The Appalachian landscape is littered by thousands of unreclaimed strip mining sites in need of remediation. For a rural region of rugged natural beauty and abundant but exploited natural resources, this project presents a new form of sustainable urbanization.

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This entry in the Korean design competition for a Public Administration Town (pop. 20,000) is the first of six competitions for a much larger Multifunctional Administrative City (pop. 500,000) planned to be built in South Korea over the next fifteen years.
Our competition entry offers a bold new vision for building cities of the future based upon lessons from the past and the present. We call this design the Sustainable Public Administration Town-as-a-Hill or SPATH. We submit this entry as an urban design embedded in a sustainability process.

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Based on the principles of co-housing developments, and the previous work of our associate, Bill Fleming of Sheltertech, this community of buildings will work synergistically as a collective to maximize energy use and minimize waste. The community of people will collaborate to decide their collective future and manage the operation of the "village."

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Inspired by the attempts of Lou Kahn and Bucky Fuller to develop a building-scale space frame, Richard S. Levine invented the Coupled Pan Space Frame system. It received a US Patent and in subsequent development and testing the CPSF proved its remarkable structural characteristics, providing large spans, light weight, and incomparable building integration possibilities. Later it was found to be well suited for the City-as-a-Hill urban model.

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The Mendes Studio was designed using a set of evolving pattern languages developed, mainly, from the load bearing brick walls and orientation of the building which is 45 degrees off the cardinal points. Once a set of pieces were established, a game was played where synergies between the different contesting aspects of the design were used to ingrain a maximum complexity of form, space, and natural light into all the scales of the project.

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New Hope, in Berea Kentucky, was designed to be a food and energyself-sufficient retirement community to be funded by the retiree “seniors” and built and maintained by “juniors.” The design and calculations of the unique annual cycle energy system were funded with a grant from the Kentucky Department of Energy. Some of the energy and participatory aspects in our current study at the Center for Sustainable Cities were pioneered in New Hope.

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The first residence to integrate passive and active solar systems with an attached greenhouse and super-insulation. Internationally published in professional and popular journals, its innovations were widely emulated and its super-efficient multi-stage air collection system received a U.S. patent. Its unique form and spaces demonstrated that responsiveness to sun, site, climate and lifestyle could indeed generate a new architecture.

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This project was a series of three commissions from the Vienna Division of Urban Development and the National Bank of Austria to make studies and proposals for an ecological overbuilding of the main rail terminal yard in the city of Vienna with a new urban neighborhood. Alternative interchangeable urban modules were utilized to rapidly investigate the viability of the new urban fabric being designed. They were designed to offer a multitude of options that took into consideration public spaces, mass transit lines, public facilities, and linkages to the existing urban fabric, to name a few. This project is one of the many iterations of the City-as-a-Hill urban model, which is designed to facilitate large facilities within the hill, such as factories, warehouse-type spaces, interior galleries, transportation, and vehicle parking, while leaving the surface of the hill open for residential and commercial buildings that would create a human-scaled urban environment that would cradle pedestrian activity.