Month: June 2010

Shimizu Dream

TRY 2004 is a conceptual “city in the air” designed to make the most of nature’s blessings, including wind and sunlight, and to serve as a home and workplace for 1m people. A megatruss structure, which also serves as a platform for infrastructure facilities, makes it possible to create a huge, livable pyramid city measuring 2km high. The basic structure—an assembly of regular octahedral units composed of shafts made from lightweight materials such as carbon fiber—is designed to meet the needs of residents and the surrounding environment at the same time. The megatruss construction method allows flexible, unrestricted structural arrangement of the facilities, eliminating the need to build massive foundations. The city’s basic construction units, each measuring 350 meters per side, contain office buildings, residential complexes, and other facilities, held aloft by structures that provide support from all directions. With each unit capable of enclosing an entire 100-story building, TRY 2004 represents a project of unprecedented scale and proportion.

i like their megaengineering dreams: Creating Lakes in the Desert, Space Hotel, a m people pyramid, floating archeologies.

Food Independence

The residents of Todmorden in England are working together to fast-track the creation of a local food system—the town wants to declare food independence by 2018. Considering that only 2 years into the project, a third more of the residents were tending their own vegetable gardens and 15x as many townspeople were keeping backyard chickens (part of the Every Egg Matters campaign), the town will probably meet its goals.

this is very promising.