EARTH 2.0™ – Re-establishing a harmonious relationship between humanity and nature, using art, science and digital creativity.
Despite their need to trademark the phrase Earth 2.0, and the heavy post-production, the content in the following videos is spot-on. To soften the blows a bit further, I’ve added some matching quotes from my own unfinished writings on these subjects.
What our cities need today to survive in the midst of climate change and increasingly heavy weather is Aikido Infrastructure.
Any sufficiently advanced engineering is indistinguishable from nature.
The Ark Hotel is some shiny, shiny design porn courtesy of Russian firm Remistudio (with the assistance of the International Union of Architects’ program Architecture for Disasters Relief).
As more cities are devastated (Brisbane alone is looking at a price tag in the billions after last week’s floods) one thing’s for sure; just rebuilding what was there before won’t be enough. And if billions are to be spent, it should be on structures armored against heavy weather.
This design seems like a good place to start (if malls and hotels are your thing, that is..)
Designed as “an integrated energy system with an uninterruptible power supply using alternative energy sources”, the slinky-like Ark Hotel uses solar panels and a rainwater collection system to provide inhabitants with power and water.
The dome-shaped hotel is constructed with wooden arches, steel cables and a “self-cleaning” plastic layer instead of glass.
Further, the 14,000 square metre shell-like construction of arches and cables distributes the weight evenly, meaning it can withstand earthquakes
It has also been designed to stay afloat in the event of floods or rising seas.
It would be built around a central pillar connecting to roof-top wind generators and heat pumps, as well as to energy storage and thermal conversion units below.
There will also be a “tornado” energy generating spiral at the top of the pillar.
Daylight is filtered through to internal rooms due to the hotel’s see-through structure, reducing the need for lighting.
There will be an array of vegetation to aid air quality and provide food sources.
Of all the forgotten and mysterious places in the Five Boroughs of New York City, few have histories as rich and interesting as that of North Brother Island. Situated in the Hell Gate, a particularly treacherous stretch of the East River, North Brother was home to the quarantine hospital that housed Typhoid Mary, was the final destination of the General Slocum during its tragic final voyage, and was the site of an experimental drug treatment program which failed due to corruption. Riverside Hospital, the name of the facility on the island throughout its various incarnations, treated everything from smallpox and leprosy to venereal disease and heroin addiction; after the Second World War, it housed soldiers who were studying under the GI bill. The entirety of the island has been abandoned since 1963; over a dozen buildings remain, in various states of disrepair.
In South America the slums are attached to the outskirts of mega-cities such as Caracas and Mexico City like wasps’ nests on a cliff face. In a hilly island city like Hong Kong, however, living space is limited. Here you only see the laboriously constructed huts made of corrugated iron and planks of wood in which the poorest of the poor live if you look upwards – they occupy, to put it in cynical terms, a penthouse location.
Some of these rooftop shacks, which in the year 2006 after the government’s first slum clearance programme still housed 3962 people in 1554 households, are up to three storeys high. Improvised structures made of ladders and bits of furniture create connections between the individual parts of the buildings and join these impoverished dwellings into complete rooftop settlements – sociologists even talk of a “self-organising niche architecture” and point to the utopian aspects of this urban way of life.
From suspiciousminds’ flickr stream, who went through three plans to get the shot:
Meet Château des Anges. A post-mediaeval castle that was once surrounded by an immense park. It belonged to a very noble family of counts. It just had everything: a grapevine, vast orchards, fountains, stables, arable lands for crops and livestock, woods, a lake. Ownership changed quite often and the castle wasn’t maintained as it should be. The last owner left the place in 1970. It is untouched ever since.
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Plan C
Waiting. For a harsh winter. And ice. I waited 8 months to explore this baby. On one of the coldest winter mornings NeQo and me set off. It was -10°C. There wasn’t a single soul for miles. Just us, this decayed castle, and Mister Winter.
The lake was frozen solid and we didn’t have any difficulties wading through the thorned bush. We arrived at the castle. The backdoor of the terrace was open. Of course it was open. What was the owner thinking? Some schmuck would cross the water – or even better – cross the ice in the event of winter?
And there we were. Setting foot in an untouched place that’s been decaying since the seventies. Forsaken. Since long. But captured in our minds. For ever more.
In a mashup between some of my favourite sexy technologies, Qosmo and architects teradadesign have transformed Tachikawa’s N Building into a QR-branded, augmented, fishtank of an building.
The building’s facade is imprinted with QRCodes that when scanned with a AR program allows viewers to peek inside the building and see animated versions of the movements and activities of those inside. People inside the building are tracked via GPS and their tweets are transformed into thought balloons hovering over their heads.
This unknown power plant had been visited in the past by some of the old explorers, dating back to 2005 and 2006. At that time it was rather easy to access the plant, but very few actually risked it. The decayed part situated just next to the active part made it a very though one…
The year 2007. Chances are you’ve never heard of Electro Magnetic Pulse, but the boys in blue had. A 24/7 security patrol was put on site, with the aid of a handful of live camera’s. There’s even a camera on top of the building, just in case some lunatic parachutes his way up there. The complete area was fenced with razor wire top to bottom and the occasional landmine was put in place. Ok, kiddin’ about that landmine.
Summer of 2008. Everyone who tried that place over the past two years got caught by security. I don’t know what we were on to, but in some crazy mood we decided to give this one a go.
Click through the photo link for the rest of the story….
A giant “digital cloud” that would “float” above London’s skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers.
The construction would include 120m- (400ft-) tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data.
The Cloud, as it is known, would also be used an observation deck and park.
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Its designers plan to raise the funds to build it by asking for micro-donations from millions of people.
“It’s really about people coming together to raise the Cloud,” Carlo Ratti, one of the architects behind the design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told BBC News.
“We can build our Cloud with £5m or £50m. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached.”
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The different spheres would act as structural elements, habitable spaces, decoration and LCD screens on which data could be projected.
“We could provide a custom feed of… searches made by Londoners during the Olympics to give a real time ‘barometer’ of the city’s interests and mood,” said Google, one of the supporters of the project, which has also offered to provide the information feeds.
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The structure would also be used to harvest all the energy it produces according to Professor Ratti.
“It would be a zero power cloud,” he said.
As well as solar cells on the ground and inside some of the spheres, the lifts would use regenerative braking, similar to that in some hybrid cars.
That way, the designers say, potential energy from visitors to the top of the tower can be harnessed into useful electricity.
