VVVVVVORK
VVORK 12/04/2012 19:37
»Blue Black Red 1«, 2012 by Devin Farrand.
Re-Hydro to Dominate in the Future
News of the Future 12/04/2012 12:34
April 12, 2040 - Although introduced in the market only five years ago, 10% of all hydrogen fuel now sold in the US is of the enviromental friendly Re-Hydro label, produced through electrolysis based on a source of 100% renewable energy.
Several producers have switched to producing Re-Hydro, mainly because of tax incentives, which also keep the price of Re-Hydro on the same level as regular hydrogen.
10% in five years might not seem much, especially compared to the move to lead free gasoline 50 years ago, which only took a decade. When producing hydrogen vast amount of energy is needed, and the main issue of producing Re-Hydro has been the lack of energy from renewable sources and that it is not generated close to the production plants.
Most analysts believe though that Re-Hydro will be the dominating fuel in the future, and the incentives to switch has already led to great improvements in producing energy even more efficient from solar, wind and water.
Since hydrogen-hybrids together with fuel-cells eventually will force gasoline vehicles off the road, followed by long-term and patient support of Re-Hydro from the government, it could be the opportunity that environmentalists in several decades have hoped for to put the last nail in the coffin of fossil fuels.
But the progress is slow, so far only 4.1 million cars running on hydrogen have been sold in the US, which is about 1.5% of the total fleet. Iceland is the leader in the world, both when it comes to hydrogen and using re-hydro, with 100% of the car fleet now on re-hydro.
Argument: The development of hydrogen-fueled cars is based on several different sources, with the optimistic scenarios for a fast introduction on the market, to the book The Hype about Hydrogen by Joseph J. Romm. With the development in renewable sources of energy it will be possible for environmental labeled hydrogen.
Questions: Will there be other fuel alternatives to hydrogen when gasoline will be replaced? Will Re-Hydro put an end to fossil fuels?
Re-Hydro to Dominate in the Future
News of the Future 12/04/2012 12:34
April 12, 2040 - Although introduced in the market only five years ago, 10% of all hydrogen fuel now sold in the US is of the enviromental friendly Re-Hydro label, produced through electrolysis based on a source of 100% renewable energy.
Several producers have switched to producing Re-Hydro, mainly because of tax incentives, which also keep the price of Re-Hydro on the same level as regular hydrogen.
10% in five years might not seem much, especially compared to the move to lead free gasoline 50 years ago, which only took a decade. When producing hydrogen vast amount of energy is needed, and the main issue of producing Re-Hydro has been the lack of energy from renewable sources and that it is not generated close to the production plants.
Most analysts believe though that Re-Hydro will be the dominating fuel in the future, and the incentives to switch has already led to great improvements in producing energy even more efficient from solar, wind and water.
Since hydrogen-hybrids together with fuel-cells eventually will force gasoline vehicles off the road, followed by long-term and patient support of Re-Hydro from the government, it could be the opportunity that environmentalists in several decades have hoped for to put the last nail in the coffin of fossil fuels.
But the progress is slow, so far only 4.1 million cars running on hydrogen have been sold in the US, which is about 1.5% of the total fleet. Iceland is the leader in the world, both when it comes to hydrogen and using re-hydro, with 100% of the car fleet now on re-hydro.
Argument: The development of hydrogen-fueled cars is based on several different sources, with the optimistic scenarios for a fast introduction on the market, to the book The Hype about Hydrogen by Joseph J. Romm. With the development in renewable sources of energy it will be possible for environmental labeled hydrogen.
Questions: Will there be other fuel alternatives to hydrogen when gasoline will be replaced? Will Re-Hydro put an end to fossil fuels?
VVVVVVORK
VVORK 12/04/2012 08:32
“Terri”, 2011 by Gillian Wearing. Painted bronze on plywood plinth.
Every House Has Cracks
BLDGBLOG 12/04/2012 04:47
[Image: Via English Russia].In a story seemingly invented for future landscape architecture thesis projects, we find the city of Berezniki, Russia. "In the West," the New York Times explains, "mines are usually located far from populous areas, to reduce the risks of sinkholes to homes and other buildings. But Berezniki, a city of 154,000 that began as a labor camp, was built directly over the minea legacy of the Soviet policy of placing camps within marching distance of work areas."
With collapsing salt pillars and widespread erosion in the derelict mines below the city, Berezniki is thus "afflicted by sinkholes, yawning chasms hundreds of feet deep that can open at a moment's notice."
[Image: Via English Russia].Incredibly, like a geologically-themed remake of The Truman Show, the city has responded with "24-hour video surveillance."
On a screen in the command center late last year, one such hole appeared as a small dark spot in a snowy field in the predawn hours, immediately threatening to suck in a building, a road and a gas station. "I looked and said, 'Wow, a hole is forming,'" recalled Olga V. Chekhova, an emergency services worker who monitors the video... While scientists have so far successfully predicted each sinkhole, the chasms can open with astonishing speed. On Dec. 4, as Ms. Chekhova watched the dark spot on her screen expand, witnesses began calling an emergency number for reporting sinkholes. They had heard a loud swooshing noise.The town has decided to "fight the holes with science," putting in place "a panoply of high-technology monitors. These include the video surveillance system, seismic sensors, regular surveys and satellite monitoring of the changes in altitude of roofs, sidewalks and streets."
While the design possibilities of a town off-kilter with itself are clear, the Times article seems to undersell the incompetence of the city officials, mine engineers, and policy-makers who oversaw the creation of the underground facilities in the first place and who made the idiotic decision to locate a city overtop land that would subsequently be excavated. Having said that, the photo gallery accompanying the original articleunlike the more sensationalist images I've chosen herefocuses on the people who actually live there, families who watch as cracks appear in their ceilings and walls, looking around at furniture they can't afford to move and the neighborhoods that seem on the verge of, in the article's words, "being sucked into the earth."
"In my view, we need to move the entire town," one of the residents says, with what seems like obvious melancholy. He's not reaching for a sketchbook or planning robotic future cities on stilts. "Every house has cracks."
Ancient Legend Saves Lives of Descendants
The Long Now Foundation 11/04/2012 20:06
Sometimes technology fails but luckily, collective memory can step in to lend a hand.
In a recent LA Times article, José Holguín-Veras writes about an old legend that saved a small island community in Japan from perishing in the tsunami that followed the earthquake of March 02011. The quake had toppled their tsunami warning system, but when villagers saw the approaching waters, a lesson passed down from their ancestors told them what to do.
A millennium ago, the residents of Murohama, knowing they were going to be inundated, had sought safety on the villages closest hill. But they had entered into a deadly trap. A second wave, which had reached the interior of the island through an inlet, was speeding over the rice paddies from the opposite direction. The waves collided at the hill and killed those who had taken refuge there. To signify their grief and to advise future generations, the survivors erected a shrine.
1,000 years later, those descendants knew not to make the same mistake, and bypassed the hill in favor of higher ground a bit further away.
Weve written before about ancient tsunami warning systems in Japan, as examples of long-term thinking that helped communities learn from lessons of the past. The work of these Japanese ancestors illustrates the value of preserving our collective knowledge for the good of the future and reminds us that local culture itself can be a durable archive of wisdom.
Ancient Legend Saves Lives of Descendants
The Long Now Foundation 11/04/2012 20:06
Sometimes technology fails but luckily, collective memory can step in to lend a hand.
In a recent LA Times article, José Holguín-Veras writes about an old legend that saved a small island community in Japan from perishing in the tsunami that followed the earthquake of March 02011. The quake had toppled their tsunami warning system, but when villagers saw the approaching waters, a lesson passed down from their ancestors told them what to do.
A millennium ago, the residents of Murohama, knowing they were going to be inundated, had sought safety on the villages closest hill. But they had entered into a deadly trap. A second wave, which had reached the interior of the island through an inlet, was speeding over the rice paddies from the opposite direction. The waves collided at the hill and killed those who had taken refuge there. To signify their grief and to advise future generations, the survivors erected a shrine.
1,000 years later, those descendants knew not to make the same mistake, and bypassed the hill in favor of higher ground a bit further away.
Weve written before about ancient tsunami warning systems in Japan, as examples of long-term thinking that helped communities learn from lessons of the past. The work of these Japanese ancestors illustrates the value of preserving our collective knowledge for the good of the future and reminds us that local culture itself can be a durable archive of wisdom.
Ghost Town Climatology
BLDGBLOG 11/04/2012 17:08
[Image: The ghost town of Animas Forks, Colorado, via Wikipedia].Fred Chambers, an Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, is studying what he calls "ghost town climatology," or the declining temperature of a region as it is abandoned by human activity. He describes it as "a reverse urban heat island effect."
There's not much info available right now on his website, but the idea of weather patterns being generated by ghost townsabandoned villages in the mountains creating artificial winters that haunt those in the city down belowis a captivating one. As if, to exaggerate the study's implications, you could hike up into the hills one day and locate the source of all that snow, stumbling, half-blind and frostbitten, into a dead valley of churches and town halls, fighting against a wind those empty buildings help to generate.
New York Quarry
BLDGBLOG 11/04/2012 16:45
[Image: Gentlemen quarriers of a golden age, via].Following on from earlier looks at the city as mining district, including a quarry on the Lower East Side, I was interested to read that parts of Manhattan were once productive marble quarries. A street and surrounding small neighborhood called Kingsbridge, in particular, was "an early quarrying district on Manhattan island."
In a 1997 article for the Mineralogical Record, Lawrence H. Conklin relates his discovery, like something out of Jules Verne, of a 19th-century print called "Marble Quarry, Kingsbridge, N.Y. (1819)," thus piquing his interest in these and other excavations around Manhattan's northern end. "The acquisition of the drawing spurred me to explore the printed record," Conklin writes, "to find out what could be learned about marble and mineral specimen production at Kingsbridge, and especially about the quarry and the house depicted in the sketch."
[Image: A quarry site that now "lies in the bed of the present Harlem River," via].Digging around in various archives, Conklin goes on to locate references to old quarries along what is now Broadway. The bracketed note in the following quotation is Conklin's:
"From 213th to 217th street the road [called at the time the Kingsbridge road and now known as Broadway] passed along the foot of the eastern slope of marble quarries." This places additional marble quarries in Kingsbridge, in the year 1808, on the lands of the Dyckman family and elsewhere. The Dyckmans at one time owned the largest single tract of land in the history of Manhattan and were honored by the naming of present-day Dyckman Street, an important east-west thoroughfare that traverses their former lands.When the quarries were later abandoned, they filled with water, becoming ponds (and, in the winter, small ice-skating rinks); however, in many cases, these already coastal land features were "obliterated" by the navigable straightening of the Harlem River.
[Image: Nautical chart of the Harlem River, courtesy of NOAA].But there are other quarries out there that have since been built over, and that remain covered over or filled in by architecture. There might even have been, Conklin speculates, a large-yielding quarry "situated on land that is now occupied by Columbia University's Baker Field." It's fascinating to consider even the possibility that there are buildings on the northern end of Manhattan whose basements are, in fact, former quarries, large artificial caverns hewn directly from bedrock, negative sculptures in which people now do laundry or park cars (or, who knows, wander around at night for hours, flashlight in hand, amazed at these labyrinths that stretch for miles, across state lines, underneath rivers, out beneath the sea).
The story of the quarries is long, as the same veins of rock that criss-cross Manhattan were also exploited further afield, at sites in Connecticut and upriver, and, if you're into that sort of thing, it's worth a quick read.
Finally, though, there is a juxtaposition of two historical photographs in Conklin's post that I feel compelled to reproduce here; it's like Piranesi-on-Hudsonor on 216th Street, as the case may be.
[Image: Manhattan Piranesi, via].A ruined arch made from quarried Manhattan bedrock later covered in signs and spraypaint, all but buried in the visual mess of the modern city.
(More on the minerals of NYC).
VVVVVVORK
VVORK 11/04/2012 15:16
»Street Money 2«, 2011. Money found in public spaces in London, over the course of one year, by Carla Cruz.
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