Archinect - News

Is it time for maintenance to be valued over innovation?

2017-07-24T18:46:00-04:00

To shift our focus from innovation to maintenance would also create an opportunity for greater political consensus. Maintenance is an area of public policy where conservatives and progressives should see eye to eye.

As Andrew Russell and Lee Vinseljuly of NY Times point out, officials in federal, state and local government do not allocate the resources necessary for preventive maintenance. The authors argue that American conception of technology is narrow and immature—obsessing over gadgets and fetishizing innovation.

All varieties of American infrastructure — roads, bridges, airports, sewers — are in decrepit condition. Lead poisons the water systems of Flint, Mich., and hundreds of other cities and towns across the nation. The American Society of Civil Engineers considers 17 percent of American dams to be “high hazard potential,” including the one outside Oroville, Calif., that nearly collapsed in February.

It’s not just maintenance that our society fails to appreciate; it’s also the maintainers themselves. We do not grant them high social status or high salaries. Typically, maintenance is a blue-collar occupation: mechanic, plumber, janitor, electrician. There are white-collar maintainers (l...

Inventor of the one and only self-cleaning home, Frances Gabe, has passed away at 101

2017-07-19T13:55:00-04:00

In each room, Ms. Gabe, tucked safely under an umbrella, could press a button that activated a sprinkler in the ceiling. The first spray sent a mist of sudsy water over walls and floor. A second spray rinsed everything. Jets of warm air blew it all dry. The full cycle took less than an hour. Runoff escaped through drains in Ms. Gabe’s almost imperceptibly sloping floors. It was channeled outside and straight through her doghouse, where the dog was washed in the bargain.

More than half a century ago, incensed by the housecleaning that was a woman’s chronic lot, Ms. Gabe began to dream of a house that would see to its own hygiene: tenderly washing, rinsing and drying itself at the touch of a button.

Ms. Gabe built the self-cleaning house with her own hands and money, receiving United States patent 4,428,085 in 1984. After more than 10 years of work and decades of planning, the house of about a thousand square feet was completed in the 1980s, at a cost of $15,000.

Floor plan

The house, whose patent consisted of 68 individual inventions, also included a cupboard in which dirty dishes, set on mesh shelves, were washed and dried in situ.
A tightly sealed cabinet was designed to deal with laundry. Soiled clothing was placed inside on hangers, washed and dried there with jets of water and air, and then, still on hangers, pulled neatly by a chain into the clothes closet. Her sink, toilet and bathtub were also self-cleaning.
In order to withstand their washing t...

The Urban Algae Canopy shows the power of "algaetecture" for Milan Expo 2015

2014-04-17T19:27:00-04:00

Here's another look at what to expect at the Milan Expo in 2015. As part of the Expo's Future Food District project, the Urban Algae Canopy shows the great potential of micro algae organisms for integrative greener, cleaner bio-digital architecture. London-based ecoLogicStudio designed the pavilion in collaboration with local architect Cesare Griffa.

Full-scale prototypes of the pavilion are currently being previewed at the INTERNI ‘Feeding New Ideas for the City’ exhibition at Cortile d’Onore, University of Milan, Festa del Perdono happening until April 18.

Once it's fully built, the canopy will be able to produce oxygen equivalent to 4 hectares of woodland and up to 150kg of biomass per day -- 60% of which are natural vegetal proteins.

Dig into the project details right below:

"The Urban Algae Canopy, based on ecoLogicStudio’s six years long research on building integrated bio-digital systems, is presented here with a 1:1 scale prototype of the world’s first bio-digital canopy integra...

Japanese Eco-Friendly Building Demolition Method Harvests Energy As It Destroys

2013-03-04T10:45:00-05:00

Rather than using cranes to take the building apart from the outside, they start from the inside, taking the structure apart floor by floor from the top down. A crane inside the building lowers materials harvested from each floor to ground level, generating electricity to power other equipment in the process. So with Tecorep, higher buildings are actually an advantage, since the crane can generate more electricity lowering materials over longer distances.