Created by Smith|Allen Studio, an Oakland based architecture firm, the 10ft x 10ft x 8ft form adds a decidedly artificial element to the otherwise organic forest it calls home. However, despite its appearance, the Echoviren is quite environmentally friendly. Printed from a PLA bioplastic, the structure will naturally decompose back into the forest in 30-50 years. According to Smith|Allen “"As [Echoviren] weathers it will become a micro-habitat for insects, moss, and birds." — engineering.com
Instead of having parks, the whole city is a park...Like aluminum extrusions the whole building is extruded and then it is cut by laser beams, then inserted into a structure by machine. - Jacque Fresco — BBC News
Paul Kerley explores the 97-year old architect's vision of the future. For the Venus Project, the goal is a radically different society. One replete with monorails and retro-Modernist architecture à la Disney's Epcot, where everything from nations to jobs are no longer... View full entry
The days of rummaging frantically for the card that gets us onto public transit may be over.
A team of engineers from MIT has created the 3D-printed "Sesame Ring," which has an embedded RFID tag that lets you tap it to a RFID-based fare reader and hop on.
— The Atlantic Cities
Syncing public transit and wearable technology, the waterproof Sesame Ring can be used in place of the Charlie Card, Boston's mass transit smart card. Available in customizable colors and sizes, the first batch of $17 rings have already sold out, but their Kickstarter campaign will ensure that... View full entry
The breakthrough not only allows an object made up of many different materials to be printed, but also lets the user change the look and feel of a single material used to print an object. It's possible to print an object with hard and compressible sections out of a single material, even if the raw material isn't flexible in itself. — Gizmag
Now you can 3D print a single object with multiple materials and varying densities, thanks to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). Through an adapted software called Spec2Fab, the designer can specify precisely which materials are to be used in each part of the printed... View full entry
Elon Musk's Hyperloop announcement resulted in quite a bit of skepticism. We'd like to think that has less to do with the feasibility of Musk's concept and more to do with the massive mass transit failures of the past.
And there have been some doozies.
— wired.com
Related: L.A. to S.F. in 30 Minutes: Tesla's Hyperloop Would Make CA's High-Speed Rail Blush View full entry
[My Ideal City] is an instrument where all people in Bogota help to create their city by interacting in proposals made for their Downtown in crowd sourcing, thus impacting design through real time interaction and direct feedback. Once the different initiatives are defined, the process is completed by the population crowd funding its own initiatives. — Aedes
Winka Dubbeldam (Archi-Tectonics) and Rodrigo Nino (Prodigy Network) have developed Downtown Bogotá // My Ideal City, an online platform for the citizens of Bogotá to influence their local city-planning proposals. Recognizing that middle-class population growth across Latin America... View full entry
Philip Beesley is a Canada-based architect who has spent years blurring the lines between nature and technology. In 2008, he began work on the Hyozolic series — a collection of immersive installations that react to, and evolve with, the movements of people who pass through them. The idea, according to Beesley, is to create a "metabolic architecture," whereby manmade structures are seen not as inanimate, fixed objects, but as living, breathing entities, capable of regeneration and growth. — theverge.com
The most recent addition to the Hyozolic series, Radiant Soil, debuted earlier this summer at the EDF Fondation in Paris, France. View full entry
How do you fancy living in a city with which you can interact? A city that acts more like a living organism, a city that can respond to your needs. [...]
But how do we get to this smarter future. Who will be monitoring and controlling the sensors that will increasingly be on every building, lamp-post and pipe in the city?
And is it a future we even want?
— bbc.co.uk
MIT researchers have developed a lightweight structure whose tiny blocks can be snapped together much like the bricks of a child’s construction toy. The new material, the researchers say, could revolutionize the assembly of airplanes, spacecraft, and even larger structures, such as dikes and levees. — MIT News Office
Finding 3D printed materials unsuitable for structural applications, this group of researchers has been investigating new ways of building "big things out of small pieces". The configurations proposed are claimed to be much less susceptible to sudden failure, providing redundancy and predictable... View full entry
The second Genius Loci Weimar festival took place in Weimar, Germany last weekend from Aug. 9-11. The annual festival is a growing event that celebrates and gathers talent in the emerging art form of videomapping. After last year's success, Genius Loci Weimar has expanded to include in its program a competition, symposium, videomapping workshops, and an exhibition in cooperation with the Bauhaus University Weimar. — bustler.net
Plugging in an electric vehicle is, in some cases, the equivalent of adding three houses to the grid. That has utilities in California—where the largest number of electric vehicles are sold—scrambling to upgrade the grid to avoid power outages. — technologyreview.com
What 4D printing offers is the opportunity for objects to change, to adapt to their environment, to respond.
Earlier this year, Skylar Tibbits, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Self-Assembly Lab, created a bit of a stir with his talk on 4D printing.
“We are looking at the ability to program physical and biological materials to change shape, change properties and even compute outside of silicon-based matter,” Mr. Tibbits told the TED conference in February.
— blogs.wsj.com
As a society slowly urbanizes over time, its psychology and culture change, too... If American culture and psychology grew more individualistic as the country urbanized, wouldn't that transformation be clear in the words from American books (and the concepts that lie behind them)? — The Atlantic Cities
Urban and rural environments impact personal psychology differently, according to research published by UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield in Psychological Science. While observational evidence may draw a clear line between current city- and country-mindsets, Greenfield's source material... View full entry
Hyperloop is a new mode of transport that seeks to change this [transit] paradigm by being both fast and inexpensive for people and goods. Hyperloop is also unique in that it is an open design concept, similar to Linux. Feedback is desired from the community that can help advance the Hyperloop design and bring it from concept to reality. — Tesla Motors
CEO of Tesla Motors, Elon Musk, posted on the Tesla blog his proposal for an alternative to the California High-Speed Rail plan, the Hyperloop. The solar-powered transportation system is proposed to function somewhat like a pneumatic tube, where capsules of up to 28 passengers on air-bearings are... View full entry
The Brooklyn Tech Triangle could become the next Silicon Valley -- if the strategic plan to bolster the emerging tech hub comes to full fruition. The plan was developed over a six-month period by a multidisciplinary team led by WXY Architecture + Urban Design and the Brooklyn Tech Triangle... View full entry