Wind dam by Chetwood Associates

Building Design shows a power-generating “wind dam” designed by architects Chetwoods that uses a giant spinnaker sail slung between mountains to funnel wind into a turbine.


Chetwoods have submitted a proposal to suspend the first wind dam across a gorge at Lake Lagoda in north-west Russia.

Pursuing a Ken Yeang Built World

” There’s an excellent interview by CNN with Ken Yeang, principle of the UK firm Llweleyn Davis Yeang. Almost a year ago, I wrote about Yeang’s fascinating Menara Mesiniaga building, and that article has been a popular one in terms of visitors. Yeang is an ecological, architectural visionary designing in a way that blurs the boundary between the natural and human-built environments. With eco-logical design, the goal is to build a structure with no pollution or waste. And we’re getting there, too. To quote Yeang, “we’ll see green buildings long before 2020 — I think the movement is intensifying. Within the next 5-10 years we’ll see a lot more green buildings being built. Not just buildings but green cities, green environment, green master plans, green products, green lifestyles, green transportation. I’m very optimistic.“ The green buildings pictured in this post are only a fraction of those designed by Ken Yeang. If you’re looking for more information, feel free to pick up his latest book: ECODESIGN: A Manual for Ecological Design. ”

McDonough reveals “Tree Tower” concept

US green architect to unveil new speculative 40-storey skyscraper at World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi later this month Green architect and writer, William McDonough, has come good on his promise to Fortune Magazine to design a speculative tower for the future. The skyscraper will have a “100% positive impact on people and places”.
… Buildings consume 40 percent of our energy and can have life spans longer than humans. Because we live, work and associate with others in buildings, they form part of the fabric of human life—and thus have an enormous effect not only on the quality of individual lives but also on the state of the earth. … we have configured a structure that is not just kind to nature; it actually imitates nature. Imagine a building that makes oxygen, distills water, produces energy, changes with the seasons—and is beautiful. In effect, that building is like a tree, standing in a city that is like a forest. – By William McDonough, founder and principal of William McDonough & Partners (Fortune)
Shaped like a cross between the Gherkin and a cone shell, the 40-plus story tower by William McDonough + Partners, encompasses trees and other greenery and, so the architect claims, will behave like a tree. “It’s a building that receives its energy from the sun, that grows food, that builds soil, that provides a habitat for hundreds of species, that changes colours with the seasons, that creates micro-climates, that would purify water,” He said. “A building that would do just about everything a tree can do except self-replicate.”
Form and function Curved forms increase structural stability and maximize enclosed space; this reduces the amount of materials needed for construction. The shape is also aerodynamic, diffusing the impact of wind.”
The building encloses a series of “atrium gardens” on the western side with plants intended to clean the air inside the building. The northern side is covered with clear glass in front of mosses which should absorb particulates in the air. The building recycles waste water for use in the building’s gardens which, when cleansed by the plants, will be fed back into the grey water system once more.
The south side of the building is made up of 34,000 sq m of solar panels, meeting 40% of the building’s energy needs. A combined natural gas-fuelled heat-and-power plant, operating at 90% efficiency supplies the missing 60%.To cut down further on energy, workstations are fitted with presence sensors shutting down when people aren’t there and adjusting heat, light and sound when they are. “We don’t heat or cool ghosts,” says McDonough, mysteriously.He and Cradle to Cradle co-author, Michael Braungart, will talk about the tower among other ideas at the World Future Energy Summit which takes place in Abu Dhabi on the 21-23 of January. Lord Foster is due to give the closing speech at the event. McDonough is credited with creating the first solar powered house in Ireland and received the first and only Presidential Award for Sustainable Development for an individual in 1996.
A spokesperson for the practice confirmed there had been no concrete commissions for the building so far.

City on the Gulf: Koolhaas Lays Out a Grand Urban Experiment in Dubai

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF ” It has been 12 years since the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas unleashed his concept of “the generic city,” a sprawling metropolis of repetitive buildings centered on an airport and inhabited by a tribe of global nomads with few local loyalties. His argument was that in its profound sameness, the generic city was a more accurate reflection of contemporary urban reality than nostalgic visions of New York or Paris.Now he may get a chance to create his own version.
Designed for one of the biggest developers in the United Arab Emirates, Nakheel, Mr. Koolhaas’s master plan for the proposed 1.5-billion-square-foot Waterfront City in Dubai would simulate the density of Manhattan on an artificial island just off the Persian Gulf. A mix of nondescript towers and occasional bold architectural statements, it would establish Dubai as a center of urban experimentation as well as one of the world’s fastest growing metropolises.
A model of Rem Koolhaas’s Waterfront City in Dubai.The mixed-use project, startling in scale, is a carefully considered critique not just of the generic city but of a potentially greater evil: the growing use of high-end architecture as a tool for self-promotion. To Mr. Koolhaas this strategy, which many architects refer to as the Bilbao syndrome, reduces cities to theme parks of architectural tchotchkes that mask an underlying homogeneity.His strategy is not to reject either trend outright but to locate each one’s hidden, untapped potential, or as he puts it, “to find optimism in the inevitable.”
In Dubai Mr. Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture seem at first glance to have simply combined the two concepts, creating a hybrid of the generic and the fantastic. The core of the development would be the island, which would be divided into 25 identical blocks. Neat rows of towers — some tall and slender, others short and squat, depending on the zoning — line the blocks, as if a fragment of Manhattan had been removed with a scalpel and reinserted in the Middle East.
The monotony is broken by mixed-use structures whose immense scale and formal energy draw on mythic examples from architectural history. A spiraling 82-story tower might have been inspired by the minaret of the ninth-century Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq; a gargantuan 44-story sphere brings to mind the symbolic forms of the 18th-century architect Étienne-Louis Boullée. The tilting intertwined towers of a complex dubbed “the loop” are a more elaborate version of Mr. Koolhaas’s headquarters for China Central Television, being built in Beijing.
These varied elements are organized with Mr. Koolhaas’s customary flair for composition. (Although his desire to tackle big urban issues can sometimes make him seem dismissive of the design work that makes up the average architect’s life, he remains one of the art’s greatest practitioners.)
The island project would be a perfect square, emphasizing its isolation. The tallest towers are concentrated along the project’s southern edge to shield the interior blocks from the blazing sun. The gigantic sphere is placed precariously at the water’s edge, setting the entire ensemble artfully off balance. The spiraling tower stands just across from it, on a narrow spit of land that forms a barrier between the island and the gulf.
The way Mr. Koolhaas addresses the island’s isolation raises the most difficult questions. If his island of densely packed towers evokes a fragment of the great 20th-century metropolis, it can also conjure its dystopian twin: a miniaturized version of a city of glittering towers built for the global elite, barricaded against the urban poor and its makeshift shantytowns. (Think of George A. Romero’s 2005 flick, “Land of the Dead,” with its menacing corporate masters peering down on a world of faceless zombies.)
rendering envisioning the interior of the project’s 44-story sphere.
Mr. Koolhaas softens this effect by creating a series of somewhat tenuous connections to other developments on the mainland. Along with four slender bridges — one on each side of the square — Mr. Koolhaas plans to link the project to the fledging Dubai transit system, which is already under construction. More towers would rise opposite the island on a curved embankment, as if the island city were spilling beyond its boundaries.
But the thrust of his strategy is to turn the logic of the gated community on its head: isolation becomes a way to trap urban energy rather than keep it out. His goal is to imbue his waterfront enclave with enough complexity to provide a distilled version of the great metropolis within this moated sanctuary.
A waterfront boardwalk would surround the island. A narrow public park slices through its center; shaded sidewalk arcades are meant to draw people out of the air-conditioned buildings. In its northeastern reaches the plan’s geometric grid gives way to an intimate warren of alleyways, like a traditional souk.
Mr. Koolhaas takes a similarly textured approach to the buildings themselves. The sphere, for instance, is conceived as a self-contained three-dimensional urban neighborhood. Various public institutions are encased within smaller spheres suspended inside the space that are connected by escalators enclosed in long tubes. These smaller spheres are embedded in layers of residential housing, like embryos floating in a womb.
In the spiral tower terraces wrap around a soaring public atrium crisscrossed with escalators and walkways, an effort to pull the surrounding street life right up through the interiors.
Will it work? Some of the public zones, still in the earliest stages of design, are surprisingly conventional, including the formal arrangement of the park, which could be likened to the Champs-Élysées. So far the boardwalks framing the project lack the intricate layering of public and private spaces found, say, on the Corniche in Beirut.
Whatever his social goals, Mr. Koolhaas will have little control over the makeup of this community, which, if current development in waterfront Dubai is any indication, is still likely to serve a small wealthy elite.
Then there is the question of scale. Covering six and a half square miles, the island is roughly the size of a small urban neighborhood. Is this large enough to sustain the dense social fabric that Mr. Koolhaas is after? Or is it more likely to become a new species of gated enclave, architecturally stupendous yet profoundly exclusionary? Does its compact size make it easier to seal off from supposed undesirables?
Whatever the answers, Mr. Koolhaas’s design proves once again that he is one of the few architects willing to face the crisis of the contemporary city — from its growing superficiality to its deadening sterility — without flinching.
If he fails he at least will have raised questions that most architects would prefer to leave safely unexplored. If he succeeds he could bring us closer to a model of a city that is not only formally complex, but genuinely open to the impure.”