All aboard!
Old style charter cruises on lake Näsijärvi on board steamship Näsijärvi II
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Help to make the + POOL a reality
The brilliant + POOL project has launched a Kickstarter Campaign take the NYC’s coolest future swimming spot one step closer to reality. The team is asking for your help to be able to build a 35′ x 35′ (11 x 11 m) Float Lab on the East River this August. They want to test the water filtration technologies that they would use in the floating pool. The kickstarter campaign is called Tile by Tile: To make the donations more interesting, you can buy yourself a tile, with a personal engraving, that will actually end up being a part of the final + POOL slated to open in 2016. So essentially you are buying yourself a piece of a giant swimming pool in a premium location while also helping to clean up our environment. Check out more information on the campaign page and pledge to make this ingenious project become reality.
The Guardian: Serpentine pavilion by Sou Fujimoto
Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto’s take on Serpentine pavilion looks like a white cloud in Hyde Park, London. Architecture critic Oliver Wainwright reviews the pavilion and interviews the architect for The Guardian. In today’s overload of wow-architecture it is increasingly difficult to impress with a pavilion, yet Serpentine Gallery manages to provide positive surprises year after year. I think Sou Fujimoto’s pavilion stands proud with the most interesting pavilions of recent years, SANAA’s pavilion in 2009, Peter Zumthor + Pier Oudolf’s in 2011 and Herzog & de Meuron + Ai Weiwei’s pavilion in 2012.
Alastair Parvin: Architecture for the people by the people
The WikiHouse cofounder Alastair Parvin talks at TED about democratizing production, and urban planning & construction as a part of it. His three lead ideas are certainly intriguing: 1. Don’t Build 2. Go Small 3. Go Amateur Watch the video to see more.
Growing a house
Ecovative, a Long Island eco-tech company is growing a house in New York. The structures of the Mushroom Tiny House will actually be timber as usual but the insulation and roof panels are grown. Ecovative uses mycelium that normally forms mushroom “roots” to bond together agricultural byproducts like corn stalks into a material that can replace plastic foam. The mushroom foam can also be used as packaging materials, replacing plastic. And what’s best, the mushroom foam is 100% compostable. You can see some impressive packaging examples at mushroompackaging.com. In this age of growing e-commerce, finding ecological alternatives for plastic foam seems like a very important step forward. Way to go Ecovative! Watch an introduction into the technology in the TED video above. Follow the progress of the house project in the Mushroom Tiny House blog.