Audy R8
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Monday, September 29, 2008
As reported today in New Scientist and elsewhere, the same basic principles used in recent experiments to render objects invisible at least in some parts of the electromagnetic spectrum have been employed to develop a dike system that can shield objects they surround from water waves.
This system is composed of “concentric rings of rigid pillars.” Waves passing through its “labyrinth of radial and concentric corridors” are not cancelled out but rather are reconfigured (re-sculpted?) in such a way that they pass through the object inside with little or no effect.
If this scheme can work in scaled-up versions, it may well protect vulnerable coastlines, entire islands and offshore oil platforms from destructive tsunamis.
While acknowledging the skepticism of so many directed at this tsunami cloaking device, we have to confess to being quite mesmerized, to the detriment of our rational faculties, by the incredibly poetic image of these barriers submerged in the gloomy depths: a flooded forest of concrete colossi diffracting sunlight into its own prismatic corridors.
Perhaps they've been turned into artificial coral reefs to generate some ecotourism income to diversify the local economy and offset construction costs. Or maybe they've been topped off with wind turbines. Or both: The Anti-Tsunami Wind Farm and Barrier Reef Wildlife Park. Surely an ideas competition must be held so as to generate other possible programmes.
In any case, it's probably something Peter Eisenman would design if hired by the Army Corps of Engineers.
Thousands of years from now, when the glaciers come to reclaim back territories they had once surrendered and sea levels retreat in response, they will begin to emerge out of the waters: false skyscrapers barnacled with the ossified remains of countless generations of organisms but still retaining their minimalist geometry; a labyrinth of monoliths taking measurements of a landscape in flux but whose true functions have long been forgotten.
“They are memorials to ancient mariners lost at sea,” one of our many-times-great-grandsons will speculate.
“They're astronomical observatories,” another will suggest.
“You're both wrong,” a future crypto-geographer will shout. “It's a contemplative space designed by a 21st century landscape architect, though rather than being used as a place of serene meditation, it became the well-concealed playground of horny teens, drug dealers and rapists, as well as the pissoir of inebriated sports fans.”
Soon afterwards they will shriek in frustration like Kubrickian apes.
Versailles in the Pacific
“On evacuation and atomization uses his self-energy and on drifting atomization sea waters skywards”
Submerged Ziggurat?
Friday, September 26, 2008
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Via del.icio.us/bldgblog, we discovered the above photo from the National Maritime Museum. In the foreground, you see a group of bathing machines en route to the waters off of Scarborough, Yorkshire.
A common sight in beach resorts in the 19th century, bathing machines allowed women to change their clothes in private, reach the waters without parading through open stretches of beach in their bathing suits, and then frolic about in relative privacy and without violating contemporary notions of modesty. Queen Victoria certainly had one, and like it, these caravans of propriety, of social mores too foreign for our own eyes, were simple wooden structures. Lest they invite voyeurs, they were built without windows, otherwise there were little ones inaccessible to prying eyes. Some were made of canvas and still others were very luxurious affairs, but all of them were on wheels, pulled in and out of the surf by horses or brute human power.
Perhaps there's something to be learned from this outmoded sea-side etiquette. Instead of building a palatial beach house with five bathrooms that will only be used as a summer retreat, you build something more modest, say, a tiny house — on wheels.
When the next Category 5 hurricane eyes your neck of the woods, it, of course, retreats to safer harbors. You don't even have to ask tax payers to bail you out after damaging winds and storm surges have deconstructed your Martha Stewart Living centerfold into driftwood and then ask/beg/litigate again to pay the federal flood insurance of your replacement colossus designed by Toll Brothers. Considering the current economic climate, there probably wouldn't be enough federal money left that can be earmarked for beach fortification that only benefits you, who, in turn, probably couldn't afford a rarely inhabited second home.
From a vernacular architecture of Victorian social conventions to a zeitgeist architecture of fiscal sobriety.
In any case, part of the label of the photo reads: “Scarborough made the headlines in 1993 after a landslide caused the Holbeck Hall hotel to fall into the sea.” Holbeck Hall should have been on wheels, too.
Other Bathing Machines
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
#1: The New York Times visits Alan Berger and gets a tour of his reclamation project in the Pontine Marshes. Says Berger, “The solution has to be as artificial as the place. We are trying to invent an ecosystem in the midst of an entirely engineered, polluted landscape.” Much earlier, The New York Times tagged along with the landscape architect and his class to a severely polluted mining area in Colorado.
#2: Thanks to Things Magazine, we finally learned what is now on the former site of Osaka Stadium: the green oasis of Namba Parks.
#3: The Farnsworth Flood of 2008: Blair Kamin, architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, reports here, here and here — the comments are worth a read. Something tells us this won't be the last postscript bearing this sort of news.
#4: “Dos Personas encadenarons sus brazos al suelo en una galería subterránea a cuatro metros de profundidad para evitar, o al menos retrasar, el desalojo y derribo del inmueble que ocupan en el centro de sevilla.”
#5: Boing Boing picked up our post on Agro-veillance, and the comments there are worth a read. They create a dialogue that a lot of blogs, including ours, long for.
#6: For a different strategy than the one planned to uncover and preserve the flooded ancient city of Seuthopolis, take a look at the proposed underwater museum of Alexandria.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Last month, we read on Der Spiegel about a German researcher who was conducting an experiment into slowing or stopping altogether the melting of Alpine glaciers.
Geographer Hans-Joachim Fuchs in the western German city Mainz has another idea. He wants to harness the power of cold mountain winds — so-called kabatic [sic] winds, or streams of cold, dense air that flow downhill — with windscreens. The screens would keep the cool air on top of the glaciers, perhaps preserving them for a little while longer.
For some reasons — maybe because our attention was somewhere else, i.e., too many RSS feeds, too little brain cells — we thought Fuchs was using the windscreens as though they were sails, to catch the winds to thrust the glaciers away from the higher temperatures of lower elevations. Curioser, we began wondering if they could also work on the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica, where they will slow their march towards the sea. Or vice versa, if you want your glaciers to melt faster so you can increase your habitable territory, make oil exploration easier, and want to sell freshwater at exorbitant prices to water-parched countries.
Our full cognitive abilities did eventually return, but frankly, we should have just continued on misreading the article, because the real experiment is as absurd and farfetched as our own speculations.
“Something like that would certainly not be very effective,” says one glaciologist about Fuchs' idea.
“Even if you built a wind screen big enough, it's doubtful whether you could meaningfully alter the wind patterns,” says another glaciologist.
Fuchs is not a glaciologist.
Perhaps Fuchs and all the others should just forget about solving the local effects of climate change and directly combat global warming head on. Attack the virus, not the symptoms.
So for instance, Fuchs can re-conceptualize his windscreens as a source of sustainable energy. To do this, he may want to collaborate with Sheila Kennedy and his durable plastic curtains gets replaced with her photovoltaic curtains.
There isn't enough sun in the Alps, you say, not to mention Kennedy's electrified fabric probably isn't scalable from domestic use to industrial use?
In that case, forget the solar textiles; use piezoelectric curtains to harvest wind energy. Array them on the the sides of mountains and along the valleys to create katabatic tunnels and magnify the force and duration of the winds.
Meanwhile, with the snows gone and vegetation not yet well-established, rockslides will be more frequent. Solution: collaborate with Cemagref, the world leading institution in avalanche science. Ask them to engineer your mega-clothesline to act like a deflection or catchment dam when disasters strike. You will definitely need some anti-landslide protection, because developers would be lulled into a false sense of security and build where they shouldn't.
And if these anti-avalance protections aren't enough, you could always apply certain types of bacterium known to hold post-glacial soil together like cement.
You still say they won't generate enough electricity to make a difference, even if all of Europe's soon-to-be iceless mountains are curtained? Very well. Forget Europe.
Let's head to Nepal, Tibet, Peru, Bolivia, Eritrea and elsewhere cut off from the grid, where a now less extensive installation may not be enough to power the microwave and the washing machine and the space heater and the television and all the lightbulbs in the house at once but they will provide enough electricity to power the public water pump, the medical instruments in the clinic, the low-kilowatt fixtures in the school, and home radios.
Collaborate with FogQuest, and they could be turned into fog water collectors as well.
But to return to Europe and to Fuchs, his curtains may yet still have a meaningful effect if they were again re-conceptualized as an art installation, one that hopefully can bring even more attention to the local effects of global warming and forces people to question their lifestyles.
His ideas may be “crazy,” the butt of jokes among true glaciologists and climatologists, but at least with his frequent appearances in the mass media, more are now keenly aware that their precious glaciers are disappearing.
In an homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, he will title it: Running Fence v2.0.
Spiraling corkscrew-like from the zenith of the Matterhorn down to its base, they'll billow in the katabatic winds like Tibetan prayer rags, awaiting the passing of one landscape and the coming of another.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Another passage from Against the Tides; we just can't help ourselves.
Here, Cordelia Dean is actually quoting the conclusions of a report written in 1981 by a group of coastal geologists and signed off by many more experts in the same field of study. Their intent was to convince local, state and federal policy makers to restrict development on American beaches. Nobody listened. Considering recent meteorological events, perhaps government officials may want to buy them lunch and do some coastal policy pow-wow.
1. People are directly responsible for the “erosion problem” by constructing buildings near the beach. For practical purposes, there is no erosion problem where there are no buildings or farms.
2. Fixed shoreline structures (breakwaters, groins, seawalls, etc.) can be successful in prolonging the life of beach buildings. However, they almost always accelerate the natural rate of beach erosion...in the immediate vicinity of structures or...along adjacent shorelines sometimes miles away.
3. Most shoreline stabilization projects protect property, not beaches. The protected property belongs to a few individuals relative to the number of Americans who use beaches. If left alone, beaches will always be present, even if they are moving landward.
4. The cost of saving beach property by stabilization is very high. Often it is greater than the value of the property to be saved especially if long range costs are considered.
5. Shoreline stabilization in the long run (10 to 100 years) usually results in severe degradation or total loss of valuable natural resource, the open ocean beach.
6. Historical data show that shoreline stabilization is irreversible. Once a beach has been stabilized, it will almost remain in a stabilized state of increasing cost to the taxpayer.
Again: To be continued.
POSTSCRIPT #1: In searching for an image to accompany this post, we stumbled accidentally into this article from All Headline News. It's title reads: “Texas Law Might Prevent Some Owners Of Beachfront Homes Destroyed By Ike From Rebuilding.”
The state legislature proposed the new law because it was tired of spending millions of tax dollars to restore beaches eroded by nature each year around houses built on the coastline. Limiting development near the shore would reduce costs to the state of storm damage, disaster response and erosion.
Do other states have similar laws in the books or being drafted by their legislatures? Let us know.
The Audi introduced the first official photos of their concept-car Audi TT Clubsport quattro. The premier of the prototype was held in Austria at the exhibition Wortherseetreffen 2007…
The new Z4 is a bit wider than the Z3
Its got some new features added
> long sweeping hood
> athletic and assertive new design.
> seating is down very low n comfortable
An extreme region for Automobiltuners, in which only some risk, was always BMW M-rows cars, in particular the compromiseless Z4 M-coup, a Thoroughbred, to the machine drives.But the fact that the delimitations are by reached on this extraordinary car far, is obvious from the new concept carrier by alternating current Schnitzer - the PROFILE - even at the beginning of volatile view. Classical machine co-ordinating pulling the energy high revving of the six cylinder of Inline enterprise to a durable HP 350. Only a special “active breathing” air box is used, but the engine control system unit remapped. But power isn’t enough propel, in order to receive the maximum from an athletic heart to. Thus the changed rear axle relationship of 3.91:1 makes sprint better the capacity available, while the perfectly smooth transmission with the alternating current Schnitzer short-circuit shift by the driver guarantees clear changes.
BMW pulled somewhat of a Shanghai Surprise with its latest creation, a Gran Turismo-styled vehicle called the Concept CS, which the automaker previewed in advance of its Shanghai Motor Show debut later today in Shanghai.
Clearly, there's plenty of Bangle in the new design, with flame surfacing and a version of the now famous rear end treatment, along with some heritage features such as the return of the 'shark nose' front end. Check out the cut line above the rear fenders, there's a little Dodge Charger in there. BMW says the CS sports potential new design themes which the automaker says signal the next step in what its design language could look like. The CS takes the four-door coupe approach with its greenhouse. With the success Mercedes-Benz CLS, that shouldn't be surprising.
The Ferrari F50 was introduced in 1995 to celebrated Ferrari's 50th anniversary. This mid-engined, convertible, two-seater supercar featured an improved version of the Ferrari V-12 engine originally developed for use on the 1992 Ferrari Formula One race car.
The Ferrari F430 was introduced at the 2004 Paris Motor Show with delivery beginning in November that same year. The F430 high-performance 2-seater sporstcar succeeded the Ferrari 360.
Make: Honda
Model: Civic Coupe EM1 1.6L
Year: 1994
Output: 210
Description: My Civic was made in 1994. I have started my tuning in 1998. There is completely modified interior: the flocked console, sporting seats, aluminium pedals. Exterior styling contains new bumpers, side sills, yellow finish with airbrushed painting, allow wheels and colored brake units. Performance modifications contains from the new ECU, modified exhaust system, Nitro, fully adjustable air suspension, brake system.
The "news" today was also about how the Touareg would serve as precursor to Porsche's Cayenne SUV. But as Porsche's engineers told me last year, a hybrid version of the Cayenne has been planned for quite some time. It would make sense though for the Touareg to turn hybrid based on the Cayenne since both vehicles share the same platform (a lot of people don't like to hear that after spending so much money on the Cayenne). Either way, I would expect the Touareg to be Volkswagen's debut hybrid model, whenever that will be.
The Honda Fit (known as the Honda Jazz in many parts of the world – we think Honda didn't call it the Jazz in North-America because they already have a motorcycle with that name). When introduced in Japan, the Fit/Jazz sold more than the Toyota Corolla, a car that has been at the top of the best-selling list in Japan for 33 consecutive years! You can find incredibly in depth reviews of the car here and here. It is not clear exactly what engines will be available for North-America, but the 1.5 liters VTEC version of the Fit is officially rated at 5.0l/100 km (47 mpg).
Swing over to eGMCarTech to read up on the hydrogen powered fuel cell car Honda just unveiled at the LA Auto Show. It’s expected to be hit the actual market next summer, getting 68 MPG and a range of 270 miles. The sales will be limited to three years leases at $600/month. eGMCarTech also has a big gallery of photos of the car.
The Frankfurt Motor Show between September 13 - 23 is shaping up to be a stellar affair with the news of yet another world premiere.
Japanese manufacturer Suzuki will unveil their 'Batmobile-like' Kizashi concept car at the show along with a newly developed Splash compact and a World Rally Championship (WRC) inspired version of the SX4.
New Suzuki Grand Vitara NEW 5 Door-bright dynamic vehicle for people leading active lives and smart functionality, technological and unique style.
Swing over to eGMCarTech to read up on the hydrogen powered fuel cell car Honda just unveiled at the LA Auto Show. It’s expected to be hit the actual market next summer, getting 68 MPG and a range of 270 miles. The sales will be limited to three years leases at $600/month. eGMCarTech also has a big gallery of photos of the car.
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