Friday, June 19. 2009
In a city where good architecture is practically de rigueur, Graz still manages to surprise and inspire with the strength and sheer variety of its built environment. In fact, the city’s stable of progressive architects seems intent that it should not simply rest on its laurels as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Leading the charge is architectural outfit Ernst Giselbrecht + Partner.
Since founding the firm in 1985, principal Ernst Giselbrecht has parlayed his passion for light – filtered and mechanically controlled light to be precise – into a series of bold and generously lit public buildings. Thanks to his training as both architect and mechanical engineer, the Giselbrecht oeuvre is extensive, covering everything from clinics, railway stations and schools to research facilities and university extensions.
His most recent work for Kiefer Technic is a high water mark for these ideals. A manufacturer of doors and equipment for hospital operation theatres and stainless steel furniture, Kiefer asked for an airy showroom – overlooking a park – that showed off the firm’s products to best effect. Giselbrecht’s solution was to clad the entire southern end of the showroom with a wall of white aluminium louvre panels that open and shut using an array of electronically-controlled horizontal hinges.
The result is a building whose façade gracefully morphs in a series of concertina folds depending on the light requirements and warmth tolerance of those inside. The system can be programmed to display countless patterns and configurations, giving what could have been a humdrum office a fascinating animated façade.
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Vis Mediaarchitecture
Personal comment:
Un autre type de "media façade"! Un peu plus intéressant.
Thursday, June 18. 2009
What if our buildings could harvest power from the air, not wind or solar but literally out of thin air? Its not as crazy as it first sounds with cities literally spewing out electromagnetic radiation from TV, Radio, and Mobile phones constantly. That’s just what Nokia is doing right now, actively researching this for future generations of Mobile phones.
It’s also not a new idea, in fact the first station to harvest the power from the atmosphere has already been built and now stands derelict in a plot on Long Island for sale for $1.6 million. (map)
The tower was conceived by Nicola Tesla to transmit information and power. It was even speculated that Tesla intended for the tower to demonstrate how the Ionosphere could be used to provide free electricity to everyone without the need for power lines. The First transmission tower, Wardenclyffe Tower was actually built, work started in 1901:
In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbeknown to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all….The first tower rose on rural Long Island and, by 1903, stood more than 18 stories tall. One midsummer night, it emitted a dull rumble and proceeded to hurl bolts of electricity into the sky. (via)
Tesla Tower or Wardenclyffe Tower building was designed by infamous NY Architect Stanford White who was later shot at Madison Square Roof Garden by the jealous husband of one of his lovers . (See the excellent book on White called The Architect of Desire us/uk). However the project soon ran into financial problems and when Marconi sent a radio transmission across the Atlantic on the 12th Dec 1901, it helped to scupper Tesla’s much more ambitious project. Tesla quickly tried to change the purpose of the Tower to a power generator and transmitter taking power from the ionosphere, but time and money ran out for him and he eventually had to sell the station to pay his debts. Now the site is derelict and for sale and campaign has started to save the building.
Image from NYT article
So the idea is not new but perhaps more powerful than ever. If we can suck in energy from the air around us for mobile phones then why not by buildings? Whether it would be mega projects of huge pylon towers sucking in power from the city around or more ambiently from integrated receptors on the roofs of housing blocks powering heating systems locally, the idea really seductive.
References:
Nokia want to build phones that will recharge this way.
NYT has an excellent article about Tesla and Wardenclyffe.
The Tesla Memorial Society of New York & The Telsa Wardenclyffe Project
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Via Lewism
Personal comment:
On a déjà blogué sur le sujet, intéressant de constater que l'idée continue à faire son chemin!
SEED Magazine has a slideshow of images from the recently completed Svalbard Seed Vault, coverage of which is especially timely in light of the rather apocalyptic report (short version: in 2080 DC will feel like South Florida, and might be just as underwater) issued yesterday by the US Global Change Research Program.
The accompanying article, discussing the geopolitics of seed collection, the place of the Seed Vault in The Global Crop Diversity Trust’s globalized network of genetic preservation, and the potential role of crop seeds and genes in mitigating the impacts of climate change, is well worth a read.
[BLDGBLOG coverage of the seed vault from 2007 here and here.]
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Via Mammoth
[Image: From "IceLink: Occupying the Temporal Seam" by Lateral Architecture].
In their submission to the recent competition to design a bridge across the Bering Strait – the Bering Strait Connection – Toronto's Lateral Architecture proposed "IceLink: Occupying the Temporal Seam."
Lateral Architecture, of course, are also the brains behind the excellent blog InfraNet Lab, as well as the designers of both the Air Unit and the awesome Runways to Greenways plan proposed for Iceland – and IceLink is no less interesting than either of those.
[Image: From IceLink by Lateral Architecture].
First, for those of you who did not see the original call for projects, the Bering Strait Connection described itself as a "project attempting to connect two continents":
In a wide sense, it includes building a tunnel or a bridge at both ends of the strait, extending [the] existing railways of the United States and Russia, and laying a world highway around the coasts of the world, which requires a massive amount of construction.
Architects were asked to design "a peace park with a bridging structure using the two islands, Big Diomede and Little Diomede at the Bering Strait," and a "proposal of how to connect two continents."
[Image: From IceLink by Lateral Architecture].
In response to this, then, Lateral proposed: "1) a tunnel/bridge hybrid that runs along the international date line and accumulates diplomatic programs, and 2) a seasonal ice park that harvests ice floes into a global water vault."
A global water vault: it's ideas like this that make me love architecture.
[Image: From IceLink by Lateral Architecture].
So the site, of course, would straddle two very different timezones: that is, both today and tomorrow (or today and yesterday). If I wasn't living in a temporary apartment right now, and thus without access to my books, I would quote from Umberto Eco's intellectually pessimistic novel The Island of the Day Before. There, we read how a shipwrecked scientist repeatedly fails to come to grips with the temporal (and epistemological) fact of his maritime abandonment along the international date line.
But, perhaps to the benefit of my readers, I can't.
Instead, let me also mention The Cryptographer, a novel by Tobias Hill. While it would be hard actually to recommend the book, it's nonetheless worth mentioning Hill's use of the international date line as an origin point for a currency-destroying computer virus: the Date Line Virus. Hill's Date Line Virus spreads westward with the ticking of the clock – or the turning of the earth – erasing digital savings and scrambling all systems of measured economic value.
That is, the world's entirely computer-based monetary system, hour by hour, goes mad.
Clearly, then, from even only these two examples, the narrative possibilities – and intellectual stakes – of the international date line are fairly interesting to draw on. Or, for instance, check out this factoid, from that well-known source of scientific accuracy, Wikipedia:
For two hours every day, at UTC 10:00–11:59, there are actually three different days observed at the same time. At UTC time Thursday 10:15, for example, it is Wednesday 23:15 in Samoa, which is eleven hours behind UTC, and it is Friday 00:15 in Kiritimati (separated from Samoa by the IDL), which is fourteen hours ahead of UTC. For the first hour (UTC 10:00–10:59), this phenomenon affects inhabited territories, whereas during the second hour (UTC 11:00–11:59) it only affects an uninhabited maritime time zone twelve hours behind UTC.
For two hours, in other words, there are three different days happening on the earth simultaneously.
But what about the spatial possibilities of the international date line?
How can this strange temporal fissure in the planet's political and cultural landscape be taken advantage of architecturally?
[Image: From IceLink by Lateral Architecture].
IceLink, its designers write, without much surprise, "seeks to capitalize and highlight [the Strait's] unique geography, climate, and context." However, they add, "The intent here is less to impose a new landscape in this context than to emphasize the sublime conditions already existing. Currently, the Bering Strait is a seasonal barometer of the impacts of climate change. The intent with this scheme is to offer spaces with which to reflect on the correlation between natural environments and their occupation."
This is where we come to the project's "two primary infrastructural elements: a tunnel-bridge link and an ice park."
[Image: From IceLink by Lateral Architecture].
The so-called "Bering Link" half of the project would consist of "bundled infrastructures," the architects explain; these infrastructures would span a distance of 85km, from Dezhnev, Russia, to Wales, Alaska. In the process, the Bering Link would skirt the Diomede islands, and even travel north-south atop the date line for 4km.
Alongside this would be a series of new buildings, "concurrent with the international date line."
Public and cultural programs intermittently rise above the bridge while research and education programs hang below the rail/road. Significant programs include a new United Nations headquarters, World Water Council headquarters, an Arctic Museum, and extensive oceanographic and meteorological facilities.
It's a little hard to believe that the United Nations would move its headquarters to the middle of the Bering Strait – after all, thriller-reading Christians know that they'll soon be moving it to Baghdad – but it's a pretty ingenious move to put the World Water Council headquarters out there.
Why?
Here we come to the second half of Lateral's project: the "Bering Ice Park," a kind of floating archive and index of global climate change:
Sea ice is often trapped between the Diomedes prior to drifting northward. The new park seeks to enhance and highlight this phenomenon. The Bering Ice Park will cultivate, collect and distribute ice floes. The extent of the park is defined by the Diomedes coastlines facing the international border and date line as well as natural ocean currents movement north.
I'm reminded of BLDGBLOG's earlier look this month at the terroir of drinking water, in a guest post by Nicola Twilley: might specially cultivated Date Line Water™ from Lateral's Bering Ice Park someday arrive on the tables of high-end restaurants the world over?
As it happens: no. The project described here did not manage to find a place amongst the finalists of the design competition.
To see what did make the cut, take a look at the results over at Bustler.
(Lateral Architecture's Air Unit makes a brief appearance in The BLDGBLOG Book – so if you haven't yet picked up a copy, be sure to do so soon!)
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Via BLDBLOG
Personal comment:
Une architecture construite dans le détroit de Béring, sur la ligne de séparation temporelle et qui vit donc à la fois aujourd'hui et hier... intéressant.
Perhaps proof that J.G. Ballard didn't really die, he simply took an engineering job at MIT, scientists at that venerable Massachusetts institution have designed a new concrete that will last 16,000 years.
Called ultra-high-density concrete, or UHD, the material has so far proven rather strikingly resistant to deformation on the nano-scale – to what is commonly referred to as "creep."
This has the (under other circumstances, quite alarming) effect that "a containment vessel for nuclear waste built to last 100 years with today's concrete could last up to 16,000 years if made with an ultra-high-density (UHD) concrete." (Emphasis added).
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So how long until we start building multistory car parks with this stuff? 16,000 years from now, architecture bloggers camped out for the summer in rented apartments in Houston – the new Rome – get to visit the still-standing remains of abandoned airfields, dead colosseums, and triumphal arches that once held highway flyovers?
16,000 years' worth of parking lots. 16,000 year's worth of building foundations.
Perhaps this simply means that we're one step closer to mastering urban fossilization.
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Via BLDBLOG
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