Tuesday, September 01. 2009The Shanghai Corporate Pavillion for World Expo 2010 / Atelier Feichang JianzhuIn the past months we’ve been featuring several pavillions from the countries participating in the Shanghai World Expo 2010 (and many more to come). Today, we bring you the Shanghai Corporate Pavillion, designed by Atelier Feichang Jianzhu. More images and full architect’s description, after the break. In 1976, Centre Pompidou in Paris, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, turned the building inside out and made utility ductworks part of the architectural expression. It was unprecedented thus a breakthrough in the field of architecture. In 2010, we will have gone through a long period of rapid technological advancement and the amount of infrastructure in a building will have dramatically increased to the point that technologies are today’s basic building blocks. For Shanghai Corporate Pavilion at the World Expo, we would like to manifest this observation in our design: the interior spaces of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, which are shaped as a series of free, flowing forms, will be no longer enclosed by walls of the static kind but a dense, cubic volume of infrastructural network, including LED lights and mist making system, which are capable of changing the appearance of the building from one moment to another as programmed through computer. However, our design is not embracing technology for the technology’s sake. Rather, we like to convey visually the spirit of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, the dream of a brighter future, through sophisticated technologies. Technology is about the enrichment of imagination and symbolic of the industry and industrialism of Shanghai. Also through technology, we like to address the pressing issue of energy and sustainability. A part of the architectural infrastructure is designated for the solar energy harvesting and rain water collecting,and the external facade will be made of recycled plastic World Expo is always a window to the future. Shanghai, as a historically progressive yet still fast developing international metropolis, has been all along the embodiment of this forward looking optimism. As architects, we take the special occasion offered by the World Expo 2010 to solute Shanghai, a great city of the 21st Century, through our architectural design. Technological Detail and Environmental Protection 1. Solar Energy System The Shanghai Corporate Pavilion features a 1600m2 solar heat-collecting tube on the roof. These solar tube can collect solar energy to produce hot water up to 95°C. Ultra-low temperature power generation techology, a novel way to generate electricity through solar power. The power generated using this technology can be used for both the exposition and for every day. 2. Recycled Plastic materials 3. Water/mist System For the Shanghai Corporate pavilion, rainwater will be collected and recycled. After such treatment as sedimentation, filtration and storage, rainwater can be used for daily purposes at the pavilion and for the “mist” in particular. The mist can lower the temperature, purify the air and create a comfortable climate in pavilion. The spray can also be used to form various patterns under ceiling of entrance hall and make the overall appearance of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion fresh and elegant Client: SHANGHAI GUOSHENG GROUP CO., LTD. Click here to view the embedded video.
Via ArchDaily Personal comment: Des volumes noyés dans une espèce d'écran volumique composé de pixels (qui n'est pas sans rappeler des choses déjà vues pour l'écran, mais en bcp bcp plus petit... Choses qui elles même nous ont souvent fait penser à la matrice de Knowscape). Il y a même du "moisturizer", mais malgré tout, le projet ne fait pas très envie... Pourquoi? Solar Power from Space: Moving Beyond Science Fictionby Michael D. Lemonick For more than 40 years, scientists have dreamed of collecting the sun’s energy in space and beaming it back to Earth. Now, a host of technological advances, coupled with interest from the U.S. military, may be bringing that vision close to reality. Despite the enormous promise of solar power, the drawbacks of the technology remain significant. People need electricity every day, around the clock, but there’s no part of the United States that is cloud-free 365 days a year — and no solar radiation at night. You have to find some way to store the energy for those sunless periods, and there’s not yet a large-scale way to do that. Moreover, the best locations for solar arrays — the deserts of the American Southwest — are far from the centers of population, so even under the best of circumstances you’d have to send electricity many hundreds of miles through transmission lines that don’t yet exist. But there is a way to tap into the sun’s energy 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and send it anywhere on the globe: Launch solar panels into space and beam the power back to Earth. The concept sounds far-fetched and wildly impractical, and when the Pentagon and space enthusiasts began talking about it back in the 1960s and 1970s, it was. Recently, however, the idea of space-based solar power, or SBSP, has begun to look less like science fiction and more like a technology whose time may be coming, with the Pentagon and private companies ramping up efforts to make space-based solar power a reality. Two years ago, the Pentagon’s National Security Space Office (NSSO) issued a report recommending that the U.S. “begin a coordinated national program to develop SBSP.” A year ago, engineers did a small but successful experiment using some of the technology that will be employed in SBSP, taking energy from solar cells, converting it to microwaves, and then beaming it 92 miles from Maui to the Big Island of Hawaii, where it was converted back into 20 watts worth of electricity. And last spring, the California-based Solaren Corporation signed a contract with Pacific Gas & Electric (PE&G) to provide 200 megawatts of power — about half the output of an average coal-fired power plant — by 2016 by launching solar arrays into space. Several other companies have announced their intentions to put up solar satellites of their own. Doubts abound that space-based solar power will come to pass anytime soon, and for good reason: The technology involves launching a series of large satellites into space, using robotic technology to assemble the solar arrays, transmitting the energy 22,000 miles to earth using microwave technology, and then converting that energy to electricity on the ground. The fact is, however, that all of that is now feasible — if pricey — thanks to technological advances in recent years. These include cheaper and more reliable launch technology, lighter and stronger materials for solar stations, significant improvements in the robotic technology needed to assemble the solar arrays, far more efficient solar cells, more precise digital devices to direct that energy accurately to earth, and significantly smaller and more powerful microwave transmitters and receivers. The big question is whether this engineering feat can be pulled off at a price competitive with terrestrial solar power. So far, the Pentagon’s estimate of what it will cost — $10 billion to put a 10-megawatt experimental solar station in orbit by 2016 — is five times higher than Solaren’s and would produce far less power. It was a little bit of both when SBSP was first proposed in 1968 by an engineer named Peter Glaser, who worked for the consulting firm Arthur D. Little on a variety of space-related projects. The basic components — solar cells and microwave transmitters and receivers — already existed, and as the Apollo program began to wind down, NASA was trying to figure out what to do next. In particular, says John Mankins, who became the manager for advanced concepts for NASA during the 1990s, “They were trying to figure out what to do with the space shuttle.” One idea was to begin launching space habitats — to get large numbers of people living and working in space. “These people would need something to do,” says Mankins, “so one idea was that they’d build solar-power satellites.” Studies showed that it was a feasible, but daunting, proposition. “This was in the days before PCs, microelectronics, robotics,” says Mankins. “The idea of something like the shuttle’s robotic arm was unimaginable. So you’d need these big crews to bolt the things together — and the satellites themselves would have had to be physically enormous. We’d need a new launch system that would dwarf the space shuttle.” The bottom line, he says, was that it could be done, but it would have cost the equivalent of a trillion of today’s dollars to get the first kilowatt of power, and it would have taken 20 years. “The National Research Council and the Office of Technology Assessment looked at it,” recalled Mankins. “One of them said, ‘Let’s revisit this in ten years.’ The other said, ‘Let’s never consider this again.’” In the mid-1990s, NASA did revisit the concept. Under Mankins’ direction, a team of engineers was assembled to see whether advances in technology made space-based solar power more feasible. “The basic answer,” he says, “was ‘yes.’” In the past decade two other factors have emerged to boost the prospects of SBSP: climate change and interest from the military. There is a growing recognition that non-carbon energy sources will be crucial if the world is going to avoid the worst effects of climate change. It’s almost inevitable that carbon emissions will end up being taxed one way or another, and when they are, renewables like SBSP will immediately become more competitive economically. That’s what motivates Solaren and PE&G. Although it is cloaking its work in secrecy, Solaren has said it will cost roughly $2 billion to launch a handful of satellites carrying the equipment that will be robotically assembled into a single, large solar station. One way the company plans to boost efficiency is to use parabolic reflectors to concentrate sunlight onto the solar cells. “The biggest expense,” says Cal Boerman, Solaren’s director of energy services, “is the cost of getting into space, and we’re convinced we can get the weight down to the point where we can do this with a minimum number of launches.” Because Solaren’s satellite will be in geostationary orbit, the antennas won’t have to track it across the sky; like a satellite TV receiver, they’ll always aim at a fixed point in the sky. At 22,000 miles up, a geostationary satellite is in full sunlight virtually all the time. As for safety, he says, the fact that the microwaves are spread out over a square kilometer means that they’d be relatively harmless to, say, a flock of birds that happened to fly through them. And if the beam should wander, the satellite will be programmed to scatter it. Solaren isn’t the only company trying to commercialize SBSP: PowerSat, based in Everett, Wash., has recently filed patents for its own space-power system, which will use an array of hundreds of small satellites linked together rather than one large one. PowerSat says it can reduce some of the high costs of putting the technology in space by using solar energy to power electronic thrusters to maneuver the satellites into orbit. A Swiss company, Space Energy, is also working on SBSP. Solaren is the only one, though, with a contract with a utility. “As we talked to investors,” says Boerman, “they naturally asked, ‘Can you sell it?’” If this first project works out, Solaren eventually wants to put in orbit satellites that can generate a gigawatt of electricity, enough to power roughly 1 million homes. Such futuristic schemes have understandably generated a great deal of skepticism. Space experts have been debating the issue online, with some arguing that Solaren’s project will be far more expensive than the company estimates, in part because it could take more than a dozen launches — not just four, as the company stated — to get the solar station into space. But the military’s interest in SBSP could give a major boost to the technology. According to Marine Corps Lt. Col. Paul Damphousse, Chief of Advanced Concepts for the National Security Space Office, the military is interested in SBSP for two main reasons. The first, he said, is that “we’re obviously interested in energy security, and we’re also interested in weaning ourselves off fossil fuels because climate change could pose national security risks.” But there would also be a tactical advantage to space-based solar, Damphousse noted. When the military is operating in remote regions of countries like Iraq or Afghanistan, it uses diesel generators to supply forward bases with power. “We have a significant footprint getting energy in,” says Damphousse, noting the need for frequent convoys of oil tankers, the soldiers to protect them, and air support — all of which is expensive and dangerous. Being able to tap into power beamed directly down from space would clearly have a lot of appeal, says Damphousse, even if it were relatively costly. And it’s not just useful for the battlefield, he says, but also for areas affected by natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina. For those reasons, Damphousse supports the idea of coordinated studies by the Pentagon and other agencies — such as NASA and the Department of Energy — that would have a stake in space-based power. “We might, for example, do some experiments on the International Space Station, which is already up there and generating 110 kilowatts of power from its own solar cells,” he says, “rather than having to send up a dedicated test satellite.” Such cooperation might appeal to NASA. “I suspect that NASA will start working on energy and on more advanced technology and less on, ‘Let’s get to the moon by 2018,’” says Mankins. By undertaking some of the research and being an early customer for SBSP, the government could rapidly accelerate development of the technology. Historians of aviation agree that the government’s decision to back air mail played a major role in developing the aircraft industry, leading to technological innovations and economies of scale. The same phenomenon could take an emerging but outlandish-sounding technology and push it into the energy mainstream. This piece originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 Learn more about space-based solar power in the WorldChanging archives: ----- Via WorldChanging Masdar Sustainable City / LAVAThe future well being of cities around the globe depends on mankind’s ability to develop and integrate sustainable technology. LAVA designed the Masdar City as the city of the future; positioned at the forefront of integrating sustainable technology into modern architectural design. Rome, Athens, Florence; most great historical cities have had the plaza, forum, or square at their epicentre – where the life, values, ideals, and vision of the population evolved. Equally, the centre of Masdar must be an iconic beacon that attracts global attention to sustainable technology.
We see Masdar Plaza as “The Oasis of the Future”: a living, breathing, active, adaptive environment; stimulated by the social interaction of people, and spotlighting the use and benefits of sustainable technology. Hence, our design proposal focuses on the delivery of three key issues:
The “Oasis of the Future” is conceived as an open spatial experience, whereby all features; whether hotel, conference, shopping, or leisure, offer the highest quality of indoor and outdoor comfort and interaction. As in the case of an oasis, the Plaza is the social epicentre of Masdar; opening 24-hour access to all public facilities. Interactive, heat sensitive technology activates low intensity lighting in response to pedestrian traffic and mobile phone usage. The Plaza is able to change into an outdoor cinema for international events and national celebrations. Buildings’ surrounding the Plaza form gorges, evoking mystical comparisons with the Grand Canyon and the entrance to Petra. The “Oasis of the Future” demonstrates sustainable technology in a user-friendly architectural environment – flexible use of space, outdoor and indoor comfort, and optimum performance. The user experience is the heart of the “Oasis of the Future”. By analysing the potential pedestrian flows throughout the Plaza and surrounding facilities, the design seeks to accentuate this ‘loop’ of indoor and outdoor user-experiences This ‘loop’ marries the lowest possible energy expenditure to the highest levels of user comfort in correlation to pedestrian flows. The following environmental and engineering design concepts will be utilized to minimize energy consumption:
Our sustainable design and engineering philosophy balances the ‘vision of the future’ with ‘scientific fact and availability’. Our aim is to provide the Abu Dhabi Energy Company with the lowest possible carbon footprint, whilst maintaining the highest level of user experience within the practical viability of affordable architecture. Our engineering specialists have analysed each component of potential energy expenditure and investigated individual efficiencies in order to reduce the carbon footprint. Even the façade of the buildings surrounding the Plaza will incorporate long-life, loose-fit structural design to enable flexible future planning and reconfiguration opportunities. Switching and sensors will activate and deactivate features and functions in correlation with usage and pedestrian flow. All front and back of house functions within the Hotel and Convention Centre will capture sustainability of water, waste, materials, indoor and outdoor environmental quality In fact, our proposal strives to exceed those of the Masterplan and is, in addition, benchmarked against Estidama and LEED (Platinum). Adaptive cooling provides all facilities with extended usability during peak heat loads. Our ‘Petals from Heaven’ feature interactive umbrellas that open, provide shade, and capture energy during daylight hours; folding at night to release stored heat. Solar analysis provides insight into the tuning of facades in order to incorporate an ability to respond to varying sun angles and levels of solar intensity. The Oasis of the Future is a living, breathing habitat. The ability to control ambient temperature at all times of the day is the key to making the Plaza a compulsive destination. The gorges pull inhabitants into the loop. The ‘Petals from Heaven’ open and close; protect pedestrians from the sun; capture, store, and release heat; adjust the angle of shade based on the position of the sun. The heat sensitive lamps adjust the level of lighting to the proximity of pedestrians. The water features ebb and flow based on the intensity of ground temperatures. The promenades lure pedestrians into the shopping and leisure facilities. Similarly, the public are seduced into the Plaza during cooler night hours and cooler months of the year. Our 5 Star Hotel is organised efficiently around a ‘Central Canyon’ and is linked to the Extended Stay Facilities via a ‘gorge’ housing Retail premises. The Central Canyon is a day-lit space deep within the building, connecting the hotel’s restaurants and ballrooms to the guest amenities. The hotel’s entrance and lobby, located at the base of the atrium, offers guests an immediate view out onto the Plaza in one direction and the green of the park in another. The western edge of the Plaza rises to create the Convention Centre forecourt and ascends as a continuous path into the Lobby area. Our design of the Convention Centre Lobby resembles an enormous, light-soaked cavern, providing an enclosure for the conference facilities with the Plaza framed in the background. The awe-inspiring ‘erosion-effect’ design of the façade that flows across this edge of the Plaza is complemented by water features and also houses the sub-podium PRT and Retail concessions. This spectacular conference facility, with its gigantic cavern atmosphere, will leave a lasting impression on all visitors. ‘Masdar Plaza, The Oasis of the Future’ will create an iconic venue within a truly visionary city. ‘Masdar Plaza, The Oasis of the Future’ incorporates the highest level of knowledge and expertise in science, technology, and construction methodology, globally. It is an intellectual balance between iconic architectural identity, cutting edge sustainable design and technology.
----- Via ArchDaily Personal comment: On peut clairement discuter du statut, des objectifs et surtout du design d'une telle architecture-ville (métapores ou citations spatiales douteuses ou nostalgiques qui en font un hybride entre un centre de récréation et une ville). On y retrouve toutefois pourtant plein de thèmes intéressants: une ville "durable" qui "respire" ("air movement that supply natural wind patterns"), "vivante" ("The Oasis of the Future is a living, breathing habitat"), "responsive" ("Switching and sensors will activate and deactivate features and functions in correlation with usage and pedestrian flow"), etc.
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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