Teatro del Agua

(Image by Grimshaw.)

In the ad-laden documentary Building the Future: The Quest for Water, produced by and broadcast last week on the Discover Channel, there was a featured segment on the Teatro del Agua, or Water Theater.

It's a desalination plant of sorts, designed by Grimshaw in collaboration with Charlie Paton for the post-industrial port area of Las Palmas in Spain's Canary Islands.


(Image by Grimshaw.)

How does it work? According to Grimshaw: “The essence of the idea is to couple a series of evaporators and condensers such that the airborne moisture from the evaporators is then collected from the condensers, which are cooled by deep seawater. This produces large quantities of distilled water from seawater and is almost entirely driven by renewable energy. The structure is orientated perpendicular to the prevailing northeasterly wind to obtain a supply of ambient air. The flow rate is controlled by louvres on the leeward side, which also incorporates solar panels to provide heat for the evaporators.”

If you have a distaste for textual descriptions and rather watch an animation, simply head on over to here. It's the third one on the list.

Disappointingly both video and project statement do not give estimates on water production. Will it really provide, as the video says, “enough for a city”? At all times or only during particularly high humid and windy days?

We also hear from the video that it “needs no fuel.” Is it really self-evaporating and self-condensing? No fossil fuel is needed?

The very curious really want to know.


(Image by Grimshaw.)

Quoting a bit more of the project statement: “The intention is to exploit the natural resources of the island, focusing on its two unique geographic features: steep beaches meaning that the cold water of the deep ocean is close to hand and can be siphoned off for air conditioning, and a steady wind direction that can be harnessed for the production of fresh water. The result should be the world's first harbourside development that is entirely cooled and irrigated by natural means.”


(Image by Grimshaw.)

And here we are left to wonder why this “dramatic sculptural form” is relegated to a corner of the marina when it should invade the whole island, bifurcating up to the mountains, snaking out to sea, invading the entire archipelago and nearby Africa, recoiling, perambulant, up and down the Atlantic coast of the parched continent, crossing the Sahara towards the Middle East, saving all from the devastation of the Global Hydrological War.

Obviously.

In the Archives:
Fog Water Project

#5

#4

Modeling Urban Panic

(Screenshot provided by Paul Torrens.)

Paul Torrens is someone after our hearts, for he has developed a realistic computer 3D model that can predict crowd behavior in various spatial configurations.

It can simulate, for instance, how people navigate through busy city streets, shoppers through urban shopping centers, and tourists through unfamiliar landscapes.


(Screenshot provided by Paul Torrens.)

For the greenish, this has obvious practical applications. According to a press release from Arizona State University, “the project will develop simulations to explore avenues of sustainability in downtown settings, such as how cities can promote walking as an alternative to driving, and how pedestrian flow can be better integrated with transit-oriented development.”


(Screenshot provided by Paul Torrens.)

Of course, you can also use the 3D model to simulate far less quotidian, obscenely more interesting scenarios.

“The goal of this project is to develop a reusable and behaviorally founded computer model of pedestrian movement and crowd behavior amid dense urban environments, to serve as a test-bed for experimentation,” says Torrens. “The idea is to use the model to test hypotheses, real-world plans and strategies that are not very easy, or are impossible to test in practice.”

Such as the following: 1) simulate how a crowd flees from a burning car toward a single evacuation point; 2) test out how a pathogen might be transmitted through a mobile pedestrian over a short period of time; 3) see how the existing urban grid facilitate or does not facilitate mass evacuation prior to a hurricane landfall or in the event of dirty bomb detonation; 4) design a mall which can compel customers to shop to the point of bankruptcy, to walk obliviously for miles and miles and miles, endlessly to the point of physical exhaustion and even death; 5) identify, if possible, the tell-tale signs of a peaceful crowd about to metamorphosize into a hellish mob; 6) determine how various urban typologies, such as plazas, parks, major arterial streets and banlieues, can be reconfigured in situ into a neutralizing force when crowds do become riotous; and 7) conversely, figure out how one could, through spatial manipulation, inflame a crowd, even a very small one, to set in motion a series of events that culminates into a full scale Revolution or just your average everyday Southeast Asian coup d'état — regime change through landscape architecture.


(Screenshot provided by Paul Torrens.)

Or you quadruple the population of Chicago. How about 200 million? And into its historic Emerald Necklace system of parks, you drop an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, a pedophile, an Ebola patient, a migrant worker, a swarm of zombies, and Paris Hilton. Then grab a cold one, sit back and watch the landscape descend into chaos. It'll be better than any megablockbuster movie you'll see this summer.

Equally plausible, Chicago does not suffer total critical system failure. In fact, the built environment is surprisingly malleable, so very accommodating to a wide range of extreme radical transformations, that the city actually thrives during this catastrophe and in the end successfully expels the intruders. Far from being a vector of apocalypses, cities will save the world.

In any case, the resulting video from the simulation will be entered into a film festival near you.

In the Archives:
The Kumbh Mela Array
Reconfiguring the Jamarat Bridge
The vortex
Advertisement: Crowd Dynamics Ltd.
The Parkless Park Resurfaces
The Parkless Park
Counting Crowds

Not in the Archives:
Subtopia: Urbanization of Panic
City of Sound: Robert Krulwich

#3

Warped Space

Simply because we cannot get enough of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, here's another photo of ATLAS, one of the five particle detectors and the future birth chamber of microscopic black holes and primordial particles not seen since Creation.



For the curious, the subterranean nave housing the detector actually looks like this to an observer, since its monstrous toroidal magnets have warped the fabric of space and time. There is no fancy Photoshop trickery at work here.

And here's another photo, looking down towards ATLAS.



Perhaps we're looking up? From 10 seconds back in time? Forward in time? From an angled view?

(Larger versions reside in our Flickr account here and here. If you want the originals, which are twice as big, let us know. The link where the images were downloaded from is lost somewhere in our archives, so the image source and photographer are presently unknown, unfortunately.)

In the Archives:
The Descent
The Machine

#2

The Alzheimer House

(Dementia sensors in the bathroom. Photo by Rick Bowmer/AP.)

“Tiny motion sensors are attached to the walls, doorways and even the refrigerator of Elaine Bloomquist's home,” writes the Associated Press. They were installed there to track any deviations in “the seemingly healthy 86-year-old's daily activity,” any small changes in her routine which could be attributed to the onset of Alzheimer's. “It's like spying in the name of science - with her permission,” we read.

And if the sensors detect any wayward behavior, Elaine Bloomquist gets zapped.


(Dementia sensors in the kitchen. Photo by Rick Bowmer/AP.)

Which, of course, isn't exactly true.

This sensor network is a sort of early detection system for the disease. “The theory is that as Alzheimer's begins destroying brain cells, signals to nerves may become inconsistent - like static on a radio - well before memories become irretrievable. One day, signals to walk fire fine. The next, those signals are fuzzy and people hesitate, creating wildly varying activity patterns.”

Currently 112 homes in the Portland, Oregon area have been retrofitted with the devices. A $7 million grant from the National Institute of Health will expand the project to 300.

Firstly, if the experiment proves successful, should we expect to hear about similar tele-monitoring networks operated at the urban scale? CCTV-Alzheimer's®. An entire retirement community comes under the constant, penetrating gaze of their hometown doctors and medical technicians thousands of miles away, diagnosing every move our grandmothers make or incorrectly make, and administering behavior modification electroshock treatment when so diagnosed.


(Dementia sensors in the streets? Image by Xiaojing Yuan and Zehang Sun. Source.)

Secondly, might we also expect to hear of a house or a town patterned after the erratic movements of Alzheimer's patients? Rooms, hallways, corners, ceilings, streets, gardens, parks arranged according to fuzzy and hesitating markings of dementia? What would these spaces look like? Perhaps we've heard about this already?

And thirdly, how about houses for, say, the most obsessive of obsessive compulsives, hacked not to monitor their disorder but rather to cure them? Wherein the faucets, for instance, run skin-peeling, scalding water whenever they sense three or more consecutive washes in the span of 15 minutes, wherein the furniture unaligns itself at arbitrary times of the day, and wherein light switches and door knobs and that tempting patch on the wall electroconduct when they come into contact repeatedly with human skin.