Calatrava’s WTC transportation hub

The image of a bird in flight is not one normally associated with an underground transportation center, but architect Santiago Calatrava has perfectly managed to marry the two. As designed, the World Trade Center (WTC) transportation hub — built with two 150-feet-tall canopies extending from a glass- and steel-ribbed “body” — sits at street level like a bird poised for flight, delivering natural light to the PATH train platform 60 feet below ground.

Calatrava originally unveiled his design to the public in 2004 and, to address security, engineering, and feasibility elements for the future landmark, revised it in July 2005 and summer 2008.

The $3.2 billion hub will sit at the northeast corner of the WTC site at Church and Vesey Streets and is expected to form an underground connection between the World Financial Center and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Fulton Street Transit Center. Through it, pedestrians will have access to Hudson River ferry terminals, PATH trains, 13 subway lines, and possibly a direct rail link to JFK International Airport.

Calatrava’s design features steel “ribs” with glass panels between them to maximize natural light inside the station. The underground concourse, mezzanine, and platform levels will be largely free of vertical columns for a greater sense of openness and movement. The hub will also be a central pedestrian thoroughfare for the half-million-square-foot retail program planned for the WTC’s lower levels.

“The building is built with steel, glass, and light. They will all be equal building materials,” Calatrava said. “The light will arrive at the platform, and visitors will feel like they are arriving in a great place, a welcoming place.”

Calatrava said that Daniel Libeskind’s original master plan both guided his design and served as inspiration, stating that the transportation hub “articulates with Libeskind’s beautiful plan. The station fits like a centerpiece in the middle of the plaza.”

*Images courtesy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

*Originally posted on lowermanahattan.info

Sustainable Modular Islands

Energy Islands may be a solution to rising ocean levels, fossil fuel dependence and diminishing supplies of fresh drinking water. The energy production and water desalination technologies have been proven and a full-scale implementation is being planned for launch in 2010.

Energy Islands will consist of floating renewable energy platforms that take advantage of photovoltaics, wave energy, ocean current energy turbines, wind turbines, solar thermal towers and OTEC power (ocean thermal energy conversion). The islands will be manufactured as modules, making them scalable and potentially mobile.

Vegetable farms and homes for workers can be constructed atop the islands, and, with an estimated 250MW of power generated, unused power could be transmitted back to the grid at the closest landmass. Roughly 50,000 modules of the Energy Island featured in the image below would meet the current global energy needs.

Projects like Seascape one and Aquarius are amongst the many concepts seeking to create environments for sustainable living. Join us for the Future of the Built Environment, this December in Hong Kong to meet thought-leaders imagining, designing and building communities for tomorrow.

Update: October 5th, 2008

The UltraFuture ThinkTank is working on a presentation of Energy Island along with Parsons Brinckerhoff and Noble Denton to be presented at the US-China GreenTech Summit this November 12-14th in Shanghai. This should be a very interesting Summit, with very positive opportunities for Energy Island to identify project partners and supporters, particularly with organizations and firms in mainland China.

Broadway Malyan

Broadway Malyan is a leading international architectural and integrated design practice with offices throughout the UK and the world.

Architecture is their core service but Broadway Malyan is multi-skilled, offering solutions throughout a project from specialists, including urban designers, masterplanners, town planners, landscape architects, regeneration and sustainability consultants, and interior designers.

Broadway Malyan will join us at the Future of the Built Environments Summit in 2009.

James Law’s Cybertecture Egg for Mumbai

Buildings are no longer about concrete, steel and glass… many incorporate cutting-edge technologies, sustainable materials and design principles based on forward-thinking models of social interaction and the ‘human experience’ of space.

This project is a Cybertecture office building that brings together Iconic Architecture, Environmental Design, Intelligent Systems, and New Engineering to create the most innovative building for the city of Mumbai and for India in the 21st Century. The building is comissioned by Vijay Associates (Wadhwa) Developers, a group known for delivering creations par excellence.

The concept for this building is inspired by planet earth. A sustainable ecosystem is derived from an integrated and seamless Cybertecture that evolves to provide the building’s inhabitants with the very best space to work in.

The form of the architecture is one that symbolizes with optimism about the future and of the 21st Century. The symbolic planet form is stretched to accommodate the available footprint and optimize space for 13 levels of premium offices. This Egg is further orientated and skewed at an angle to create both a strong visual language as well as to alleviate the solar gain of the building. By using this Egg shape, compared to a conventional building, this building has approximately 10-20% less surface area. The architecture is sleek and computer designed, with engineering that creates a building of extremely high quality and geometric sophistication.

This building will act like a  jewel for the new Central Business District of Mumbai, and a worthy neighbor to the esteemed neighboring buildings of the district. Within the building, an innovative structure derived from the skin of the egg creates up to 30m spans of column-less floors. Innovative Cybertecture Technologies within the buildings system empower people to communicate and work in a better way.

DETAILS
Location: India
District: Mumbai
Use: Office
Site Area: ~6676 sq.m.
Bldg. Area: ~4025 sq.m.
Gross Floor Area: ~32000 sq.m.
Bldg. Coverage Ratio: ~60%
Gross Floor Ratio: ~80%
Bldg. Scale: Stories above Ground : 14 Levels
Stories below Ground : 3 Levels
Structure: Reinforced Concrete and Steel Structure
Max. Height: ~62m
Landscape Area: ~2800 sq.m.
Parking Lot: ~450 Lots
Exterior Finish: Curtain Wall

>

Liquid Architecture in the Desert

Dubai has once again demonstrated an unsurpassed capacity for engaging leading-edge, UltraFuturistic possibilities. This elegant, liquid, dune-shaped design by Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher is planned for an opera house and cultural center in the Seven Pearls district of the city. The development, including an opera house, performing arts school, playhouse, art gallery, and themed hotel, will be built on an island in Dubai Creek next to the mainland. A road will connect the center to Greater Dubai.

TrendHunter reports: “All the facilities will be grand: the opera house will have a seating capacity of 2,500, the playhouse will have a seating capacity of 800, the arts gallery is a full size exhibition facility with 5,000 m2 of exhibition space, while the hotel will have a 6 star setting.”

The form, emerging fluidly from the desert landscape, evokes a sense of timeless integrity and harmony. Howard Roark and Ayn Rand may even approve, presuming an honest use of construction materials. Zaha Hadid Architects describes the project as follows:

“The proposal houses all of the facilities within a single striking structure. The gentle winding form evokes images of mountains or sand dunes. Rising out of the ground, this form is both a part of the landscape yet very much a distinct element in the skyline. The surrounding landscape forms build up to the main building. These constitute open park spaces as well as ancillary functions such as the parking facilities and the monorail station, which are either tucked under or integrated into the landscape forms.”

7 Floors & 7 Stars Below Sea Level - Istanbul and Poseidon Underwater Hotels

This seven floor underwater hotel will give its guests a new view of the famous city of Istanbul. It is due to open in 2010, and will coincide with its Culture Capital of Europe nomination and lay down a gauntlet as a world capital of tourism. The hotel is the work of Tanriverdi Holding and have set aside a multi-million dollar budget to ensure the project is finished to 7 star standards. The underwater hotel trend emerged over a year with a project in Dubai. This new project shows two unique characteristics - it will be based in the city center and will go one floor further underwater. The underwater hotel is being built on the ruins of a historical 1930s tobacco factory and will have restaurants, exhibition halls, and rooms all with sea views.

It will be interesting to check-in and check-out the underwater hotel rooms and facilities, as local experts suggest that the underwater visibility of the Istanbul Bosphorus Strait (which is the body of water that links the Black Sea, to the north, with the Sea of Marmara, to the south) is about ten feet.

Poseidon is a $500 million complex marketed as the world’s first underwater hotel. The Poseidon Mystery Island will be a 1.1 million square foot complex submerged 40 feet into a 5,000 acre coral lagoon near Fiji. The project has been underway for some time now, but the big news is that the Fiji location has now been secured.

“When I was in high school, I was always writing letters to Jacques Cousteau and sketching underwater habitats,” Jones recalls. In 2000, he took the first step toward the real thing, offering a reward to whomever found the best location for his futureundersea playground. “I’ve got a lot of friends in the submersible business who are also scuba divers,” he says. “So I put the word out that if someone came up with the perfect spot, we’d pay them $10,000. A business associate and avid diver suggested a reef off the Bahamian island of Eleuthera and collected his reward.” But Jones eventually ran into trouble negotiating a price for the site with its American owners. After a year of fruitless back-and-forth, he decided to set his sights farther afield, on Fiji.

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Visual Buildings

William McDonough Interview - Massive Change

William McDonough Interview. March 23, 2004 - four years old and very UltraFuture. From massivechange.com

You talk about the Next Industrial Revolution, where industry and environment come together in harmony. What does this look like?
It looks at the idea as Francis Crick said in 1962, that in order for something to be vital it has to have growth, it has to have a free form of energy, and it has to have an open system of chemicals. So if we think about a tree, it has to have some cells that grow, even for simple reproduction, and it has to have free energy from outside the system, in this case natural sunlight, and it needs an open system of chemicals that synthesize within its metabolism for the benefit of the organism, its reproduction, and its ecosystem.

If we saw human industry in a similar way we’d realize that there’s something relatively new in evolutionary terms that we call technical nutrition. Not just biological nutrition, which is the living thing powered by the sun and ‘consumed’ by other organisms as they breakdown (or, as we say, ‘waste equals food’), but actually seeing human artifice and technology as something that is put into the same kind of cycle. These are what we call technical nutrients. Take aluminum for example. Our species has made 680 million tons of aluminum since 1880 and we still know where 440 million tons are. So the idea would be that you would design two kinds of things, one is what we call ‘products of consumption’, those things that are literally biologically consumed and go back to soil, or ‘products of service’, things from which we want the service, but not necessarily the molecular potential. With something like a computer or a car or carpet, the user is a ‘customer’ not a ‘consumer’. These are services and in fact, when you finish with a synthetic carpet, for example, you should be able to either return it back to industry forever and remake carpets or other useful things. So biological and technical nutrition - that’s the protocol we initiated and have been continuously championing and developing.

What is the difference between eco-efficiency and what you call eco-effectiveness?
Eco-efficiency (doing more with less) as a strategy is well meaning but not necessarily adequate to the task. Being efficient means that you’re probably doing something right, in terms of using the least to do the most, but the problem is that if you’re doing the wrong thing, it might be pernicious because it perpetuates the wrong system with the erroneous thought that things are getting better. For someone to tell a company to be more eco-efficient and please make twice as many cardboard boxes out of the trees in Indonesia, sounds like a factor 2 efficiency. Even if they said make it factor 4 or factor 10, you still haven’t really solved the problem, because it’s still goodbye to Indonesian forests. Why would you use something as beautiful and as diverse as a tree for something as prosaic as a cardboard box that’s used once or even twice, and then put into a chlorine-laden ‘recycling’ loop that is actually continuously down-cycling all the materials and destroying water quality? From our design perspective, the question really needs to be, ‘With eco-efficiency, is being less bad being good, or is it simply being bad, just less so?’ With eco-effectiveness, on the other hand, we ask the question, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ And then we start to do it efficiently, so we can create prosperity and growth.

So we’re not interested in being less bad. We’re interested in being 100% good.
Right. That means you have to design with positive principles and positive goals. Modern industrial culture doesn’t seem to have principles, except something like: ‘If brute force isn’t working, you are not using enough of it.’ While its goals are unclear, its de facto goal appears to be to create ecological and human tragedy. If you play a game, you have to have a clear goal; in chess, you’re going to take a king. So we have an end game in mind because without this strategy becomes meaningless. What we seek is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean water, air, soil and power, that is economically, equitably, ecologically, and elegantly enjoyed.

How did you get turned onto the idea of changing the world of design?
I grew up in Hong Kong, so I was in a place with four hours of water every fourth day during the dry season and six million people on forty square miles. I saw a lot of optimization of very precious resources. Then, as we went to the Pacific Northwest for the summers with my grandparents and saw astonishing abundance - fresh water, big forests, pure springs, salmon. I went from a world of extreme limits to a world of extreme abundance, and yet my grandparents were also very careful and kept the spring clean, composted organic waste, and saved rubber bands and aluminum foil and so on. So I always thought the world was something you took care of, and it hopefully got better because you were there. And I also saw in Chinese agriculture a perpetual agriculture: farmers for forty centuries farming the same piece of ground. So that was the context in which I grew up. When I came to the United States to live as a teenager, I entered a world of profligacy and seeming wanton abandon of things in a take-make-waste production system, with a cradle-to-grave ‘throw it away’ philosophy. I think this, in many ways, was the result of something I, personally, had not lived through - nuclear threat. While I was a child in Hong Kong, third graders in the U.S. were being taught how to dive under their desks because Armageddon may appear at any instant. When you sense that everything could end in an instant, you live as if there might not be a tomorrow. This became embedded in the culture - modern culture actually created geo-political and physical threats (global terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, biological warfare) that could destroy us all tomorrow - so many industrialized countries have a ‘get it while we can’ attitude rather than a continuous long-term prosperity in mind.

What goes on in a cradle-to-cradle cycle?
Cradle-to-cradle essentially says that you have an open metabolism of chemicals that are manifesting benefit for living systems or technical systems. They’re not contaminating each other and they are designed to either replace themselves in cycles or get better as they go through the system. Typically what we call recycling today is down-cycling in our lexicon. Things are actually getting lower in quality as they go through the process. Clear milk jugs will be transformed into a park bench that’s on its way to a landfill or an incinerator, getting contaminated by various additives and dyes and losing its quality through the system. We’ve been looking at nylon fibers, for example, that can be chemically recycled, and actually up-cycled. They get better as they come back and go through the new cycle because mechanical properties have been improved, thereby increasing the quality of the fiber. Essentially, cradle-to-cradle says that if things relate and can improve soil health, then we may return them to soil.

What does your fractal triangle diagram mean to you?
We use this triangle known as the Sierpinski gasket, or fractal tile, to be able to navigate the relationships between ecology, equity, and economy. It’s a fractal way of looking at the entire universe that’s self-similar. Cost, performance, and aesthetics meet life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!

 

William McDonough is an architect and co-author of Cradle to Cradle with Michael Braungart.

William McDonough on Sustainable Ecocities in China

For anyone who is not familiar with William McDonoughs work in sustainable development, I urge you to have patience during loading and watch this video. His philosophy of ‘Cradle to Cradle’ design is the foundation of many modern sustainable development. To learn more, please visit the following websites: www.mcdonough.com, www.mcdonoughpartners.com, www.mbdc.com.

It is this kind of inspired and ambitious vision and planning that UltraFuture seeks to promote and incubate.

UltraFuture Related Topics:

Urbanization and Environmental Sustainability

Clean Energy Research Centre set up in Shanghai

Famed geneticist creating life form that turns CO2 into fuel

Buckyballs as hydrogen containers

See this post on Technocrati:
Technorati Profile

Visual Buildings

Hong Kong based James Law Cybertecuture International designs on the leading edge of architecture, outdoor media, and lifestyle technology. James joined us last December for the UltraFuture Expo in Hong Kong to present his work and philosophy along with a stunning exhibit of a current project in Dubai .

The Visual Building is just one of the firms many innovative and decidedly “UltraFuture” designs.

“The Visual Building is a new piece of Cybertecture that deals with the changing nature of buildings in the city. This mix commercial/retail building comprises of an intelligent skin that allows for it to change like a information lantern creating Art in the City, Information in the City, or Nature in the City.” (www.jameslawcybertecture.com)

James Law, Chief Cybertect and Chairman of James Law Cybertecture is a member of the UltraFutureWorld advisory board. James’ bio can be viewed at www.ultrafutureworld.com/Home/advisors.html