Yalın Mimarlık won first place in an international design competition for an archaeological museum on the site of ancient Troy. Renowned for the famous Trojan horse story in Homer’s Iliad, this historic site in the northwestern corner of Turkey reveals a lot about the country’s artistic and cultural development leading up to World War I; the new museum will help make that legacy known to a greater number of visitors.
Turkey’s Yalın Mimarlık Wins Ancient Troy Archaeological Museum Design Competition
This Desalination Infographic is Like Taking Climate Change Advice from Shell
If Shell were to design a clever infographic with a bunch of facts, it would probably highlight the amount of fossil fuels the United States imports from “dangerous” foreign countries, how expensive those imports are, and how the company could save the world if only they had unrestricted access to the Arctic’s fossil fuel reserves – for example.
Now read this infographic from Energy Recovery, a company that provides technology for the fossil fuel industry, that attempts to persuade us that desalination is a panacea for chronic water shortages. Granted, more than one third of the world’s population lacks access to decent sanitation. And yes, our planet is comprised of 96.5 percent salt water.
But can we rely on a company whose bottom line depends on selling desalination technology to give us the straight scoop on the detriments of desalination?
Eco-Activist Mindy Baha el Din Dies Suddenly, Egypt Mourns
An American environmental activist who shone a piercing light on environmental negligence in Egypt, Mindy Baha el Din died suddenly last week after suffering a brain stroke, leaving behind a husband, two daughters and a large community of grieving eco-warriors.
Born and raised in the United States, Mindy first moved to Egypt in 1988 and married a renowned ornithologist, Sherif Baha el Din, a quiet, intelligent man. She was outspoken and direct, the very opposite of her husband, and yet they persevered, united in their shared passion for nature. Confronted with an opportunity to return to the United States, Mindy once said to me, “what will I do there?” Instead she stayed, and fought for Egypt until the very end.
Istanbul Municipality Knits Enormous Sweater for Energy Conservation
All over the Middle East and North Africa, governments are feeling the energy pinch, and each has a different solution. Morocco and Algeria are turning to solar energy, so are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, while Jordan seems more intent on exploiting its oil shale reserves to bridge the soaring gap between supply and demand.
But Turkey has taken a different approach. Instead of relying only on increasing generation capacity, the government has launched a national energy conservation campaign. And this enormous sweater is its intriguing focal point.
7 Steps to Wean Yourself From Processed Food
A new book holds your hand and walks you through the stuff you already sort of know: 7 simple steps to bring you back to food basics.
Once a week, a small group of arty pals convene after work to play with papier-mâché, share a simple meal and unwind. It’s wonderful. With our hands busy, our minds declutter and good conversation floats like a plastic bag in the wind. We talk about food, about how, without true intention, we’re mostly vegetarian. Vegetarian doesn’t always mean healthy. We talk about our weaknesses: potato chips, ice cream, Cheez Doodles.
One mentioned she’d found a decent real-food cookbook, and she’d tuned in to the author’s blog: his name is Mark. Another said, “I know that site, but it’s a knitting blog, I found it after buying the guy’s patterns. His name is Bruce.” We scrub floury paste off our hands to settle the debate. Gather ’round my laptop: find they’re talking about the same website. Tiny world.
Knitter Bruce Weinstein and Chef Mark Scarbrougheal share a website where they blog about life, food and knitting. The duo has co-authored about 20 books. Their latest, Real Food Has Curves, describes a 7-step plan for weaning yourself off processed foods. Here’s their healthy eating road map, condensed to baby steps:
Zakaria Café Returns to Sustainable Lebanese Roots
At the heart of Beirut, Zakaria counters corporate cafe culture with art and heritage
As larger coffee and restaurant chains take over the streets of Beirut and other Lebanese cities, smaller, local cafes are abandoning their businesses as they are faced with too much competition. Walking away from the scene is not only a coffee shop or a local eatery but also a tradition, a culture, art and in some cases sustainability.
Zakaria café is the dream of Layal Boustany, her father, George Boustany, sister, Yara Boustany, and boyfriend, Jawad Taher. Opened in March 2013, they are in the process of creating a relatively novice idea in Lebanon by pushing the “green aspect” at the center of their café culture.
Iranian Snipers Take Aim at Tehran’s Giant Mutant Rats
It sounds like a sci-fi B movie, but the problem is real. Super-sized rats infesting Tehran are so huge that a special team of sharpshooters using night-vision-equipped rifles have been tasked with extermination.
Rats have long plagued Iran, and the problem worsens when springtime arrives: melting mountain snows flood the critters’ nests, and millions are flushed into the city’s streets and sewer network.
Tehran reportedly has more rats than its 12 million human inhabitants.
“It’s become a 24/7 war,” the head of Tehran municipality’s environmental agency, Mohammad Hadi Heydarzadeh, said on state television last month. “We use chemical poisons to kill the rats during the day and the snipers at night.”
Nearly one million rats are exterminated in Tehran every year, with city authorities launching multimillion dollar campaigns annually to curb the problem.
Authorities have employed over 45 tons of rat poison, but the rodents seem impervious, thriving despite chemical warfare: some reportedly weigh as much as 11 pounds.
Tehran city council environment adviser Ismail Kahram told Iranian news website Qudsonline that the rats, “seem to have had a genetic mutation, probably as a result of radiations and the chemical used on them.” “They are now bigger and look different”, he said, according to the International Business Times. “These are changes that normally take millions of years of evolution. They have jumped from 2 ounces to 11 pounds, and cats are now smaller than them.”
So Tehran has ramped up its attack. City officials told state media that 10 sniper teams armed with infrared scopes caught more than 2,500 rats recently, but Abu Dhabi’s The National called that number “a drop in the ocean.”
Dr David Baker, a veterinarian at Louisiana State University, told The Huffington Post it’s unlikely that a mutation caused the rats to super-size. “Nearly all genetic mutations identified across the field of biology are harmful and confer a disadvantage to the species rather than an advantage,” he said. “It’s not like in the movies.”
He conceded that there are several species of giant rats that can achieve the sizes described by Mr. Kahram. “During the Middle Ages, black rats in Europe reportedly grew large enough – and children were small enough – to carry off babies,” he said.
Genetic mutations aside, scientists have reported that certain rat populations are becoming poison-resistant. Last year, British researchers published findings estimating that 75% of west England’s rats were resistant to rodenticide. Last October, the BBC reported that preliminary research indicates all UK rats in could become poison-resistant within 10 years.
Rats flourish in warm weather. As snows on the nearby Alborz mountains start melting, water levels rise, forcing rats from their subterranean habitat. They migrate to roadside streams along Ali Asr, the Middle East’s longest street. The popular thoroughfare is home to restaurants and food stalls, and threads it’s way from North Tehran’s expensive neighborhoods to poorer southern suburbs, where the rat population is reportedly six times greater than the human population.
The government is considering ratcheting up the snipers to forty, but with a 6:1 ratio of vermin to humans, this war earns the monicker “quagmire”.
Springtime in Paris Means Khamsin Sandstorms in Amman
Springtime in Jordan brings ferocious sandstorms and a nose-clogging meteorological phenom called “khamsin”.
Grab your Michael Jackson face masks and the decongestant of your choice, close the windows tight and stockpile tissues. The dry, dusty winds of khamsin are blowing across the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa and right into your sinus canals. That image above is the white tile on my balcony one day after being fully swept. Imagine what my lungs look like.
Khamsin means “fifty” in Arabic, a reference to the duration (in days) of this annual weather event where dust-filled windstorms blow sporadically over springtime months. Storms sometime descend like hurricanes, leaving behind an agitated atmosphere loaded with a fine grit that coats every surface, blocks the sun, and clogs your ears and nose. In between windy onslaughts, the air stays choked with sandy particles. The sky turns dingy and the temperature drops.
Saudi Erects World’s Tallest Tower
Update: 2020: Construction of the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, also known as the Kingdom Tower, has been plagued by political, economic and labour issues, with the proposed completion date of 2020 deemed unrealistic for many years now.
Boys, boys, boys, when will you learn that size doesn’t matter as much as performance? Next Azerbaijan broadcast plans to top that with their own mile-high cloud-puncher. Then Pakistan upstaged both with their own biggest building boast.
And performance brings us full circle back to Team Saudi who just commissioned the project delivery team for their kilometer-high Kingdom Tower. Even though 7 years later the project never managed to launch while the Saudi King is building Neom on the Red Sea. Is this engineering ingenuity, diversion, or architectural porn?
Actions speak louder than empty press releases. Obama may have scratched another trip to the moon, but, regrettably, the terrestrial race towards the heavens is on.
Green Prophet’s told you all about Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Tower. First conceived years back, geological testing commenced in 2008 for the planned one-mile-high structure. That initial engineering resulted in a down-sizing of tower height, which still bests Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.
Now Kingdom Tower is off the theoretical and into production. Its staying power lies in its wider context of regional development and in the deep pockets of its owner, billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. The Prince likes his things big.
The Tower is the centerpiece of an ambitious urban development project called Kingdom City, a phased construction on 2 square miles of undeveloped waterfront property near the Red Sea port city of Jeddah. Once the Tower’s erected, they’ll be multiple phases of expansion and major infrastructure works to support it all.
British-based EC Harris and Mace have hooked up to provide project, commercial and design management for the $1.2 billion development which will break ground later this year. (Construction, by Bin Laden Group, is planned to wrap up in six years.)
This team’s delivered over 100 skyscrapers including London’s Shard and Abu Dhabi’s The Landmark. Adrian Smith, the American architect behind the Burj Khalifa and New York City’s Trump Tower, is the designer.
Stack up those four skyscrapers and you could run a 5k race along their facades without ever treading on something sustainable. Despite their sky-high project price tags, they are devoid of innovative design elements that would reduce their gargantuan environmental impacts or enhance occupant safety.
Consider the waste generated, the power and water consumed, the resultant road congestion, and the devastating impact on local real estate. Consider the thousands of birds who die in collisions with the acres of tower skin (ornithologist Daniel Klem, Jr. estimates that collisions with skyscraper glass kills up to 1 billion birds a year in the United States alone). Are Jeddah emergency services equipped to handle fires a kilometer above ground? Think of the attraction for splashy acts of terror.
Then read through their project press releases. You’ll find nothing to address those previous questions, but spot a few ho-hum green features including proximity to mass transit, high performance thermal glass, and efficient plumbing fixtures. The same can be said about my little apartment which was built over 25 years ago.
Middle Eastern mega-projects tend to chase world records in terms of manly dimensions or bloated price tags. What would it take to incite project teams to hit new heights in green technologies? Buildings made from smart materials that don’t deplete already-stressed water resources, with on-site renewable energy-generation. International media would eat it up, and it would be a powerful project differentiator for all stakeholders to lay claim to, with bragging rights to the host nation.
Call me Miss Cranky, but these competitions to see whose is biggest are better suited for the locker room and not the world construction stage.
Iranian Snipers Take Aim at Tehran’s Giant Mutant Rats
It sounds like a sci-fi B movie, but the problem is real: Super-sized rats infesting Tehran are so huge that a special team of sharpshooters using night-vision-equipped rifles have been tasked with extermination. Rats have long plagued Iran, and the problem worsens when springtime arrives: melting mountain snows flood the critters’ nests, and millions are flushed into the city’s streets and sewer network. Tehran reportedly has more rats than its 12 million human inhabitants.
“It’s become a 24/7 war,” the head of Tehran municipality’s environmental agency, Mohammad Hadi Heydarzadeh, said on state television last month. “We use chemical poisons to kill the rats during the day and the snipers at night.”
Nearly one million rats are exterminated in Tehran every year, with city authorities launching multimillion dollar campaigns annually to curb the problem.
Authorities have employed over 45 tons of rat poison, but the rodents seem impervious, thriving despite chemical warfare: some reportedly weigh as much as 11 pounds.
Tehran city council environment adviser Ismail Kahram told Iranian news website Qudsonline that the rats, “seem to have had a genetic mutation, probably as a result of radiations and the chemical used on them.” “They are now bigger and look different”, he said, according to the International Business Times. “These are changes that normally take millions of years of evolution. They have jumped from 2 ounces to 11 pounds, and cats are now smaller than them.”
So Tehran has ramped up its attack. City officials told state media that 10 sniper teams armed with infrared scopes caught more than 2,500 rats recently, but Abu Dhabi’s The National called that number “a drop in the ocean.”
Dr David Baker, a veterinarian at Louisiana State University, told The Huffington Post it’s unlikely that a mutation caused the rats to super-size. “Nearly all genetic mutations identified across the field of biology are harmful and confer a disadvantage to the species rather than an advantage,” he said. “It’s not like in the movies.”
He conceded that there are several species of giant rats that can achieve the sizes described by Mr. Kahram. “During the Middle Ages, black rats in Europe reportedly grew large enough – and children were small enough – to carry off babies,” he said.
Genetic mutations aside, scientists have reported that certain rat populations are becoming poison-resistant. Last year, British researchers published findings estimating that 75% of west England’s rats were resistant to rodenticide. Last October, the BBC reported that preliminary research indicates all UK rats in could become poison-resistant within 10 years.
Rats flourish in warm weather. As snows on the nearby Alborz mountains start melting, water levels rise, forcing rats from their subterranean habitat. They migrate to roadside streams along Ali Asr, the Middle East’s longest street. The popular thoroughfare is home to restaurants and food stalls, and threads it’s way from North Tehran’s expensive neighborhoods to poorer southern suburbs, where the rat population is reportedly six times greater than the human population.
The government is considering ratcheting up the snipers to forty, but with a 6:1 ratio of vermin to humans, this war earns the monicker “quagmire”.
Traditional Passover Matzah Balls Recipe
Matzah balls, the only Eastern European food that crossed over to Sephardic cuisine.
While Ashkenazic Jews have enthusiastically adopted the spicy foods of Israeli’s Sephardic communities, there hasn’t been much culinary exchange from the other direction. Ordinarily, Sephardic Jews (Middle Eastern and North African origin) wrinkle their noses at the foods of Eastern European Jewry. Too bland, too sweet, too overcooked! We know this isn’t always so, but admit that Sephardic cuisine fits into Israel’s hot, dry climate perfectly.
There’s one Ashkenazic food that everyone in Israel loves, though, and that’s matzah balls. Come Passover, you can walk into a Yemenite or Moroccan housewife’s kitchen and see, floating in the soup pot, a batch of matzah-based dumplings made from a recipe that any Polish grandmother knows by heart. Your haroset may be based on dates or on fresh apples; you may chose to drink toxic kosher-for-Passover coke or healthy Syrian mint lemonade – your very matzah may look and taste different from your neighbors’ – but matzah balls are pretty much the same all over.
Lebanese “Green Loan” Funded Solar Irrigation System Breaks Ground
When Fadi Jamaleddine decided to install a solar array on his farm in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, he wasn’t thinking of the environment or global warming, he told The Daily Star.
He was simply tired of spending $50,000 a year on electricity for what is a hobby organic farm for the corporate lawyer. And while he could afford the upfront $76,000 to pay for an off-grid solar-powered irrigation system, he took out a green loan just to demonstrate to others that it is possible to do so.
Yours & Mine Eco-Fashion Arrives in Amman
A new Amman clothing retailer is hitting all the green lights on the fashion runway: Yours & Mine makes sustainability chic, selling locally sourced, recycled garments in a virtual store.
I’ve been stylin’ used clothes for decades: it’s old hat in New York City to personalize your wardrobe with key finds from an Army & Navy store, charity thrift shop or “antique” clothing emporium. But that tolerance for recycled fashion doesn’t transport all over the world. I’d spent years in Ireland, where the Celtic Tiger transformed a healthy hand-me-down tradition into a lust for only fresh off the rack. Urbane Dubliners view used clothes as admission you can’t afford new. It was heartbreaking to dump barely worn (but outgrown) items into the bin.
I left that environment for Jordan, where there is a potential (and willing) home for anything you care to discard: charities solicit clean, used clothes for a myriad of causes. I’ve given practical, warm garments to Palestinian and Syrian refugees, Jordanian orphans, and gypsy camps. But what to do with extra handbags? Dress-for-success business suits? Western-style dresses and (too) short skirts? Now there’s a new solution.
Abu Dhabi’s New Market “The Souq” Harkens Us Back to Disco Days
Everything old is new again in Abu Dhabi’s Central Market “The Souk” where developers are inspired by the emirate’s not-so-distant past.
Kinda crazy that the 1970’s can be viewed as olden times, but in the rapidly developing United Arab Emirates, thirty years represent radical transformation. Nestled in the base of the Emirate’s new World Trade Center is a marvelous modern souk (market). A wood-screened atrium houses bright new shops and food outlets, with tiled walkways bathed in dappled sunlight.
The Souk sits atop one of the oldest developed sites in Abu Dhabi, the former Central Market which once hosted the city’s original one-story souk, sprawled over 12 acres. That market began in the 1970’s. While the western world was doing “The Hustle”, a thousand emirati traders were hustling their traditional wares. It’s where the modern city of Abu Dhabi began.
Earth Architect Nader Khalili’s Book: Racing Alone
In the book “Racing Alone”, Nader Khalili pursues his own revolution using fire, earth, air and water.
In “Racing Alone”, the late Iranian earth architect Nader Khalili who died in 2008 recounts the years leading to the realization of his dream; building a dwelling that infuses Persian culture, history, art, and ingeniousness, and a structure that promises the utility of withstanding the tremors of earthquakes and revolutions, heat and cold.
His material: fire, air, water and earth.