May 27 Listener

It is worth purchasing a copy of this weeks Listener. There is a reasonable article about the future of city planning in New Zealand, detailing the possibilities for our main urban centres.

'Auckland is run by a business class which favours development and employs a bureaucracy to further developers. They just let developers do whatever they wanted to do and couldn't see they'd made mistakes.'

Says Ian Athfeild, 'Now the country is looking around for a champion for their physical environment... If architects are going to rule, now's their chance.'

inflatable decentralised racing hydroplanes

From Greenpeace UK, a very detailed analysis of decentralised energy in the UK. (If only John Lydon was a greenie) It is crucial you download the full report on distributed energy, I wish I had seen this a year ago.

Mmmmm, inflatable buildings.

Imagine a series of canals, with solar racing hydroplanes shooting passengers through them. Very cool.

Ceramic Hanging Apartments?

The form of these is beautiful, I can almost imagine a cluster of little living compartments....

Everything He Knows

Everything I Know is an excellent site on design thinking, by a lecturer on Interaction Design at the RCA. There is a lot here worth reading, for our brief, as well as in general.

Essential.

links for land-lubbers

A rapid roundup of recent reading.

Flat-pack housing

Beautiful patina in design

Ahoy there me scurvies

Mazda bioplastic

This guy really does talk a lot. At least most of it is worth reading.

wow, This could be as ground breaking as the Vespa?. Or an evolutionary dead-end like the Sinclair C5. Not exactly pretty, sadly, but a very interesting idea.

Taxibus

a HA! another of my ideas is justified, in Taxibus.

Could this engage some real thinking about mechanics? Of course the cost of a new type of vehicle would be prohibitive for operators here, but what would the ideal vehicle for this role look like?

H2PIA

H2PIA is interesting as an indication of some similar approaches to our Urbibana.

Basically a self contained, self-sustaining community. The idea of generated storage is rather close to the energy use formulation I set out last year. I just hope that when the sun and wind ARE available, electricity is used as directly as possible.

“The renewable energy comes from solar or wind power and is used to split H2O – ordinary water – into H2 and O2 – hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is vented into the atmosphere, which already contains about 20 percent O2. The hydrogen is used in fuel cells that can produce energy, for instance in the form of electricity and heat. In the fuel cell, the energy is created by silent electrochemical processes with no pollution. The only product left over when the hydrogen is used up, is pure water. During periods with low energy demand, we can store the hydrogen. Then, when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining, we use the stored hydrogen.”

There are some aspects of the community I am dubious about, primarily the fact it is indicative of yet more suburban sprawl. Could it have been more centrally designed, with a minimal footprint? The actual aesthetics of the structures also leave a lot to be desired, nevertheless I think H2PIA encapsulates the relative scope of our own project.