Start:	Oct 12, '07
End:	Oct 20, '07

This looks really interesting - in October, the biannual Solar Decathlon competition hits Washington. From across the country - in fact, from across the world - teams of students will be converging on the city to erect houses - houses they have designed, and which run on entirely self-generated electricity. The 'solar' in the title implies that it's all electricity from the sun, but at least one of the entries in 2005 had a hydrogen fuel cell, so I dunno. Anyway, it looks utterly fascinating, and I wish it was coming to a city near me.

Ah... I've got a feeling this isn't the first time this has been done, but since it's someone at my old alma mater (hah), the Royal College of Art, I kind of have to post it. Plus, it's cute. Although I'm not entirely certain where the tent would be, it doesn't appear that the satellite photos have been updated fast enough - predictable, but still, how cool would that have been?



On a completely unrelated note, why the heck did the designers of my computer keyboard put the quotation marks as a 'Shift +' key? I use them far more than I do, say, #, or [], all of which have their own keys. Dammit people, get a grip.

I just love this photo. It's from an inhabitat report on Rizhao, the Chinese city which claims that 99% of the households in the central district use solar water heating, as well as nearly a third of the outlying houses. What everybody does when it's cloudy, I don't know.

I was reminded of this while reading this good-news story about education in Tibet which mentions that solar cookers are apparently extremely popular in Tibet - and the list of benefits has a few unexpected items on it. Apparently, yaks produce more milk if they can drink warm water! How lovely.

First of all, I discover via inhabitat that Kisho Kurakawa's Capsule Tower is to be demolished. This will make all fans of Transport Tycoon very sad (incidentally, I never realized that Chris Sawyer took so many of the buildings in the game from local landmarks in Glasgow). It makes me a bit sad, too - all of Japan's major architecture institutions have pleaded for a refit rather than demolition, and it seems sad to me that a design which has modularity as its central concept is not being allowed the chance to really put that modularity to the test - after all, so far, none of the capsules has ever been removed. Residents have complained (And with good reason, imho) that the pods are small, and have become increasingly unpleasant to live in; but why not replace a bundle of two or four capsules with a single, larger, more modern living space? All sorts of exciting possibilities suggest themselves.



Money, that's what it boils down to. A new-build can fit more people onto the land, which means more money. Shame.

And then on top of that, BBC's PM programme has just informed me that the current architect in charge of completing Gaudi's famous Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona has warned that it could collapse even before it is finished, thanks to an underground railway which is planned to run under the site. I can't find any confirmation on that, though, not anywhere on the web - so I might be spreading scurrilous lies. I truly hope so.

Since Sao Paolo city passed radical new restrictions on the size of billboards in the city, new Cold War-style surveillance aerials have sprouted up across the city. Or at least, that's what it looks like from Tony de Marco's photoset. You can feel the sudden silence descend, and the aerial-like quality of the former billboards only serves to heighten the impression of a sudden, breathless, attentive silence descending.

via core77, via boingboing, via the whole freakin' internet.

It's a nice idea - people around the world take photos of their homes and upload them, letting you do a bit of sneaky voyeurism under the guise of ethnographic research. But really, how normal are these rooms going to be? Not very, and not for very long, is my guess. See how quickly this place turns into an audition space for 'Home and Garden' magazine.

Having said that, it's really interesting. What strikes me is how similar these rooms across the world are - there doesn't seem to be a vast amount of cultural difference apparent.



via core77

Of course I'm on the wrong side of the world to actually go to the event, but I just like looking at the pictures. These sketches of science fiction architecture from James Clyne, Ryan Church, Ben Proctor and Mark Goerner are simply fabulous.





I just didn't want it to stop.

via BLDGBLOG.

Billed as Sydney's greenest building, it's just the latest ecobuilding to be bragged about. Yeah yeah... but what caught my attention was the big fat sandstone wall in the atrium. When (yeah, when, not if) I design my own house, I've always promised myself it would have a big fat thermal mass in it to regulate the temperature. Imagine doing that with a couple of massive blocks like this... yeah, I'm so doing that.

...in Japan, of course (where even the trains have cute little ears).

Work have blocked treehugger as being an 'advocacy group'. Grrr.

Still only a baby network really, mostly stuff that is already covered in the book Design like you give a Damn', but has the potential to be really, really interesting, I think.


via core77 which also has some interesting ideas on ways of using lulu.com for printing portfolio books, supposedly very cheaply...

The man is a god. A god, I tell you!

I nearly got to do some work for him once, but turned it down. If I'd known who he was at the time... one of life's untaken roads. Still one of my all-time heroes, though. I mean, just check out the bridge:

"Superuse is a online community of designers, architects and everybody else who is interested in inventive ways of recycling."

Most of the references seem to be Dutch, but that's just another good reason to register and post more stuff that's local to you. My favourite is the 'materials' section, which ranges from the eminently sensible through the perversely attractive to the pointlessly desirable...

i have a couple of white walls, currently unadorned, so how 'bout this for my flat?

Okay, this is from way back in 2005, but I find it interesting so I'm posting it. So, like, two years ago, an artist called Shusaku Arakawa created the Reversible Destiny Loft apartments, an apartment block designed to keep your brain alert by constantly challenging your spatial awareness. The logic is more or less the same as those road junctions where they take away all the road signs and make it superficially more dangerous in order to get you to drive more carefully; this place uses distorted floors, optical illusions and light switches in counter-intuitive places, in order to keep the brains of the occupants active.

Cripes (more pictures here).

Leaving aside whether one would want to live in these places (and when they first went on the market they went for about twice the normal price of an apartment that size)(which is lucky when you consider how much they must have cost to make - what a fortunate coincidence that the price covered it), this made me think. One of my most valued precepts of design is that any design should be intuitive, easy to use, and generally free up the user to think about other things... and of course, Arakawa is going in completely the opposite direction.

On one level, it's deliciously counter-intuitive, but makes a charming sort of sense - if the occupants genuinely struggle to find stimulation, then here it is, on a plate. But personally, I think this represents a triumph of materialism over humanity. Those who need more stimulation are those who are isolated from human contact - especially the elderly. Making Granny live in a psychedelic obstacle course is going to isolate her further - elderly friends will be wary of visiting such a hostile environment, and she's going to find it harder to get out the door. What's required in such situations is more human contact, rather than more artifacts put in the way. Not for nothing is the architect described as an artist rather than a designer.

I have something of a personal interest in this because I have a granddad who is suffering terribly from Alzheimers. He's unable to distinguish between reflections and the genuine article, he struggles for words, he barely recognizes even his closest family (he certainly doesn't know who I am) - and I think he finds living alone with my grandmother very difficult. And although he's a nightmare to live with, the times I've seen him relax are when there's people around. The TV does nothing - it's hopeless, he can't follow it. People - human contact - is the only stimulation that works. So when Arakawa talks about 'halting mental decline', it's him that I think of - and I can only see him retreating from this environment, spending all day in a chair.

Sure, you'd need to be a pretty sharp cookie to live in this place - but I doubt very much whether living in this place would keep you sharp. I think it would just hurt.

Subtopia has an article on inflatable prisons which I am directed to by BLDGBLOG. It makes for pretty grim reading. I knew migration was a problem, but as a solution, these seem pretty inhumane: '“the tents are windowless and the walls are blank, and no partitions or doors separate the five toilets, five sinks, five shower heads and eating areas. [..] Lacking utensils on some days, detainees eat with their hands.”'

Thee's something seriously creepy about these disposable Guantanamos, housing a burgeoning demographic group. Who knows, maybe the next great novel of the twenty-first century will be written about those who live in these growing populations - about their births, their deaths, their lives and loves, entire dynasties incarcerated by a state which provides everything but freedom and privacy...

(via BLDGBLOG)

BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh interviews Simon Norfolk, a photographer, apparently.

Which is nice.

And would be the end of the story, but the photos themselves are incredibly compelling, and the stories they tell fascinating. Maybe as a result of his former career as a photojournalist, Simon concentrates on war - not the 'guy on a ridge in a turban watching a very, very far away explosion', but the air-conditioned supercomputers which design and simulate nuclear warheads, and the vast and silent arrays of surveillance aerials (check out the photos of Ascension Island, fantastic!) - and at the other end of the scale, the buildings that have been chipped and scarred by generations of bullets and shells. Not to mention the worn staircases of Auschwitz. It's an incredibly interesting interview, too. Highly recommended.

This is intriguing: an emotional map of Greenwich (that's London Greenwich). A bunch of volunteers were issued with Biomapping devices, which I guess are like GPSs which measure galvanic skin response. The result could be a really useful planning tool, if you had enough people, but with a small number individual events dominate. Interesting to see a map of where people get agitated, but I can't tell whether they're excited-good or excited-bad.
Cool idea though.

Start:	Oct 12, '06 7:00p
End:	Oct 19, '06
Location:	Glasgow Lighthouse

Show-and-tell for grownups, basically.

Well, I was going to talk about peace and love today, but then I read this article and got my knickers all in a twist. According to the author, the US wastes $5-10 BILLION on generating ENTIRELY wasted light. That's a staggering sum. And the problem's getting worse, not better. And what gets my goat is that it would all be so EASY to avoid, if only we were able to think our architecture through and implement it right. Upsetting.