#i may need to stop trying so hard to preserve design elements across settings. but it's fun 😔

[whypolar]

Brainstorming gundam/trigun character swap designs and so far every single one of these looks like a warhammer 40k character

[meadowsland]

THRIVE OR SURVIVE

BY ZACH MORTICE

São Paolo is a small aquaponics farming settlement where residents and visitors gather medicinal compounds from the surrounding jungle. 2100: A Dystopian Utopia—The City After Climate Change, by Vanessa Keith/StudioTEKA (New York: Urban Research, 2017). Courtesy of Terreform.

In the not-so-distant future, what remains of São Paulo is something like an ecoresort medical crop farm for ewoks. People from all over the world travel to its lush, frequently flooded rain forest and set up shop in ovular pods in the treetops connected by open-air skywalks. They farm fish, grow sugarcane, and harvest rare, medicinal compounds from the surrounding jungle. Crews deconstruct the old city, leaving more room for this life-saving flora to reassert itself.

A continent away, the city of Phoenix, Arizona, is also in the process of unbecoming. Residents of its single-family houses are cannibalizing their neighborhoods at the stern urging of statist security forces. (Let’s say something like United Nations troops, perhaps wearing black helmets instead of blue ones.) The nation’s sixth-largest city will be shrunk to a tiny fraction of its former size to make way for more massive solar energy farms that dominate the desert landscape. Former Arizonans are invited to move themselves along with the bricks and mortar of their communities to a burgeoning megacity in Vancouver. Some people don’t want to go, and are meeting in secret to talk about what to do if they’re forced.

Those companion (but tonally opposed) visions of the future begin with the same book, Vanessa Keith’s 2100: A Dystopian Utopia—The City After Climate Change, published by Terreform’s Urban Research, Michael Sorkin’s publishing imprint. It envisions a world where preventing the two-degree Celsius change in global temperatures to forestall a total ecological collapse is a quaint memory. In 2100, global temperatures have risen by four degrees Celsius. Much of North America and Europe is a largely uninhabitable desert. Humanity races toward the poles, purposefully melting glaciers for freshwater and establishing a new stock exchange in Greenland. Many millions of people are displaced by climate change, yet the global population reaches 10 billion. Carbon is sequestered from the air into carbon fiber, and concrete megastructure biomes in Antarctica are filled with pleasure gardens and fresh fruits and vegetables. Is this a resilient techno-utopia or a tomb for the dying days of humanity? It’s presented as neither, exactly, with the direct, matter-of-fact tone of exhibition wall text, and with no political undercurrents inherent in mass relocation induced by climate change. Keith, an architect whose practice is StudioTEKA, puts this contradiction up front. “This work is intended to be both a resounding call to action,” she writes, “and an optimistic proposal for the difficult future we stand to inherit if we do not act.”

Much of Phoenix, Arizona, is given over to solar power farms as the city is largely deconstructed. 2100: A Dystopian Utopia—The City After Climate Change, by Vanessa Keith/StudioTEKA (New York: Urban Research, 2017). Courtesy of Terreform.

Keith’s most ingenious idea is the pairing of city types that organize the book and form closed resource loops in its world. There are extraction cities (often located in a very wide equatorial band with extreme weather) that are cannibalized for materials, mined for energy, and staffed by a skeleton crew of residents. These formerly great cities, like Manila and New York, harvest wind energy from constant tropical storms or take advantage of other extreme weather for energy generation. Each extraction city is paired with a compact megacity: ultradense settlements closer to the poles that welcome climate refugees (and energy generated in the depopulated zones) into hive-like high-rises. Sleepy Siberian outposts become thick with biomorphic megascrapers. In Vancouver, acres of trees and understory march up sloped skyscrapers. In Wellington, “landscrapers” burrow into the earth and also funnel wind energy. Johannesburg’s buildings are covered in facades that allow all manner of vines and animal habitats to dig in, acting as a huge carbon sink. They’re also a vital element of ecological preservation, since half of all animal species have gone extinct.

In Johannesburg, building facades that act as habitats for plants and animals provide refuge in a world where half of all species have already gone extinct. 2100: A Dystopian Utopia—The City After Climate Change, by Vanessa Keith/StudioTEKA (New York: Urban Research, 2017). Courtesy of Terreform.

This key pairing is what allows Keith to stop short of a total Malthusian collapse for humanity. Securing resources and habitable land in such a tight city-to-city connection across international borders also seems implicitly to call for the dissolution of the nation–state as the fundamental organizing unit of government, and for the re-emergence of the city–state.

Keith’s book tears down disciplinary divisions and assumed divisions between the natural and the urban. It reaffirms the omnipresent need in the climate change era for all infrastructure to serve multiple functions. All the technology she mentions either exists or is being researched. For decades now, ecologists and environmental designers have been reminding the world that humans must find ways to live more in concert with nature’s design. But in 2100, we’re forced to pound ourselves out on the climate change anvil of our own design. Keith talked with LAM about what these hammer strokes might look like.

So is this a utopia or a dystopia?

We’re trying to get away from binary thinking of a dystopia or a utopia. It’s really hard to separate. What we’re trying to really do is focus on hybridity. Things can be this and that. We can have a utopia within a dystopia. We took as our site this world at four degrees of warming, which is arguably dystopian.  And it’s far from ideal, but if we keep going, it may very well happen. The utopian part of the book is that, while we have not been able to stop global warming, we’ve been able to prepare for it in a way that is orderly and in a way that hasn’t caused chaos and death on a massive scale.

Troll is Antarctica’s first large city. 2100: A Dystopian Utopia—The City After Climate Change, by Vanessa Keith/StudioTEKA (New York: Urban Research, 2017). Courtesy of Terreform.

Outside of the habitable megastructures that several of these projects use, what you see in these scenarios pretty broadly falls under the definition of landscape architecture or landscape urbanism. What can these design practices do that others can’t in this extreme climate?

I feel that landscape architecture has an enormous role to play, and that we need to have more collaboration and interdisciplinary work across our fields. In Troll [Antarctica], the landscape is inside the building. So, is that interior design or landscape design? Who does that? Is that the architect or the landscaper? We need to think beyond these categories.

We’re going to have to work together internationally, and we’re going to have to work together across the divides in our thinking that act as a blind spot preventing us from seeing solutions. The city is not separate from nature. There’s nature in cities—we just don’t choose to see it that way. What’s really required is a new perspective and work that is truly interdisciplinary. Why is it that the architect makes the building, the interior designer does the inside, and the landscape architect does the outside? Maybe nature [forces us to] rethink these artificial positions we have.

In Beijing, former landfills are mined for precious metals. 2100: A Dystopian Utopia—The City After Climate Change, by Vanessa Keith/StudioTEKA (New York: Urban Research, 2017). Courtesy of Terreform.

The challenge is to create intermediate spaces that are neither fully urban nor fully of the biosphere. If you look at the example of Beijing, I wanted to have a site where we could look at the issue of polluted environments, and how we deal with waste. Eco-System, a recycling plant near Tokyo, produces around 600 pounds of gold per month—as much gold as a small gold mine—from old cell phones and circuit boards. I really feel that in the future we’ll go back to our landfills and mine them like we currently mine for gold. There’s so much value in the things we throw away.

Which of these places would you really want to visit? Which sound terrible to you?

I’d like to visit all of them! I love New York, and I live here now, but if we go to a four-degree world, I don’t know if anyone is going to want to be in a coastal area during hurricane season. Wellington is very interesting. The climate is supposed to be pretty mild there, even with four degrees of warming. I really like the idea that we have this radial city over a gorge with these furry bridges that collect wind energy, and I like the public outdoor space in the stacked rambla. People might also want to tour the energy installations in Manila and New York, and spending time in São Paulo in the rain forest either as a vacationer or a volunteer looks like it would be great. The places you’re going to want to spend the most time are the compact megacities. We envisioned a world of dense urban settlements, smaller-scale outpost settlements, and a lot of wilderness, farming, and renewable energy farms in between. Not a lot of urban sprawl.

“Landscrapers” in Wellington help funnel wind energy. 2100: A Dystopian Utopia—The City After Climate Change, by Vanessa Keith/StudioTEKA (New York: Urban Research, 2017). Courtesy of Terreform.

Are these places to thrive as a species or places simply to survive? Or are both of these ways of living happening at the same time?

I think they’re places to thrive. I don’t want to see a world where we’re focused only on survival. I think that if we have a world where we’re able to harness our smarts and our technology, that we would do it in such a way to have a better quality of life.

So why not shade this more intensely as a pure, joyous utopia or completely dismal hellscape, instead of a more middle-of-the-road approach?

I wouldn’t say that it’s middle-of-the-road. Again, it’s utopia within dystopia. It would be horrifically irresponsible of me to say, “Let’s just go on the way we are.” Right now business as usual is six or seven degrees by 2100. At six degrees [warming], with very warm oceans, hurricanes can circumnavigate the globe multiple times. That is not something that we want. What we want to emphasize is, look at all this great stuff that’s going on. Look at all these wonderful people that are doing this research to solve our problems. Why don’t we start using that now, and maybe we can have something that’s better than we’re imagining?

Compact megacity Moscow is a vertical maze of old and new high-rises. 2100: A Dystopian Utopia—The City After Climate Change, by Vanessa Keith/StudioTEKA (New York: Urban Research, 2017). Courtesy of Terreform.

But why not scare people the other way with UN storm troopers and mass relocation to the Antarctic? There’s the carrot, and the stick.

Within the arc of a few years we’ve gone from thinking that driving a hybrid SUV and recycling was doing enough to [solve] the problem, to [thinking] “it’s so big I can’t do anything.” People get crisis fatigue. Everything’s a crisis. If you can’t do anything, you may as well party while the world burns. I didn’t want to do the storm trooper vision of the future because it makes people feel overwhelmed and that there’s nothing we can do, and that’s not true. I don’t want people to feel disempowered and that they have to wait for a top-down state solution.

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based architecture and landscape architecture journalist. Listen to his Chicago architecture and design podcast A Lot You Got to Holler, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram. 

from Landscape Architecture Magazine https://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2017/05/11/thrive-or-survive/

[kangpaw88-blog]

Window Cleaning Robot Malaysia Suria KLCC Jawdropping Discount

No mundane household process is protected, with household robotics becoming increasingly standard! Although software vacuums like the Roomba have practically outsourced vacuuming's idea, the Hobot robot window solution goals to similarly automate window-washing for technology- friendly owners.

Yes, an issue that is clearly identified is solved by the Hobot the theory is that, but does the engineering meet the assurance? Just like any property automatic, the evidence is in the delivery. Within this Hobot evaluation I will be looking at the professionals and negatives as well as the top functions of Hobot 268

Produced and developed by HOBOT Technology Inc., the Hobot claims to automate the boring and sometimes hazardous activity of window washing. For business people or home owners with high - hard to achieve - windows, here is the reply to an obvious problem. Whether you planning to save costs on window-cleaning or are currently seeking to clear glass floors which have not been cleaned in years, the Hobot supplies a case that is compelling. Similarly, if you have bodily limitations, the Hobot is a solution that is distinct.

Top

Powerful Cleaning Method: The core of the Hobot is really an exclusive 3- process cleaning. Essentially replicating the process of window-washing yourself, with cleaning out the dirt, starting and remove pollutants from the floor, and the micro fibre cloth wipes the rest of the dust for a glass that is clean off.

Anti- this element is incredibly impressive, although dropping: this indicates precarious to have expensive gadget such as this merely mounted on the window via suction. Though I did so not have the stomach to check out the boundaries of it on my third-story house, I was instructed the robot comes with an embedded UPS (Un-interrupted Power System) which will avoid the robot from dropping while there's no energy source. I believe I'm likely to try out on a greater terrain, but of course using its high strength security string (150 Kgf).

Operates on Multi-Surface: The Hobot 268 works on the high volume, centrifugal pump which doesn't lower its tension easily even if there is a tiny leakage; it could proceed properly on diverse floors such as for example: screen film, safety foil, level glass, representation glass, engraved glass, rough glass if not hardwood.

Automatic Cleaning Way: The best aspect regarding the Hobot is the fact that it'll auto-navigate to find the best cleaning path over a specific window-pane using laser technology that is complex. The software goes in two instructions and it's also able while it easily works on frameless windows to assess the distance and level.

Quick Washing:Two caterpillar treads are mounted on the Hobot 268 that are quick to maneuver at 12cm s, cleaning 1 sqm in only 2.4mins

High Reliability Design: a car- flexible pneumatic pad automatically handles the driving pressure and retains cleaning cloth in proportion and the pressure between caterpillar treads, consequently excessively filthy glass floor doesn't disturb Hobot 268 task of washing the complete screen and make it slippery.

Real Time Problem Readings: Luckily, the Hobot features real-time error messages to the device's exhibit interface. This preserves a lot of trouble troubleshooting and diagnosing problems. Of flashing lamps, a series indicates the rank of the device. An alarm will appear if an issue is and area will be stopped in by the device.

Pros - Points I Appreciated

1-Touch Cleaning: whilst not usually as straightforward as set-it and overlook it, the Hobot is quite near a complete hands-free remedy. Especially if you have plenty of glass real estate and hard to achieve edges, this is a significant period and cost saver.

3-Remote Control Selection: When The device needs to clear an especially filthy location or gets stuck, the Hobot can be physically controlled by you with a remote-control that comes included with the unit. That is a superb backup that I came across beneficial, specifically for corners of windows that had not been washed in some time, since the engineering is not always great.

4-Quiet Operation: I was at how calm these devices was, amazed. On the exterior of the glass it was virtually imperceptible to my hearing on the inside. I had been originally worried that it may add to the noise pollution.

2-Superior Security Precautions: With an expenditure with this measurement, the final thing you need is the new gadget falling off the medial side of one's design. Whilst it looks counter intuitive, security leash and the suction surface tend to be enough to secure your expense.

Where to Choose The Hobot

Autovac Bot is the leading distributor for household robotics appliances. Get one today and never clean your house windows. AutoVac Robot supplies a 30 Days Cash Back Guarantee so there is no risk along with your purchase.

What to improve

The Hobot-268 is just for automating window-cleaning, a valuable investment. However, if you're considering a screen cleaner that is automatic, it is likely that that you just have glass which would not usually be washed or some hard to attain windows. Or you just need to saveall the risky and tedious work for the software. If so, the Hobot-268 is certainly worth the expense.

However Working-Out the Kinks: The Hobot is about an 80% option. Such as the Roombas, the Hobot keeps improving with each version.

Anyway, there is not much matter with Hobot 268. Granted its exceptional performance, my watch is, Hobot 268 happens to be the best window-cleaning robot in the market.

Verify them out here:http://autovacbot.com/shop/hobot/hobot-268/