Stockholm’s strawscraper will produce electricity from thousands of wind-agitated straws – skyscraper addition designed by Belatchew Arkitekter’s Labs studio applies piezoelectric technology via “hair-like material that harvests energy from the wind.” From the architect’s website: The straws of the facade consist of a composite material with piezoelectric properties that can …
In Memoriam: Niels Diffrient – anyone who’s been in the design world within the last 50 years will have come into contact with the work and ideas of designer Niels Diffrient who died last Saturday at the age of 84. From his ground-breaking work on the 3-volume reference set Humanscale to …
Ancient Roman Concrete Is About to Revolutionize Modern Architecture – researchers at Berkeley Lab have analyzed the concrete from Roman ruins in 11 Mediterranean harbors and discovered why so many of them are intact despite two thousand years of pounding by the sea. The composition of that ancient concrete and method …
A Year of Light and Space – anyone who’s interested in James Turrell’s work with light, space, and perception will have ample opportunity to see it in person this year. Exhibits of his installations will open in Los Angeles (LACMA), Houston (Museum of Fine Arts), and New York (Guggenheim Museum – …
My Ideal City / Mi Ciudad Ideal – six-month collaborative urban design project from PSFK and W Radio in Bogota, Columbia is using social media to generate discussion and ideas from around the world. The results will be reviewed by an architect and urban planner as they redevelop a neighborhood in …
ArchiAfrika Magazine #2 – this second issue covers a wide range of topics, from the cover story on musician Hugh Masakela to African architects at Milan Design Week (shown here) to recycling practices in 6 African cities to community-built compressed-earth block schools in the Dogon to informal housing in Accra …
Announcing here.stamen.com – designers of maps and data visualizations at stamen design have been working with Nokia map data from Here.com to create shareable, embeddable WebGL 3D maps at here.stamen.com. A description of this early-release prototype: It uses 3D data from HERE for San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin to …
“Lectorial” rooms: shifting the emphasis to active student-centred learning – post about recent research at Australian RMIT University, the final report of the Lectorial Project (65-p PDF report). The study looked at custom designed “Lectorial” rooms that have been especially designed for the teach-discuss-share model to encourage the students …
Sculptural pipes play secret lullabies to entertain hospital patients – the kids at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital are in for a treat, an “audio-playground for the young patients.” The Lullaby Project (check out the drawings and the backstory) was developed by architects at Studio Weave and sound artist Jessica Curry. Sculpture? Sound …
A ‘Whom Do You Hang With?’ Map of America – here’s a map that’s not drawn according to state boundaries but by transaction areas. Based on the website Where’s George? which tracks the flow of dollar bills, Dirk Brockmann of Northwestern University devised this map. Deep blue means …
New Cooling Technology for Buildings Works In the Full Heat of a Sunny Day – electrical engineers at Stanford have discovered a “metal-dielectric photonic structure” that acts like a mirror to solar light reflecting the Sun’s energy, emits what it reflects within a specific range of …
OMA and Knoll Unveil Furniture Worthy Of Dr. No – Rem Koolhaas’ architectural firm OMA has teamed with furniture maker Knoll to produce a line called Tools for Life. Knoll is known for enlisting famous architects and designers for furniture ideas, and tapped Koolhaas as part of its 75th …
Daimler envisions the future of car technology – car-maker Daimler recently sponsored a Future Talk event to imagine the “evolving role of vehicles in the future.” All of the ideas for using vehicles to make our lives safer and easier reuse some already-existing aspect of cars (GPS, waste heat) and apply them …
How Healthcare Uses Water – page on the website of Practice Greenhealth with statistics on water use in health care facilities and links at the bottom to further information on how to reduce water use in hospital and other medical environments. Healthcare facilities consistently fall within the top ten consumers …
The Digital Public Library of America is launching on April 18-19 in Boston. This huge and long-awaited project is a cooperative non-profit venture undertaken by libraries, museums and other institutions from across the country, aggregating access to digitized content and making it all easily searchable and accessible. Their Elements page …
Living Walls Effectively Mitigate Air Pollution – investigators in Karlsruhe, Birmingham, and Lancaster have established that plantings like green walls or even trees, bushes, and creeping plants can improve air quality in cities by up to 30%. Biochemist Thomas Pugh and colleagues … conducted the street canyon study by utilising …
Designers Debate Yahoo Memo at Inscape’s Workplace Salon – link is to a 3-min clip about a recent debate among office designers and workplace experts on the pros and cons of a recent memo from Yahoo’s CEO requiring its employees to be physically present in the office rather than working …
A Building Not Just Green, but Practically Self-Sustaining – the about-to-open Bullitt Center in Seattle hopes to be “the world’s greenest” office building. It’s aiming for certification with the Living Building Challenge, “the built environment’s most rigorous performance standard” and which requires 12 months of continuous occupancy to qualify. The article …