Category: Architecture

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Sepp Hasslberger: 3D Design and Print of a Customized Solar Home

Architecture
Sepp Hasslberger
Sepp Hasslberger

Video, 7:53.  Produces 150% of the energy it consumes.  Surplus can go into your car or to a less well-endowed neighbor.

Solar House 2.0, erected this year on Barcelona's waterfront, uses time-tested passive solar techniques, but it takes a high-tech leap forward using digital design and digital fabrication techniques to make it completely optimized for ideal solar gain.

With its jagged cantilevers jutting out at odd angles across most of the facade (except the North corner), Solar House 2.0 looks, and acts, like few other buildings. Thanks to digital design, the building's structure was mathematically adjusted so that every point of the building was adapted to the exact conditions of the exterior.

Software also played a lead role in the building's construction. Relying on 3D milling (for more on 3D printing see our video MakerBot: open source, self-replicating, stuff-making robot)- the Solar House designers employed a CNC (computer numerical control) wood router- the building's individual pieces could be completely customized, creating the totally irregular patterns not possible (or affordable) with older, mass production techniques.

Solar House 2.0 was completely prefabricated so when the pieces arrived at the site, it took the team just 2 weeks to erect the 154-square-meter (1,658 sq ft) building. The building's plans are open source and available to anyone who wants to build their own solar house, solar office or solar tower, but completely-customized to their location.

More info on original video: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/fully-customized-modular-solar-house-is-…

Music by Paperhand Lincoln: http://www.paperhandlincoln.com/

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SchwartzReport: Corridors of the Mind — Neuroscience Shaping Architecture Shaping Minds and Healing Souls

Architecture

schwartz reportCorridors of the Mind

Could neuroscientists be the next great architects?

ARCHITECTS HAVE BEEN talking for years about “biophilic” design, “evidence based” design, design informed by the work of psychologists. But last May, at the profession’s annual convention, John Zeisel and fellow panelists were trying to explain neuroscience to a packed ballroom.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

The late-afternoon session pushed well past the end of the day; questions just kept coming. It was a scene, Zeisel marveled—all this interest in neuroscience—that would not have taken place just a few years earlier.

Zeisel is a sociologist and architect who has researched the design of facilities for Alzheimer’s patients. Architects, he explains, “understand about aesthetics; they know about psychology. The next depth to which they can go is understanding the brain and how it worksand why do people feel more comfortable in one space than another?”

. . . . . . . . .

New neurons continue to be born throughout life, particularly in the hippocampus, the part of your brain that processes new information on its way to being stored as long-term memories. This means that your capacity to add new memories and learn new skills can continue to expand. And how fast these cells are added seems directly influenced by the richness of our interactions with our environment. When Gage introduced these findings to architects at the American Institute of Architects’ 2003 convention, he pronounced an idea that is still sinking in: “Changes in the environment change the brain, and therefore they change our behavior.”

Read full article — this is IMPORTANT.

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Michel Bauwens: One Community – Global Free-sharing and Open Source Collaboration

Architecture
Michel Bauwens
Michel Bauwens

GLOBAL OPEN SOURCE COLLABORATION

One Community is a non-profit organization and think tank leading a global free-sharing and open source collaboration for the creation and building of a duplicable open source village model for self-sufficient and sustainable living. Everything we do and create is open source, free-shared, and aggressively marketed to make available and spread the information and ideas as quickly as possible.

Our goal in creating this open source village model is to provide everything necessary to establish a global collaborative of successive teacher/demonstration communities, villages, and cities to exponentially expand and share sustainability. One Community is creating this because we believe it has the potential to facilitate a new Golden Age of sustainable living, cooperation, collaboration, and people thinking and creating for The Highest Good of All.

Learn more.