15.Apr.2010 Weekly Fuel – Tax Day Edition
by Jay Cox-Chapman, Design Build Assistant
This week I had the pleasant duty of attending a workshop hosted by the Boston Society of Architects entitled “Toward Net-Zero Energy Houses in New England,” with presentations by Albert, Righter, and Tittman, Transformations, Inc., and Byggmeister Associates. While many of the concepts were familiar from our Box Office project, any conversation involving R-values and kBTUs/sf/yr is music to a green-building-geek’s ears.
A useful diagram from Albert, Righter, and Tittman
According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, there are 8.6 million robots in the world. Still, better robots than zombies.
The Infrastructurist thinks that 3D imaging is the future of infrastructure construction. While we at Stack think it’s the future of all construction, it is clear that infrastructure projects, with their complex pathways and myriad interactions with other systems in congested environments, are a particularly ripe application.
Imaging sample from Parsons Brinckerhoff and WSDOT
90 percent of the world’s subsurface office space isn’t in Moscow or Toronto….it’s in Kansas City, Missouri. Welcome to SubTropolis, a 5-million sf underground facility built in an old limestone mine. The Atlantic touts it as a way to save energy — as they quote inhabitants, the weather forecast down there is always “mid 60s and overcast.” Personally I would go crazy without the sky, but it raises the intriguing possibility of housing certain services — distribution centers, warehouses, or data centers — below the surface, where they can be close to the center of things without taking up valuable land and energy.
Instead of a corner office as a promotion, you get a pillar. (via the Atlantic)
Via BLDGBLOG, a very cool architectural installation: a room full of lights that records heart rates by turning on and off in rhythm. Each row of lights records a new person’s heart rate, and each rate moves sequentially down the room as new rates are recorded, resulting in a ceiling that twinkles in tune with its occupants’ hearts. Pretty poetic, and it raises an interesting set of possibilities around architectural biofeedback.
A photo of Pulse Room installed in Quebec, from the artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
