So, not long ago I came to live in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in this very very weird country of football, carnival, boobies, bums, thieves and samba – everything always ends in a samba, we say.
This city, where the Royal Family – the King of Portugal and all his super duper gang – lived in the colonial days; Rio that once was the capital of the Republic, and later became infested with violence, civil war, abandonment, finally loosing its cultural and economical hot spot to São Paulo, and its status as capital to Brasília. This is, obviously, resuming a few hundred years of history into less than a paragraph, but the point here is to show that the city once “had it all” – in here was build the first university of Fine Arts of Brasil, the first cultural centers: theaters, libraries – and although the fall was big, the city is still blessed with its own magnificence, and still radiates an aura that you cannot find anywhere else in the world but here.
Partially because of its natural beauty – its geography with the hills and greens and blues and sea – partially because of its people, a mix from every corner of the country, descendants of all of those who conquered us and were conquered by us, bringing and mixing cultures from all around the globe; partially from all the early cultural effervescence; but mainly from our resilience, this aura still remains. The resilience of the people that survive every day the social denial, the economical difficulties, the political unscrupulous lies and robberies, the lack of education, of attention, of funding, of interest, of common sense, of the most fundamental respect – the respect for life! We continue to push forward even than.
As a people, we are brave! And we transform this bravery into action – not the action of fighting for our right unfortunately, but into creation. We are creative people, one of the most creative, I dare to say, in the world. We use and abuse and distort and stretch the most fundamental power of the human being – the power of creation – into shaping new possibilities, new realities, new ways of expressing a full spectrum of emotions. And nowhere else in Brasil but in Rio de Janeiro this explosion of creativity is so rich and diverse, not even in São Paulo – because in here they have caos. They have history, and very deep scars. They have the sea to wash all away and the hills to project everything up into the infinite sky. And they have people that smile and dance the samba, even though the light in the end of the tunnel is still as far as yesterday, as last week, last year.
And I am now submerse in this place, still not breathing. I’m letting the water into the lungs, cause I wanna sink here.
I still don’t know where I am inside all this cultural mess, but I am happy just wandering around right now. I don’t think I need to determine what or who I am in here yet. Things will certainly change as I’ll keep on walking…
Pro Luxe is a new brand of quality rolling papers that are being introduced to the Israeli market. Until now there were only 2 brands – OCB and Rizzla, for a very big consumer market (believe me on that – there is a chubby slice of market to be shared in this field over there), and realizing the opportunity before their eyes, the 3 partners of PRO Israel decided to import the new brand into the country.
PRO is PRO because of the quality of the super super fine paper and completely natural materials. But this is not enough to catch the israeli audience. Once you live in Israel you can understand what they connect with and how to speak a language they will understand and like. And I have noticed, some time ago already, that Israelis like to laugh. They like to take the piss of things – really. So I’ve created the whole concept of the Brand for Israel – it has to be smart-funny, and it has to challenge the viewer. PRO is young, smart, outgoing, spirited, and free! (free to stand for what it is).
2 Slogans were created for the Campaign, one in English and one in Hebrew. “How to be a PRO” (E), and “The next roll” (H – הגלגול הבא), complemented by the illustrations of a hand rolling up a very special shape (for the campaign we used what is know as the “Tulip joint”).
Because the money to invest in marketing and advertising is never big enough, we have decided to make punctual actions in specific occasions. The first action to kick off the Campaign took place inside a music festival called Indigo Festival (also my customer… mmmm… coincidence?). We made t-shirts, 1,80 meter flags, chain flags and stickers and we hired people to go around the festival distributing samples of the product and the stickers. The people liked so much the idea of “How to be a Pro” with the illustrations, that we had a few flags stolen!!! Brilliant!
Now we’re building the website, that will have a few techniques of “How to be a Pro”/”The next roll”. Soon it will be online. Check it out!
You can see the materials of the Campaign here
See you next time!
So, as some people know, I have moved from Israel to Brasil, just a few weeks ago. This time I am taking this process slowly and I am measuring each step of the way. There’s something easier on getting back to the homeland, although no change is ever really that easy.
I have been misusing this blog space. Thinking I should only write “big stuff”, but the time to write big stuff never comes – we’re all so busy in our little ant’s world inside the machine without a breathe of air sometimes, aren’t we? – and the blog has been forever out-of-date.
So now I have decided to write “short stuff”. New accomplishments, a quick insight, something old, something new, something blue… ops, I think this is from somewhere else…
There will be more work related topics. I have realized I have to put the word out about what I do, and did, and how the process went. My customers will be happy to be mentioned, and I will be happy to share the process of creation.
News on the front: I will be changing my website soon. I’m tired of its look, and some of the links there are just too much for me to handle. When we’re a “one-man-show” it is hard to handle too many tasks, and updating several sections of a website is really the last thing on the creative mind. I am negotiating with a programmer to build the website I’ll be designing. Hope to have it up and running in a month or so…
* I have updated my portfolio with new works, and replacing some of the old for better images, and deleting a few that were less significant.
* In the past 3 months I have recorded 3 sets! All of them are available to download through RapidShare. Whoever is interested, please send me an email.
* A few successful campaigns came out of the last months in Israel, and one more is on the way, for Tania Vinokur – Cinco Flamenco Fusion. I will be updating here news on the Cinco campaign.
I think that this is it so far.
More will come soon! (this time I mean it – SOON)
Its been quite some time that I wrote about Design or sustainable design, and today I came across this article from Worldchanging, and I really liked it.
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We need new leadership from architects, planners and designers.
Yes, we need them to design better buildings, streets and public spaces. But what we may need most from them has little to do with the act of design itself. That’s because we need a massive change in the very way buildings and places are planned, regulated and seen by the public. We urgently need people to re-imagine their cities in very directly political ways, and no one else is as prepared for that job as the talented few who’ve been trained to understand form and space and place.
When Ed Mazria first started getting vocal about buildings and climate change in 2003, his message became a rallying cry that professional groups, politicians, designers and journalists could stand behind: If we want to fight emissions, we must fundamentally change the building sector, the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Mazria and his non-profit research organization, Architecture 2030, posed the famous 2030 Challenge: make all new buildings carbon neutral by the year 2030.
The tools and knowledge we needed to build carbon-neutral buildings already existed in 2003. Mazria called on architects and developers to use those innovative design strategies, building practices and on-site renewable power (as well as a small amount of purchased renewable energy and/or certified offsets, if needed), in order to achieve a net fossil fuel-based/GHG-emitting energy usage of zero.
People everywhere jumped on board. The American Institute of Architects, the leading professional association in its industry, adopted the Challenge on behalf of its now 85,000 members. In November 2006, the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a resolution adopting the 2030 Challenge. And so on.
But such adoptions have been largely aspirational, with little enforcement. Now we’re nine months from Architecture 2030’s first incremental goal: by 2010, the Challenge expected all new buildings and major renovations to meet a 60 percent fossil fuel reduction standard, with an equal number of buildings retrofitted to the same standard as those built new.
Look around. We’re not going to be celebrating in 2010. Green buildings are breaking into mainstream culture – in fact, a film about Boston’s first LEED project is now touring indie and environmental film festivals. But green buildings are still a novelty to nearly everyone, still the stuff of awards ceremonies.
Awards are good motivation, but a handful of award-winners at the head of the movement won’t be enough to reinvent the industry in a generation. As Worldchanging ally Dan Bertolet of design firm GGLO wrote Monday on his urban planning blog, HugeAssCity:
Like most in the endless parade of green lectures and meetings in Seattle, the AIA event this Tuesday will be overflowing with big-brained folks who possess piles of knowledge, skills, and desire to make green development happen. But the vast a majority never get the opportunity to implement all their great ideas in real projects. And that is our integral predicament: we know what to do, but we’re not doing it. Green building is not a design problem or an engineering problem, it is a people problem — institutional, political, economic, cultural.
Part of the solution will be to get regulators — and voters — on board. Outdated zoning codes can stop designers from incorporating new technologies. One story making the rounds has a team of city employees in a Washington town designing a theoretical dream green development, and then seeing how well it met local code — they found, so the story goes, more than 50 rules that would prevent the project from moving forward before they stopped counting.
“Our land use code, and the building codes to some extent, are an accretion of 75 years of reactions against things, as opposed to a vision for how we want to live,” says architect and former Seattle City Council President Peter Steinbrueck. “Those sets of problems don’t apply anymore. So now what we need to do is rethink all that, and that’s a really hard thing. We need to go to performance-based codes, and form-based codes, that recognize the place and its uniqueness and character and authenticity, and quality of life, and the values of compact, walkable communities. Our codes work against that right now. And people are still very fearful. If they remove parking requirements or allow retail with the housing project, or allow a slightly taller housing project, people freak out.”
Policy change, particularly energy policy, also has potential to open new doors with lenders. As Richard Conniff wrote for Yale360, the final stretch can be the most discouraging for designers who would reach the farthest. “There’s actually a sweet spot, said Bill Browning, a partner in the sustainable design firm Terrapin Bright Green, where going aggressively green gets to be cheaper than a more modest approach…But that sweet spot fades away, Browning added, as you get beyond an 80 percent improvement in energy efficiency.”The costs of equipping a building with all of the technology to generate its own renewable power is still the deal-breaker for most developers behind these would-be neutral projects.
“The technologies that allow you to produce energy onsite are still not competitive with fossil fuel,” says Robert Peña, associate professor of architecture at the University of Washington. “That would change overnight if we had some kind of carbon tax and some predictable sense that energy isn’t going to be as cheap as it is now. The world is the way it is because we’ve had breathtakingly cheap energy for so long. And we know that’s not going to be the case in the future, but markets need clear signals. It’s an incredibly risk-averse profession, from the design profession to the construction profession, because the margins are relatively small and the risks are relatively large.”
The solution begins with education. Later this month, AIA Seattle will launch itsAIA + 2030 Professional Series, a 40-hour continuing education program that will address strategies like integrated design, passive lighting/heating/cooling, and even staff training and post-occupancy performance monitoring, to help designers reach a 50 percent reduction in fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the first course in the nation specifically addressing the 2030 Challenge goals. If it is successful in Seattle, the program may roll out in other states or nationwide.
But architects must educate others as well as themselves. Steinbrueck believes strongly that architects must lead at the policymaking level, and with good reason. In his years on the Seattle City Council, he helped raise standards for green building with legislation including Seattle’s Sustainable Building Policy, passed in 2000, which requires all new City-funded projects and renovations involving more than 5,000 square feet of occupied space to achieve LEED Silver accreditation or higher. LEED standards were still largely untested at the time, but in retrospect, Steinbrueck says that the policy has had a significant positive impact on Seattle’s building program.
(Many expected Steinbrueck would challenge Seattle’s incumbent Mayor Greg Nickels in 2009, but he has chosen to sit back from politics this year and instead will join Harvard University as a Loeb Fellow to conduct independent research on U.S. best practices for sustainability. When we talked, however, he hinted that he is considering a run for national office in the future.)
Policy could also encourage architects to veer into new territory when appropriate, rather than adhere to checklists for certifications such as LEED or Built Green. The standards have unquestionably raised the bar for green building since their introduction, and the USGBC works diligently to keep pushing the envelope further (you can help them by commenting on the new LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system in this forum, which opened today). But because LEED standards are based on a set of known strategies, they can become an anchor that encourages a baseline, instead of a propeller driving new innovation toward the goal of carbon neutrality. And because many LEED points address issues separate from energy efficiency, simply building to accreditation standards won’t ensure we do the job. New dynamic policies can help spur innovation where certifications and building codes fall short. In a recent Worldchanging Interview, Amory Lovins describedgreen building codes as “obsolete before the ink is dry,” and suggestedfeebates as a means of rewarding energy efficiency and encouraging designers and developers to continue pushing the standards higher.
Many practicing architects are already taking paths of civic engagement. In 2008, the AIA Board of Directors issued a resolution in support of “Citizen Architects” who participate by joining boards and commissions, writing and publishing, and holding elected office. The organization’s national office surveyed its chapters around the country earlier this year, and reported that at least 850 AIA members hold elected and appointed office at the local level, from mayors and city council members, to county supervisors and planning commissioners.
The importance of what those engaged professionals will do with their public platforms cannot be overstated. As Worldchanging contributor Patrick Rollens wrote in 2007, the United States has the opportunity to remake the built environment by 2030, when about half the nation’s buildings will have been built or substantially renovated in 2000 or later. On a global scale, the opportunity is even larger. And so however it happens, it is important that effective leadership from architects and designers change green building from a novelty to a standard.
There are many ways to begin making a difference beyond the drafting table. Here are a few of them:
1. Join your colleagues, and push them further. Ask your local chapter of the AIA, APA, ASLA or other professional organizations what they’re doing to further sustainability in your region and beyond. You can also network with local visionaries through professional outreach organizations like Architecture for Humanity, or Architects Without Borders.
2. Join a cross-disciplinary conversation. Alicia Daniels Uhlig, an associate and co-chair of the Sustainable Design Group at GGLO in Seattle, is active with the Cascadia Region Green Building Council (a local branch of theUSGBC), which spans building-related professions from construction and engineering to architecture and development and beyond. “That’s really where it’s strength is, because you’re broadening your horizons, you’re talking to people with different opinions,” says Uhlig. “You have the ability to ask, for example, what are the hot-button issues from the commercial developers? How can we address that? And you learn how to improve your storytelling [to a client or colleague].” (The CRGBC in particular has been aggressive about finding out where barriers to living buildings still remain, and making that information available to its network.) At the very local level, Portland’s Coalition for a Livable Future and the Seattle Great City Initiative come to mind.
3. Support good candidates, or run for office. Taking up the mantle of politics can seem like an intimidating proposition to someone outside City Hall. But, as Steinbrueck says, if architects and designers don’t lend their expertise to legislative bodies, it’s hard to expect much to change. Steinbrueck and colleagues are working with AIA to build resources for its Citizen Architects, including a forthcoming directory that will allow members to network and support one another in the political arena.
4. Become a politically engaged citizen. If you want to remain firmly in the design profession, take a seat on a planning commission or design review board. These institutions have been in place a long time, and can get mired in conventional or even outdated ways of thinking and doing things. Bring your knowledge of sustainable building practices to the table and refresh the process for your neighborhood, city or region. Even if you can’t commit to serving, you can still make a valuable contribution by attending meetings and speaking from a citizen’s perspective.
5. Write about it. Writing and publishing in industry journals is important, but getting the designer’s perspective into the mainstream can open up a whole different conversation. Though we’re biased, we believe in the power of blogging, which has the advantage of real-time flexibility and audience interactivity. Dan Bertolet has successfully built HugeAssCity into a widely read public debate on the best and worst in planning and architecture in Seattle. Another Seattle-based site, the Columbia Citizens neighborhood wiki, attracts regular input from planners and designers that helps raise public awareness of neighborhood projects.
6. Talk about it … unconventionally. Unconferences, unconventions, webinars and similarly informal forums are increasingly the go-to events for those seeking cutting-edge innovations and ideas. Some of the leaders in this arena include Pop!Tech, Design Indaba, PICNIC, Foo Camp and BarCamp. (The CRGBC’s Living Future forum in Portland, Ore. is coming up next week, and Worldchanging’s Sarah Kuck will be there reporting.)
7. Get behind an issue. In 2004, a multidisciplinary team of designers led by landscape architect Cary Moon won second prize in Metropolis magazine’s national Next Generation: Big Idea competition with their highway-less vision for Seattle’s downtown waterfront, which is currently blocked off by the elevated strip of I-99. Moon went on to found the People’s Waterfront Coalitionto mobilize local groups around the issue of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and used national data on highway deconstruction and to back up her compelling argument for not rebuilding the highway. Her efforts gained attention in local politics and national debate. Though Washington state ultimately did not choose the surface/transit alternative that the PWC supported (they are instead planning an underground tunnel, though costs are drawing controversy), many are happy that the Viaduct will not be replaced by another elevated highway. The lesson: if you’re passionate about it, go after it.
8. Get engaged in open-source government. Citizens often understand the needs of their communities more deeply than policy makers. Working collaboratively, it’s likely they could develop policies that enable holistic solutions at the local level. On Tuesday, Open Government NYC, hosted aCollaborative Policy Building Workshop to figure out how just such a process might work. The NYC group’s slogan is “people helping government help people,” and it’s possibly the most proactive form of protest we’ve ever heard of.
