Tag: architecture

Shenzhen

Bunnie Huang, a Research Affiliate for the MIT Media Lab with a PhD at MIT in EE, shares some stories about crossing the gap from a single home-made prototype to mass production, using supply chain services located in the Shenzhen area of China.

2015-06-04:

HAX invites teams with working prototypes to come to Shenzhen, China, for 4 months. Once they arrive, creators work with experts in a variety of fields to shape their designs, products and strategies. It’s like a boot camp for the world’s hardware-heads, in the heart of the most frenzied manufacturing hub on the planet.

i like to make fun of kickstarter but this is really cool, and much more useful than Y Combinator.
2015-08-10:

When it comes to manufacturing, no place in the world has the same kind of allure as the Pearl River Delta region of China. Within just a hour-long train ride, 2 vastly different cultures co-exist, each with its unique appeal that keeps attracting engineers, entrepreneurs and hustlers alike. On the mainland side, cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou bring the promise of cheap components, low-cost contract work, and the street cred of “having done the Shenzhen thing.” And on the island, the capitalist utopia called Hong Kong glows with all of its high finance and stories of lavish expat lifestyles.

2017-01-20:

Shenzhen completed 11 skyscrapers. That’s more than the US and Australia combined.

2017-02-05: if you want to bring manufacturing back, you have to switch to open source hardware and scrap all the patents overhead. as long as everything is slowed down by lawyers, shenzhen will innovate 3-10x faster.

NYC 2030

i’m a fan of nyc’s plan for 2030, the sort of large-scale, long-term thinking cities ought to be invested in, but which is very rare in practice, even though most of society’s wealth is produced in cities. it’s fun to contrast this to Hyperurbanization which is full of eye-opening stuff like

The next 10 years will see the largest transformation of our built environment ever. 50% of what will be the built environment in 2030 doesn’t exist today.

Tokyo Zoning

Tokyo is known for its oddly angled buildings such as the sloping roof’s on the row of buildings in the center of the picture. The slicing and angles come from natural lighting regulations – neighbors have the right to the same level of natural light with the new building, as what previously stood there. Builders optimize the interior size of the building by optimizing the meterage by taking up as much of that space as possible, even if it means slicing off corners to provide light-access.

Why Tokyo is the land of rising home construction but not prices

It was the rapidity of what happened to the house next door that took us by surprise. We knew it was empty. Grass was steadily taking over its mossy Japanese garden; the upstairs curtains never moved. But one day a notice went up, a hydraulic excavator tore the house down, and by the end of next year it will be a block of 16 apartments instead. Abruptly, we are living next door to a Tokyo building site. It is not fun. They work 6 days a week. Were this London, Paris or San Francisco, there would be howls of resident rage — petitions, dire warnings about loss of neighborhood character, and possibly a lawsuit or 2. Local elections have been lost for less. Yet in our neighborhood, there was not a murmur. “There is no legal restraint on demolishing a building. People have the right to use their land so basically neighboring people have no right to stop development.”

Broad group naysayers

There are many critics of the Skycity and broad group:

  • political allies of other builders who would lose business if broad group had runaway commercial success with construction methods that are faster and lower cost
  • workers who would lose work to a more efficient pre-fabrication process
  • city officials could see fewer payoffs for buildings that are put up in months instead of years
  • china critics who want to see china fail and who want to view the construction of an audacious skyscraper as a sign that china has overextended

Proper HVAC

by collecting 500M data points from the sensors in all their buildings every 24h, finding huge energy savings right away:

In 1 building garage, exhaust fans had been mistakenly left on for a year (to the tune of $66K of wasted energy). Within moments of coming online, the smart buildings solution sniffed out this fault and the problem was corrected.

2016-07-21: Cooling AI

by applying DeepMind’s machine learning to Google data centers, we’ve reduced the energy we use for cooling by up to 40%. In any large scale environment, this would be a huge improvement. Given how sophisticated Google’s data centers are already, it’s a phenomenal step forward.

this is why smart grids are one of the highest ROI investments countries could make.