DE ROTTERDAM is a building being built in the the Kop van Zuid area of Rotterdam in an effort to regenerate the area. Its is being designed by Rem Koolhaas and is scheduled for completion by the end of 2011. The project is made up of three towers that will be multifunctional with plans for corporate offices, residential apartments, a hotel, restaurants, cinema and retail shopping. The project is similar to a number of buildings that I encountered in Japan and seeks to be a bustling vertical city. While I must admit that the architecture doesn't do much for me, its got some odd angles sure but its essentially the classic glass box skyscraper. However I am a big fan of mixed use projects and this definitely fits the bill, plus its got a pretty neat video proposal video. Enjoy!
I came across one of the most interesting property videos today. The Luxury Property Blog has a property video by squint/opera of an Alsop renovated property in London. The Victoria House property is a mixing together of traditional and modern styles. The video is a surrealists trip through the property starting with the more traditional aspects of its architecture an moving to the more modern elements as the video progresses.
New Urbanists, bike enthusiasts and pedestrians would love to see more and more of us switching from private vehicle use to mass transportation and bicycles. In order to cut down on the pollution caused by cars and eliminate so many of the parking lot wastelands that are a part of our cities. One of the problems that can come with this is where do we put all these bikes. Anyone who has walked around a major Japanese city, or even Amsterdam can understand that these multitudes of bicycles can be a bit of a jumble to wade through. Well leave it to the Japanese to come up with a high tech way of dealing with them. Meet the computerised bicycle storage vault, you drop off your bike at the computer valet station and it whisks your bike away until you come back to retrieve it.
While it is definitely not practical for North America where we have way more space, it could be the shape of things to come.
Yuri Ivanov of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories has come up with a comprehensive building monitoring and tracking system that may actually be less invasive of peoples privacy then current CCTV systems. He and his college Christopher Wren outfitted their office with 215 detectors placed at 2 meter intervals. These detectors capture less information in terms of raw data, but they are actually able to generate much more data then a conventional CCTV system. To understand how this is possible one only needs to think of the way that these sensors work.. a motion sensor picks up and relays if and when a person goes by, by having the sensors spaced closely together they are able to track a persons movements through the office. A CCTV on the other hand captures images of the areas they surveil regardless of whether anyone is there or not. Wren explained the difference as such;
"It's not going to catch you picking your nose. You can only tell that some person went by," Wren explains, "maybe this is better than living under thousands of cameras."
The system basically knows that you are in the building but you could be walking around naked and it wouldn't be able to tell. In order to make sense of all the data that these motion sensors capture the pair developed a software package that we have only seen before in Harry Potter of all places, they developed their own version of the marauders map. People on the display show up as bright spots of light with a comet tail that fades away behind them. Giving viewers the ability to both see where they are and what their trajectories are. The program also allows them to compile this movement data over extended periods of time and look for anomalies and patters.
The implications for security and traffic data collection are exciting. The pair was able to analyse data from a fire drill to discover that two out of three of the fire exits went virtually unused. The congregation habits of people and how long they stay at work also have implications for making air conditioning and heating systems more efficient. The system seems like an excellent trade off for better security without compromising personal privacy.
I am a believer in cities, as is well known the majority of our world's population lives in urban areas now and this trend will no doubt continue for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately many of our cities are ill equipped to deal with the demands that are placed on them. The suburban dream has proven especially difficult for our cities by making them inefficient and spread too thin to provide the services expected of them. At present I am a student in the Urban Planning Program at Concordia University and have rediscovered my love of cities and the urban environment. In this forum I will be exploring issues in urban design and also publishing some of my own works and idea's. In the past I have found it hard to find a site that truly speaks to my interests in ubanism and hope to make this a database of urban design, along with a forum for Daniel Barham Urban Design.
