Carbon Neutral master plans are being adopted in several countries, in times when energy and emissions are becoming very important.

And that´s exactly what Azerbaijan will do to develop Zira Island on the Caspian Sea, located in the bay of the capital city Baku. The master plan was developed with danish BIG Architects and Ramboll engineers, with an architectural proposal based upon the country’s dramatic natural setting.

In the words of Bjarke Ingels, the proposal for Zira Island [...] is an architectural landscape based on the natural landscape of Azerbaijan. This new architecture not only recreates the iconic silhouettes of the seven peaks, but more importantly creates an autonomous ecosystem where the flow of air, water, heat and energy are channeled in almost natural ways. A mountain creates biotopes and eco-niches, it channels water and stores heat, it provides viewpoints and valleys, access and shelter. The Seven Peaks of Azerbaijan are not only metaphors, but actual living models of the mountainous ecosystems of Azerbaijan.

This mountain concept may sound strange, but BIG has developed this in the past as you can see on Mountain Dwellings.
As you can see on the images, this urbanized peaks that Bjarke describes are derived from the geometry of famous mountains in the country, and each peak becomes a unit of private and public mixed uses. The result is an organic skyline that merges buildings with the natural topography of the island. Among the peaks, there´s a public central valley that connects a series of private resort villages and the beaches. Also, a public trekking path connects the mountains and allows the visitors to scale up to the top. It also includes 300 private villas that take advantage of their setting with panoramic views out over the Caspian Sea.

But the main highlight of this masterplan was to make the Zira Island completly independent of external resources, achieved through the mix of traditional Azerbaijani building tradition and new technologies. The aim is to provide a high-end living wiht a minimum usage of the resources.

This strategy includes several aspects:




SUN
The buildings of the island are heated and cooled by heat pumps connecting to the surrounding Caspian Sea. Solar heat panels integrated in the architecture create a steady supply of hot water, while photovoltaics on strategically located facades and roof tops power daytime functions as swimming pools and aqua parks.

WATER
Waste water and storm water is collected and led to a waste water treatment plant, where it is then cleaned, processed and recycled for irrigation. The solid parts of the waste water are processed and composted and finally turned into top soil, fertilizing the island. The constant irrigation and fertilizing of the island supports the lush green condition of a tropical island, with a minimal ecological footprint.

WIND
Zira Zero Island benefits from the fact that Baku is “the city of wind”. By harvesting the wind energy through an offshore wind farm, the island will have its own CO2-neutral power supply. Further by locating the wind turbines on sea, it transforms the existing offshore oil industry’s platforms & foundations in Baku into a more sustainable future of wind turbine platforms.

LANDSCAPE
The landscaping of the island is derived from wind simulations of the microclimates created by the mountains. Swirly patterns created by the wind moving its way through the Seven Peaks inform the planting of trees and the design of public spaces. Where the winds and turbulence are strongest the trees becomes denser, creating lower wind speeds and thus a comfortable outdoor leisure climate.

Forget about wandering through an art gallery and wondering if you’re the only one who has no idea what anything means. Hannes Broecker has brilliantly invited the cultural elite to grab a glass at an exhibition in Dresden, Germany, and drink away the art.

Regardless of what we do or do not understand about art, we can all agree, it stimulates our senses. Broecker has aroused our sense of taste (not to mention eliminated the need of elbowing our way to the bar) by hanging flat, glass containers with a variety of cocktails in the exhibition space. As the night progressed, the levels of the multi-coloured infusions diminished. By the end of the event, the art, itself, ran dry, and empty drinking glasses were returned to where they were originally placed.

The joint submission by Foster & Partners and Aston Martin has won first prize, alongside Capoco Design, in Transport for London’s competition to design a new bus for the capital. The two iconic British brands worked together to challenge preconceptions of bus design with a vehicle that is environmentally sensitive, accessible, convivial and reinvents a much-loved symbol of London for the modern era.

The winning designs make imaginative use of hybrid-drive technology, lightweight materials and a wealth of fresh engineering ideas. The designs pay homage to the well-known shape of the Routemaster, a particularly fine city bus that defied fashion and changes in the ownership and control of London’s buses.

Lord Foster said:
“I am delighted that we have won joint first prize with the Aston Martin/Foster + Partners design. This project has really captured my imagination. London’s buses are so much a part of the essence of this city – functionally, symbolically and geographically. They help us draw a mental map – their destinations are London’s historic places, often green: Shepherds Bush, Islington Green, Hampstead Heath, Green Park. Our design seeks to combine contemporary innovation with timelessness. Like the original Routemaster – which was ahead of its time and consequently endured – a new bus for London should establish a whole new travel experience that espouses 21st century aspirations, while celebrating the memory and the experience of the original.”

After a two-phase international competition (with offices such as Morphosis, Abalos+Sentkiewicz, MVRDV and Zaha Hadid), OMA has been awarded the first prize in the design competition to build the new Taipei Performing Arts Centre.

The project, led by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, is based on 3 theaters (1 x 1,500 seats - the round one, 2 x 800 seats - cubes) which are plugged into a central cube cladded with corrugated glass. This scheme puts all the stage accommodations of the 3 theaters into the central cube, allowing for more flexibility as theaters can be used independently or combined, expanding the possibilities for experimental performances - an art which is very strong on the country. This new arrangement of stage and seatings includes a public circulation that exposes parts of the backstage to the public.

For her thesis project at Rice University, a student, Chin, proposed ten "waterscrapers" that would slice across the urban space of Manhattan, cutting through buildings, through parks, and through the urban grid itself, forming strange aquatic intersections with the city.
Inside would be routes for scuba-diving, new aquariums, and multi-seasonal sites for public swimming.
These above-ground pipes of water – like hydro-boulevards, or one might say the hydrological Haussmannization of Manhattan – are less an actual proposal for construction than a sort of architectural dream: the city cross-cut by amniotic utopias through which people can wander at all hours of the day.


As you can see in the short comic strips that accompanied the project, it is themed around overlapping idea of excess, self-indulgence, and addiction, as if these Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture-like scenes might be therapeutic, a mass psychotherapy of space.
It's 3am and you're depressed; you can't sleep. You go out wandering across Harlem, inside one of the Annexes, completely alone, not a single other person in sight – when a group of people goes scuba-diving over your head. As if they've attained flight through an artificial river in the sky.
In a city of insomniacs, the city itself becomes the dream.

as seen in bldgblog

Verb Crisis examines architectural solutions to the extraordinary conditions of an increasingly dense and interdependent world.It presents innovative projects and research through original photos, essays, and exclusive interviews with key figures from architecture and urban planning to environmental, economic, and global affairs. Confronted by shifting densities and uncharted urban transformations, Crisis tackles the conflict between the physical limits of architectural design and the demands on the practice for an updated social relevance. Featuring: FOA, Teddy Cruz, Shigeru Ban, Elemental, Boris B.Jensen, Hilary Sample, John May, Jacobo García Germán, Markus Miessen, Interboro Partners, MVRDV, and Takuya Onishi.

as seen in Charneira

A new green complex from world renowned architecture firm Foster + Partners will be adding more than a dash of green to the Singapore skyline. As sustainability becomes an essential ingredient to development in this island nation, the UK-based firm is leaving no stone unturned to make good use of alternative energy sources in this 150,000 square meter mixed-use project. As the winning design from an international competition, Singapore’s new eco-complex from Foster + Partners is pushing the green envelope from top to bottom in this sophisticated downtown design.

The complex will fill an entire city block between Singapore’s Marina Center and the Civic District with commercial, residential, retail, hotels, and a ‘green’ link to an Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) station. All facades will be fitted with solar cells and, to help control solar gain, direct sunlight will be filtered through ribbon-like canopies rising from the base of the entire complex to the exposed east and west elevations of the towers.

The canopies will form vertical louvers at the elevations and provide more renewable on-site energy with integrated thin-film solar arrays. Vertical green spaces, and extensive sky gardens are also important components of the towers, further greening the whole structure with natural vegetation and ambient temperature moderation.

The slanted facades are designed to catch the wind and direct it downwards for natural cooling of the ground floor spaces. A rainwater harvesting system, geothermal heating system, chilled beams and ceilings, and an ice storage system for cooling are further enhancements planned for the complex.
While it looks intensely complex, the design takes advantage of simple green building principles like passive solar, natural ventilation and natural cooling. Foster + Partners’ dynamic design will function in sync with the surrounding climate, and just might be the perfect merger of elevated architecture and grounded green build thinking.

The green building movement in Asia may be lagging behind the U.S. and Europe, but it is slowly gaining momentum. Today’s Wall Street Journal features a piece that highlights eco-architecture projects taking shape in Asian cities across Thailand, China, Hong Kong and Singapore. One project is Ocean One, a 91-story beachfront residential high-rise in the Thai resort town of Pattaya.

Designed by Australia-based firm Woods Bagot, the building (set to be completed in 2010) will be the first eco-friendly high-rise and tallest building to be built in Thailand. Energy efficient appliances will save residents as much as 30% on electricity bills and up to 80% of the water used will be recycled for toilets and then treated for use outdoors. “A highspeed elevator will zip visitors to an observation deck, generating enough electricity as it descends to light the deck at night. Solar panels on the roof of an adjacent commercial building will power shops and restaurants.” Excess energy will even be fed into Thailand’s electricity grid.

Riding the wave of new development in China, Studio SHIFT recently won a competition to design a new landmark in Miyi County. Miyi Tower will sit on the edge of the Anning river as a symbol of the new face of Sichuan provence. The tower’s most striking feature is its whimsical latticework skin, which suffuses the structure with daylight and “evokes the shimmering surface of the river below.” This connection is reinforced by the project’s goal of filtering and transforming the polluted Anning river into a lush landscape of wetlands, lakes, leisure and agricultural areas.

The Miyi Tower itself will be a state-of-the-art community space providing a multitude of educational, entertainment and community programs aimed at promoting the region’s heritage and natural amenities. Ambitiously redefining the term multi-use, the tower will feature “an auditorium, exhibition spaces and restaurants featuring local cuisine on the interior while open-air floors are used as event spaces, gardens and an observation deck. The pairs of lower and upper enclosed spaces are joined by structures which act as light monitors. These light monitors, of which there is a third at the highest level, are aligned to take advantage of different lighting conditions throughout the day. The tower is sheathed in a very porous yet continuous skin that gives the various programs their unified form. As porous building skins are often treated as opaque modules with subtracted holes (i.e. perforated skins) Studio SHIFT deliberately created the inverse.“

Masdar, the new sustainable super-city being developed by Abu Dhabi, recently announced that it is building the largest grid-connected solar plant in the Middle East. The 10 MW solar plant will be half thin-film and half crystalline silicon photovoltaics, with 5 MW of thin film solar panels being provided by Arizona-based First Solar. The Masdar solar power plant is expected to reduce emissions of 15,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually and cost around $50 million.

Designed by Foster + Partners, Masdar is poised to be the world’s most sustainable city. Their masterplan envisions a development that is zero-waste, car-free, and carbon neutral. Solar power will be an essential resource for the city, as the sun will also power their Rapid Transit System.


Abu Dhabi-based Environma Power Systems Designed and developed the new power plant, which will support ongoing construction activities in Masdar and later will provide energy for the Masdar Institute, which opens in late 2009. Any excess power from the plant will be fed into the Abu Dhabi electric grid.

First Solar’s thin film photovoltaics utilize Cadmium Telluride as a semiconductor, which enables them to use only 1-2% of the semiconductor material required for traditional photovoltaic panels. Manufacturing a thin film panel takes around 2.5 hours from start to finish using First Solar’s process. The efficiency of these panels is estimated to be around 9%, and costs are expected to be below $1 per peak Watt per module. Currently, commercial efficiencies for traditional photovoltaics are above 20%, but costs rise above $1.5 per peak Watt.

It has been a while since i last posted something. I`m sorry for the absence but i was visiting Portugal for one week and it involved quite a bit of time consumption...



BMW's Idea: Pioneering a carbon-free future

BMW has a history of not just being a pioneer in car technologies but also thinking ahead into the future. That is why in terms of a long term vision BMW has invested in a 20-year R&D project to develop sustainable transportation for a post-carbon world. Their proposed solution: Hydrogen. It's a plentiful resource. And the exhaust produced by a hydrogen engine is 99% water. It's not an uncomplicated solution. But provided we can figure out how to extract it from water cheaply, manufacture it efficiently, and build out the infrastructure of hydrogen fueling stations that will make deployment practical, it could be viable.

As a first step toward making this a reality, BMW developed the Hydrogen 7, which runs on gasoline and liquid hydrogen. It's not an end solution, but a manufacturable proof-of-concept. One they wanted the world's influencers to see up close and try for themselves.

But BMW does not stop here. In keeping with their pioneering spirit BMW launched Club of Pioneers (be sure to check it out, it`s worth an insightfull peek), an open dialogue platform all about future mobility - encouraging people to discuss, share and spread their ideas and visions on sustainable concepts.



GINA stands for "Geometry and Functions in 'N' Adaptations", which basically means that designers from both BMW and BMW Group DesignworksUSA were allowed to throw out the rulebook. This is most evident in the GINA Light Visionary Model's outer skin, which is made entirely out of textile fabric that's pulled taut around a frame of metal and carbon fiber wires. The skeleton of the car is controlled by electro-hydraulic devices and can actually move and change shape beneath the fabric skin. For instance, the headlights of the concept can be exposed or hidden by the car's skin just like blinking eyes, and the hood opens from the center as the fabric parts to expose the engine. This idea extends to the interior, where BMW designers have made visible only those instruments that are required at a certain time, while the rest of the time the same fabric interior "blinks" them out of view. The car itself looks somewhat like a Z4 Roadster, though after viewing the extensive gallery of high-res images below, you'll be amazed how much the outer skin looks like normal sheetmetal. Until, that is, you see how the doors open. They lift up in a semi-scissor fashion and since there are no exposed hinges, the fabric artfully binds up as the door swings open. While the design of the GINA Light Visionary Model is very Bangle-esque with concave and convex surfaces intermingling everywhere you look, it looks appropriate and natural here. The car is very much a concept, meant more to inspire BMW's own designers and engineers rather than excite the public, but now we're excited about shape-changin, fabric-covered cars, anyway.

BMW at TED2007: From top to bottom: Test driving the Hydrogen 7; Dr. Frank Ochmann, BMW's VP of Clean Energy, discusses hydrogen at a special lunch; The Hydrogen 7 in the conference Simulcast Lounge.