Futurismic

Imagine trying to exit a burning building.

Based upon conversations with the WTC survivors, researchers from the Universities of Greenwich, Ulster and Liverpool concluded that more than half of them delayed evacuating because they wanted to gather information about what was happening; those intent on getting more info about the attacks before exiting took between 1.5 and 2.6 times longer to begin evacuating than others; and congestion in stairways was the main cause of delay in getting out, even though the towers were less than one-third occupied that day.

Also: Al-Qaeda HQ has harsh words for AQ in Iraq:

Taken in context, Zawahiri’s latest memos seem to indicate that al-Qaeda’s oft-cited “central front” is a persistent if increasingly difficult management challenge for the movement’s front office.

And some angry leftist observes:

Aside from everything else, 9/11 was the day our mainstream news people promised they’d stop focusing on the trivial.

Oh well.

[Bayonne, NJ 9/11 memorial, Sister72]

Related posts

• Two miles high, one mile wide, and housing a million people (5)
• Virtual reality and PTSD (0)
• Using biometrics to identify potential terrorists (0)
• Urban redevelopment: building demolition, Tokyo style (2)
• UK women spending more time online than men (0)

It sounds like something Bruce Sterling foresaw as long ago as Islands in the Net: Larry Dignan on ZDNet looks at a patent for a structure that would sit offshore like an oil rig:

Google is pondering a floating data center that could be powered and cooled by the ocean. These offshore data centers could sit 3 to 7 miles offshore and reside in about 50 to 70 meters of water.

….Now wild-cards abound. Jurisdiction issues will occur. Are states really going to allow Google or anyone else place these pontoons offshore without some tax hit?

And will Google take advantage of such a setup to bank your data like the Swiss bank money?

[Rusting sea forts in the Thames estuary photographed by phault; story tip: Gregory Frost]

Related posts

• With Knol, Google enters the knowledge market (0)
• Two miles high, one mile wide, and housing a million people (5)
• Tour de Earth (0)
• The new advertising age - there is no escape! (0)
• The good books: church converted into bookstore (0)

Devotees of rapid prototyping technologies like the RepRap Project will be pleased to hear that construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar is funding research into scaling the technology up so that it can be used to produce concrete structures:

Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, says the system is a scale-up of the rapid prototyping machines now widely used in industry to “print out” three-dimensional objects designed with CAD/CAM software, usually by building up successive layers of plastic.

…
Instead of plastic, Contour Crafting will use concrete,” said Khoshnevis.

I suppose that rapid prototyping technologies are going to be a change of web/Internet/genetic engineering proportions over the next couple of decades, affecting everything and leading to unpredictable social changes.

[story on Physorg][image from jared on flickr]

Related posts

• When 3D spam got old (7)
• Two miles high, one mile wide, and housing a million people (5)
• The good books: church converted into bookstore (0)
• Reserve your place in the Great Pyramid of death! (2)
• Looking back on 9/11 (0)

Combining two of the most compelling tropes from science fiction: floating cities and colonising other planets, Geoffrey Landis, a scientist at the NASA Glenn Research Center (who also writes science fiction, apparently) suggest the idea that humans could live in aerostatic cities in the upper atmosphere of Venus:

50 km above the surface, Venus has air pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0°C-50°C range, a quite comfortable environment for humans. Humans wouldn’t require pressurized suits when outside, but it wouldn’t quite be a shirtsleeves environment. We’d need air to breathe and protection from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.

My first thoughts were of Charlie Stross’ depiction of the (post-)human colonisation of Saturn in the brilliant Accelerando series, which uses huge aerostatic structures to create a human-friendly environment in the upper atmosphere of Saturn.

This is a compelling idea - although speculative - but there are many technical difficulties to look at:

The biggest challenge would be using a substance resistant to sulfuric acid to form the outer layer of the bubble; ceramics or metal sulfates could possibly serve in this role, but of course, you’d want to be able to see outside, as well. “Just think of the great pictures you could get,” said Landis.

Indeed. I’d love to see some artwork depicting this…

[story via Slashdot][image by fdecomite on flickr]

Related posts

• Two miles high, one mile wide, and housing a million people (5)
• The good books: church converted into bookstore (0)
• Reserve your place in the Great Pyramid of death! (2)
• Print-a-house (2)
• Nothing says “future” like a big fat airship (0)

The announcement of the world’s first dynamic building has echoes of the futuristic and modernist designers of the Archigram movement:

The 420-metre (1,378-foot) building’s apartments would spin a full 360 degrees, at voice command, around a central column by means of 79 giant power-generating wind turbines located between each floor.

It is interesting to see certain elements, including the modularity, individualism, and dynamism of concepts like the Archigram Plug-in-City re-emerge in the 21st century.

The Dynamic Tower itself is impressive in it’s grandeur and the scale of it’s ambition. The fact that the architect claims the building “would be energy self-sufficient as the turbines would produce enough electricity to power the entire building and even feed extra power back into the grid” adds to the wonder.

[story via BBC News][image by Claire L. Evans]

Related posts

• UK makes massive step towards wind power (2)
• The little house that could (0)
• Wind power balloons upward (0)
• Where to store wind energy? (1)
• Where to put the carbon… (6)

The ever compelling Alex Steffen over at WorldChanging is talking about Infrastructure a lot lately. A lot of the US and much of the world is built on an infrastructure of highways, electric grids and waterways, which are struggling to keep up with population growth and increased costs, especially of fuels. Whilst new technologies like superfast trains and solar panels are good, they need investment in the infrastructure for it to work - as seen by Britain having to spend millions to replace track for the Eurostar because Margaret Thatcher chose the cheaper infrastructure in the eigthies, whilst the rest of Europe put in place track suitable for what became the TGV.

There’s a lot of interesting ideas out there, from Alexander Trevi’s use of carbon-harvesting nanocrystals and radiation reprocessing to produce a green ‘New Chernobyl’, to architects IwamotoScott’s ‘Network Hydrology’ reimagining of a water and hydrogen-producing algae based 2100 San Francisco. There’s plans to artificially create a new river delta to protect the Louisiana coastline and Amsterdam might drain its canals to create a new underground subcity. Or what about BLDGBLOG’s idea to create housing projects in the same way people make zoos? By combining good design in new infrastructure with the inventions already out there we can start looking at a future way of living rather than just trying to extend the one we have beyond its lifetime. And is it coincidence that most of best ideas also look ridiculously cool?

[picture by IwamotoScott]

Related posts

• The Independent reports on the rise of British Sea Power (2)
• The importance of infrastructure (4)
• What does the financial crisis mean for the future? (1)
• Welcome to the United Kingdom of Ubiquitous Surveillance (2)
• User contributed wifi - the advantages of Foneros (0)

There’s nothing quite like a good daily mixture of RSS feeds for generating some great serendipitous synchronicity. Today’s topic-from-the-blue - unique hotels!

When Geoff Manaugh isn’t cranking out what are arguably the posts most worth reading at io9, he’s churning out great posts about mad architecture-related stuff at his own BLDGBLOG … like this one about a hotel in Sweden made entirely from ice, or this other Swedish “hotel” - which is in fact just a bunch of fishing shacks on a frozen lake where you can stay to watch the Northern Lights. [Image: Photo by Ben Nilsson of Big Ben Productions, lifted from BLDGBLOG]

Aiming for slightly warmer climates, Warren Ellis’ grinders point us toward some impressive treehouse designs from around the world, delivered in the web-ubiquitous top-ten list format. The ice palace is pretty, but I think I’d rather be sleeping in one of these if I was to be resident for more than one night. [Image lifted from WebUrbanist]

The ice hotel reminds me of a scene from Julian May’s Galactic Milieu series, and I’m pretty sure there have been tree-cities in a number of books - Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, for a start, and a Brian Aldiss novel whose title eludes me for now.

What’s your favourite environmentally-tailored residence - fictional or otherwise?

Related posts

• Floating houses - Dealing with flooding without fighting it (21)
• Will cleaner fuels raise the cost of food? (1)
• Watering Southern Australia (With Ziploc Bags) (0)
• Using salmonella to administer vaccines (0)
• Two miles high, one mile wide, and housing a million people (5)

In Robert Silverberg’s 1971 novel The World Inside (a book I remember fondly for having contributed a great deal to my early sex education), the bulk of the 75 billion people on a future Earth live inside Urban Monads, or Urbmons, each of which is three kilometres tall and houses 800,000 people. (Via io9.)

Architect Eugene Tsui has a proposal on his website for something similar: the two-mile high “Ultima” Tower, intended to be home to a million people:

There are 120 levels to the structure with great heights at each level. The scale of this stucture is such that the entire central district of Beijing could fit into its base. One must not think in terms of floors but, instead, imagine entire landscaped neighborhood districts with “skies” that are 30 to 50 meters high. Lakes, streams, rivers, hills and ravines comprise the soil landscape on which residential, office, commercial, retail and entertainment buildings can be built…the structure itself acts like a living organism with its wind and atmospheric energy conversion systems, photovoltaic exterior sheathing, and opening/closing cowl-vent windows that allow natural air into the interior without mechanical intervention….ecological efficiency is a rule and all areas of the structure feature resource conserving technolgy such as recycled building materials, compost toilets, nature-based water cleansing systems for all buildings, plentiful amounts of forrest, plant life and water-based ecosystems.

Even the setting would be beautiful:

The tower is surrounded on all sides by a lake. Sandy beaches, stone cliffs, water inlets, grass, trees and rocky islands create a beautiful and majestic setting…

Could such a thing ever be built? Well, Tsui’s concept dates back to 1991, and nobody’s breaking ground for it yet, or for similar projects like Tokyo’s SkyCity. (The projected $150 billion price tag might have something to do with that.) But the problems of urban sprawl and overpopulation aren’t going away, and structures like this could be part of the solution.

And to me, at least, it actually sounds like a pretty cool place to live…unlike Silverberg’s rather nightmarish (plentiful–mandatory, in fact–sex notwithstanding) Urbmons.

(Image: Amazon.)

Related posts

• Looking back on 9/11 (0)
• Urban redevelopment: building demolition, Tokyo style (2)
• The good books: church converted into bookstore (0)
• Safer, saner cities (5)
• Reserve your place in the Great Pyramid of death! (2)

With floods again occupying many of us here in the UK, those living on the floodplain are searching increasingly for an insurance policy that will cover them for any water-related inundation. Recently the chief executive of the Thames Gateway London Partnership said of the river:

“There will be at some stage a massive catastrophic event that will finally goad us into doing something.” His advice? “Everybody should get a boat.”

However, other less sensationalist solutions are being thought about if our country is starting to go through a wet patch. Many of these solutions originate in Holland, two thirds of which is below sea level. Architect Koen Olthuis’s houses that float on hollow concrete bases that move up and down with the water level are an innovative way to have a normal home-like existence whilst working with the water instead of trying to stop it. There are two good interviews with the architect at Inhabitat and Washington Technology.

Also in the guardian today - architects are designing a city in the United Arab Emirates that is 99% waste efficient and uses 100% renewable power, in a quest to create a completely sustainable city.

[story and image via the Guardian]

Related posts

• Coastal villages may be abandoned to the sea (4)
• Bespoke hotels of the future (1)
• Two miles high, one mile wide, and housing a million people (5)
• The little house that could (0)
• The good books: church converted into bookstore (0)

Love books? Like baroque architecture? Then you’ll probably squee with delight at the thought of this Dominican church in Maastricht that has been repurposed as a bookstore. [Image credited to Roos Aldershoff; copied from linked article]

I wonder if they have the complete works of Richard Dawkins in stock?

Related posts

• Two miles high, one mile wide, and housing a million people (5)
• The bell tolls for second-hand bookstores (0)
• Reserve your place in the Great Pyramid of death! (2)
• Print-a-house (2)
• Looking back on 9/11 (0)

Well, this is just plain weird, but it appears to be genuine. The German town of Dessau, birthplace of the Bauhaus art movement, is home to a group of entrepreneurs who intend on using concrete blocks containing the ashes of dead people to build an immense pyramid. Reserve your block now! Whether or not the business model is even vaguely plausible, you’ve got to give them kudos for sheer ambition. What kind of bizarre legacy for future civilizations would that be? [BLDGBLOG]

Related posts

• Where art meets science - the pickled frog webserver (4)
• UK military denies deploying killer badgers (0)
• Two miles high, one mile wide, and housing a million people (5)
• The good books: church converted into bookstore (0)
• Science-fictional property for sale - US$1.5m o.n.o. (0)