New windturbine to the neighbours´liking

Windturbine that silences NIMBYs

Rooftop solar panels are unlikely to elicit complaints from neighbors–they’re silent and relatively unobtrusive. But loud rooftop wind turbines? That’s where the virtually NIMBY-proof Ridgeblade turbine comes in. The turbine, designed by a former Rolls Royce turbine engineer at UK-based The Power Collective, boasts a sleek profile that is both powerful and visually pleasing.

continue> inhabitat.com

Helsinki the Design Capital 2012

Helsinki and Eindhoven competing for becoming Design Capital 2012

UPDATE 25.11.2009> Helsinki will be the Design Capital 2012!

Two cities, Helsinki inFinland and Eindhoven in The Netherlands are competing about the prestigeous title of Design Capital 2012. The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design will choose the winner in November. The judges will visit the two cities in August.

If Helsinki is chosen there will be big opening and closing events and several festivals and happenings organised around Design and Architecture in the city during the two-year capitalship.

Will the establishment of Iittala, Marimekko, Fiskars, Aalto, Artek, Helsinki art nouveau- and modern architecture, and designers like Ilka Suppanen, Harri Koskinen, Valvomo bring the price home, or do the judges look for new design ideas of  non-commercialism, ecology, ethics and mysticism like Hel Looks, Globe Hope, Hollmen-Reuter-Sandman Architects, Marcus Copper, or -since the almost total death of free graffiti culture in the city-, the risign culture of guerilla gardening in Helsinki?

Marimekko

Alvar Aalto

art nouveau architecture

Snowcrash Globlow lamp

Hel Looks: Colin (33)

Hollmen Reuter Sandman

Archangel of the seven seas - Marcus Copper

Guerilla Gardening

Cement that eats CO2

Revealed: The cement that eats carbon dioxide

Tuomo Siitonen Architects´ plan for apartments in downtown Helsinki

Cement accounts for 5% of the world’s CO2 emissions – more than aviation. Now British engineers have discovered a new form of cement that instead reduces CO2 emissions. Cement is the key ingredient in concrete. In Finland, concrete is the most common material for building bearing structures of high-rise apartment houses.  Scientists predict, that worldwide, the demand for cement will grow by 50% in the years to come.

Cement, a vast source of planet-warming carbon dioxide, could be transformed into a means of stripping the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, thanks to an innovation from British engineers.

Making traditional cement results in greenhouse gas emissions from two sources: it requires intense heat, and so a lot of energy to heat up the ovens that cook the raw material, such as limestone. That then releases further CO2 as it burns. But, until now, noone has found a large-scale way to tackle this fundamental problem.

The new cement, based on magnesium silicates, not only requires much less heating, it also absorbs large amounts of CO2 as it hardens, making it carbon negative. Set up by chief scientist at Novacem, Nikolaos Vlasopoulos and his colleagues at Imperial College London, the innovation has already attracted the attention of major construction companies and investors.

VIA > The Guardian

How would a butterfly inspire your next design?

Biomimicry

Butterflies exhibit vibrant colors and stay clean using nano-scale structures on their wings. Designers and engineers have emulated this strategy to create self-cleaning coatings, fabrics and paints, and electronic display screens.

What is Biomimicry?

Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a design discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf.  The core idea is that Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with: energy, food production, climate control, non-toxic chemistry, transportation, packaging, and a whole lot more.

Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most importantly, what lasts here on Earth. Instead of harvesting organisms, or domesticating them to accomplish a function for us, biomimicry differs from other “bio-approaches” by consulting organisms and ecosystems and applying the underlying design principles to our innovations. This approach introduces an entirely new realm for entrepreneurship that can contribute not only innovative designs and solutions to our problems but also to awakening people to the importance of conserving the biodiversity on Earth that has so much yet to teach us.

> Ask Nature

> Morphotex

Shopping uniformly

Our cities are malls

I was sitting on the tram number 6 trough the center of Helsinki on my way to Hietalahti, and it crossed my mind, how similar the businesses in metropolitan areas are becoming. It doesn’t matter if its Paris , Madrid, Stocholm or Helsinki, but in the core shopping district you always find Prada, Gucci, Hugo Boss, Hästens, Hennes et Mauritz and Zara occupying all of the downtown rental spaces. It’s the same verywhere! Cities need to stand out and find their own character again.

We used to imagine this was a phenomena only concerning shopping malls; that is where you find the shops and enterprises composed of specific pre-organised compounds of shops. Shops that do not enter into each other comfort zone too much to create real competition in prizing, shops that tend to the needs of the average IMAGINED shopper of a specific targeted area. You have malls targeting middle class; these are the malls on the ring roads and perhaps the malls in city center targeting the offspring of the wealthy (those who can afford to live in the city)…so we get for example Kamppi Mall in Helsinki centre that attracts mainly teenagers. (The Kamppi Mall is by the way the busiest mall in Europe –insert ad here-). But as I watched the well known brands pass by my tram window, I realised this has happened to our city centres outside the malls as well. Our cities are becoming a malls.

So what will happen if the turbulence on the financing market continues? Would it possibly create new opportunities to reclaim the liveliness and dynamics of the city centres? When people stop spending on luxury, and the brand shops have to close down, is there a new dawn for experimental enterprises in the centre? Perhaps we will see sprawling young entrepreneur businesses find a niche in our cities. I remember the attraction and excitement of for example Barcelona a decade back, that lay in the possibilities to create things, live from it, change your mind if you felt like it and go in another direction, and succeed again. This was the creation of young students, immigrants, of refugees, of local people using the buzz…all of this both gave opportunity to business to establish and to the atmosphere of that your life lay at your feet to create, whatever age you were. The centre of Barcelona was full of unknown designer shops, small clubs popping up everywhere, record shops, cafés, restaurants. The huge number of tourists consequently flocking there gave way to a lot of trendy hostels. Forget Gaudi (however fantastic), forget the MACBA Museum…the city grew its fame out of the will to do things of people living there. If the city centre would not have supported low enough rents for small new businesses, if the rent levels would only allowed brand names there, the famous Barcelona we know today would not exist.

History, Catalunya, beauty of architecture…all of this would prevail, but we would not have our imaginary City of Life. A lot of `city´ is in the minds of its inhabitants and its visitors, and like the rug under the feet of the financing market, it is also easily shaken if not tendered.//aito

Helsinki Hietalahti fleemarket clothes

link> Wardrobe remix

The street flow of architecture

Does architecture shape our surroundings and our behaviour

-or do we collectively shape our architecture?

The street was not wide, maybe four meters wide, and it was sloped up towards a small bell tower. The level change was realized as steps, so that street felt like an interior– a part of a public building or a church. And indeed at the fond of the street there was a the local church, to which outrage the local gay bar on the street set up a fiesta every Sunday at the same time as church sermon took place.

The space of the street was surrounded by four-five story buildings, that seemed to grow out of the same material as the street. Their architectural qualities were humble, one had an over proportioned balcony off center that was full of dry plants like a hairy mold on your face, another had bad cracks in the plaster of the façade resembling a very old woman´s skin. There were also new-builds in the street. One lot on the street had as an economical venture sold building right to wealthy Russians from Novosibirsk, and the Russians had built a luxurious, but slightly tasteless apartment building on the lot. Still something – undefined still by our modern architectural theories – kept the streetscape together like glue and made it hole.

What we noticed after a while after settling in at our rented apartment on third floor, was that the street was never quiet. Even by night you could hear apart from some traffic here and there, also sound of heels tapping the stone pavement, strange shouts you could not locate, and dogs barking.

By day the street was a stage for activity. There were small shops that poured out their products on the street for display, cramped by the small space they had inside. People stopped and talked to the shop owners while passing by. The butcher on the street had a peculiar way of greeting all elderly ladies with a bit too intimate hugs. White collar workers rushed pass the street on their way to work and home. The homeless loitered around. Young men played football on the street. There was a sense of liberties taken and given, an unpronounced allowing code of conduct.

The above writing is freely adapted from professor Panu Lehtovuori´s lecture “Calzada de sant´Ana”, but it could be a description of any street in Europe admired in travel brouschures for its genuinity. Why are we as trained architects unable to design a street like this today?

It’s a steet that encourages, not just allows people to be themselves. It forces to interaction with other people. Interaction is one of the main keys to happiness, if not one of the most crucial. All humans have a need to define themselves and their identitiy through others , through their reaction. Be the reaction admiration, schock, indifference, but we all crave that in some form. When the possibility to interact is taken away from you, you seek it trough the internet, through books, or through meditation or other. Human life is an exodus for recognicion, reaction or the lack of it. But it has to be tested. Every single human being seeks interaction. What architecture needs to do, is to give space for people to meet on the terms they define. Individuality wants liberty to have the freedom to choose who and how it interacts with, but individuality always needs to define itself trough others; if it only observes from the balcony above the street, if it stays in the shadow of the doorway, timid to step out into the limeligh, of if it takes center stage and becomes the hero or the antihero of the show called Calzada Sant´Ana.

Give and get in return.

The above is a story of a street in Lisbon Portugal – Europe. Thanks to professor Panu Lehtovuori and his “Calzada de sant´Ana”.

Keywords:

-Genuine

-Humble

-Scenography

-Noice

-Interaction

-Entity

-Street space

-Flow

-Choise

-Intimacy

-Freedom

-Tolerance (to balance your own freedom)

//aito

> www.urbanphoto.net

Important events

Things happening soon in Helsinki worth checking out:

1) This year´s Megapolis 2023 on date 27.9.2008 at Vanha Ylioppilastalo in Helsinki

2) Carrotmob is coming to Finland: Saturday 27.9 (at 18.30) in Ravintola Juttutupa in Hakaniemi.

Concept idea presented by the founder Brent Schulkin on youtube:

The result in: Talous Sanomat

3) Thursday 2.10.2008 (at 17.00)

HUM:ARC (Architecture for Humanity) exhibition opening at A-Guild´s Gallery “Mom, whats´s architecture?” Neitsytpolku 8 in Helsinki

www.new.facebook.com/EVENT

www.new.facebook.com/GROUP

Announcement: Ekosähkö Oy

Ekosähkö

An announcement, better late than ever:

Aito, and most of its affiliates, has tossed Helsingin Energia into the trash bin (except for the monopolized transfer part) and has a new electricity provider: Ekosähkö Oy http://www.taustavoimaa.fi/ekosahko/.

Ekosähkö produces electricity through small power plants and at least one third third is produced by wind power. We made the contract here (keep the suggested parameters unchanged, consumption of energy for an one-two person household is 2000 kWh/year) http://www.taustavoimaa.fi/ekosahko/laskuri/ekosahko/index.asp

We will see in some time how it works. :)

Cheers//aito

Electricity through my window

MIT opens new ‘window’ on solar energy

Cost effective devices expected on market soon

glass facades

Imagine windows that not only provide a clear view and illuminate rooms, but also use sunlight to efficiently help power the building they are part of. MIT engineers report a new approach to harnessing the sun’s energy that could allow just that.

The work, to be reported in the July 11 issue of Science, involves the creation of a novel “solar concentrator.” “Light is collected over a large area [like a window] and gathered, or concentrated, at the edges,” explains Marc A. Baldo, leader of the work and the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering.

As a result, rather than covering a roof with expensive solar cells (the semiconductor devices that transform sunlight into electricity), the cells only need to be around the edges of a flat glass panel. In addition, the focused light increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell “by a factor of over 40,” Baldo says.

Because the system is simple to manufacture, the team believes that it could be implemented within three years–even added onto existing solar-panel systems to increase their efficiency by 50 percent for minimal additional cost. That, in turn, would substantially reduce the cost of solar electricity.

…

LINK

> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/solarcells-0710.html

WIRED SCIENCE: See-Through Solar Hack Could Double Panel Efficiency:

LINK> blog.wired.com

The city of voice – Wikicity

Wikicity

Vaarallisia ajatuksia - Dangerous Thoughts – that is something the guys at Demos like. Imagine year 2050 they say: most of the worlds population will live in “slums”; self-built cities. `This is our salvation!´ the men state. Wait a moment?

Wikicity is the city of voice. It’s the place of opportunity superior to the gold paved streets of another utopia, it is where opportunity is something you create together. It’s the place where man (hopefully woman, too…) can create his own surroundings. It is organised anarchy – extremely alluring. Dangerous? Risky? Naive? Optimist? Innovative? Hopeful? Progressive? Unpredictable? Brilliant? YES!

Look at what we have as an option: people more and more disengaged in decisions on their own lives, more and more distrustful of neighbours, more and more alone, embedded into a blanket of that everything in life is -so well organized-.

Roope Mokka of Demos Helsinki wrote an article on “Thinking Cities” for the Monocle alongside Alain de Botton, Richard Florida, Jonathan Raban, Ricky Burdett and Richard Alston. //aito

The idea of self-built cities is the greatest promise for urban development. The idea is that we open up the creation of cities in the same way we have opened the compiling of encyclopedias and online-media to allow anyone to contribute. It’s the same principle that many industries are using to open up their R&D, design and marketing processes to their customers and which also inspires “open source” software development. Co-creating cities is one of the few positive developments in a problem-ridden tidal wave of urbanisation in the 21st century. And it’s one that could make us happier.

The core issue is that cities no longer enable us to live out our dreams. We have changed, but the cities haven’t. They remain the final bastions of modernistic design where users are seen as the masses and individuals are an obstacle. Even suburbia (on the surface a tasteless, mundane, hypermarket-bound high-carbon lifestyle) offers more potential for self-expression. That is why we fleeing cities. To lure us back we need cities that give us a voice. We need to take democracy to the next level, where it recognises our individual needs and dreams.

Demos NOW, an urban think tank, has created the concept of City 2.0 (PDF) – an urban ecosystem of social innovation, governance and social risk funding. We want to turn the Helsinki Metropolitan Area into a self-built city; a hi-tech low-carbon “slum” with an unforeseen and unpredictable quality of life. A Wikicity.

yhteiskunta 2.0