V2_ Knowledgebase

The Active Phytoremediation Wall System is a modular system of pods, housing hydroponic plants. Its main purpose is to encourage airflow and contribute to the quality of life through its air cleaning capacities. The project is a result of a collaborative research between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It is a bio-mechanical hybrid system that produces ‘fresh air’ from within buildings, thereby reducing the energy consumption. Because the plants’ roots are exposed, instead of being buried in soil, the plants’ air-cleaning capacity increases by 200 to 300 percent. The pods themselves are made from vacuum-formed plastic, and the form allows the maximum amount of air to reach the root rhizomes while using the minimum amount of material. It also creates a beautiful base for the plants. The wall system can be installed in large commercial interiors, but works equally well in small settings—a four-module system in an apartment would have the impact of 800 to

ecoLogicStudio’s installation for AILATI 2010 has been developed in collaboration with the Global Footprint Network group. We aren’t surprised to discover, through data, that the world is going towards a continuous increase of consumption of resources in relation to the biosphere’s capacity. Nevertheless we are wondering, which processes and stories could define this tendency and which are the relations between debtor countries and creditor ones? Most of the political choices today are based on data and graphics shown in these images; how can the single citizen take part in these decisions while interacting with his daily processes, his histories and his inventions? Can technology act as an intermediary, generating devices that link city, architecture and landscape with politics, society and environment? The “ECO-FOOTPRINT DATA GROTTO MACHINE” focuses on the representation in a relational architectonic system, parametrically designed, of the ecological footprint data.

The project shows in encyclopaedic breadth topics that define contemporary mobility. The topics are organized in three large chapters (culture, economy and system) and twelve themes ranging from mobile space to fuel. Each theme again is examined in the scale of the car, the region, the world and time. Throughout the themes, the project intends to show the link between individual experience and global effects.

BBa_K221000 is a sequence of DNA that produces an enzyme called geosmin, which is responsible for the smell of wet earth when it begins to rain. When BBa_k221000 is transformed (injected) into the DNA of E. coli bacteria, it transforms the bacteria into “living machines” that produce the smell of rain. The mystique surrounding the aroma of the Indian monsoon is encoded as a genetic sequence. This is an artistic investigation into the narrative and promises of synthetic biology. The installation comprises a mobile DIY bio lab housed in a geodesic dome. The lab is equipped with all the facilities needed to perform rudimentary genetic engineering and is built entirely out of hacked, local, homemade consumer electronics. The bacteria / “living machines” are grown inside the lab in a custom-made incubator inviting the audience to engage, up-close in critical debates around such forms of biotechnologies. The lab also functions as a pedagogical space and artist studio, as it hosts artists’ workshops and performances and also facilitates the conceptual development of artworks that are produced by borrowing tools and methodologies from the life sciences. This mobile bio lab is collapsible and can be re-assembled in a day. The entire process of building the lab is documented and made available at http://artscienceblr.org or http://hackteria.org/wiki

Carbon credit brings the ‘convenience’ back to the ‘inconvenient truth’. Global warming has been driven by capitalism, now we are trying to solve global warming through capitalism. Is this possible? Should we save the planet for the planet’s sake or for money? From an ecological perspective, CO2 is a byproduct of the living, either directly or indirectly. From the economic perspective, CO2 may become the world's largest commodity market. What do we consider the price of our own byproducts? This project aims to criticise the carbon trading system as well as raise awareness of how good we are at destroying the planet. One problem is how to show the intangible amount of CO2. BreathSink is one simple way of visualization carbon footprint. BreathSink is dry timber which has same CO2 as 1 day of breathing. However, in term of design, what is the function of this BreathSink?

A website about research in the field of Architecture. I have been exploring novel ways to passively harvest energy from around buildings with devices and mechanisms and finding ways to make it do useful work, this website is about that ongoing exploration. This is a research topic where there is an opportunity to gain because the principal energy resource is the sun which is completely free. A measure of success in this area is to balance the available energy from ambient resources with the possibility for buildings that respond to the dynamic changes in their surrounding environment. This is a research topic that is as much about observation of what there is to be harvested as creative thinking about matching it in time and place with the design of buildings. I think that this can be achieved in effective but subtle ways in the passive design of building enclosures, and this is a research topic that has been explored through doing design projects to demonstrate this. Please explore

We are forced to face the reality on a daily basis that environmental damage is more advanced than experts predicted. As global warming becomes the top of almost every government's agenda, recent trends have put pressure on world leaders to act immediately: for instance, forced recycling, carbon offsetting and a 10-year campaign to make environmentally friendly living fashionable. Are these efforts really improving the environment? are these activities saving the earth? what is eco-friendly living? when we live in a period where the worlds climate disaster is about to happen, how can we live the ultimate green lifestyle? The project takes current green trends to the extreme by proposing a community of people called "Extreme Green Guerrillas". This project fell into three design proposals, which explore their lifestyles and systems they use to enjoy their lives: Communication, Feast and Death.

Translator II: Grower is a small 'rover' vehicle which navigates around the periphery of a room. It hugs the room’s walls and responds to the carbon dioxide levels in the air by actually drawing varying heights of 'grass' on the walls in green ink. The Grower robot senses the carbon dioxide (CO2) level in the air via a small digital CO2 sensor. This sensor is mounted high on a wall of the exhibition space and sends data wirelessly to the robot. The number of people in an exhibit space breathing in oxygen and exhaling CO2 has an immediate effect on the sensor. My robot takes a reading of the CO2 level every few seconds and in response it draws a vertical line in green ink on the wall. The line height pertains directly to the level of CO2 (and therefore also the people traffic) in the space. The more CO2, the higher the line is drawn - the maximum height being 1ft. Once Grower completes a line, it moves forward several millimeters and repeats the process.

Future Cities Lab’s HYDRAMAX Port Machines project proposes a radical rethinking of San Francisco’s urban waterfront post sea-level rise. The proposal renders the existing hard edges of the waterfront as new “soft systems” that would include aquatic parks, community gardens, wildlife refuges and aquaponic farms. A synthetic architecture is introduced that blurs the distinction between building, landscape, infrastructure and machine. Using thousands of sensors and motorized components, the massive urban scale robotic structure harvests rainwater and fog, while modulating air flow, solar exposure and intelligent building systems.

We're developing open-source technologies to explore and study the oceans. Join us in designing, testing and building the International Ocean Station!

Plants are moving creatures. Their movements generally remains invisible to us, because their muscle and nerve-like systems operate at a very slow timescale and their rooting in soil confines their motion to the movement of branches and leaves. These restrictions give plants an enormous disadvantage compared to their main aggressors: animals and humans, in many instances resulting in a loss of biodiversity and even extinction. In the prototype that Ivan Henriques developed during the V2_ Summer Sessions a plant is provided with an off-the-shelf motor system. The potential of the plant to sense when it is being touched is used to set the motor in action. By doing so, the plant is able to speedily drive away in response to human touch.

Chris Bosse, Tobias Wallisser and Alexander Rieck founded the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture [LAVA] in 2007. It was established as a network of creative minds with a research and design focus and has offices in Sydney, Shanghai, Stuttgart and Abu Dhabi. LAVA explores frontiers that merge future technologies with the patterns of organisation found in nature and believes this will result in a smarter, friendlier, more socially and environmentally responsible future. The potential for naturally evolving systems such as snowflakes, spider webs and soap bubbles for new building typologies and structures has continued to fascinate LAVA – the geometries in nature create both efficiency and beauty. But above all the human is the centre of their investigations.

A multitude of individuals, groups and institutions will form a massive intelligent swarm that would move roughly along the unfinished “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” in the former Yugoslavia. The road was made in sixties in the massive voluntary campaign of the peoples of all nationalities that constituted Yugoslavia. The expedition is meant to generate new projects, new art works, new networks, new architecture and new politics based on experience and knowledge found along the highway. Projects developed from the expedition will lead to exhibitions, publications and symposia of “Europe Lost and Found” in Stuttgart and Ljubljana in 2007.

Makrolab is an autonomous communications, research and living unit and space, capable of sustaining concentrated work of 4 people in isolation/insulation conditions for up to 120 days. The project started in 1994 and was first realised during an art exhbition, documenta X in Kassel in 1997.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s poetic-scientific investigations weave fact, imagination, storytelling and myth, past, present and future. Here she develops an ongoing narrative based on The Man in the Moone, by bishop Francis Godwin, in which the protagonist flies to the Moon in a chariot towed by ‘moon geese’. Meyer-Brandis has actualised this concept by raising eleven moon geese, giving them astronauts’ names, imprinting them on herself as goose-mother, training them to fly and taking them on expeditions and housing them in a remote Moon analogue habitat. An analogue is a rehearsal for living in space. At various remote facilities around the world astronauts are practising for the phsychological challenges humans can face living away from earth. Meyer-Brandis` remote analogue habitat simulates the conditions of the Moon and will be accessed and operated from Meyer-Brandis’s control room installation within the gallery, where instructional videos, photographs and vitrines of the geese’s egg shells and footprints will be displayed. The viewer can see and interact with the geese here in the control room in real time while the artist encourages you to explore the margins of reality, in that liminal space where scientific data becomes elegiac data. Meyer-Brandis develops the contested history of Godwin’s original fiction – posthumously and pseudonymously published in 1603 as if the genuine account of the travels of Domingo Gonsales. She weaves a narrative that explores the observer’s understanding of the fictitious and the factual, with a nod to notions of the believably absurd.