Circulus at the disused Seeley G. Mudd Library at Pomona College
Art student Sam Starr built a small velodrome in a disused library at Pomona College. The project riffs off the idea of circulation — of bicycles, of books, of bloodflow in exercise — and simultaneously touches on the relationship between old and new media. Regardless, its a beautiful structure.
A boat!
Workers restoring the World Trade Center site found an 18th century ship buried in the muck. BLDG Blog explores what it means to find ships and wharves suspended beneath the foundations of our cities.
Plastiki lands in Australia
A few months ago, a group of sailors departed from San Francisco on a trip to cross the Pacific Ocean, with a stop at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, to raise awareness about plastic and waste. Their vessel? A catamaran made entirely of recycled soda bottles. Last week, they arrived in Australia. A staggering feat of seamanship, resourcefulness, and commitment to the environment.
While good news from the Gulf appeared on the horizon this week with the successful capping of the Deepwater Horizon well, the above simulation underscores how serious the situation still is. The simulation follows the release of 8 million particles into the currents of the Gulf and Eastern Atlantic.
Lord understands what Stack is all about, when he writes that we
focus on sustainable and innovative construction projects that lower costs by removing the inefficiencies that often arise between design work and construction.
Containers to Clinics was a gratifying project to apply that methodology, and we’ll continue to follow its progress closely!
by Jay Cox-Chapman, Design-Build Assistant
Stack recently installed green roofing on a project in Providence. As a certified green roof installer in MA and RI, we are always thrilled when our clients can realize the decreased heating and cooling loads, decreased stormwater runoff, and improved air and water quality that vegetated roofs provide.
The staff of Containers to Clinics, the organization that engaged Stack to build a clinic out of two 20′ shipping containers, sent us these photos from Red Hook, Brooklyn, of the clinic getting loaded onto a cargo ship bound for Port-au-Prince.
The ISO containers fit in happily alongside their more utilitarian neighbors on the ship, a key part of Stack’s adaptibility-driven design.
The cranes that load the containers are controlled by highly precise GPS; the operator only varies the speed.
From Guatemala, news that a terrifyingly enormous sinkhole swallowed an entire factory, which was fortunately closed. The thing is reportedly 60 feet across and 300 feet deep — about as deep as the Statue of Liberty is tall.
The sinkholes — which occur regularly in Central America and Florida, among other places, are a result of the underlying Karst topography. Water (often from leaking infrastructure) dissolves the limestone bedrock, creating a cavity. Additional saturation — in this case provided by the destructive Tropical Storm Agatha — can cause the soil structure to collapse into the void. (Infrastructurist)
This guy got pretty lucky. And possibly didn’t even notice.
Some building scientists have done a study on the effectiveness of sticky rice as a mortar ingredient in traditional Chinese buildings. A pretty cool example of simple but secretly sophisticated technology, especially in earthquake-prone China. (Inhabitat)
And finally, because I can’t seem to leave this story alone, a visualization of what the BP oil spill would do to your region: If It Was My Home. Makes the magnitude of it a bit more real, notwithstanding their neglect of the subjunctive.
BLDG Blog points out this architectural prank/sculpture from artists Julien Berthier and Simon Boudvin: a fake door installed against a wall in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris. It’s almost touching that the door is faithfully cleaned of graffiti by the city.
Stack continues to follow the Deepwater Horizon disaster closely. It’s events like this that redouble our commitment to green and high-performance buildings. The Infrastructurist lays out the technical causes of the disaster, while CBS news has a harrowing (and damning) survivor account.
Speaking of the Gulf, this stunning 1944 map, prepared by the US Army Corps of Engineers, shows the wildly variable course of the river over millennia. John McPhee meditated on the futility of controlling these changes in his 1990 book The Control of Nature.
Early in the morning in NYC, an intrepid flight crew has been using LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) to produce a highly accurate map of New York City. The information will be used in disaster preparedness and sustainability efforts; comprehensively understanding a place helps in managing it. The effort reminds me of an essay by Adam Gopnik that beautifully describes the impossibility of mapping a place as ever-changing as New York. (NYT)
Via inhabitat, a very cool armchair that prominently celebrates its recycled origins.
GE provides a fascinating and interactive look at energy consumption by appliance. It’s possible to sort by consumption by watts, dollars, and even equivalent gallons of gas. Click here for the interactive version. At Stack, we admire elegant ways to handle complex information, especially related to sustainability and energy consumption.
Stack principals Andy Keating and Joshua Brandt will be presenting their vision for 21st century building systems at the May meeting of the Rhode Island chapter of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association on May 4th. They’ll be discussing the energy-efficient Box Office and the future of green building in Rhode Island and beyond.
First, the good news: after nine years of regulatory wrangling, the Cape Wind offshore wind turbine project got the go-ahead from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Roadblocks remain, but there’s no question that the approval is good news for the wind industry in general. Developers favor offshore sites because of steadier winds and easier access to large coastal populations. (NYT)
And now, some bad news: a giant oil rig suffered a bad explosion and ultimately sank in the Gulf of Mexico. The really bad news? The 450-ton subsurface machinery that is supposed to cap the well in precisely this situation has failed, dumping thousands of gallons of oil into sensitive habitats. Even robots sent down to revive the valves can’t shut it off.
This photo from treehugger.com shows the scale of the accident -- each of those ships is several hundred feet long.
From the used-to-be-good-news department, this incredibly outdated ad from the Humble Energy Corp, now part of ExxonMobil. Can you imagine an energy company running this ad today? Via.
Via io9, a roundup of “weird urban ecosystems” — several of which, including Garbage City in Cairo and Subtropolis in Kansas City, have appeared here on the StackMachine. Especially intriguing are Moscow’s metro-riding dogs.
The island ghost city of Gunkanjima in Japan (via i09)
And finally, from the silver-lining department, an interesting effect of the Rhode Island floods on fisheries. Apparently the sewage and other organic matter stirred up by the floodwaters is dramatically increasing phytoplankton blooms, which is great news if you’re a Narragansett Bay fish, and therefore a Rhode Island fisherman.
The blue line means more fish food this year -- NOAA via NYTimes
