popular logistics

Architect Sheila Kennedy has, with her colleagues (whose names we don’t know, hence no attribution) designed The Soft House; Jorge Chapa at Inhabitat has an excellent post on Kennedy’s prototype house whose solar-collecting curtains would produce 16KWH. We strongly recommend you read Chapa’s post - and that you check in regularly at Inhabitat.

Given our concern with worst-case scenarios - and preventing them - this technological use could go far in prevention by producing more power cleanly and locally. But we want to see rugged and waterproof textile uses for tents and canopies and emergency shelters and sails - consider the possibility of transporting the equivalent of a circus tent to the site of a disaster or power failure - as contrasted to the transportation of heavy petroleum-consuming generators - or solid photovoltaic panels or turbines.

One last thought: Kennedy’s design, we suspect, likely does more than produce energy: it probably acts as a cooling mechanism, preventing or mitigating the effects of a heat emergency.

NanoTechWire has a short interview with Sheila Kennedy here.

From Jill Fehrenbacher and Sarah Rich at Inhabitat, we learned about Waterstudio:

In the months following Katrina, one of the most interesting design solutions we found for dealing with rising water levels was the amphibious architecture of Dutch firm Waterstudio. Architect Koen Olthius specializes in a unique technology that allows land-based buildings to detach from the ground and float under rising water conditions. Olthius’ claim to fame is that he focuses exclusively on aqueous design - design for building in, on and at the water - in a country where water dominates the landscape.

Link to Inhabitat’s post.

This design - if a flood-prone city grid were designed around having, say, 10% of its building stock built this way - would provide precious evacuation time - and since these structures are might well survive serious flooding - they’re the avant-garde of the recovery. Once the water recedes - these structures won’t need to be rebuilt.

Here’s a 2005 piece from Building Blog called “London Topological.” Not to quibble - bu t perhaps more correctly London Infralogical - or Infra-Topo-logical? We recommend it for the following reasons:

1. Every piece on  Building Blog perhaps more properly, BLDG BLOG - is worth reading, whether or not you think that you care about architecture.
2. Read a couple of pieces, and you’ll realize that of course you care about architecture.
3. This particular piece has implications for anyone who thinks about (relatively) modern history
4. and even more so for people who care about emergency planning. Although the author, Geoff Manaugh, doesn’t address those issues directly.

We’ll try to directly address the implications of underground system for emergency planners in upcoming posts.