percent of New York City’s total carbon dioxide output . Yet addressing/redesigning urban socio-ecological systems means dealing with the dense array of competing interests; a contested domain highly regulated and constrained by arcane zoning requirements; and prohibitive construction and maintenance costs that are dominated by tremendous human capital costs. Yet the energy cost in demolition, site clearance and rebuilding any (or many) of these structures—a recent Canadian study found —costs almost 3 times as rehabilitating these. Any environmental performance improvements in urban context are tremendously leveraged--the world largest cities while occupying only 2% of the surface area account for 75% of the worlds carbon emission; by 2008, for the first time, more than half of the globe’s population will reside in urban contexts . Yet, tremendous urban growth is good news, given that the density, apartment buildings and reliance on mass transit produces the most carbon-efficient lifestyles. New Yorkers, “produce 71 percent less carbon dioxide per capita than the average American.” In short addressing the environmental performance of our existing residential and commercial buildings, albeit a complex socio-ecological realm, is worth exploring. Boldly.

The purpose of the new urban spaceship USS Interprise is to reimagine and reengineer our relationship to the urban ecological systems, now; to demonstrate, promote and advance closed and coupled system design for major improvements in resources cycling (a principle that can be widely applied if it can be concretely communicated to nonengineers); to produce a glamorous highly functional new space / facility that will seize, excite and engage the public ; to exploit the environmental services and functionality of vegetation and engineering microlandscapes; to provide and maximize habitat and nutritional resources for nonhuman organism with whom we increasingly share urban space (including small mammals, birds; insects; soil microbes; and aerobiology); to facilitate urban agriculture and beyond: to facilitate our productive interdependence with diverse organisms (beyond instrumental calorie production); and, perhaps, most critically, to invite and maximize the participation and potential of a new generations of human capital for hands-on engagement with redesigning our urban environmental systems.

USS adapts CLOSED SYSTEM approach of SPACE STATIONS to an urban agriculture facility optimized for urban roof system and couple to an open GREEN ROOF, exploiting the greenhouse effect for different effect.

The USS structure is designed to address the structural constraints of a roof space, focusing the load on the columns and masonry walls additional loading can be easily accommodated without any additional structure or retrofitting; This provides the opportunity to couple to the CO2 enriched air from output of HVAC system; the “legs” position all load on masonry walls and columns, while maximizing the open vegetation and habitat provisioning on the roof; and capturing more radiative heat energy. Shape is motivated to maximize radiative heat and internal thermal distribution: for climate control in intensive agriculture; grey water cycling etc, to take on the closed systems design from space stations.

Furthermore and energy harvesting adapts the systems engineering involved in Space Station design to pressing urban issues. The space station is designed to generate it own energy and can provide energy to the building it rests upon. in the form of parasitic mutualism.

Description: USS is a systems design approach and specific designs for incorporating closed systems biomass production into/onto existing buildings--i.e. growing things on and in buildings--for the purpose of locally coupling and reusing the waste streams from the building, and for their subsequent replenishment of these streams--i.e. recycling water, air, energy(thermal; kinetic etc); nutrients (and cellulose/paperbased) to provide clean oxygen enriched air; clean water; etc. This diverting waster streams from overburdened city infrastructure, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Referred to in biology as mutualistic parasitism, this approach also borrows from the closed and coupled systems design strategies of Industrial Ecology(IE) and reflect the trimtab principles. In biological systems mutualistic parasitism (MP) increases the environmental performance for any given unit of energy; air; water or nutrient, which also describes the IE principles. Producing locally coupled relationships in the built environment, and extending Industrial Ecology to the mixed use, residential and office blocks domain, is intended to provide significant improvements in environmental performance. While these improvements will be reflected in reduced energy costs by the building, metered water use and other traditional metrics these tend to obscure the exchanges in actual environmental resources, and the inherent value, hence the performance design we are optimizing is directly related to the cycling of water, air and –to environmental health metrics.

This application is focused on one concrete design being the Urban Space Station, to provide an urban ecology lab facility that functions similarly to a greenhouse optimized for this application. Because the vegetation is efficiently packed against the maximum surface area (unlike plants-on-tables approach of commercial greenhouses); the glazing provides ambient light shaded with vegetation; it additionally creates a urban ecology lab, circulation and work space in the interior. A related project involves a window-based adaptation with solar awning powered greenlight system, and other prescription within the delivery framework of the environmental health clinic.

The structural constraints of this urban roof contect are dominated by the incorporation onto existing inhabited buildings—i.e. retrofitted. The introduction of additional load onto existing buildings dictates, not only minimizing additional load, but that extra compressive load must be born on masonry wall and existing columns where there are points of excess load capacity. Hence the structural solutions must be both self contained and coupled to the building at these particular points; while minimizing the coupling of strain, vibrations and sheer load into the building. Furthermore the geometry of the traditional greenhouse is adapted and optimized geometrically for solar radiation capture; wind loading, and the material, in addition to meeting structural demands of a highly exposed conditions; requires vegetation supporting light transmissivity characteristic; thermal insulation properties; and specific water vapor permeability.

The system characteristics are dependent on the design of coupled plumbing, HVAC systems and other building outputs(cellulose based waste for on), to become the inputs for the USS. That is, to recycle and augment air circulation; nutrient cycles, grey-water cycling, nitrogen, micronutrients and industrial contaminants. Although this is closed system design, no systems are closed, so that the excess materials (salt build up, for example) must then be released in controlled and accountable manner--in the case of the USS, this involves designing the relationship to an open ecology in the form of the green roof and balancing the flow of materials between these systems (salt is expunged onto salt absorbing vegetation; water treated in passive wetlands system). The novel aspect of this research is this coupling of open ecological function with the closed building systems. While optimizing the systems for their capacity to support vegetation, the actual environmental services that we are experimentally optimizing include but not limited to carbon fixation; phytoremediation and contaminant removal; habitat provisioning; soft/distributed and emergency energy systems; damping seasonal fluctuation and hybrid energy capture.

The construction constraints are dominated by an open structure of participation, familiarly known as the barn-raising aspect. The designs are optimized for collective construction by variably skilled persons whose involvement in the construction is exploited for pedagogical purposes (DfX) and substantive ongoing involvement in research concerns of the facility [redesigning urban relationships to natural systems]. In coupled socio-ecological coupled systems—such as the USS—a critical factor is human capital, both in terms of the immediate expense (the dominant cost in design and construction processes), and in terms of the generative potential and cumulative effect of the system. In socio-ecological system people are reproductive entities in so much as they reuse ideas (with which they are familiar), and can reapply and reuse the systems design in other contexts. This project is intended to explore, extend, demonstrate and develop closed and coupled systems design as a [perhaps the] major strategy for environmental performance improvement. That is, involving students and other stakeholders in the building process produces intimate familiarity with the systems, and tangible representations of complex interrelationships. This enables system duplication and improvement i.e. a student is more likely build other similar systems or incorporate these systems logic into another domains if they have been substantively involved vs. if they have not been involved. This in turn produces human resources skilled in ongoing monitoring and able to contribute to future design improvements i.e. students are substantively involved over the dynamic evolution of a locally optimizing system. Like other systems characteristic, the open source construction processes (barn raising and other additional strategies) are exploited for the reduction of human capital costs in the short term, however the system is designed to optimized the long term benefits of introducing students to closed system design in general and the USS instantiation specifically. For the same reason, the visual and imagistic impact of this project specifically associates familiar cues of Space Station—and the cultural attention and engineering resources dedicated to the space race—as an icon for similar attention to improving environmental performance of urban systems.