Tuesday, December 18. 2012
Via space.com
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NASA plans a new weapon in the fight against space insomnia: high-tech light-emitting diodes to replace the fluorescent bulbs in the U.S. section of the International Space Station.
About half of everyone who flies to space relies on sleep medication, at some point, to get some rest. For $11.2 million, NASA hopes to use the science of light to reduce astronauts' dependency on drugs.
According to NASA flight surgeon Smith Johnston, studies in Anchorage, Alaska showed that hospital staff made more medical errors during the darkest times of the year. The finding demonstrates that people have a day-night cycle that must be respected, even when they're doing the demanding work of space exploration.
"When you have normal light coming through the windows of stores, and schools, and hospitals, people do better. They function better," said Johnston, the lead physician for NASA's wellness program. [Video: Do Astronauts Dream of Weightless Sheep?]
Tough sleep in space
Sleep is no trivial matter in space. Astronauts generally get about six hours of shut-eye in orbit despite being allowed 8.5. Demanding schedules and unusual environments are among the factors that cause insomnia.
"The station is noisy, carbon dioxide is high, you don't have a shower, there's a lot of angst because you've got to perform. Imagine if you have a camera on you 24 hours a day," Johnston said.
Over time, sleep deprivation can cause irritation, depression, sickness or mistakes. Any of these problems can be dangerous in the close, confined, pressurized quarters of the space station.
In an effort to address the problem, NASA plans to replace the orbiting laboratory's fluorescent bulbs with an array of LEDs switching between blueish, whitish and reddish light, according to the time of day. The changes can be programmed in by the ground, or the astronauts. The new light bulbs are due to be swapped in by 2016.
Blue light stimulates the human brain best because people evolved to respond to the color of Earth's sky, experts say. When an astronaut's eyes are exposed to blue light, his or her body suppresses melatonin, a sleep-inducing hormone. Blue also promotes the formation of melanopsin, a "protein pigment" that keeps people awake.
In simple terms, the color red reverses the process. Melatonin increases, making the astronaut sleepy, while melanopsin is suppressed.
"You can dial in a natural day-night cycle on the space station" with the new light arrays, which are being developed by Boeing, Johnston said.
It should work well, he added, unless astronauts look out the window at bedtime. They then run the risk of confusing their body clocks by exposing their eyes to natural sunlight reflecting off of Earth.
Sleep training
Technology can go only so far in solving sleep problems, Johnston said. This is why NASA prescribes good "sleep hygiene" for its crews before and during spaceflight.
Medications are used only as a last resort, and are tested extensively on Earth by each crew member. In case of emergency, astronauts must awaken easily even during the deepest stages of sleep.
The astronauts also get practice sleeping under difficult circumstances by virtue of their demanding preflight schedules, which include flights to Russia and Japan for training.
NASA works with the astronauts to minimize jet lag. Techniques that help for each crew member, such as wearing sunglasses on the plane and taking medications at a certain time, can then be used in orbit.
Groups on Earth will benefit from the research, too, especially shift workers or travellers fighting jet lag, Johnston said.
"Hopefully, we'll have spinoffs that other doctors can use, and the military can use for their flight surgeons."
Note:
Of course, it makes me think (a lot!) to the 3 projects we did back in 2010 (I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting) and with Philippe Rahm architects in 2009 (I-Weather v.2009) and 2001 (I-Weather).
This to say, you can still download the I-Weather App for free on the app store an regulate your sleep during Christmas (which is also some sort of sleep deprivation period)!
I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, 2010 01SJ Biennial, San Jose (CA), by fabric | ch.
I-Weather, networked based application and deterritorilized luminous climate, 2009 version, by Philippe Rahm architects and fabric | ch.
Tuesday, December 11. 2012
By fabric | ch
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Gradientizer is an architectural proposal for the New Planetarium and Natural Science Center buildings and program in Lausanne, Switzerland. It consists in the transformation of an old, almost rural and isolated settlement and the adjunction of two new buildings.
The proposal was completed early this year and was developed in close collaboration with Madrid based architects AMID.cero9 (Cristina Diaz Moreno and Efren Garcia Grinda, both also teachers at the Architectural Association in London).
We didn't win the "trophy" unfortunately, but as we believe nonetheless that the project is of interest, we take the opportunity to document and shortly present it on | rblg.
Gradientizer (excerpts from the competition text)
An architecture that articulates light, that pervades into the existing luminous gradients and albedos of the site, that transforms them on site, in plan and in section and which creates "dark poles", real "attractors" of the program: Planetarium, Solar room, Sky observation deck. A forgotten atmosphere, "almost unknown", but monitored nevertheless, built around the exposure of the program to light, in which visitors and scientists freely wander, layer by layer.
Monitored architecture of light gradients and albedos
The observation of the sky, by daytime and nighttime, is always marked by an intimate relationship with weather and light conditions. To make accessible the cosmos from Earth with the naked eye as through a powerful telescope, special conditions are needed: minimum cloud cover, low atmospheric density, maximum distance to the sources of artificial light at night.
Would we realize today a world map of the suitable observation locations, in continuous time, it would likely reveal a landscape in a vanishing phase, a kind of forgotten preindustrial relic. A sensual landscape that evolve along days and seasons: clear sky, starry dark night, low pollution, near low reflectance (albedo) lands.
It is this landscape, which has become almost unknown nowadays, that makes possible the observation of another one, fascinating and borderless: the cosmos. It is also precisely around this landscape that our project is built: a "gradient" architecture that seeks to analyze and transform the light patterns of the place, to inhabit them, which looks to generate and shape this "unknown landscape" and to comment it.
(...)
Expression of the light gradient on site at night (top image, the road axis are artificially lit, the rest of the site is dark --woods and grass land-- with the adjunction of a courtyard in the new project on the left image) and relation bewteen surfaces and albedo of surfaces (bottom image).
However, the site of the New Planterium has a light gradient of its own, with varying intensities: artificial illumination of roads at night, large farm like roofs that generate darkness during the day.
The project seeks to leverage this existing state, to develop it, whether it be in the positioning and association of functions in an almost generative way (rule based) or in the amplification of the roofs of the buidlings: to "gradientize" the overall site through its architecture.
(...)
To "gradientize" the site
Articulated around 4 main categories of exposure to light ("fully", "mostly", "partly" and "not at all" exposed), the program is distributed around the matching gradients of light on the site to achieve the initial distribution of functions. In section, this gradient is reinforced in order to create permanent "black areas" and to further distribute the program vertically.
Expression of the light gradient on site and on the buildings (average value between the exposition to natural or artificial luminosity and the albedo of the surfaces).
White zone (fully exposed to light) along the roads axis, in the courtyard and around the ground levels that evolve toward the black zone (not exposed to light) on the east of the site and in the upper levels (roofs), through light grey (mostly exposed) and dark grey (partly exposed). The gradient on site serves us both as a way to locate functions and to choose materials or landscape treatments (according to their reflectance - albedo).
The program (surfaces, volumes and functions) of the New Planetarium and Natural Science Center dispatched according to its potential exposition to light, with the same 4 levels (fully, mostly, partly, not at all) as expressed on site.
Schematic rules in plan and section to increase and deform existing lighting conditions (both natural and artificial): "onion" rings that filter light from the outside toward the inside in plan, suppression of basements that are moved into bigger roofs to progressively create drakness from botton to top levels.
Three main rules allow us to organize in this way the whole program of the New Planetarium and to outline its architecture. At night and in mass plan, the luminosity and reflectance gradient of the site evolves from lit perimeters, near traffic areas and roads, to dark areas towards forests and grassland (on the east part of the site, guaranteed to be kept in the future due to the reallocation of the whole area into a protected green park). The repartition of activities and functions on the site results mainly from this first rule (the program analysis based on its exposition to light). Thus, no artificial light is directed towards the east and south of the site at night. In plan, again but inside the buildings this time and mainly during day time, a concentric organization of volumes allow to filter and lower the light from the outside toward the inside. In section finally, during day time especially, large and deep roofs of agricultural characteristics also ensure the creation of shadows and darkness. No artificial lighting is installed in the dark grey or black areas.
The resulting axonometry of the project and principles of spatial organisation/uses according to the chosen set of rules.
This approach makes it possible to define principles of spatial organization, by day and night. This is the intention of the project: an architecture that fits into a monitored gradient of light proper to the site, which exploits but transforms its vocabulary of forms and materials, which deforms, amplifies and strengthens them, both in plan and section. These principles engender our architecture of spatial shifts, its main code. The result is the GRADIENTIZER.
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Planetarium, solar room, museum, hotel and eco-shop: ground floor plan and planetarium section, where the principles of organization in plan and section are applied.
Probes, sensors, monitoring, feedback loops and algorithms
A set of light and atmospheric probes equip the site and the interiors of the buildings. They are positioned so to reveal in first sight the average gradient on the site and to locate specific areas for the public (white, light grey, drak grey and black masts at different heights equiped with sensors that are positioned along the main lines of each gradient). Some also serve as furniture or lighting (white areas). These sensors continuously analyze the state of illumination of the Gradientizer and reveal it through freely accessible interfaces (both on site information displays, distributed over the Internet or through mobile apps) and feedbacks.
This constant analysis transcribes in "real time", along time and seasons, the variable state of a large architectural device based on simple rules (the exposition of the program to --monitored-- light). Custom and architectural algorithms indicate appropriate times to achieve a particular observation, shift of functions or activities in a conducive area.
(...)
The position, orientation and design of the probes, made out of 4 different heights and that are coated in white, light grey, dark grey and black, reveal a first vision of the site's light gradient and surfaces albedo to the naked eye. They also serve to locate different activities (observation in the potential dark areas, public program in the white ones).
Darker than black (meta-material)
The upper levels of the new roofs (around the observation decks) are treated like “darker than black” meta-materials (see below), instead they are scaled about 10 billion times: a spiked surface within which incident lighting is getting reflected many times, loses its strength before eventually getting out. It can be considered as a similar process as what is happening in an anechoic chamber, but in this case for light instead of sound.
“Darker than black” metamaterials are nanoscale materials (that could also be used as coating) that trap the reflexion of light through very dark spiked surfaces. Therefore, the incident light is reflected a lot of time (at a tiny scale) before eventually getting out again. The light is "sucked" by the material and much less of it is reflected (only 1%).
Architecture as shifting landscape
The whole Planetarium and Natural Science Center can be seen and experienced as a light based architecture - landscape in constant evolution. It offers therefore oscillations, unpredictable spatial and uses variations. It suggests some sort of nomadic and evolving uses over time to adapt to the varying conditions.
A landscape that should be understood here in the sense of an environment with blurred limits, within which one can evolve with a certain freedom according to ones desires or needs. A landscape that "feels" its own variations and makes them visible, livable.
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Project: fabric | ch and AMID.cero9
Location: Lausanne, Switzerland
Team, fabric | ch: Patrick Keller, Christophe Guignard, Sinan Mansuroglu, Nicolas Besson
Team, AMID.cero9: Cristina Diaz Moreno, Efren Garcia Grinda, José Quintanar, Vicente Soler, Laura Migueláñez, Pei-Yao Wu
Partner: Computed·By (coding creative projects)
Friday, December 07. 2012
In the firts part of the XIXth century, we saw our landscape gradually populated by water towers. They came all together with the advance of railways and steam trains as well as with the delivery of water under pressure to households, offices and factories, etc. They took their part in the implementation of the first industrial revolution.
Will we see now our landscape progressively transformed by some new types of energy constructions (i.e. above, a "duct turbine" designed to increase wind velocity, that we could also call a "wind tower") and become the new landmarks of our (still to come) sustainable society. Could we combine this type of structure with some other program? With living or with data centers, with other new and "iconic structures" of our still early century? Should these types of structure also inhabit hurricanes and their usual paths and collect huge amount of energy?
More about the "ducted wind turbine" on MIT Technology Review.
Tuesday, December 04. 2012
Via Cabinet
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By Nicola Twilley
More than three-quarters of the food consumed in the United States today is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, and sold under artificial refrigeration. The shiny, humming stainless steel box in your kitchen is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak—a tiny fragment of the vast global network of temperature-controlled storage and distribution warehouses cumulatively capable of hosting uncounted billions of cubic feet of chilled flesh, fish, or fruit. Add to that an equally vast and immeasurable volume of thermally controlled space in the form of shipping containers, wine cellars, floating fish factories, international seed banks, meat-aging lockers, and livestock semen storage, and it becomes clear that the evolving architecture of coldspace is as ubiquitous as it is varied, as essential as it is overlooked.
(...)
More about it and about a "perpetual winter" on Cabinet's website.
Friday, November 16. 2012
Via The New York Times
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WASHINGTON — Climate change is accelerating, and it will place unparalleled strains on American military and intelligence agencies in coming years by causing ever more disruptive events around the globe, the nation’s top scientific research group said in a report issued Friday.
The group, the National Research Council, says in a study commissioned by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies that clusters of apparently unrelated events exacerbated by a warming climate will create more frequent but unpredictable crises in water supplies, food markets, energy supply chains and public health systems.
Hurricane Sandy provided a foretaste of what can be expected more often in the near future, the report’s lead author, John D. Steinbruner, said in an interview.
“This is the sort of thing we were talking about,” said Mr. Steinbruner, a longtime authority on national security. “You can debate the specific contribution of global warming to that storm. But we’re saying climate extremes are going to be more frequent, and this was an example of what they could mean. We’re also saying it could get a whole lot worse than that.”
Mr. Steinbruner, the director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, said that humans are pouring carbon dioxide and other climate-altering gases into the atmosphere at a rate never before seen. “We know there will have to be major climatic adjustments — there’s no uncertainty about that — but we just don’t know the details,” he said. “We do know they will be big.”
The study was released 10 days late: its authors had been scheduled to brief intelligence officials on their findings the day Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, but the federal government was shut down because of the storm.
Climate-driven crises could lead to internal instability or international conflict and might force the United States to provide humanitarian assistance or, in some cases, military force to protect vital energy, economic or other interests, the study said.
The Defense Department has already taken major steps to plan for and adapt to climate change and has spent billions of dollars to make ships, aircraft and vehicles more fuel-efficient. Nonetheless, the 206-page study warns in sometimes bureaucratic language, the United States is ill prepared to assess and prepare for the catastrophes that a heated planet will produce.
“It is prudent to expect that over the course of a decade some climate events — including single events, conjunctions of events occurring simultaneously or in sequence in particular locations, and events affecting globally integrated systems that provide for human well-being — will produce consequences that exceed the capacity of the affected societies or global system to manage and that have global security implications serious enough to compel international response,” the report states.
In other words, states will fail, large populations subjected to famine, flood or disease will migrate across international borders, and national and international agencies will not have the resources to cope.
The report cites the simultaneous heat wave in Russia and floods in Pakistan in the summer of 2010 as disparate but linked climate-related events that taxed those societies.
It also cites the Nile River watershed as a place where climate-related conflict over water and farmland could arise as the combined populations of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia approach 300 million. South Korea and Saudi Arabia have purchased fertile land in the Nile watershed to produce crops to feed their people, but local forces could decide to seize the crops for their own use, potentially leading to international conflict, the report says.
The 18-month study is not the first such report from government agencies or research organizations to draw a direct link between climate change and national security concerns.
The National Intelligence Council produced a classified national intelligence estimate on climate change in 2008 and has issued a number of unclassified reports since then. The Pentagon and the White House have also highlighted the role of climate change in humanitarian crises and security threats.
The National Research Council recommends in the new report that all government agencies improve their ability to monitor the global climate and assess the risks to populations and critical resources around the world.
Yet Mr. Steinbruner said that as the need for more and better analysis is growing, government resources devoted to them are shrinking. Republicans in Congress objected to the C.I.A.’s creation of a climate change center and tried to deny money for it. The American weather satellite program is losing capability because of years of underfinancing and mismanagement, imperiling the ability to predict and monitor major storms.
Personal comment:
Following the previous post about hurricanes, another article by The NYT that strength the necessity to take into account the effects of climate extremes.
We've seen in the recent years projects taking into account floodings or higher levels of oceans. Probably should we also already consider more generally "climate extremes" (wind, floodings, rain, heat waves, etc.) that will occur more and more often at a global scale in the coming 50 years in the design of contemporary architectures, cities, landscapes and infrastructures. Undoubtedly a research project.
Personal comment:
A set of (beautiful, if viewed from above...) pictures of hurricanes by Nasa. It also tells how far, at a large scale, a hurricane is some sort of continuous and dramatic climatic architecture. With different wind velocities, rain and pression (from inhabitable to uninhabitable) --could we harvest wind, hydro and piezoelectric energy from hurricanes btw?--, its relatively calm and sunny "patio" (the eye) and its tail. What would it look like to produce an architecture to fully inhabit hurricanes, its different and variable climatic zones?
An interesting research would be to map the different geographic paths that hurricanes took (i.e. over the last 20 years) and sketch such an architecture and infrastructure (i.e. harvesting wind and hydroelectric energy, collecting water), to inhabit such a special climatic zone.
In a way, design environments for harder climatic events.
Wednesday, November 07. 2012
Via Dezeen
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Hundreds of spinning blades reveal the invisible patterns of the wind in American artist Charles Sowers’ kinetic installation on the facade of the Randall Museum in San Francisco.
And also, Ice window:
or Dip Chambers:
and other works...
Personal comment:
http://charlessowers.com/#Charles Sowers
Monday, October 15. 2012
Via Dezeen
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Visitors can play in the rain without getting wet in this installation by interactive designers rAndom International at the Barbican in London (+ slideshow).
Located in The Curve gallery, Rain Room is a perpetual rain shower which lets visitors feel the moisture in the air and hear the sound of rain while remaining untouched by drops of water. Cameras installed around the room detect human movements and send instructions to the rain drops to continually move away from visitors.
The water drips through a grid in the floor where it is treated before being sent back up to the ceiling to fall again. Formed in 2005 by former Royal College of Art students Hannes Koch, Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood, rAndom International has created a number of installations involving audience participation.
“Rain Room is the first time that we’ve extended the level of our experimentation to the huge public space that is The Curve at the Barbican,” rAndom International told Dezeen. “Our other work has performed on a more intimate scale in terms of size and engagement, but what’s common to most of our projects is that they extract interesting behaviour from the viewers,” they added.
Their proposal to create a rain shower inside the gallery didn’t faze the curators. “The curatorial team around Jane Alison has not blinked once in view of the actual implications of realising the Rain Room at The Curve – a never-done-before project featuring thousands of litres of water above a BBC recording studio and right next to a theatre and concert hall in a public art gallery.”
The designers have also collaborated again with British choreographer Wayne McGregor, whose Random Dance company will perform short ‘interventions’ in the Rain Room to a score by Max Richter on selected Sundays during the exhibition. “Working with Wayne and Random Dance has always been very rewarding, as his perspective seems to complement our way of working extremely well,” said the designers. Earlier this year Dezeen featured their collaboration for the Future Self project at MADE in Berlin, in which a lighting installation mapped and replicated human movement.
Rain Room isn’t the first weather-related art installation to appear on Dezeen – we’ve also featured a moving cloud of raindrops in a Singapore airport and an LED sign in a London park displaying yesterday’s weather.
Photographs are by Felix Clay.
See all our stories about weather »
See all our stories about art »
See all our stories about the Barbican »
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Here’s the full press release from the Barbican:
Rain Room by rAndom International at The Curve, Barbican Centre, London
Admission Free
4 October 2012 – 3 March 2013
The exhibition is supported by Arts Council England. Rain Room has been made possible through the generous support of the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art.
Known for their distinctive approach to digital-based contemporary art, rAndom International’s experimental artworks come alive through audience interaction. Their largest and most ambitious installation yet, Rain Room is a 100 square metre field of falling water for visitors to walk through and experience how it might feel to control the rain. On entering The Curve the visitor hears the sound of water and feels moisture in the air before discovering the thousands of falling droplets that respond to their presence and movement. Rain Room opens in The Curve on 4 October 2012.
Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries, Barbican Centre, said: The Curve has previously played host to guitar-playing finches, a World War II bunker and a digital bowling alley. rAndom International have created a new work every bit as audacious and compelling – Rain Room surpasses all our expectations.
At the cutting edge of digital technology, Rain Room is a carefully choreographed downpour – a monumental installation that encourages people to become performers on an unexpected stage, while creating an intimate atmosphere of contemplation. The work also invites us to explore what role science, technology and human ingenuity might play in stabilising our environment by rehearsing the possibilities of human adaptation.
rAndom International said: Rain Room is the latest in a series of projects that specifically explore the behaviour of the viewer and viewers: pushing people outside their comfort zones, extracting their base auto-responses and playing with intuition. Observing how these unpredictable outcomes will manifest themselves, and the experimentation with this world of often barely perceptible behaviour and its simulation is our main driving force.
Finding a common purpose as students at the Royal College of Art, rAndom International was founded in 2005 by Hannes Koch, Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood. Today the studio is based in Chelsea – with an outpost in Berlin – and includes a growing team of diverse talent. With an ethos of experimentation into human behaviour and interaction, they employ new technologies in radical, often unexpected ways to create work which also draws on op art, kinetics and post-minimalism.
rAndom International have gained international recognition, inspiring audiences from broad multidisciplinary interests. A breakthrough work of 2008, Audience, marked rAndom’s first installation with audience participation. Motorised mirrors disconcertingly respond to human activity in their midst in inquisitive, synchronised movements, with the viewer becoming both active agent and subject of the piece. Swarm, a light work of 2010, emulates the behaviour of birds in flight: the sound created by the presence of visitors causes the abundant individual light sources to respond in swarm-like formations. With Future Self, a new commission by MADE Berlin in 2012, the studio explores the direct interaction of the viewer with the full body image of the self, represented in light in three-dimensions.
Other notable commissions include Reflex, a large scale light installation that inhabited the windows of London’s Wellcome Trust for one year, and the studio’s scenography for Wayne McGregor’s production, FAR, presently on world tour. rAndom International’s kinetically responsive sculpture Fly was premiered at the last Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, while intelligent light installation Swarm Study / III is on display permanently at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
rAndom International are represented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London and Paris. An overview of their work, Before the Rain, is on show in Paris 8 September – 21 December 2012. Prior to this they have exhibited at Tate Studio at Tate Modern, Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich and Museum of Modern Art, New York. They have won a number of awards including Designer of the Future 2010, Prix Ars Electronica – Honourable Mention, CR – Creative Futures Award, Wallpaper* Award and were listed in the Observer’s Top Ten Creative Talent in the UK. Earlier works form part of the permanent collections at the Frankel Foundation for Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Monday, June 04. 2012
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by rholmes
[Ship tracks -- "narrow clouds... form[ed] when water vapor condenses around tiny particles of pollution that ships either emit directly as exhaust or that form as a result of gases within the exhaust” — in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, captured photographically by a NASA satellite; the atmospheric trace of the seaborne transfer of goods and materials between East and West.]
Tuesday, January 10. 2012
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de Paul Petrunia
Overstocked with a large supply of men’s spring and winter coats, a clothier in Copenhagen, Denmark, adopted a unique sales scheme. He erected a scaffolding around his store building and completely covered it from roof to sidewalk with more than a thousand overcoats. The novel display attracted prospective customers in such droves that police were summoned. Although the police ordered the proprietor to remove the display, he succeeded in selling all the overcoats.
Personal comment:
As the weather is getting freezing over Switzerland, we discovered today a new way to protect our buildings from it: clothing for buildings, in winter, but also then, in summer, why not too? Could be an intersting project. Or think about having all your wardrobe as an insulation layer against the facade in winter, and remove it during the summer time (in fact, we are thinking about something similar for a project...).
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