[Press Release]

Ancona, Italy. September 22, 2009. WHY, Wally Hermès Yachts, today unveils a revolutionary
approach to cruising in motor yachts with the presentation of a full size model of its first born, an
innovative 58 metre-long 38 metre-wide yacht, in Ancona’s shipyard.

Wally Hermès Yachts: a joint-venture.
WHY is the result of the joint-venture signed in June 2008 between Hermès and Wally, to develop a new type of motor yacht redefining the art of living on the sea. The iconic Parisian house and the iconic Monaco yacht brand formed an equal partnership whereby each company is fully involved in all aspects of the conception and design of each project. Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Artistic Director of Hermès says : “When we met, in autumn 2007, Luca Bassani Antivari, President of Wally had thought about asking Hermès to accessorise the interior of one of his boats. I was impressed by the daring of his projects. My instinct was to get on board with him and go and seek out new territories in yacht design, but I had no interest in speed.”

Luca Bassani Antivari explains: “What I’ve always liked about Hermès, aside from its intrinsic quality, is its audacity and radicalism; its desire to go beyond trends, to make no compromises and to maintain the authenticity of the house. Wally shares the same values, ‘Hermès-on-Land’, ‘Wally-on-Sea’: inevitably our paths had to cross.”

WHY 58×38
The common values of the two brands have led to a first yacht that offers an unparalleled living space at sea. WHY was developed to give life to this concept assembling a team of dedicated talents in design, engineering, and naval architecture.

Then the tried and tested Norwegian Ramform hull characterised by exceptional and unprecedented stability and volume and spotted by Luca Bassani Antivari, revealed itself as the ideal choice to be adapted to the WHY 58×38 project.

Following this unique adaptation, the decks and the interiors were developed in accordance with the fundamental credo of WHY, ‘form-equals-function’. Thus were born other innovations in the world of mega yachts: patios generously flooding the interior with natural light, photovoltaic panels on the glass hull sides, as well as on the roof opening, like Venetian blinds, a 25 metre-long forward end swimming pool, and a 36-metre aft deck beach.
WHY 58×38 offers comfort, privacy, stability, space, independence and sustainability.

Sustainability
“We are very interested in creating a yacht that will have a low environmental impact”, says Pierre-Alexis Dumas. “Its relationship with the sea must be respectful and easy. WHY intends to offer a new way of moving over water by creating an innovative way of managing and recycling its sources and uses of energy.”
“If you want to go totally ecological, it’s only sailing yacht. The reality is that today, 90 % of the market is powerboats, echoes Luca Bassani Antivari. Our aim is to reduce diesel consumption per year and per yacht: 20 to 30 % for propulsion and 40 to 50 % for generation.”

Thanks to its specific hull, WHY 58×38 requires less power at cruising speed than a boat of equal size. Its diesel-electric propulsion is the most efficient motorisation today, and the surface of the photovoltaic panels, almost 900 square metres, covers most of the boat’s auxiliary system needs.

WHY Research and Development plan to optimize this project’s energy consumption by improving the isolation of the yacht and the heat recovery of its engines, and is also investigating the latest wind energy production and wind propulsion system technologies.

In comparison to a yacht of the same size, WHY 58×38 has been conceived to reduce drastically its energy consumption, saving up to 200 tons of diesel per year.
The WHY R & D program includes tank testing for hull stability in the SSPA facilities in Sweden, and the construction of a full-scale mock-up in order to allow the design team to fine tune the living areas correctly in accordance with the hull’s unique shape.

“The WHY 58X38 yacht looks very unfamiliar but it remains on a human scale. Space is the greatest luxury on the sea, but I believe the new luxury will be the time to enjoy it”, concludes Pierre-Alexis Dumas.

Designer : Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Luca Bassani Antivari, Gabriele Pezzini, and MauroSculli

This proposal is focused around providing an alternative view of what the future of the Taxi might be. The vehicle is designed around the user and this is reflected in the safety of ingress/egress, the passenger/driver compartment split and features for ease of use by passengers. Features include, split for driver safety when used as night rider, GPS and mapping system for driver and passenger, passenger entertainment/info hub, Smart card system, disability access and focus on curb side access only. Technological features include the hydrogen fuel cell, battery generators, solar panel system and recharging hubs.

The overall aesthetic of the vehicle is influenced by the Australian environment; space, relaxed ambience, unique identity, comfort, security, and a ‘can do’ attitude. These unique characteristics immediately identify the vehicle as special purpose and also set it apart from other vehicles on the road. The curb-side DLO captures the essence of the Taxi in that it is inviting passengers inside for an experience.

The footprint is emphasized by the wheels being in the outermost corners of the vehicle which allows for greater volume and also a very level and balanced stance. The roof features an acrylic opening area to allow for a greater sense of space while also allowing a great vantage point for passengers. The solar panel is also cleverly housed on the roof to harness the most energy from beating Australian sun.

Curb side access only for passenger ingress / egress safety. All doors use a slider system for minimizing the overall footprint of the vehicle whilst it is in operation. Access for wheel-chair bound passengers is catered for by providing a platform that extends to the curbside to allow access. All rear compartment seats tuck away to open-up maximum floor room for wheelchair access. Rear trunk also operates on a slider system.

The rear compartment is split-up to allow for better communication for the rear occupants. Rear seats fold away to allow access and floor clearance for wheelchair access. Heads-up display on split window for accessing features such as map, places of interest, fares and also for advertising. Driver to passenger split is driven by – safety and privacy. The split ensures security of the drivers whilst also providing a more private booth-type environment for passengers. Doors split open at the centre to allow for maximum operating opening distance.

Polycarbonate is used throughout the vehicle due to its impact resistance, relative lightweight, optical qualities and high temp resistance. The chassis comprises of aluminum to minimize weight.

Curb-side access only for passenger safety, bright orange livery for visual impact, safety-cell for passengers and driver all contribute to overall safety. Optimized seating configuration allows greater interaction, comfort and ease of use – especially the fold away seats for wheelchair access.

Hydrogen fuel cell technology coupled with electric generators / batteries propel the vehicle. The solar panel is used to harness extra energy as well as the recharging hubs when the vehicle is used to pick up passengers.

Designer : Damian Lucaciu

The bicycle is designed to generate energy when riding and this energy can be used as currency to pay for your bus rides. The bike electronically folds into the bus seat storage mode for space and weight efficiency and to fit on the bike stand. Bike stands can be found at the bus stops where the bikes will be stored securely in order to collect energy from the sun and wind. Moreover, it contributes energy to the bus system that was generated during riding and stored in inner batteries. Finally, the energy will be accumulated from all the bus stops into the London Garden network system, which is the Universal Electricity Network of this concept.

Designer : Marten Wallgren, David Seesing, and Miika Heikkinen

Designer : Chen Chun Tung

This concept has been driven from the need for zero-pollution, efficient and affordable cars for the future community and enjoying the freedom of a ride. The ATNMBL is designed as a self-driving car with artificial intelligence which arrive to you with just a phone call. The standing-height entrance has an electric sliding glass door and upon entering, you will be asked for your desired destination. The comprehensive and innovative voice recognition system of this vehicle along with a touch screen remote and slide up display, it can offer a wide range of tour planning, detailed performance setting and enjoyable ride sharing.

The overall arrangement of the interior of ATNMBL is very much familiar with conventional living room sitting including side chair, a couch and a low table. Up to seven passengers can sit towards each other and can see outside through large floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides. From outside, this vehicle looks like micro-architecture with a large window, pitched room and asymmetrical shape from every view without any reference to past automobile designs.

A considerable amount of typical car space is blocked with the engine and drive train, while, the mechanical components of ATNMBL are simplified and densely packed, providing more interior space. Each wheel contains electric motors which provide all-wheel drive. The power storing mechanism is located beneath the floor; moreover, alternative solar energy can be obtained from the roof-top solar panels. The front and rear end contains an array of tail lights, headlights and sensors.

Designer : Mike and Maaike via Core77

These wind/solar powered street lamps are fitted to locally made, usual galvanized steel poles and can be easily swapped with previous street lamps. The turbines can be either a horizontal axis wind turbine or a 2nd generation 300W vertical axis wind turbine. Two solar panels are mounted on the side of the pole that is capable of producing up to 80W of power.

The lamps are able to produce the maximum power of 380W if the sun is shining and at the same time the wind are blowing as well. It will save the excess generated energy in a battery that will supply the required power to lighten the high efficient LEDs all through the night. Since not every location and project is not the same, the designers have focused on the components – the LED lights, wind turbine, solar panels, battery storage and tower height are all can be easily balanced to fit best in a particular project.

The hybrid LED lamps looks like a commissioned art piece instead of the traditional industrial looking street lamps and the decorations on the pole can be customized as per the buyer’s requirement. This project surely will help the streets becoming self sufficient with street lamps that can generate the power they require.

Designer : Urban Energy via Inhabitat

[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

Designer : Julien Bergignat

Kenneth says :
Shake is a mp3 player that can be charged by shaking when the HOLD function is on. With HOLD off, the user shakes the player for PLAY/PAUSE. The action of shaking the player to play or charge it is similar to shaking a pocket watch to wind it. The similar semantics provide an interesting yet familiar experience of giving life to an electronic device.The form of Shake was developed based on the language of a pocket watch, not only through the operation of shaking but also visually. Using the form from an established typology, Shake provides a comforting familiarity in a sea of electronics with foreign shapes and forms.

The use of kinetic energy to charge the battery not only solves an environmental issue, but also a more personal one. In situations like a long commute home, the user can enjoy personal audio without worrying about the battery dying out.

An electromagnetic coil is connected to the battery, converting kinetic energy into electrical energy that charges the battery. The player connects to the computer via a USB cable through the headphone jack, facilitating the transfer of songs as well as the conventional method of charging.

Shake would utilize kinetic energy generation technology developed by start up company M2E Power. M2E’s micro-generator technology delivers 300% to 700% more power than existing kinetic energy solutions (according to the company’s website), harvesting sufficient energy from normal daily and mechanical motion to power a wide range of mobile electronic devices.

This technology allows Shake to charge even in the user’s pocket while he/her is walking around.

Designer : Kenneth Tay

Sergio says “Outside the car industry technologies have been developed in order to regenerate power, like kinetic watches, wind turbine, geothermic energy absorption even a sustainable dance floor is developed that regenerates the energy from the bouncing of the floor.

Around those ideas I designed a car with a central kinetic axis that generates the power of the movement as the vehicle turns like two attached motorbikes.

Second, I thought electrical cars should be designed aiming for sensations and not for speed in order to preserve the batteries longer. At high speed the battery range drop considerably, so this vehicle would provide sensations at lower speeds.

Drivers that have lived in a virtual computer game word that want to drive a vehicle closer to a spaceship, something that can provide them with different sensations.”

Designer : Sergio Loureiro