Here‘s some long-term thinking:

The Ficus elastica produces a series of secondary roots from higher up its trunk and can comfortably perch atop huge boulders along the riverbanks, or even in the middle of the rivers themselves.

The War-Khasis, a tribe in Meghalaya, long ago noticed this tree and saw in its powerful roots an opportunity to easily cross the area’s many rivers. Now, whenever and wherever the need arises, they simply grow their bridges. In order to make a rubber tree’s roots grow in the right direction – say, over a river – the Khasis use betel nut trunks, sliced down the middle and hollowed out, to create root-guidance systems

…

The root bridges, some of which are over a hundred feet long, take ten to fifteen years to become fully functional, but they’re extraordinarily strong – strong enough that some of them can support the weight of fifty or more people at a time. In fact, because they are alive and still growing, the bridges actually gain strength over time – and some of the ancient root bridges used daily by the people of the villages around Cherrapunjee may be well over five hundred years old.

It looks like there was an interesting late submission to the Re:Vision Dallas competition by Little Diversified Architectural Consulting, which seems to address a lot of the ideas we were hoping to integrate into our own proposal; there’s extensive green space, an attempt to create a diversity of experience and address the issue of verticality, and a decent amount of systems thinking.  They seem to be using fairly well-understood systems (greywater treatment, PV panels, green roofs etc), but it’s at least nice to see more people presenting these elements as a central aspect of a design proposal.

More eye candy after the break

This just turned up in a post about the gas crisis of ’73.  It’s described as “the outcome of the architect asking himself the question “How to make a house that resembles a park?”, and has an interesting resemblance to our approach to the Red Bluff residence.

I couldn’t find any good images of the interior, but the basic design seems interesting.  It’s a shame that integrated systems thinking seems to have died out in the 80′s after the energy crisis abated.

Here’s one for the next structural engineers we work with in California: physicists in france have recently extended their work on sonic invisibility cloaks to encompass buildings and earthquakes, and have proposed a method for designing buildings which are invisible to the shock waves of earthquakes.

Guenneau said that it’s possible to shield an object, even a building, so that an incoming earthquake wave behaves as if the object weren’t there. The building in the path of the wave is like a rock in a fast-flowing river, he said.

“It’s the same picture, the wave pattern, as for a water wave that is propagating in a river, and it’s bent smoothly around the rock and will be reconstructed around the rock.” The object, or building, is “invisible” to the mechanical waves.

A series of concrete rings would surround a building or other structure, forming the shield. The shield would redirect the vibration around the object inside. “Each ring is going to wobble in such a way that the wave will bend around (the object),” Guenneau said.

Earthquake waves come in varying lengths, with many peaks and troughs in a given distance, or just a few. To effectively shield a building from short and long waves that earthquakes generate, several rings could be built around a structure, each “tuned” to a different wavelength.

A 1,000 square foot house, for example, would need a circular shield with a 33-foot radius, which could be built with commercially available concrete. Guenneau suggested that the method might be used to protect a large building like a stadium, where people could seek shelter after an earthquake and be protected by the rings from possible aftershocks.

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.

I saw this project on BLDGBLOG the other day and was a little suspicious of the claims being made:

Larsson has proposed using bacillus pasteurii, a “microorganism, readily available in marshes and wetlands, [that] solidifies loose sand into sandstone,” he explains.

I suspected some undergraduate had misunderstood or over-generalized from a research paper, but after reading the links, this looks like a real possibility.  Here are some images of the project based on the science:

And here are some images from the researchers doing the work on microbes:

I love that project – terraforming on a small scale.

www.fryarstopiaries.com/

Sitio Roberto Burle Marx