Designer : Yaroslav Rassadin

Populous says :
Incheon Metropolitan City is a world class city, and this will be an innovative design, benchmarked against world’s best practice.

The multipurpose stadium builds on the design developed by Populous for the main stadium for the 2012 Olympic Games in London and illustrates a new level of sustainable design in public infrastructure built for major events such as an Olympics or an Asian games.

The key to the stadium’s success will be reducing it down and linking it into the surrounding parklands, to make it an open accessible building, for its people. This way it can achieve a connection with the community that is vital to securing its long term sustainability and a true legacy for the people of Incheon.

Designer : Populous and Heerim Architects and Planners

Because of the relatively shallow water levels of the Straits, the proposed structure can descend to the base of the ocean with just a few meters floating over the water level. Compression is the main working principal of this structure that features two parallel walls cut through the adjoining water bodies, held apart with bracing, which is habitable at times. Each wall is 10 meters wide and respectfully provides vehicle and train infrastructures at its apex. The trait is used only to give simplicity to this massive structure that features a direct line to connect the two sides.

The wide interstitial space spans 50 meters which was created by this vast separation and becomes an interface for human haulage, providing inhabitants and visitors the opportunity to navigate the Strait by walking. The visitors will enjoy constant views of underwater landscape walking across the tubes, submerged below 50 meters of water level. Moreover, the separation of the Pacific from the Arctic can improve temperature isolation, by gradually reducing the water temperature in the Arctic, which would be a great environmental benefit.

Designer : OFF Architecture via Bustler

Gabriel says :
The Renault Picnic seeks to augment rather than detract from the health of it’s surrounding environment. It is a Zero-emissions vehicle that provides a social function to the parked car within in the urban landscape. When parked, the Picnic transforms into urban furniture, becoming a social space for people to re-acquaint themselves with the surrounding environment. LED-impregnated, glass-coated polycarbonate windows project customized images when the vehicle is parked, transforming the vehicle into a form of public art.

Further considering the environment, the exterior panels are composed of hemp-based composites, and the vehicle is powered by Lithium Ion batteries and two rear-mounted in-wheel hub motors.

In order to reduce cost, complexity and weight, the simple interior is constructed of modular components, with four identical, soy-foam seats and an i-pod doc replacing most of the functions, including sound system and GPS on the dashboard.

Designer : Gabriel Wartofsky

Tribons are designed as digital mentors, that support kid’s personal interests and show pathways to boost knowledge and development of skills. Moreover, it offers experiences and information, and make possible the understanding and participation in environments. By using Tribons, an urban child would be introduced to the natural and biological world, and similarly, a rural child can enhance their knowledge about the urban landscape. The accessories developed to comprise an earpiece that is controlled by a spontaneous 3D interface that projects various educational materials and features a safety system that allows parents track their children. Not only that, this gadget includes an additional medical module that offers surveillance of the wearer’s health parameters that will take care in case of chronic sickness and the probability of injuries.

Designer : FrogDesign

The angular bodywork of this vehicle takes inspiration from both superbikes and modern architecture which results this unique vehicle, from both in aesthetic aspects and highly functional body panel mechanism. The body panels are independently attached onto the vehicle with hex-head bolts and can be replaced easily when damaged. The tires were designed to form a contrast by combining digital technology and dune buggy paddle tires, and both the alloys and tires are interlocked to create a strong image.

Raptor is based on an exposed carbon fiber chassis that provides closer sense of speed to the occupants, whilst providing comprehensive safety. The cantilever roof offers an unrivalled view from the front seat, giving a close panoramic view of the landscape. The vehicle is powered by Lithium-Titanate batteries that can be recharged through a standard wall socket or dedicated high powered outlets. It features unique “hot-swap” battery system that allows the user to replace the batteries easily and quickly.

Designer : Ryan Skelley

Teakwondo Park would be a great place for visitors to discover the artistry of Teakwondo, Korea. This place will offer various embodiment training sessions such as Body ‘One’ to prepare body, Mind ‘One’ to inspire the mind and Spirit ‘One’ for complete the spirit. The main goals that this design has emphasized most is to develop a world cultural heritage spot and create a place that promotes the research, education and practice of groundwork for visitors all over the world. Moreover, this concept would be a center to promote Teakwondo and Korean art and culture through an international network. This mega-construction will also provide the opportunity to promote sustainable and socio-cultural synergy between the local markets.

Designer : Samoo Architects via Bustler

[Press Release]

DRAGONFLY, A METABOLIC FARM FOR URBAN AGRICULTURE

2009 : 800 MILLION OF URBAN FARMERS FOR RESPONSIBLE ECO-CITIES

The world of fast-food and frozen food is over! The urban keen interest of the beginning of our Century turns toward the garden flat bringing back the countryside in our overcrowded cities fighting from now on for a community urban agriculture able to contribute to the durability of the city and to rethink the food production.

On the roofs, terraces, balconies, in the hollow of the non-built public spaces, in the interior yards and the suspended greenhouses, the eco-warrior aspires to escape from its competitive and consumeristic universe imposed by the laws of the market. He desires to cultivate its immediate landscape so as to better take root in the ground by creating his own ecologic and alimentary biodiversity. The consumer becomes from then on producer and the garden inhabitant !

From the Parisian « worker gardens » to the « community gardens » of New York going though Muscovite « vegetable squares », eight hundred million of urban farmers, i.e. more than one human being out of ten, consume nowadays chlorophyllous products from these cosmopolitan kitchen gardens. These new gardens, aware of the emergency to reduce our fuel consumption and the necessity to modify our behaviour facing the climatic changes, decrease thus their environmental impact and build eco-responsible cities on a community way.

2025 : 5.5 BILLION OF CITY SLICKERS FACING THE FOOD CHALLENGE OF THE 21ST CENTURY

According to the PNUD (Programme of the United Nations for the Development), the worldwide urban population will go from 3.1 billion of inhabitants in 2009 up to 5.5 billion of inhabitants within 2025. Looking for a positive energetic assessment, the contemporary city aims within fifteen years at producing cleanly and intensively more energy than it consumes so as to pack this urban exodus! It develops therefore the urban agriculture to become food self-sufficient by recycling at the same time its liquid waste by phyto-purification, its solid waste in fertilizers by composting and by producing energy by biomass, photovoltaic cells and other renewable energies (thermic solar, photovoltaic solar, wind, tide-turbine energies…).

In order to avoid the asphixiation of the planet and the feeding of its 9 billion of inhabitants within 2050, it deals thus with reinventing the traditional energetic pattern between the city and the countryside between western countries, emerging countries and developing countries. This sums up as following: on the one hand import of natural and food resources, and on the other hand export of waste and pollution. The ecologic city aims at reintegrating the farming function on the urban scale by emphasizing the role of the urban agriculture in the use and the reuse of natural resources and biodegradable waste so as to close the loop of ecologic flows.

The urban agriculture can feed the city without any pesticide or chemical fungicide (whose toxicity is proved on the human being : cancer, sterility…), and make it less food dependant of its backcountry or other regions of the world. Organising the distribution of fresh products in short circuits, that means linked directly with the consumer, the urban agriculture complete thus the traditional agriculture. In addition to the nutritive quality of the produced and consumed food, the urban agriculture is also a growth lever of the urban unemployment market and the local economy. It is used directly as a social link in the conciliation of the primary needs of the newcomers with the challenge of their integration in the life of the city, fighting thus against poverty and exclusion. On the sanitary level, this farm approach presents also an interesting potential for the decontamination of polluted grounds and undergrounds as well as for he purification of the polluted atmosphere in CO2.

Due to the fuel crisis and climatical change, the rural agriculture of the western countries must answer to the worldwide food crisis of the developing countries and mainly Africa. Its role is from now on to produce (with an increase estimated of 60% within 2050) all the foodstuffs transportable by boat such as cereals or corn. This is based on the evolution of the science and the most advanced biotechnologies. In addition to this nutritious role, the rural agriculture is newly challenged to recycle its own culture rebus for the green chemistry in order to produce the bio fuel called “second generation fuel” using the energy of non-consumable materials from the plants, that means fibres such as celluloses.

DRAGONFLY, A NOURISHING VERTICALY CULTIVATED CENTRAL PARK

The architecture has to be in the service of this new agriculture and to design this new social desire in this context of ecologic mutation and food autonomy! The Dragonfly project suggests therefore building a prototype of urban farm offering around a mixed programme of housing, offices and laboratories in ecological engineering, farming spaces which are vertically laid out in several floors and partly cultivated by its own inhabitants. This vertical farm sets up all the sustainable applications in organic agriculture based on the intensive production varied according to the rhythm of the seasons. This nourishing agriculture is furthermore in favour of the reuse of biodegradable waste and the keeping of energy and renewable resources for a planning of ecosystemic densification.

Floor by floor, the tower superposes not only stock farming ensuring the production of meat, milk, poultry and eggs but also farming grounds, true biological reactors continuously regenerated with organic humus. It diversifies the cultivated varieties to avoid the washing of stratums of soft substratum. Thus, the cultures succeed one another vertically according to their agronomical ability to provide some elements of the ground between the essences that are sowed and harvested. The tower, true living organism, becomes thus metabolic and self-sufficient in water, energy, and bio-fertilizing. Nothing is lost; everything is recyclable to a continuous auto-feeding!

A BIONIC AND ENERGETICALLY SELF-SUFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE
The architecture of Dragonfly prototype suggests reinventing the vertical building (that outlined the urbanistic booming of New York City since the 19th Century) as structurally and functionally as ecologically and energetically.

To ensure the social diversity and a permanent life cycle (24h/24) in the tower, the mixed programmation is mainly laid out around two poles of housing and work places. Around housings, offices and research laboratories as well as the most private to the most public agricultural and leisure spaces are designed in gardens, kitchen gardens, orchards, meadows, rice fields, farms and suspended fields. The distribution of flows is made around a true safe spine spreading in loop the numerous elevators, the goods elevators and stair wells serving all the levels by separating simultaneously the inputs and the outputs recycled from plants, animals and human beings.

Architecturally, the functional organisation is represented by two oblong towers symetrically arranged in pair around a huge climatic greenhouse that links them and deploys itself between two crystalline wings. These very light wings in glass and steel retake the loads of the building and are directly inspired from the structure of the dragonfly wings coming from the family of “Odonata Anisoptera” whose transparent membrane is very finely nervured. Two inhabited rings buttress around these wings. Their organically chiselled exo-structure accommodates the inter-climatic spaces that receive the agrarian cultures. They buttress.

The whole set forms «double layer» architecture in bee nest mesh that exploits the solar passive energy at its maximum level, by accumulating the warm air in the winter in the thickness of the exo-structure, and by cooling the atmosphere by natural ventilation and by evapo-perpiration of the plants in the summer. Protecting thus the cultures from climatic changes in New York (from -25.5°C in the winter to +41°C in the summer), these plug spaces are useful to reflect on the agriculture not anymore in terms of surface area but really in terms of volume. Actually, whereas grounds nourish orchards, each wall and each ceiling are metamorphosed into three-dimensional kitchen gardens. The interior frontages of the housing and offices throw towards the skyline of New York the cantilever of their hydrophonic balconies with hexagonal section thanks to what it multiplies the culture layers by floors. The vegetation abounds, the earth is swarming of insects and animals are freely brought up in holding tanks by urban consumers with low income. The architecture becomes eatable!

Designer : Vincent Callebaut Architect

Flexible inner space
The seats are multifunctional; we can use them as a disabled seat area, as a bicycle area and also, during rush hour, we can pull them all back in order to use the inner space efficiently. The seats are made of a flexible material and they have a retractable mechanism that allows pulling them out and back in.

Public transportation should be an event
We have to forget that a public transportation vehicle is an object that transports us from point “A” to “B”. If we want it to compete with cars and put them away from big cities, it is necessary that public transportation become an event. The vehicle has to seduce people; it has to capture people’s attention. It has to be able to transmit emotions to its users. The tramway must project an image of itself and also from the city. It must become a symbol that projects the identity of the city and its inhabitants.

The Tramway is different from all other trains because it is a train that becomes part of the urban landscape; we will have to coexist with it every day. That’s why we have to care so much about the emotional and stylistic characteristics.

Designer : Rodolfo Ciudad Witzel

Designer : Beckmann-N’Thépé Architects via [Bustler]