Ecological
Architecture is a subject much in debate now with the growing consciousness
of global warming, especially since it appears buildings are the first
greenhouse gas emitters, before industry, transport and any other sector.
The challenge of ecological architecture is a time battle because of
the escalating damage due to colossal real estate and urban development,
particularly in developing countries and new hot spots such as Dubai
and Shanghai. Even though these can also be seen as opportunities, it
is most likely that much of what will be built in the near future will
dramatically increase our ecological footprint, and unless viable and
exiting solutions make some headway, we will continue to exert pressure
on our environment with consequences we cannot predict fully but that
are obviously not desirable.
The purpose of our next
event is to demonstrate that there are true "visions"
out there being tested and experimented that actually develop and enhance
our lifestyles instead of simply constraining them.
the
future of Ecological Architecture
- Thursday, March 20, 18:30-21:15 Where: Netherlands Architecture Institute,
Museumpark 25, 3015 CB ROTTERDAM Felix
Bopp, editor-in-chief
The Hannover Principles
are a set of statements about designing buildings and objects
with forethought about their environmental impact, their effect
on the sustainability of growth, and their overall impact on society.
They were first formulated by William McDonough and Michael Braungart
for planning Expo 2000 in Hanover and are presented in a copyrighted
1992 document.
The principles may be summarized as:
Insist on human
rights and sustainability.
Recognize the interaction
of design with the environment.
Consider the social
and spiritual aspects of buildings and designed objects.
Be responsible for
the effect of design decisions.
Ensure that objects
have long-term value.
Eliminate waste
and consider the entire life-cycle of designed objects.
Make use of "natural
energy flows" such as solar power and its derivatives.
Be humble, and use
nature as a model for design.
Share knowledge,
strive for continuous improvement, and encourage open communication
among stakeholders.
The original document states: "The Hannover Principles should
be seen as a living document committed to the transformation and
growth in the understanding of our interdependence with nature,
so that they may adapt as our knowledge of the world evolves."
Cradle-to-Cradle Design
MBDC is articulating and putting into practice a new design paradigm;
what Time calls "a unified philosophy that - in demonstrable
and practical ways - is changing the design of the world."
McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry
is a product and process design firm dedicated to transforming
the design of products, processes, and services worldwide. The
firm was founded in 1995 by William McDonough and Michael Braungart
to promote and power "the Next Industrial Revolution" through
intelligent design. We employ Cradle to Cradle Design using strategies
we call "eco-effective" (rather than the widely promoted "eco-efficiency")
to create products and systems that contribute to economic, social,
and environmental prosperity.
Instead of designing
cradle-to-grave products, dumped in landfills at the end of
their 'life,' MBDC transforms industry by creating products
for cradle-to-cradle cycles, whose materials are perpetually
circulated in closed loops. Maintaining materials in closed
loops maximizes material value without damaging ecosystems.
Michael Braungart of EPEA and George Beylerian of Material ConneXion
discuss their Cradle to Cradle collaboration with William McDonough
of MBDC.
and
William McDonough: The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle
Architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings
and products would look like if designers took into account
"All children, all species, for all time." A tireless
proponent of absolute sustainability (with a deadpan sense of
humor), he explains his philosophy of "cradle to cradle"
design, which bridge the needs of ecology and economics. He
also shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world's
largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan),
and the entire sustainable cities he's designing in China.
.Next
Event
the
future of Ecological Architecture Thursday,
March 20, 2008 Registration:
18:30-19:00, Conference: 19:00-21:15 Tickets
Where:
Netherlands Architecture Institute,
Museumpark 25, 3015 CB ROTTERDAM The speakers are Malcolm Smith, Director of
Integrated Urbanism, ARUP
Bill
Holdsworth, environmental, architectural and energy
engineer
Design with a global impact
Thomas
Rau, Director, Rau Architects
Moderated byThomas
Ugo Ermacora,
Founder and Creative Director, Etikstudio
LIVE
WEBCAST at www.webcastingstudio.eu
We
would like to thank our supporters Netherlands Architecture Institute,
Etikstudio and Innergy Creations.
10
Emerging Technologies 2008 Technology
Review presents a list of the 10 technologies that are most likely
to change the way we live:
Modeling Surprise - Combining massive quantities of data,
insights into human psychology, and machine learning can help manage
surprising events, says Eric Horvitz. Probabilistic Chips - Krishna Palem thinks a little uncertainty
in chips could extend battery life in mobile devices - and maybe
the duration of Moore's Law, too. NanoRadio - Alex Zettl's tiny radios, built from nanotubes,
could improve everything from cell phones to medical diagnostics.
Wireless Power - Physicist Marin Soljacic is working toward
a world of wireless electricity. Atomic Magnetometers - John Kitching's tiny magnetic-field
sensors will take MRI where it's never gone before. Offline Web Applications - Adobe's Kevin Lynch believes that
computing applications will become more powerful when they take
advantage of the browser and the desktop. Graphene Transistors - A new form of carbon being pioneered
by Walter de Heer of Georgia Tech could lead to speedy, compact
computer processors. Connectomics - Jeff Lichtman hopes to elucidate brain development
and disease with new technologies that illuminate the web of neural
circuits. Reality Mining - Sandy Pentland is using data gathered by
cell phones to learn about human behavior. Cellulolytic Enzymes - Frances Arnold is designing better
enzymes for making biofuels from cellulose.
Frozen
Garden Eden
The Svalbard Global
Seed Vault is located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near
the town of Longyearbyen (population 2,075) in the remote arctic
Svalbard archipelago. The island is about 1,120 kilometres (700
mi) from the North Pole.
The Seed Vault is managed
under terms spelled out in a tripartite agreement between the Norwegian
government, the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Nordic Genetic
Resource Center.
The seedbank is constructed 120 metres (394 ft) inside a sandstone
mountain. Prior to construction, a feasibility study determined
that the vault could preserve seeds from most major food crops for
hundreds of years. Some seeds, including those of important grains,
could survive far longer, possibly thousands of years. The variety
and volume of seeds stored will depend on the number of countries
participating the facility has a capacity to conserve 4.5
million. The first seeds arrived in January 2008.
.International
Green Roof Association
Green Roofs have become
a very important component of sustainable urban development within
the last 30 years. Growing environmental awareness and the striking
economical and ecological advantages are the driving forces for
this great success.
At present, Green Roofs, sky gardens and rooftop gardens can be
found in nearly all big cities around the world, benefiting the
urban environment and their inhabitants.
Finally, landscaped
roofs provide many positive effects for the life expectancy and
the energy balance of a building. In order to guarantee lasting
function, Extensive Green Roofs, Semi-Intensive Greening and Intensive
Green Roofs are all based on the same principles: high quality
materials, professional planning and installation, state of the
art technology and acknowledged guidelines
An international
exchange of ideas and technologies within the Green Roof sector,
therefore, is not only desirable, but simply a necessity with
regard to efficient environmental strategies.
The International
Green Roof Association (IGRA) offers the platform
for the worldwide promotion and dissemination of ecological Green
Roof ideas.
Saving the environment
from continued devastation by our built environment is the single
most important issue for our tomorrow, feeding into our post-millennial
fears that this third millennium will indeed be our last.
Ken Yeang reconstructs
and revisions how and why our current design approach and perception
of architecture must radically change if we are to ensure a sustainable
future. He argues forcefully that this can only be achieved by adopting
the environmentalists view that, aesthetics apart, regards
our environment simply as an assembly of materials (mostly transported
over long distances), that are transciently concentrated on to a
single locality and used for living, working and leisure whose footprints
affect that localitys ecology and whose eventual disposal
has to be accommodated somewhere in the biosphere.
This manual offers
clear instructions to designers on how to design, build and use
a green sustainable architecture. The aim is to produce and maintain
ecosystem-like structures and systems whose content and outputs
not only integrate benignly with the natural environment, but whose
built form and systems function with sensitivity to the localitys
ecology as well in relation to global biospheric processes, and
contribute positively to biodiversity (as opposed to reducing it).
The goal is structures and systems that are low consumers of non-renewable
resources, built with materials that have low ecological consequences
and are designed to facilitate disassembly, continuous reuse and
recycling a (a cyclic process that mimics the way ecosystems recycle
materials), and that at the end of their useful lives can be reintegrated
seamlessly back into the natural environment. Each of these aspects
(and other attendant ones) is examined in detail with regards to
how they influence design and planning.
Ecodesign provides
designers with a comprehensive set of strategies for approaching
ecological design and planning combined with in-depth analysis and
research material not found elsewhere.
.San
Francisco in 2108
IwamotoScott
won the Grand Prize in the History
Channel City of the Future: A Design and Engineering
Challenge, San Francisco. The competition was held Jan. 20,
at the Ferry Building, against 7 other teams including: Anderson,
Anderson Architecture; Fougeron Architecture; Gelfand Partners
Architects; IF Architecture; Kuth Ranieri Architects; Pfau Architecture;
and SLOMobility. The brief asked each architect to rethink and
envision San Francisco 100 years in the future. IwamotoScott
now goes up against the Grand Prize winners of Washington DC
and Atlanta for the title of National Champion, via an online
public voting process.
Symbiotic and multi-scalar, SF HYDRO-NET is an occupiable infrastructure
that organizes critical flows of the city. HYDRO-NET provides
an underground arterial traffic network for hydrogen-fueled
hover-cars, while simultaneously collecting, storing and distributing
water and power tapped from existing aquifer and geothermal
sources beneath San Francisco. A new aquaculture zone with ponds
of algae and forests of sinuous housing towers reoccupy Baylands
inundated by rising sea levels. Hydrogen fuel is produced by
the algae, and is stored and distributed within the nanotube
wall structure of HYDRO-NET's robotically-drilled tunnels. At
key waterfront and neighborhood locales, HYDRO-NET emerges to
form linkages between the terrestrial and subterranean worlds.
Here new architectures bloom as opportunistic urban caves and
outcroppings, fostering new social spaces and densified urban
forms, fed by the resources and connectivity provided by HYDRO-NET.
These locally responsive and distributed nodes and tendrils
facilitate both the preservation and organic evolution of San
Francisco.
'Geothermal Mushrooms' at Twin Peaks, view down Market Street
to 'Algae Towers' downtown
'Fog Flower' in foreground, 'Ocean Fringe' housing at Ocean
Beach / Sunset District, 'Loop Spa-Hotel and 'Geothermal Mushroom'
in distance.
.Futurist
Portrait: Ray Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is an inventor
and futurist. He has been a pioneer in the fields of optical character
recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition
technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author
of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism,
technological singularity, and futurism.
Ray Kurzweil has been
described as the restless genius by the Wall Street
Journal, and the ultimate thinking machine by Forbes.
Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United
States, calling him the rightful heir to Thomas Edison,
and PBS included Ray as one of 16 revolutionaries who made
America, along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
As one of the leading
inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the
first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character
recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the
blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music
synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other
orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed
large-vocabulary speech recognition. Rays web site Kurzweil
AI.net has over one million readers.
Among Rays
many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson
Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received
the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor
in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony.
And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall
of Fame , established by the US Patent Office.
He has received
fifteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Rays latest
book The
Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best
seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and
philosophy.
Ray Kurzweil is currently making a movie due for release in
2008 called The Singularity is Near: A True Story About the
Future. Part fiction, part non-fiction, he interviews 20
big thinkers like Marvin Minsky, plus there is a B-line narrative
story that illustrates some of the ideas, where a computer avatar
(Ramona) saves the world from self-replicating microscopic robots.
In an on-stage interview with Moira Gunn about the book on October
11, 2005, Dr. Gunn reluctantly allowed the question "How
will the singularity help me to get more sex?" and Kurzweil
and Gunn then engaged an elaborate and playful yet serious half-hour
discussion of why "version 3.0" of the coming virtual
reality or augmented reality will provide really good sex while
avoiding some of the risks of traditional sexual intercourse
as experienced circa 2000.
Ray Kurzweil's keynote
address at The Singularity Summit at Stanford put on by the
Singularity Institute in May 2006.
Part I
Part II
Part III
.Agenda
The
Season Events are on Thursdays
Registration: 18:30-19:00, Conference: 19:00-21:15
the
future of Money
Location: Museum
de Burcht van Berlage, Henri Polaklaan 9, 1018 CP Amsterdam [near
Artis Zoo]
May
29
18:30 - 21:15
the
future of Children Learning to Play
Location:
Waag Society, Nieuwmarkt 4, 1012 CR Amsterdam [Center of the Nieuwmarkt]
June
26
18:30 -
Taste
of Diversity
.Club
of Amsterdam Open Business Club
Club
of Amsterdam Open Business Club
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.Contact
Your
comments, ideas, articles are welcome!
Please write to Felix Bopp, Editor-in-Chief: editor@clubofamsterdam.com