Category: energy
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Smart Trees
Way back in undergraduate studies, I developed a project for a pedestrian street mall in Vancouver, British Columbia. The conceptual framework of car-free zones in cities was a contentious one at the time with some notable failures but the idea of removing cars from urban zones was a key driver of my design. This has…
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RBC: Zeekracht (OMA)
Zeekracht | OMA A related follow-up to the essay by Koolhaas, this short essay explores Zeekracht, a master plan for the North Sea, driven by it’s “high wind and consistent wind speeds and shallow waters…” making it “…arguably the world’s most suitable area for large-scale wind farming.” The project master plan (below) outlines the strategy. …
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Vertical Agriculture (From Outer Space)
While I continue this impromptu study of the current state of Vertical Agriculture – it’s important to realize that the ingenuity of humans is always a factor. Industrialization of growing food is a long-standing feature of agriculture – which has probably simultaneously done the most good for productivity and the most harm in severing our…
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Personal Infrastructures
Working on some link house-cleaning and came up with a few posts that seems to thread together in an interesting narrative. The first of this was a beautiful installation for the ‘Flower Street BioReactor’ via Dezeen: “Los Angeles architects Emergent have designed an installation filled with green algae that produce oil by photosynthesis.” This sort…
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More Fake Trees
And They’re Pretty Handy if we are Attacked by Giant Interstellar Swarms of Flies: :: image via InhabitatVia Inhabitat: “A report published last Thursday from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME) suggested that a forest of 100,000 artificial “trees” could be “planted” near depleted oil and gas reserves to trap carbon in a filter and…
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The Future is Now
The Wall Street Journal asked a trio of designers to imagine the ‘Green House of the Future’, with energy efficiency as a point-of-departure. This group came up with some inventive visions – although it’s telling that all of these ideas and problems could be envisioned right now with our available technology and materials. Nonetheless, the…
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White House, Green Garden
No shortage of speculation about the plans for the ‘farmer-in-chief’ and what this means for some instant credibility to the burgeoning urban agriculture movement. Also, the latest search for the White House Farmer is getting the conversation elevated to a new superstar echelon of uber gardeners. Enough to make conservatives cringe and comment on the…
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Energy Dump
Not a lot festering here in terms of energy links, but a couple of interesting ideas related to our electricity infrastructure – coming from two different worlds. The first takes a look at our existing power structure – namely the ubiquitous grid. From InfraNet Lab, this post announces the ‘Power of Ecosystems/Ecosystems of Power’ –…
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Chilean Facades: Consorcio + Concepción
A stunning new example of VIA (i think?) via Urban Greenery presents the The Consorcio Building in Santiago – with an amazing green wall system on significant portions of the facade – which recalls Ken Yeang’s Bioclimatic structures in this tropical climate. :: images via Urban Greenery Located in Santiago, Chile – the green walls…
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Our Crumbling Infrastructure [aka Call Before You Dig]
[UPDATE: 01.10.09 – As mentioned, I recieved this as an email forward – one of those ubiquitous things that get pitched around in our digital age – thus had no context in which to verify the story. Thus, it turns out that the pics are from a corrosion-related rupture of the high pressure gas line…