Turbine Free Wind Power

Can't embed the video, but it's here.

From the Times Year in Ideas:

Conservationists argue that wind turbines pose a risk to birds, bats and sensitive habitats like shorelines. People living close to wind farms, meanwhile, complain of constant noise and vibration. This year, engineers responded with a new way to draw electricity from the wind: oscillating wind panels.

The wind panels are the brainchild of Francis Moon, a professor of mechanical engineering at Cornell University. He created a panel of 25 pads that oscillate in the wind, much the way leaves vibrate when a gust of air sifts through a tree. The pads attach to piezoelectric materials that produce electricity from each vibration.

Moon and a team of undergraduates have a working prototype called Vibro-Wind, which functions in variable wind speeds and generates little noise, making it ideally suited for urban spaces. Moon envisions Vibro-Wind on the sides and roofs of buildings, powering electronics and ad displays day and night. ANDREW TOLVE

Big in Romania

MARK # 29

All Day - Streaming Mashup Breakdown

http://mashupbreakdown.com/

Surviving Afghanistan but not the US

Afghan Hero Dog Is Euthanized by Mistake
The dog survived a suicide bombing but was euthanized by mistake.

Marissa Textor

http://marissatextor.com

Andy's Memorial on Kauai

Chilean Miners

I know I don't need to report this, but just for the record, this is great.

NYTimes

Goats on a Dam

Just chillin, whatever.

from Treehugger

Ishigami at Toyota Museum of Art

more from dezain/flickr

a crowd in the balcony

in the sport of used book bin diving there are finds and then there are eff-eye-en- dees. a book that i fished out yesterday by the late harvard professor, laurence wylie is undoubtedly one of this latter category.

in beaux gestes (1977) wylie—a witty and dignified professor of french civilisation—models and interprets many different gestures from france’s baffling battery of non-verbal communication.

he admits that many of the gestures are the domain of boys in the schoolyard or young men doing military service and that his behaviour in the photographs is incongruous. says wylie, “an elderly harvard professor should not be making these gestures.” this however is the precise appeal of the book and the reason why it remains one of my best eff-eye-en-dees to date.

thanks, ragbag

Free solar panels

The rash of free solar panel offers being promoted to householders aren't quite the financial bargain they first appear to be, a consumer rights group warns today.

Using figures from the Energy Saving Trust, Which? reveals that consumers could save as much as £10,500 over 25 years – depending on where in the UK they live – by taking out a loan to buy their own system.

full

Algae Fuel

The sizable scientific team at Ocean Nutrition Canada in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the world’s largest supplier of omega-3 EPA and DHA fatty acid supplements, was hardly looking for an alternative to conventional fossil fuels.

In 2005, as part of a five-year research effort, the company was screening algae samples, taken from marine environments across the Atlantic provinces of Canada, for specific nutraceutical ingredients. That is when, in one of hundreds of filmy, green test tubes and flasks, it uncovered a single-celled microorganism that produces substantial quantities of triacylglycerol oil — a base for biofuel.

“It was like finding a needle in a haystack,” said Ian Lucas, Ocean Nutrition Canada’s executive vice president of innovation and strategy. “We got extremely lucky. This certainly isn’t our core business, but we’ve been told by experts that this is the most efficient organism for the production of oil identified in the world to date.”

Dozens of companies and academic laboratories are pursuing the objective Ocean Nutrition Canada did not know it had — to cultivate algae, the foundation of the marine food chain, as a source of green energy.

But Ocean Nutrition Canada’s prolific grower, experts say, appears capable of producing oil at a rate 60 times greater than other types of algae being used for the generation of biofuels.

In view of its discovery, the company will lead a four-year consortium, formed over the past months and funded by the federal not-for-profit foundation Sustainable Development Technology Canada, to develop its proprietary organism into a commercial-scale producer of biofuels.

full article

Thinking Small, and Still Smaller, on Wind Power

An article in The Times on Wednesday centers on Tocco da Casauria, a small, traditional town in Italy whose four wind turbines, installed over the past four years, produce 30 percent more energy than its residents use. In fact, money made from the production of clean energy has brought the town back from the brink of insolvency and allowed to renovate its school and perform other much-needed municipal repairs.

Tocco is near L’Aquila, the site of a devastating earthquake in 2009, and the quake damaged many of its buildings, including the city hall. Some were no longer safe to inhabit.

In fact, many of the recent renewable plants in Italy are small in scale — a turbine or two in a village — not those immense wind parks that dominate a landscape. That is partly the because the permitting process for large-scale installation is so complicated in Italy.

Still, across the globe, there are signs that wind energy innovators are trying to go smaller still. Just as there are rooftop solar panels, so, too, engineers have designed rooftop turbines.

Swift turbines, designed by the British company Renewable Devices, are pole-mounted rooftop wind turbines that can generate as many as 1,900-kilowatt hours of energy a year, supplementing the supply of energy-poor households at a time of high electricity rates.

This summer, the French designer Philippe Starck unveiled his own chic version of a rooftop turbine, a sculptural gizmo called the Revolutionair, which comes in quadrangular or helicoidal shapes and costs about $3,500.

Some buildings in New York City and elsewhere are experimenting with rooftop wind. But getting useful amounts of energy out of a turbine requires the analysis of wind patterns and proper placement. And buildings in tightly packed urban areas can scatter the breezes.

So whether super-small is good when it comes to wind turbines remains to be seen.

here
original full article

Hahaha

Here it is in video form, with David Cross.

CAD for Mac in October

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/technology/31autodesk.html?_r=2

New Competition! - ELES

So the new Slovenian competition is for Elektro Slovenija (ELES), a "state-owned electricity transmission company of Slovenia. It is an only power transmission system operator in Slovenia." [wikipedia].

It's for their new business complex in Baricevo, which is here:

There's a bunch of competition material which I'll upload but in the meantime this is probably the most useful of the briefs:

http://familyarchitects.com/public/FAMILY_ELES_C_PROJECT_TASK.pdf

Monster Remix

Did everyone get this already? Nicki Minaj's verse is face melting.

Get it

oti oyot

I am sure these are not his, but still thought they are awesome. via

Just a Test

The Transcendent City by Richard Hardy

THE TRANSCENDENT CITY from Richard Hardy

TURF FEINZ "RIP Rich D" | YAKFILMS | ERK THA JERK | TURF DANCING in the RAIN | DANSE SOUS LA PLUIE

explicit on credit

As I sipped a much-needed cappuccino on the patio,Herzog took exception to that idea. “If there is any new direction in the office,” he said, “it is driven by me and
Pierre and by us alone!”.

a good read - Full article On Credit

Wwilderness Aesthetic

Random thought: I was looking through some of the old picasa albums I have and really liked the overall aesthetic that the Wwilderness Club folder had. The weird nature atmosphere is more inherent in an office name like Wwilderness of Rad Nature, but obviously there's nothing stopping Family to do the same. I think I had just forgotten about it since the name wasn't asking for it. More mushrooms and surfing and twigs and lakes and smoke.




I also like the WW line logo, but I guess the AM of Family can be more or less the same.

Jordy kicks Ass!!!

Dane? huh?

Double Rainbow All The Way

UPDATE: Mr. Double Rainbow


I am clearly a bit late on this (vacation!) since Fast Company has already interviewed him? Huh.

Thanks Ira!

Rick Ross' Calendar

http://calendar.ytmnd.com/

baby i'm hungry!

you guys got yourselves in shit!

Summer!

More photos of the exhibit

Kaohsiung Port Competition

This could be a good competition to do after the pool booklet is done and while we are shopping it around.

We would have to team up with a licensed architect.
The competition website doesnt seem to be working yet (bad sign?) but keep checking.

Port of Kaohsiung Passenger Transport District: Port and Cruise Service Center

Category: International
Type: Open, two-stage
Registration Deadline: 08/30/2010
Submission Deadline: 08/30/2010
Open To: Licensed Architects
Entry Fee: None
Awards: US $50,000 each 2nd stage finalist, design commission to winner
Jury: Hitoshi Abe, Maximiliano Fuksas, Hisao Kohyama, Shengfong Lin, Victor Y. Su, Yuan L. Tsai and Minghung Wang
Email: barry-cheng@umail.hinet.net
Website: http://www.pncsc.com.tw

More info at Death By Architecture

huh

VIA

Family Chairs by Ishigami

Ahaha, these are actually called "Family Chairs".

more from Designboom

Love the video!

It doesn't really work cause I chopped my hair off

Concept Magazine

From Korea.
Also in this issue: OMA and Zaha. You know, peers.