Horizon ploughs straight through the crest instead riding over it which reduces vertical acceleration drastically. Only with the SkySail, Horizon can run at 24 knots max and coupled with the 2 5000hp engines, it will top out at 45 knots.

Designer : Barnaby Heseltine

[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

Here’s short description about Grätzel panel :

“There’s a revolution going on in solar energy, which is about to become part of our daily lives in unexpected ways – appearing with multiple forms, richly coloured and with multiple functions. A new generation of solar cells has been born : thin, coloured, translucent and even flexible. The source of this revolution is EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), where Professor Michael Graetzel, inspired by plant photosynthesis, began to use molecules from colorants to transform the sun’s light into electricity. His work drew heavy praise from the scientific community, resulting in a World Technology Award. While many other technological developments have followed, designers need to take advantage of the extraordinary potential of these “dye-sensitized” solar cells. It will ultimately be up to them to fully explore the possibilities of this form of solar energy – to render us conscious of the significance of this major change.”

Designer : Léa Longis, Photographic credits to Véronique Huyghe.

A refreshingly bold and innovative concept, Blu Bottle is a suitably feasible, technically efficient and independent system. Intricately researched and designed, Blu Bottle dares to go further with a deeper, more versatile and sustainable solution that is more intrinsic than most.

Designer : Yuri Teodorowych

[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

Anders says:

“Since most of the worlds power supply comes form water, I wanted to use this as a concept. Th!nk is a Norwegian brand, so I also got inspiration from arctic clima. Arctic clima+water=Ice. Freezing water creates natures most powerful force. So that would be good to use for an electric car as an inspiration and concept for clean power. I wanted to create something different from all other works i have seen, mixing sports car looks with off road set up.

Using the non symmetric structures of ice as styling inspiration. Creating hard edgy and non symmetric surfaces. I wanted the car to look different, when its seen from different angles. The cracks in the body, hides signal lights over each belt, as the original think cars do. The huge fans at the back, controls air onto the cockpit also, and adjust the engine and cars temperature. The information hose at the back sends data about weather,temperature and all information thats needed, viewed from inside the car, and also outside. The data information will be shown on screens near at the fans, at the back of the car. That means you can operate the data info from the outside.

This 2 seater car has AWD, 4-wheel steering, independent suspension and hydraulic wheel extenders, for maximum traction and maneuverability.”

Designer : Anders Gloslie

Designer : He Cheng Fei

Nintendo DSi is the third product which is a much improved version of the Nintendo Light. In fact the company has emphasized and considered the user feedbacks while developing this new gadget. Most of the gadget freaks like their favorite widget to be as lightweight as possible. This aids in carrying them on long tours without increasing the weight of the backpack. The Nintendo DSi is about 2.6 mm thinner than its predecessor Nintendo Lite. But as a user you need not worry about the durability of the product because at Nintendo they can never ever compromise on this particular factor.

A large screen obviously wins over the smaller ones as they look much more appealing to the users of all age groups. Keeping this on mind the Nintendo DSi is provided with a powerful LCD screen that is around 8% larger than the previous one. You get to view the graphics on a larger way than before which improves the game’s appeal indeed. The quality of sound is much more improved this time. The device will also include the function of playing audio and a camera as well. Though the camera is not a high resolution one, it features a set of 11 different lenses which aids you to add special effects to the photographs. This is going to overwhelm most of the users for sure as none of the nearest contenders have it all in them.There are certain features which you can use and alter by the touch screen option like speeding up the game and change the pitch of the audio player. Apart from the internal memory, there is provision to inert a SD memory card which is definitely an added advantage of the device. There are quite a number of innovative features included in the portable Nintendo DSi which makes it a gamers’ delight.

Source : Nintendo

Text from Yiftach :

SeaO2 is an experimental ecological housing project. The project poses an alternative to current plans for Tel Aviv North West coastal district. SeaO2 demonstrates vast use of cutting edge computer software, some being used in the aerospace industry, in order to improve building performance and to ensure the existence of a sustainable urban environment with a minimal ecological footprint. The project final form is a consequence of a scientific approach that calculates numerous of elements: the sun orbit, wind conditions, maximum open scenic views, very high density and more, all in a free-form organic manner.

Advanced Computer Simulations ensure the project’s credibility. The project’s unique morphology enables: optimized solar reception for heating at winter time, self-shadowing and solar reception for electricity generation at summer time, natural lighting, optimized natural ventilation, open looks to the natural coastal environment, public green spaces, rain collection and more. Various passive mechanical systems complement the basic morphology, enable better performance and create an energy efficient, environmentally friendly housing project

Designer : Yiftach Ben Meir

Gold Award to New York City’s first carbon-neutral building

Silver Award for a self-contained day labor station in San Francisco

Freshwater lake restoration and research facility in Ontario wins Bronze Award

Source : Holcim Awards via Bustler