cities be re-purposed to sustain themselves against the rapidly changing environment of climate change?
Those questions — well, certainly the last two — also are particularly timely for an audience in Atlanta, where infrastructure left over from our the late 20th century building boom looks especially poorly suited for a future.
The first question was addressed by New Jersey-based Adam Kalkin, inventor of the “Quik House,” a 2,000-square-foot kit house built from recycled cargo containers. It takes three months to complete and one-day for actual on-site assembly. The more relevant issue Kalkin addressed was the unlimited variety of roles to which used container cargos can be adapted. Kalkin’s buildings have provided emergency shelter, multi-unit housing and high-end avant gard houses. And naturally the issue of Haiti came up.
Cargo containers — thousands of which are discarded every year and which by there very nature are shipped globally — are ideal for such uses, and Kalkin has become an international champion.
“Obviously one of the important parts about this is the speed of deployment,” he said at TEDx. But so is the re-purposing of materials and the energy required to fabricate them.
Ellen Dunham-Jones pedaled her own idea: re-purposing suburbia. She’s cataloged strip centers that have been converted to colleges, big box stores that have become libraries, and malls that have been demolished and reborn as grid-based, old-fashioned town centers.
It’s a concept New Urbanist and smart growth advocates have been advocating for some time, but the Georgia Tech architecture professor — whose book, Retrofitting Suburbia, was published last year — argues that its time is ripe, especially in places like Atlanta after the recession. The reasons run from economic issues like changing demographics and tastes, to environmental issues like climate change and limited land.
“For the last 50 years, we’ve been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences,” Dunham-Jones said. “The growing number of underperforming, especially retail projects across suburbia represents an opportunity.”
(Retrofitting Suburbia has gotten lots of good press. It deserves fuller coverage on MyGreenATL, which I hope to bring to you soon.)
The guy who addressed the repurposing of entire cities made Kalkin and Dunham-Jones look conventional. Matthias Hollwich’s name may be familiar to you because as the lead designer of MEtreePOLIS, a vision of an Atlanta of in 2008 where plant DNA willl be manipulated and married to human structures as energy sources. He calls them “power plants.”

It sounds like science fiction. But Hollwich insists certain elements of marrying plants to human structure are as little as 10 years away.
Who would have known how the Internet could change communication and wireless could change things yet again, or for that matter how the internal combustion engine could change the way we live so radically over the past 100 years.

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