Building

When Vancouver won the competition to host the 2010 Olympic & Paralympic Winter Games thoughts immediately turned to construction, and one of the most awe-inspiring initiatives has to be the redesign of the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Center (VCAEC). Currently hosting the international broadcasting and media hub for the Winter Olympics, this waterfront building is not only beautiful and functional but is environmentally sustainable, boasting a green electricity program, a seawater heating and cooling system and the largest "living roof" in Canada populated with 40,000 plants and grasses. Read More

There’s no doubt fashion is fleeting. What might be the height of fashion today is almost certainly the fashion faux pas of tomorrow. Thankfully, clothes and hairstyles are easy to change and we’re not getting around in leg warmers and new romantic bouffants anymore – well most of us aren’t. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to change the look of a building. What was the pinnacle of architectural design in the '60s is often the eyesore of the skyline today. The Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA) proposes a simple, cost effective, easily constructed skin that promises to transform dated structures into sustainable and stunning buildings. Read More

In the age of green energy we are seeing interesting new developments that marry building materials with the capacity to harness renewable power sources. Building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) or concentrating PV technologies aren't new, but the ability to concentrate and maximize the capture of energy by tracking sunlight from dawn to dusk is. The Center for Architectural Science and Ecology CASE has unveiled a new Integrated Concentrating (IC) Dynamic Solar Facade which does just that - and it looks great! Read More

Are you sick and tired of spending valuable time commuting to work and enduring peak-hour traffic and road rage? Well now that most people have access to mobile phones, email, video conferencing and the Internet - the dream of trading in an office job for working from home can become a reality. However, separating work from home life can sometimes be difficult. That’s where the Pod comes in – it might look like an enormous coconut has landed in your garden, but this is a unique garden office that is energy-efficient and environmentally friendly, plus it gives you a designated space in which to work. Read More

In a world that largely relies on elevators to ferry people from one floor of a building to the next, it is remarkable how inefficient current systems are in terms of favoring passenger convenience over the increasingly important aspect of reducing energy consumption. Japanese manufacturer Mitsubishi Electric looks set to buck the trend with the announcement of its development of multi–elevator smart control technology that can not only reduce energy use by up to ten percent, but do so while adding a mere few seconds to passenger waiting times. Read More

Although digital storage devices that cram more and more information into smaller and smaller packages continue to be developed, unfortunately the same can't be said for those trusty old analogue data storage devices known as books. However, the British Library’s Boston Spa site in West Yorkshire has used new technology of a different sort in the form of seven robotic cranes that will be used to retrieve items in its new Additional Storage Building (ASB) that will eventually house approximately seven million items from the UK national collection. Read More

At first glance, even second glance, Bletchley Park could easily be just another beautiful British building deserving of some loving care and attention. But for many years its walls guarded one of the best kept secrets of the 20th Century. During the Second World War it was the top secret home to the cryptanalysts, mathematicians and military personnel later credited with shortening the war by at least two years and saving millions of lives by breaking the secret ciphers used in Nazi communications. Seventy years after war was declared on Germany, Gizmag's Paul Ridden takes a closer look at what went on at HMS Pembroke V, the people who worked there and talks to some of the those now dedicated to ensuring that its legacy lives on. Read More

Concrete is the most prevalent building material on the planet, and though the world would be pretty flat without it (not many tall buildings and structures), it does come at a price – around 5-8 percent of all human-generated atmospheric CO2 comes from the concrete industry. A culprit is Portland cement, the binding agent in concrete. It’s the most widely produced man-made material on earth. Production of Portland cement is currently exceeding 2.6 billion tons per year worldwide and growing at 5 percent annually. To halt these alarming pollution figures, innovative research on geopolymer concrete, along with ways of using a waste byproduct from coal-fired powerplants, is being conducted by Dr Erez Allouche, assistant professor of civil engineering at Louisiana Tech University and associate director of the Trenchless Technology Center. Read More

A rebuilding exercise is underway in Rome, but it’s not one that uses bricks and mortar, rather, it uses digital images – maybe even ones you provided unwittingly. A team from the University of Washington (UW) has developed a new computer algorithm that uses hundreds of thousands of tourist photos to automatically reconstruct an entire city in about a day. It’s thought that one use for the technology could be to provide visitors with an on-line virtual-reality 3-D tour of cities they visit. Read More