Bioengineered Brick Wins 2010 Metropolis Next Generation Design Prize

An American architecture professor, Ginger Krieg Dosier, 32, Assistant Professor of Architecture at American University of Sharjah (AUS) in Abu Dhabi, has won this year’s prestigious Metropolis Next Generation Design Prize for “Biomanufactured Brick.” The 2010 Next Generation Prize Challenge was “ONE DESIGN FIX FOR THE FUTURE” - a small fix to change the world. The Next Generation judges decided that Professor Dosier’s well-documented and -tested plan to replace clay-fired brick with a brick made with bacteria and sand, met the challenge perfectly.

“The ordinary brick - you would think that there is nothing more basic than baking a block of clay in an oven,” said Horace Havemeyer, Publisher of Metropolis. “Ginger Dosier’s idea is the perfect example of how making a change in an almost unexamined part of our daily lives can have an enormous impact on the environment.”

1-2-3 brick-making with Dosier’s competition-winning concept: pour the bacteria solution together with the cementing solution over the sand inside the formwork, let it saturate and harden (currently about one week) - voilà: we have an ecobrick!

There are over 1.3 trillion bricks manufactured each year worldwide, and over 10% are made by hand in coal-fired ovens. On average, the baking process emits 1.4 pounds of carbon per brick - more than the world’s entire aviation fleet. In countries like India and China, outdated coal-fired brick kilns consume more energy, emit more carbon, and produce great quantities of particulate air pollution. Dosier’s process replaces baking with simple mixing, and because it is low-tech (apart from the production of the bacterial activate), can be done onsite in localities without modern infrastructure. The process uses no heat at all:mixing sand and non-pathogenic bacteria (sporosar) and putting the mixture into molds. The bacteria induce calcite precipitation in the sand and yield bricks with sandstone-like properties. If biomanufactured bricks replaced each new brick on the planet, it would save nearly 800 million tons of CO2 annually.

One of Dosier’s many ecobrick experiments in the lab

Professor Dosier, was trained as an architect (at Auburn University, Rural Studio, and Cranbrook Academy) and teaches architecture.  But she studied microbiology, geology, and materials science in her spare time, most recently when she was teaching architecture at North Carolina State University. The results - which have been tested with Lego-sized bricks in research at AUS - impress architects and geologists alike. Grant Ferris, professor of geology at the University of Toronto, says that in all the scientific studies of microbial mineral precipitation, there has been little or no work on the “fabrication of construction or design materials,” which is what makes the Next Generation winner’s work “so compelling.”

Source: Bustler

Shipping Container Art Studio in New York

Wow! We knew that shipping containers could be used to build beautiful buildings, but this art studio by MB Architecture in Amagansett, New York is truly gorgeous. The artist had a limited budget of $60,000 to work with and wanted something close to home that was both functional as a working space, but would also be inviting and reflective. The exterior is kept very simply as the shipping container, but painted gray for a sophisticated look and a way to blend the container into the wooded environment. Inside, bright white walls act as a blank canvas for new artwork and ample daylighting streams in through the large windows on either end.

The foundation for the studio is built into the earth with 9′ walls and acts as the lower level and work space for the studio. Two 40′ (9′6″) high cube shipping containers were then set on top of the foundation to create a two-story double wide structure. About 75% of the floors of the containers were cut away to create the tall ceilings with lots of natural light flooding in from the high windows.

Next to the painting area on the lower floor is a large storage area and directly above on the top floor is another work area. The container wide staircase acts as a transitional and gallery space for artwork. Each of the two containers cost about $2,500 delivered. An amazing example of how beautiful shipping container architecture can be.

+ Maziar Behrooz Architecture

Via Le Journal du Design and Arch Daily

photo credits: Dalton Portella, Francine Fleischer and Maziar Behrooz

LIFEWALL: Modular Vertical Garden Panels Clean the Air

Creating vertical gardens just got a whole lot easier thanks to these modular garden tiles by Spanish firm Ceracasa. Their Lifewall product, which we just saw over at Jetson Green, is a modular tile that can support a number of different plants and is drip irrigated for water efficiency. Since it’s modular, the designer has the ability to place these in whatever pattern they want, which could create some really fascinating designs. Lifewall tiles also interface with another Ceracasa product called Bionictile, which is able to suck pollution out of the air.

Lifewall was developed by the architect Emilio Llobat of Maqla Architects, Azahar Energy and Ceracasa, and it is now being marketed globally. Each tile is one square meter in size and can accommodate a number of different plant varieties. The Lifewall tile works in conjunction with the Bionictile, which is a porcelain tile that uses the sun’s UV rays to break down nitrous oxide in the air, improving the local air quality.

When used together the two products create a symbiotic relationship, where the Lifewall has plant matter that soaks up CO2, and the Bionictile converts NOx to fertilizer which is used by the plants. Tests show that Bionictile ceramics are able to decompose 25.09 micrograms of NOx per m2 per hour, and if 200 buildings were coated by ceramic BIONICTILE, an equivalent volume of 2,638 million cubic meters of air per year would be decontaminated. In other words, more than 400,000 people could breathe air free of harmful NOx from vehicles and industries in one year.

+ Ceracasa

Via Jetson Green

Amoeba-Inspired Network Design: Physarum polycephalum

Science/AAAS

For anyone interested in going into engineering, I can offer a warning: prepare to get your butt handed to you repeatedly
by nature. Many of the processes at the forefront of engineering
technology are just trying to play catch-up with what nature has done an
innumerable number of times. Photosynthesis, genetic replication, the creation of joints, even the simple act of
flight—nature has done it before, with greater ease, and often cheaper or more efficiently.
A paper in the current issue of Science discusses
the ability of a single-celled creature to create a robust network while
foraging for food—one that mimicked the Tokyo rail system in
complexity. Creating a good network is a balancing act; you need to span a large number of
nodes with a minimal number of edges (keeping cost low), while being
able to function when an edge is lost (fault
tolerant). Problems of this type are a shining example of the
adage "fast, cheap, or good: pick any two."
Many organisms grow in the form
of a connected network, and they have
the benefit of innumerable generations of natural selection behind
them. Selective pressures have
forced the organism to find a happy balance among connectedness, fault
tolerance, and cost/efficiency. The authors of the Science article use
the slime mold Physarum
polycephalum as their biological network generator, and it served as a muse for the creation of an adaptive network model.

Physarum
is a single-celled amoeboid organism that spends its time searching for
physically distributed sources of food. When starting on a fresh
substrate, it spreads in all directions to maximize the area it is
capable of searching. Behind the outer perimeter of its search area, it
forms a tubular network that connects cells to any food sources that it has
discovered. Over the course of a few hours, the network it forms connects the food sources in a manner that optimizes the
network's properties.
As part of their experimentation with the slime, the
researchers placed 36 food sources on a substrate in a manner that
mimicked the geographical layout of cities around Tokyo. (Physarum is apparently fond of oat flakes.) They then
introduced the slime mold
to the foraging grounds and compared the network that it formed with
the actual Tokyo rail network in place around the city. 
Initially, the Physarum began to
spread out over the entire available area but, over time, it
concentrated its network on the tubes that connected the food sources. The
resulting network topology "bore similarity to the real rail network."
To see if the organism could be coaxed into an even closer match, the
researchers used light—which is known to inhibit the growth
of physarum—to
simulate mountains, lakes, or similar impasses that the actual rail
network must contend with.
While looking like the real network is nice, it's not exactly an objective measure. To attempt to quantify the similarity, the
researchers examined a handful of metrics used for describing topological networks. The cost of the network (total length),
efficiency (average minimum distance between nodes), and robustness
(degree of fault tolerance) were examined relative to the minimum spanning tree
(MST) for each network. The MST represents the smallest possible
network that connects all the food source (or city rail station) positions.
When compared to the length of the MST, the Tokyo rail system was 1.8 times larger, while the Physarum network
was 1.75±0.30 times larger. The average minimum distance between
cities (food sources) was 0.85 and 0.85±0.04, respectively. These two measurements illustrate the fact that Physarum-based networks have a lower "cost" but provide a relatively equal distance
between nodes.
One place where engineers did a bit better: the amoeba's networks were not as robust as the actual rail network. For the rails, four percent of the possible faults could lead to the
isolation of a node, whereas a fault in the Physarum network
has a 14±4 percent chance of leading to an isolated food source. That just won't do for Tokyo, given the frequency of monster attacks there.

Using these observations of network formation, the
researchers attempted to develop a model that was
capable of describing the network's formation. Using a simple fluid
flow model for the arms, along with sink/source terms to represent the food
sources, they were able to reproduce the Physarum network with the help of a pair of free
parameters. The authors conclude that planners might consider using the model during the preliminary
planning stages of other self-organized networks, such as remote
sensors arrays or mobile, ad-hoc networks.

Source: 
Science 22 January 2010: Vol. 327. no. 5964, pp. 419 - 420 DOI: 10.1126/science.1185570