Palestra is a building situated in the South London and inside you can find the London Development Agency and the London Climate Change Agency. Palestra has an extraordinary design envisioned by Alsop Architects and its construction cost about $120 million.
Although there was a big amount of money invested, one of its component failed in 2006 and now the Palestra is going to receive new wind turbines in order to power up the building again. LDA and LCCA have the purpose of improving the life quality for the Londoners, to sustain the economic growth and to contribute to the reduction of CO2 emissions.
The substitution of the wind turbines will be made by Solar Technologies Ltd. and soon the Palestra will be powered also with the help of fuel cell technology. As London moves forward, the authorities are planning to build another green and high technology structures. We will have to wait and see if other cities in the world will follow their example.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College claim to have found a way to convert the electricity from heat much more efficient, a discovery that is supposed to make many of the today’s products use a smaller amount of energy for the same applications.
A new company has already received start-up funds from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to develop and commercialize the new method. The technology is based on the thermoelectric effect and scientists managed to use nanotechnology in exploiting the phenomenon. The company’s first product will be a material able to bear temperatures of over 400 degrees Fahrenheit, which will be used in industrial purposes. The primary target to benefit from this system will be the utility-scale power plants, that waste a great deal of heat.
The first thing that comes to our imagination from the objects we use that should be improved with this technology are cars, and yes, they surely will, but I guess we’ll have to wait until this company finishes the work on products that will drastically reduce the heat used in the industrial field.
It seems that when our vehicles will use this method, a car that now reaches a maximum of 110 miles per hour will be able to get to 4 or 500 miles instead (of course, if the wheels can take it). The method is called GMZ Energy and MIT professor of mechanical engineering Gang Chen, physicist Zhifeng Ren, and nanotechnology MIT researcher Mildred Dresselhaus worked at developing the system.
The idea of a greener world is starting to get in the minds of many people because it’s inevitable not to see that we are danger due to global warming. Green has begun to draw the attention of architects who will have to build greener buildings and structures. One of the best concepts is called Vegetated Architecture or Veg.itecture.
This results from the fusion between landscape and urbanism, and it consists of aesthetically placing vegetation on buildings. Most of the buildings that will be built are called bioclimatic skyscrapers and they were envisioned by Ken Yeang, designer and fond of veg.itecture.
Is not easy to construct these kind of structures because the designer has to take into consideration season changes, temperature and rainfalls, the lighting which will be provided by the alignment to the solar path and ecological materials.
Ken Yeang already designed some extraordinary concepts involving bioclimatic skyscrapers and other very interesting projects which you can see in the gallery below.
Arcosanti is an experimental town project begun in 1970 by the Cosanti Foundation, aiming at improving urban conditions and lessening our destructive impact on nature. It is built in the Arizona desert, 70 miles north of Phoenix and will host 5,000 people when finished.
The large-scale solar greenhouses will occupy only 25 acres of a land preserve of 4,060, keeping the natural countryside near the urban habitants. Beside residential houses, it has a foundry, several labs, an amphitheater, an office suite, swimming pool and others. At this point, it is quite small, looking more like a village, but it’s still under construction.
Arcosanti was designed by Italian architect Paolo Soleri and is part of a master plan to develop more and more towns using arcology, which is the abbreviation of architectural ecology.
Auroville is an under-construction town from south India that plans to create a harmonious way of life for all its inhabitants. Lalit Bhati is an urban planner, an architect and resident of Auroville, and will be presenting the project at the Ecocity World Summit. The Auroville site states that the ultimate purpose of this city is “to realise human unity”, and to be a town where “men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities”.
Although the spiraling neighborhoods are only half way done, we can see from this 360° view of Auroville the idea under which it’s being made, that both industrial and residential areas have to blend perfectly in order to offer a modern, but still natural living to the population of 50,000 people from around the world it is about to host.
