Archive for January, 2006
Last night I was at the smart materials event at the Dana Center in Londons Science Museum where a number of interesting materials that could be potentially applied to interactive architecture. I personally didn’t find anything that was mindblowingly new but it was good to talk to some of the people in this industry and discuss the future uses of these materials.
An obvious way to start an overview of Smart Materials should be to provide a definition of Smart Materials. However, beyond the completely accurate but not too useful, “a material that displays smart behaviour” that is easier said than accomplished. To define a Smart Material we really need to understand what is meant by Smart behaviour and then, by means of some examples, to develop our definition.
Smart behaviour occurs when a material can sense some stimulus from its environment and react to it in a useful, reliable, reproducible and usually reversible manner. A really Smart material will use its reaction to the external stimulus to initiate or actuate an active response, e.g. with an active control system. Whilst this is perhaps a more useful definition examples from familiar items would help at this point.
There are some materials that are designed to change their colour at a particular temperature. They find uses in bath plugs that show when the bath water is too hot, children’s feeding spoons and coffee or tea mugs. Gromit’s nose on the PG Tips mug is a very recent example. Technically this is described as “thermochromic” behaviour where a thermal stimulus causes a useful optical response.
Smart behaviour is therefore the reaction of a material to some change in its environment, no material can be Smart in isolation, it must be a part of a structure or system such as the bath plug, the spoon or the coffee mug.
Another interesting heat responsive material is Oricalco
This men’s shirt by Corpo Nova is woven with titanium, which allows the fabric to react to temperature shifts. The shirt holds its wrinkles when bunched up, and then instantly relaxes when exposed to a current of hot air (as from an electric hair dryer). The shirt can thus be ‘ironed’ while its user wears it.
Here’s a project at MIT using Smart Materials I really love called Puddlejumper
Puddlejumper is a luminescent raincoat that glows in the rain. Hand-silkscreened electroluminescent lamps on the front of the jacket are wired to interior electronics and conductive water sensors on the back and left sleeve. When water hits one of the sensors, the corresponding lamp lights up, creating a flickering pattern of illumination that mirrors the rhythm of rainfall.
more on Smart Materials soon to come…
January 20th, 2006
Toshiba Elevator and Building Systems Corp have developed the world’s first elevators controlled by magnetic levitation available as early as 2008.Using maglev technology capable of suspending objects in mid-air through the combination of magnetic attraction and repulsion they promise quieter and more comfortable travel at up to 300m per-minute, some 700m per-minute slower however than conventional lifts. Personally I’d prefer to trust in Otis rather than Electromagnets.
Video of Superconducting Levitation
Maglev technology has already been used to develop high-speed trains. The only passenger-carrying maglev train in the world links Pudong International Airport in Shanghai, China, to the city center at speeds of 430 kilometers per hour.
While I’m on the subject of Lifts, NASA have shown an interest in Space Elevators. Check out the space elevator website which follows the progress of research into utilizing lifts as a transportation and utility systems for moving people, payloads, power, and gases between the surface of the Earth and space!
“Recent advances in technology, most notably the development of carbon nanotube composites, now appear to make building a space elevator feasible. Initial research reports on building the space elevator that draw upon these discoveries have now been completed. As proposed in these reports, the space elevator will consist of a carbon nanotube composite ribbon stretching some 62,000 miles from earth to space. The elevator will be anchored to an offshore sea platform near the equator in the Pacific Ocean, and to a small counterweight in space. Mechanical lifters (robotic elevator cars) will move up and down the ribbon, carrying such items as satellites, solar power systems, and eventually people into space. The Space Elevator is not a tower, or even an elevator shaft. It’s just the elevator cable, without even any big motors at the top to pull things up. Vehicles and their payloads have to pull themselves up the cable with their own motors and power.
via wmmna and bldgblog
January 19th, 2006
Okay apologies for irrelevant last post here’s one about interactive architecture strangely enough. NOX run by Lars Spuybroek do some fantastic work and have made a number of interactive buildings and installations over the past few years including Son-O-House and D-Tower which I still haven’t got round to blogging. Here’s one of their new projects which should be completed by the end of 2006.
Whispering Garden is a public art work next to Hotel New York in Rotterdam, that we based on the myths of Lorelei and the Sirens, luring the ships onto the rocks. All the possible wind properties (direction, force, duration) are used to have computer-generated female voices continuously singing vowels splitting into other vowels, making overtones proliferate, creating a polyphonic forest of sound.
The steel structure brings the whirls from Mucha’s hair-arabesques into a systemacy of crossings and mergings supporting green glass panels. The faceted glass shatters the light into many directions, and with every step we take there will be a new flicker, a new variation of emerald shading. Whispering Garden is a synaesthetic node, short-circuiting all elements and forces that are present: connecting the wind to light, light to structure, structure to sound, sound to architecture, architecture to bodies, looping all the loops, making everything sensing everything, making everything sensuous.
NOX Website
via designws
January 18th, 2006
James Clar of LED Voxel fame is currently working on an architecture model for the Cloud9’s ‘Habitat Hotel’. “The Habitat Hotel will be developed in the Barcelona area. It is a hotel with a light mesh that wraps the whole building. The light mesh has sensors that will read the daylight sun amplitude and then at night each node will give off color according to how much that node collected sun. Therefore, the mesh reflects the energy levels of each day, it will change over seasons and due to weather… The mesh itself is raised off the building and forms its own see-through structure. Also, each node is self-contained with it’s own sensor and LEDs, there is no central computer controlling the whole structure.”
An interactive prototype of this system will be exhibited at ‘MoMA‘ next month.
via the always on the ball pixelsumo
January 16th, 2006
Above is the Blur Building by Diller + Scofido whirling above Lake Neuchatel , Switzerland and Below is an interesting interview of Brian Massumi by Thomas Markussen.
Thomas Markussen
A few years ago, architects were almost obsessed with the question of how cyberspace and virtual reality are changing basic ideas about architectural space. But events like the Neuroaesthetics conference here in London , along with the increasing impact of neuroscience on contemporary architectural theory, marks a clear change of interests — if not a paradigm shift. Significantly, the then almost ubiquitous word “virtual” is now being replaced by “neuro.” What is happening?
Brian Massumi
The introduction of digital techniques into architecture, and the preoccupation with the virtual that came with it, brought up some very old questions with a new intensity. The change came at a time when the idea of “virtual reality” was very current in popular culture and had a major presence in the mass media. “Virtual reality” was used as a synonym for “artificial reality.” There was something of an apocalyptic tone to many commentaries, to the effect that the new generation of digital technology was creating a technological cocoon around human beings that would separate them from any direct access to the world, and would denature human relations.
The old questions that took on new urgency had to do with the relation between nature and culture. Digital techniques in architecture added a new twist that changed the terms in which this question could be asked… Read Article Here
via turbulence also check out their recent post ‘…and more thoughts on the End of Cyberspace‘
January 16th, 2006
Website
I’ve been looking at using dirigibles for an interactive installation I’m thinking about building but more about that hopefully in the future. I found this while I was looking for some meteorological balloons. JP Aerospace is a volunteer-based organization developing cheap access to space using lighter than air systems and although it doesn’t have the same sort of funding as the Scaled Composites space programme, it does have an interesting approach to cheap sustainable space tourism. Its been in development for over two decades with eighty ‘real hardware test flights’ and expectations are for it to be completed in seven years.
‘Balloons have carried people and machines to the edge of space for over seventy years. JP Aerospace is developing the technology to fly a balloonor more accurately, their relative, the airshipdirectly to orbit. Flying an airship directly from the ground to orbit is not practical. An airship large enough to reach orbit would not survive the winds near the surface of the Earth. Conversely, an airship that could fly from the ground to upper atmosphere would not be light enough to reach space. The resulting configuration is a three-part architecture for using lighter-than-air vehicles to reach space.’
This 3 part system begins with an ‘atmospheric’ airship which will travel from the surface of the Earth to 140,000 feet and meet with a suborbital space station, a permanent, crewed facility called the DSS (Dark Sky Station). It will be here that they build the orbital airship initially and then use the DSS as the departure port.
‘The third part of the architecture is an airship/dynamic vehicle that flies directly to orbit. In order to utilize the few molecules of gas at extreme altitudes, this craft is big. The initial test vehicle is 6,000 feet (over a mile) long. The airship uses buoyancy to climb to 200,000 feet. From there it uses electric propulsion to slowly accelerate. As it accelerates it dynamically climbs. Over several days it reaches orbital velocity.’
‘The high altitude airship has been built and is awaiting test flights. Several Dark Sky Station platforms have been built and flown. Every piece of equipment for this system has been carried to 100,000 feet and tested in the environment. The first crewed DSS is scheduled to fly in eighteen months. The ion engine 120,000 foot flight test for the orbital airship will be flown in the next five months.’
January 15th, 2006
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