The Riverview Gardens Residences have been awarded the UT Austin Student Architecture Award. The annual award is juried by students of the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and is presented for the best architecture in the Austin Metroplex. The award is directed by Wilfried Wang who is the O’Neil Ford Centennial Professor in Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at the Polytechnic of North London, University College London, the ETH Zurich, the Staedelschule, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and at the University of Navarra.

15 Year Old Invents Algae-Powered Energy System

http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/06/24/versatile-system-by-javier-fernandez-han/

The NY Times Story about the downsizing of Flint, MI, (https://blog.bcarc.com/2009/04/22/deconstructing-flint/) seems to be gaining traction.

Apparently the Obama Administration is investigating other cities that could benefit from a proper shrinking: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5516536/US-cities-may-have-to-be-bulldozed-in-order-to-survive.html

There’s a great segement in the Slate Cultural Gabfest for this week (I highly reccommend the Slate podcasts btw) about an experiment that New York is doing with Times Square.  Apparently they’ve blocked off some of the lanes of traffic and are using the blacktop as a pedestrian mall.  Pending the arrival of permanent seating, they’ve put a bunch of beach chairs for people to sit on.  What an awesome image.

BLDGBLOG just picked up the story I posted yesterday about 16,000-year concrete, and refers to an earlier post with some facinating bits.  The post is for an interview with geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, author of The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?.  Some excerpts:

The surface of the Earth is no place to preserve deep history. This is in spite of – and in large part because of – the many events that have taken place on it. The surface of the future Earth, one hundred million years now, will not have preserved evidence of contemporary human activity. One can be quite categorical about this. Whatever arrangement of oceans and continents, or whatever state of cool or warmth will exist then, the Earth’s surface will have been wiped clean of human traces.

…

Thus, one hundred million years from now, nothing will be left of our contemporary human empire at the Earth’s surface. Our planet is too active, its surface too energetic, too abrasive, too corrosive, to allow even (say) the Egyptian Pyramids to exist for even a hundredth of that time. Leave a building carved out of solid diamond – were it even to be as big as the Ritz – exposed to the elements for that long and it would be worn away quite inexorably.

…

So there will be no corroded cities amid the jungle that will, then, cover most of the land surface, no skyscraper remains akin to some future Angkor Wat for future archaeologists to pore over. Structures such as those might survive at the surface for thousands of years, but not for many millions.

…

Mexico City has a good short-term chance of fossilization, being built on a former lake basin next to active, ash-generating volcanoes; but its long-term chances are poor, as that basin lies on a high plateau, some two kilometers above sea level. The only ultimate traces of the fine buildings of [Mexico City] will be as eroded sand- and mud-sized particles of brick or concrete, washed by rivers into the distant sea.

This begins to address a discussion Calvin and I have had recently about the time horizon of architecture and the unconsidered possibilities of thinking in the very long term.  I wonder if we’re not the first sentient species to inhabit this planet?  Perhaps the great triassic extinction was actually caused by dinosaurs driving SUV’s from the grocery store to the movie theaters.  Maybe our iron ore mines are extracting the remnants of ancient metropolises.

This sort of speaks for itself (these are inflation-adjusted numbers):

Reserachers at MIT have discovered the molecular causes of concrete ‘creep’, the primary method concrete fails (aside from corrosion on reinforcement of course).  They’ve also started playing with ways to reduce the speed of the process, and are predicting concrete able to last for millenia.  As a convenient side-effect, they can dramatically increase the strength of the concrete:

Ulm, who has spent nearly two decades studying the mechanical behavior of concrete and its primary component, cement paste, has in the past several years focused on its nano-structure. This led to his publication of a paper in 2007 that said the basic building block of cement paste at the nano-scale — calcium-silicate-hydrates, or C-S-H — is granular in nature. The paper explained that C-S-H naturally self-assembles at two structurally distinct but chemically similar phases when mixed with water, each with a fixed packing density close to one of the two maximum densities allowed by nature for spherical objects (64 percent for the lower density and 74 percent for high).

For your feed reader: Veg.itecture, a blog about ‘vegitated architecture’.

This green roofing idea seems to have legs – I wonder why it’s taken so long for the idea to take off.  Maybe the technical issues of building a reliable membrane was a problem…

Some images from recent posts:

After watching ‘Up’, some enterprising people over at Deputy Dog went and found a set of images of houses stuck in the middle of development sites.

Not sure what to say about these – I just find them amusing.

This is a great story.  Some scientists have developed a method for extracting water from the air using passive energy collection.

The principle of the process is as follows: hygroscopic brine – saline solution which absorbs moisture – runs down a tower-shaped unit and absorbs water from the air. It is then sucked into a tank a few meters off the ground in which a vacuum prevails. Energy from solar collectors heats up the brine, which is diluted by the water it has absorbed.

Because of the vacuum, the boiling point of the liquid is lower than it would be under normal atmospheric pressure. This effect is known from the mountains: as the atmospheric pressure there is lower than in the valley, water boils at temperatures distinctly below 100 degrees Celsius. The evaporated, non-saline water is condensed and runs down through a completely filled tube in a controlled manner. The gravity of this water column continuously produces the vacuum and so a vacuum pump is not needed. The reconcentrated brine runs down the tower surface again to absorb moisture from the air.

I’m not sure what provides the energy to circulate the brine (it has to get to the top of the tower somehow), but I suspect that PV collectors run a pump.  It would be interesting to use a stirling engine powered by the waste heat from the evaporation process to power that.

If you’ve read any of Frank Herbert’s Dune series (which I highly suggest – it’s one of the most significat works of scifi ever) you’ll remember he refers to similar mechanisms powering a centuries-long geoengineering process to convert a desert planet into a verdant one.  This process is surely slower than other desalination techniques, but if implemented widely (perhaps integrated into architectural forms?) I suspect the net effect would be much more efficient.

I wonder what the implications of massive numbers of people de-humidifying a desert atmosphere would be?  Would the reduced humidity affect the local flora?  Unintended consequences…