28.Jan.2010 Weekly Fuel – 1/28/10

by Jay Cox-Chapman, Design-Build Assistant

At Stack, we’re all about construction, but every once in a while it’s nice to check out the other side of the coin: choreographed destruction, set to opera. (Virginia DOT)

Another “best architecture of the decade” list, with intriguing choices like the Large Hadron Collider and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (mammoth.us)

GOOD Magazine explores what makes a city bicycle friendly, with some accidental insights into the nature of all good design: “Each element should help us understand the system on a grand scale, give the user the right amount of appropriately timed information, and be very deliberate and unobtrusive.”

An Albany, NY, grocery store becomes one of the first in the nation to be powered by a fuel cell. Tax credits to UTC, the manufacturer, helped the new technology make sense. (Green Inc.)

Out of Denmark, the 2006 Samso Energy Academy by Arkitema. Samso’s commitment to renewable energy was profiled in a 2008 New Yorker piece by Elizabeth Kolbert, and demonstrates how sustainability is an integrated challenge: it demands infrastructure and architecture working together.

Finally, the blog of a small Providence furniture designer–it’s the presence of so many small and innovative providers that makes Providence an interesting place to work. (bilt furniture)