I'm assuming that they'll use some mixture of helium, hydrogen and nitrogen gasses to help keep the sphere afloat. Possibly even carbon monoxide.
Supposedly, the idea is to cover the top-half in photovoltaic panels (presumably to power some kind of engine for upwards thrust) and use the remaining power for electricity.
As long as the balloon maintains positive pressure, it should float.
thanks █...I guess an engine thrusting it upward would oobviously do the trick..with the combo of hydrogen, nitrogen and helium...
did they consider the floating ball being swept off by wind during storms?? I only see some sort of wires attached to it for the extra electricity to be passed of for other usage.
Anyways the whole idea as a vessel to reflect the landscape as the landmark is one ball lifting idea....i think this is a when pigs fly milestone..right?
somebody please, please, please tell me that there is an archigram- or yoni-friedman-esque big idea here and that it's not just a big shiny bauble.
i'm a BIG fan because they've always brought a kind of left-of-center pragmatism with their flash. if it's just flash: blech. leaves me as cold as that giant star that MAD(?) floated across the internets a year or so ago.
Don't even *think* about stealing any office supplies, young intern!
The pragmatism, Steven, seems to be in the solar panels that keep it afloat and power nearby homes. Given how much research is going in to lofted wind turbines these days, it's not unrealistic.
solar film/panels can fit on roofs and on the ground. they don't need a big floating ball to support them. and the big ball will cast a huge shadow, undermining potential for daylighting in structures below it, won't it?
anybody heard the 'BIG idea' yet? the thing that sells it?
Yeah... i have to be honest, Im not that impressed with BIG's work. I'm even less impressed with his insatiable appetite to be the worlds biggest Starchitect.... something about him rubs me the wrong way...
As for that giant globe floating in the sky, i wonder if it would be distracting to be driving towards a massive mirror in the sky... how many automobile accidents will that ridiculous p.o.s cause?
wake me when the BIG craze is over... or maybe just wake me when they do a project that isnt a windy corridor with boxes stacked to variable heights on either side...........
The shadow is a big question. But the point of lofted wind turbines is that there is so much MORE wind up high that they can create more power. I don't know if solar panels work better up higher, I imagine they do, and the possibility of the thing floating above the clouds on low ceiling/fog/overcast days means more days to generate.
I think the big idea that's *not* about pragmatics is the reflection of old city/new city on one surface, and the silly but existential fun of seeing oneself reflected in that image - that's the fun of the Bean, anyway.
this diagram appears to be the biggest justification. there was a void and they needed to answer it with a celebratory piece. the question for me is: do we really love highways and their expanded roadbeds full of gravel, broken glass, oil stains, and shoulder drainage so much that we want them reflected/doubled in a floating mirror? 'cuz that's primarily what you'll see.
maybe they could project video feeds of something else onto it instead.
Steven, i actually really like your last point. You saw the use of mirrored surfaces on things like high rise curtain walls a lot a few decades ago. But the justification always seemed to be the reflection of the beauty around it. Im thinking in particular of 333 W Wacker ...
...though we all have these types of towers in our cities.
Anyway, the point is these reflective surfaces always seem to be justified by the positive things they reflect... perhaps this giant floating sphere reflecting a superhighway intersection can be a more realistic representation of our priorities... if it can do that, perhaps its not so ridiculous... it could be pertinent.
Bjarke: Hey Julien?
Julien: Ya, Bjarke?
B: Want to make paarty?
J: Ya ya. I like to make paarty!
B: We eat some E...
J:And run in ze forrest...
B: And make za dance
J:But we need...
B:We need...
Together: ZE DISCO BALL!!
(music:thump thump thump)
B:Ich loven zie Julien
J:Ich loven you more, Bjarke.
Rem: Was ist up my homies!
B:Nozing...
J: Nichts...
B: Rem, we need some money for ze tonight.
R: I hate you both.
donna, regarding wind turbines aloft - it's more than just having more wind/less turbulence up high, it's that the wind power kites or flying propellers can 'sweep' a much larger area which results in much more power (area swept by a turbine=cubes the power) - the math is rather obtuse and complicated so just trust me on this...
bucky fuller already proposed this about 50 years ago... except he was proposing to make a floating spherical city... i remember reading something about that if you enclosed a full sphere with a geodesic system that it could float with only a few degrees temperature difference between inside and outside... i don't really buy it, but whatever...
I am taken back that this 'proposal' is actually being discussed in seriousness.
A magic shiny ball that includes all of the green energy solutions de-jour. BIG is a well known architectural design firm. They are not engineers. To ever suggest otherwise is delusional. At least bucky was provocative. And an engineer.
This project is a steaming pile of poo from a company that is known for doing.... innovative condos.
Bjarke thinks BIG, and in a way that's fun not overly self-serious. And, frankly, more than any other contemporary architecture firm I'd wager on BIG to be able to actually get this project off the ground(!).
What I meant in my post, rusty, is that BIG has a history of getting ideas that seem, at first blush, too unconventional and crazy to be possible actually built.
I can't predict what the final payoff of this floating sphere-thingey would be now, but given BIG's track record I, personally, don't have any fear with letting it run its course so we can all find out.
Now if Libeskind proposed a big floaty thing (with 80s-era slash-marks all over it, of course), I'd point and laugh while loudly claiming it was another ego-stroking architectural boondoggle.
Fair enough Donna. I find BIG's actual, built portfolio of work to be quite underwhelming. 50 wacky unbuilt schemes per actual (modest) project completed. They sure get a lot more publicity than any other company I can think of.
Rem koolhaas, BIG, etc... All pompous flashy eye candy crap. That's what they specialize in.
BIG is the equivalent of the Backstreet boys or NKOTB.
This will never look like it is rendered, never.
I hope they are just fucking with everyone, they probably figure oh we are famous we can now crumple paper and call it architcture...haha no wait big floating disco ball.
Rem koolhaas, BIG, etc... All pompous flashy eye candy crap. That's what they specialize in.
BIG is the equivalent of the Backstreet boys or NKOTB.
This will never look like it is rendered, never.
I hope they are just fucking with everyone, they probably figure oh we are famous we can now crumple paper and call it architcture...haha no wait big floating disco ball.
Interesting. Maybe many of you have forgot that one of architecture's jobs is to propose the 'new'. And in lieu of 'new', repropose and execute the 'old'.
I am sure the conversation in the presentation didn't go something like this:
Juror: so, this large, highly reflective, apparently weightless ball looks good - how does it work?
Bjarke. dunno
Juror: oh well, who cares - 1st place to you sunshine!
Hopefully, the sphere is to reflectivity what Mountain dwellings is to waterproofing details.
"Maybe many of you have forgot that one of architecture's jobs is to propose the 'new'. And in lieu of 'new', repropose and execute the 'old'"
that's priority number #29. at least 20 priorities before that involve doing actual architecture.
this idea is about as fantastic as my unfinished Double Float - see www.vuuve.com
difference between say me and BIG is I am one guy half wasted making shit up as I go achieving the same design results in 5 minutes versus a firm headed by guys with years of experience and ample political connections having a bunch of masochistic self degrading peon god worshipping interns cut chip board models all day in hopes they can "visualize" their masters bullshit concepts.
my point is - Most people love crap - NKOTB beotch...with donny d on the backup.
Like anything that proposes something new and initiates change or something like it, it raises a lot of questions and criticism.
The floating ball is intentionally flashy as it is supposed to be a landmark. Although it can be a hazard to drivers for possible glare. It's floating above a highway so the shadow it casts under it isnt different from a road under an overpass in an intersection.
It will only be a nuisance if it doesn't serve its purpose. If it really does serve as an agreeable source for clean energy I guess it's just going to turn into another cheap ass novelty....like a huge donut oooooh I wonder if it serves as a watch tower too like the supposed God Ed Harris in Truman's Show.
It is a landmark, right?..nothing more but the pork that eifel tower stakes for the aroma that a barbecue it would become. It begs for attention.
olaf, the difference between you and BIG is that Bjarke Ingels has actually designed a lot of buildings that are constructed by and inhabited by people in the physical world. His success at getting outlandish proposals completed is impressive - getting more outlandish is just, IMO, going through his Marin County phase.
really, the big ball shouldn't be the issue, and i'm sorry it's what drew my attention.
the master plan materials appear to be well-considered and i'm sure that the selectors were looking at all of the real and (knowing big's m.o.) data-driven thinking that went into the re-thinking the areas around the perimeter as much as/more than the ball. these are the communities for whom this plan will have real impact.
i'm not blanket-critical of big and i think the plan is probably a good example of their holistic thinking about a problem: proposing solutions that should work very well, despite the fact that no-one else would ever have thought of them, and providing some flash. if it was taken seriously, there's also probably a book-length argument based on demographics, market-studies, and traffic counts to back up these pretty graphics.
my beef is still with the ball itself, though. the quality of the 'flash' this time is lesser than in previous projects, and it's disppointing.
more like elton john in the honky chateau era, maybe: kick ass lyrics penned with bernie taupin, great songcraft, and amazing performances - so the hard work got done - but then he had to go and wear those stupid oversized sunglasses.
I think what we're all forgetting that a sphere a 100m in diameter is roughly 18,000,000 cubic feet.
With the price of helium being around $75 per thousand cubic feet, it'll cost around $1,400,000 to fill this thing up with cheap helium. I don't know how to calculate effusion rates of helium over metalized Mylar. But if a party balloon is correlative, I'd assume you'd probably need to pump about an extra $1,000,000 worth of helium into it yearly.
Floating Sphere?
Bjarke Ingels is just ingenious. In his latest wok in stockholm master plan, I am in awe in how the hell would they make that friggin sphere float?
Can someone refer me to a site which explains the technology on that? Is it the same with the flying hotel ?
Flying hotel - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7_3PDnihMg
BIG's master plan -http://www.archdaily.com/121770/stockholmsporten-master-plan-big/
Thanks!
It's powered by manatees.
Oh god yes!!! How in the hell did I overlook that. Those flippin flippers always had the answers!
in the renderings there is a big column at the base isn't there?
@ jump, there's a tether but no column.
Probably similar to how this was made.
I'm assuming that they'll use some mixture of helium, hydrogen and nitrogen gasses to help keep the sphere afloat. Possibly even carbon monoxide.
Supposedly, the idea is to cover the top-half in photovoltaic panels (presumably to power some kind of engine for upwards thrust) and use the remaining power for electricity.
As long as the balloon maintains positive pressure, it should float.
Whoops. This early satellite was 100 ft in diameter.
thanks █...I guess an engine thrusting it upward would oobviously do the trick..with the combo of hydrogen, nitrogen and helium...
did they consider the floating ball being swept off by wind during storms?? I only see some sort of wires attached to it for the extra electricity to be passed of for other usage.
Anyways the whole idea as a vessel to reflect the landscape as the landmark is one ball lifting idea....i think this is a when pigs fly milestone..right?
magnets
somebody please, please, please tell me that there is an archigram- or yoni-friedman-esque big idea here and that it's not just a big shiny bauble.
i'm a BIG fan because they've always brought a kind of left-of-center pragmatism with their flash. if it's just flash: blech. leaves me as cold as that giant star that MAD(?) floated across the internets a year or so ago.
Don't even *think* about stealing any office supplies, young intern!
The pragmatism, Steven, seems to be in the solar panels that keep it afloat and power nearby homes. Given how much research is going in to lofted wind turbines these days, it's not unrealistic.
Think of it as Anish Kapoor's Bean x 500.
maybe it's a big brother ball. no escaping pls.
So that's where Elvis has been hiding... sorry couldnt resist.
solar film/panels can fit on roofs and on the ground. they don't need a big floating ball to support them. and the big ball will cast a huge shadow, undermining potential for daylighting in structures below it, won't it?
anybody heard the 'BIG idea' yet? the thing that sells it?
btw thanks unicorn for posting the same 7MB image in this thread 3 times. I hate it when web pages load quickly and properly.
Yeah... i have to be honest, Im not that impressed with BIG's work. I'm even less impressed with his insatiable appetite to be the worlds biggest Starchitect.... something about him rubs me the wrong way...
As for that giant globe floating in the sky, i wonder if it would be distracting to be driving towards a massive mirror in the sky... how many automobile accidents will that ridiculous p.o.s cause?
wake me when the BIG craze is over... or maybe just wake me when they do a project that isnt a windy corridor with boxes stacked to variable heights on either side...........
The shadow is a big question. But the point of lofted wind turbines is that there is so much MORE wind up high that they can create more power. I don't know if solar panels work better up higher, I imagine they do, and the possibility of the thing floating above the clouds on low ceiling/fog/overcast days means more days to generate.
I think the big idea that's *not* about pragmatics is the reflection of old city/new city on one surface, and the silly but existential fun of seeing oneself reflected in that image - that's the fun of the Bean, anyway.
this diagram appears to be the biggest justification. there was a void and they needed to answer it with a celebratory piece. the question for me is: do we really love highways and their expanded roadbeds full of gravel, broken glass, oil stains, and shoulder drainage so much that we want them reflected/doubled in a floating mirror? 'cuz that's primarily what you'll see.
maybe they could project video feeds of something else onto it instead.
Steven, i actually really like your last point. You saw the use of mirrored surfaces on things like high rise curtain walls a lot a few decades ago. But the justification always seemed to be the reflection of the beauty around it. Im thinking in particular of 333 W Wacker ...
...though we all have these types of towers in our cities.
Anyway, the point is these reflective surfaces always seem to be justified by the positive things they reflect... perhaps this giant floating sphere reflecting a superhighway intersection can be a more realistic representation of our priorities... if it can do that, perhaps its not so ridiculous... it could be pertinent.
i just asked him on FB.
Bjarke: Hey Julien?
Julien: Ya, Bjarke?
B: Want to make paarty?
J: Ya ya. I like to make paarty!
B: We eat some E...
J:And run in ze forrest...
B: And make za dance
J:But we need...
B:We need...
Together: ZE DISCO BALL!!
(music:thump thump thump)
B:Ich loven zie Julien
J:Ich loven you more, Bjarke.
Rem: Was ist up my homies!
B:Nozing...
J: Nichts...
B: Rem, we need some money for ze tonight.
R: I hate you both.
donna, regarding wind turbines aloft - it's more than just having more wind/less turbulence up high, it's that the wind power kites or flying propellers can 'sweep' a much larger area which results in much more power (area swept by a turbine=cubes the power) - the math is rather obtuse and complicated so just trust me on this...
bucky fuller already proposed this about 50 years ago... except he was proposing to make a floating spherical city... i remember reading something about that if you enclosed a full sphere with a geodesic system that it could float with only a few degrees temperature difference between inside and outside... i don't really buy it, but whatever...
I am taken back that this 'proposal' is actually being discussed in seriousness.
A magic shiny ball that includes all of the green energy solutions de-jour. BIG is a well known architectural design firm. They are not engineers. To ever suggest otherwise is delusional. At least bucky was provocative. And an engineer.
This project is a steaming pile of poo from a company that is known for doing.... innovative condos.
Bjarke thinks BIG, and in a way that's fun not overly self-serious. And, frankly, more than any other contemporary architecture firm I'd wager on BIG to be able to actually get this project off the ground(!).
Don't quit your day job Donna. Leave the gambling to Vegas and Wall Street.
You love BIG, and so do many others, for whatever reason. I am not sure what separates this project from the one proposed by our friend from Arizona.
What I meant in my post, rusty, is that BIG has a history of getting ideas that seem, at first blush, too unconventional and crazy to be possible actually built.
I can't predict what the final payoff of this floating sphere-thingey would be now, but given BIG's track record I, personally, don't have any fear with letting it run its course so we can all find out.
Now if Libeskind proposed a big floaty thing (with 80s-era slash-marks all over it, of course), I'd point and laugh while loudly claiming it was another ego-stroking architectural boondoggle.
Fair enough Donna. I find BIG's actual, built portfolio of work to be quite underwhelming. 50 wacky unbuilt schemes per actual (modest) project completed. They sure get a lot more publicity than any other company I can think of.
Rem koolhaas, BIG, etc... All pompous flashy eye candy crap. That's what they specialize in.
BIG is the equivalent of the Backstreet boys or NKOTB.
This will never look like it is rendered, never.
I hope they are just fucking with everyone, they probably figure oh we are famous we can now crumple paper and call it architcture...haha no wait big floating disco ball.
Disco disco.
Rem koolhaas, BIG, etc... All pompous flashy eye candy crap. That's what they specialize in.
BIG is the equivalent of the Backstreet boys or NKOTB.
This will never look like it is rendered, never.
I hope they are just fucking with everyone, they probably figure oh we are famous we can now crumple paper and call it architcture...haha no wait big floating disco ball.
Disco disco.
Interesting. Maybe many of you have forgot that one of architecture's jobs is to propose the 'new'. And in lieu of 'new', repropose and execute the 'old'.
I am sure the conversation in the presentation didn't go something like this:
Juror: so, this large, highly reflective, apparently weightless ball looks good - how does it work?
Bjarke. dunno
Juror: oh well, who cares - 1st place to you sunshine!
Hopefully, the sphere is to reflectivity what Mountain dwellings is to waterproofing details.
"Maybe many of you have forgot that one of architecture's jobs is to propose the 'new'. And in lieu of 'new', repropose and execute the 'old'"
that's priority number #29. at least 20 priorities before that involve doing actual architecture.
this idea is about as fantastic as my unfinished Double Float - see www.vuuve.com
difference between say me and BIG is I am one guy half wasted making shit up as I go achieving the same design results in 5 minutes versus a firm headed by guys with years of experience and ample political connections having a bunch of masochistic self degrading peon god worshipping interns cut chip board models all day in hopes they can "visualize" their masters bullshit concepts.
my point is - Most people love crap - NKOTB beotch...with donny d on the backup.
Like anything that proposes something new and initiates change or something like it, it raises a lot of questions and criticism.
The floating ball is intentionally flashy as it is supposed to be a landmark. Although it can be a hazard to drivers for possible glare. It's floating above a highway so the shadow it casts under it isnt different from a road under an overpass in an intersection.
It will only be a nuisance if it doesn't serve its purpose. If it really does serve as an agreeable source for clean energy I guess it's just going to turn into another cheap ass novelty....like a huge donut oooooh I wonder if it serves as a watch tower too like the supposed God Ed Harris in Truman's Show.
It is a landmark, right?..nothing more but the pork that eifel tower stakes for the aroma that a barbecue it would become. It begs for attention.
yeah maybe I should quite making money doing architecture and just start making half brain landmarks.
Eiffel tower was design by an engineer.
BIG not engineers.
Gustav Eiffel = Ben Harper or G. Love or even Phillip Glass
BIG = N-Sync, Backstreet, or even Katy Perry
big difference man, big difference.
olaf, the difference between you and BIG is that Bjarke Ingels has actually designed a lot of buildings that are constructed by and inhabited by people in the physical world. His success at getting outlandish proposals completed is impressive - getting more outlandish is just, IMO, going through his Marin County phase.
should I keep drinking? who do I have to sleep with, that's all I need to know.
really, the big ball shouldn't be the issue, and i'm sorry it's what drew my attention.
the master plan materials appear to be well-considered and i'm sure that the selectors were looking at all of the real and (knowing big's m.o.) data-driven thinking that went into the re-thinking the areas around the perimeter as much as/more than the ball. these are the communities for whom this plan will have real impact.
i'm not blanket-critical of big and i think the plan is probably a good example of their holistic thinking about a problem: proposing solutions that should work very well, despite the fact that no-one else would ever have thought of them, and providing some flash. if it was taken seriously, there's also probably a book-length argument based on demographics, market-studies, and traffic counts to back up these pretty graphics.
my beef is still with the ball itself, though. the quality of the 'flash' this time is lesser than in previous projects, and it's disppointing.
So you are telling me BIG is really more like Metallica on the Black album or Snoop Dogg ending up in some boy band video.
They know their shit, but know how to do POP even better now.
more like elton john in the honky chateau era, maybe: kick ass lyrics penned with bernie taupin, great songcraft, and amazing performances - so the hard work got done - but then he had to go and wear those stupid oversized sunglasses.
Elton john. That explains it, that shiny disco ball is so elton john.
I think what we're all forgetting that a sphere a 100m in diameter is roughly 18,000,000 cubic feet.
With the price of helium being around $75 per thousand cubic feet, it'll cost around $1,400,000 to fill this thing up with cheap helium. I don't know how to calculate effusion rates of helium over metalized Mylar. But if a party balloon is correlative, I'd assume you'd probably need to pump about an extra $1,000,000 worth of helium into it yearly.
looks like their not the onlly one making things float...
link
olaf's website kicks ass, BTW.
i'm serious, BTW.
I second the awesomeness of olaf's website.
w00t!
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