Lorenzo Matteoli, "Some “pensierini” about the technologies"

Here attached some “pensierini” about the technologies.
Consider seriously and check the feasibility of the Great Green Pensile Boulevard over the railway tracks: cost comparison between the GGPB and diverting the tracks, time involved, profitable activities to be placed on the GGPB.
Also the idea of the Fly Wheel Storage needs a serious feasibility check.
Cheers,
Lorenzo

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Technologies

The complete “passive” catalogue: cooling in the summer and heating in the winter.

Energy model of the settlement: space, time, ed entalpy.

Electricity demand, thermal demand > 100° C < 100 °C

Food processing heat demand: hot water, pressurized steam.

Solar thermal: mandatory coverage for Domestic Hot Water

Hot water demand > 100°C o steam for food processing

Solar PV and wind energy: to be associated with local storage Fly Wheels

Thermal hot water storage: for each single residential unit

Explore wave energy cfr

http://www.carnegiewave.com

Solar stack effect chimneys for undercroft areas ventilation.

http://www.greenzly.org/article/how-does-solar-chimney-work/277

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_effect

Light ducts for undercroft areas day lighting.

Electricity storage:

Go for the fly wheels!

Fly wheels, study scale possibilities check

http://beaconpower.com

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volano_(batteria)

http://www.uaf.edu/files/acep/BoeingFlywheelOverview_06_20_2012.pdf

http://energystoragenews.com/Flywheels%20With%20Low%20Loss%20Superconducting%20Bearings.html

(YBCO = Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide superconductor compound material)

The Great Pensile Boulevard (linear park?) above the train tracks.

This could be a great feature for the whole urban design of the New Midland!

Cost comparison between new track line construction and displacement of the tracks and the cost of the structural covering platform.

How and where to cross it? Underpasses? Coaxial ramps?

Examples of pensile parks on elevated train tracks (Paris, New York) cfr:

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/dec/30/diller-scofidio-renfro-high-line

http://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/paris-elevated-park-predates-nycs-high-line-20-years.html

Commercial structures or services on the Great Pensile Green Boulevard: tennis courts, basketball courts, bocce, cycle path, skateboard ramps or bowls, BMX bowls, volley ball, mini-football, minigolf, tracks, kiosks, cafès, restaurants, …what else?

The “piazza”? Or the “piazzas”…

Palassis Architects, "Conservation Plan for Block 3 at the Midland Railway Workshops"

Historical image of Block 3. Courtesy www.mra.wa.gov.au

By following this link you can download the Conservation Plan prepared in 2014 by Palassis Architects for Block 3 at the Midland Railway Workshops.

The purpose of this Conservation Plan is to:
_identify the cultural heritage significance of the place within the context of the Midland Railway
Workshops;
_provide guidelines for the future use, care and management of the place within the context of
the redevelopment of Midland Railway Workshops (fmr); and,
_provide a prioritised schedule of conservation works and a program for ongoing maintenance
at the place.

Please, if you use some elements of this Plan we ask you to quote "Palassis Architects".
Thanks !

Luciano Pia, "Considerations on façades and masterplans"

Luciano Pia, "25 Verde", Torino, 2007-2012. Image: www.lucianopia.it

Our towns are the portrayal of our ways of life, habits, culture and social relations.

We live in urban , suburban, rural and alpine environments that we built through history, as history passed by, adapting the built-up areas to our needs and technological development. We have adapted the environment to those different visions of society we have conceived in the centuries; the way we move, by cars, trains, ships or planes has deeply transformed the landscape with roads, railways, harbours and airports. 

Commerce has shifted from small shops to big surfaces transforming the commercial network of our towns by removing the nearby points of sale which were often located not far from the place where products were made, in favour of a more  impersonal commerce, in areas at the edge of towns , in order to satisfy the need for large parking lots for many people and goods which are essential to shopping centres.

A change in the producing system and the ways we manifacture and exchange goods, informations, knowledge and culture has widely modified the image of our towns.

Towns and more in general all the built environment do represent who we are, what we think, our values and ambitions: they are the image we have about our present time.

If we analyze the  different ways of building towns  through  time and think  at the transformations they  have undertaken,  we see that they follow the changing ways  of thinking life and therefore they adapt  to new usages and customs: the major radical changes ( from handicraft to industry, for example) replaced and wiped out the former  dwellings. 

When we are asked to develop a  urban project, we analyze the build-up areas to get information on our way of life, dwelling models and economic development, there we live and are part of it, so it is difficult to have both a general and total vision, while a distance in time would certainly help.

The  designers of contemporary cities know that any planning choice at any scale has correlated effects on all activities and functions that will occur eversince.

If we compare the old Medieval towns which were entranced for reasons of defence and control to the Renaissance towns  open to arts, research and technical developments, we can learn a lot about the ways of life that were carried on because of totally different urban spaces . They  persecuted similar basic aims but both the urban systems offered to their inhabitants different opportunities of development and perception of the present and future.

If we compare a town with a density of 1 mq/mq, I am thinking to Renaissance towns, to a town with a density of 10mq/mq like most of today's vertical towns, we know that different conditions  made it possible and the result is a way of inhabiting towns which in its turn influences people's life.

Because of the complexity of our present time, it is getting more and more difficult to project our living space.    Nevertheless,  we feel  the responsability for trying to correct all those glaring mistakes which are due to a lack of a forward -thinking planning,  in order to build up areas according to our expectations and future needs.

For these reasons , when we draw a masterplan indipendently from its extension and formulation, we are carrying out a task that will deeply condition the future development of the area. From the way of organizing functions depends everything will grow in that context, for example services and their quality, people’s interplay and life quality.

Our cultural models and the vision we have of our society, interactions among people and among people and Institutions is converted into an image of town, in its local and volumetric organization that is what we expect from a plan of urban development.

Since we know that the living space affects thoughts and behaviors, then the masterplan is one of the main elements in the development of our society and sets the fundamentals of wellness and life quality.

The organization of built-up areas shows our way of life and behaviours, leeds choices and limits possibilities.

The masterplan gives a shape to towns and a framework to people’s interactions, while the image we give to our buildings acts as an intermediary between ourselves and the others: the masterplan represents the image of society as a whole but our image as individuals is given by the “skin” , once called façade, of our buildings.

We understand other people mostly by the way they present themselves and by their behaviours , similarly the “skin”of the buildings tells about both the designers and developers of those buildings and their users.

We immediatly associate a façade to a specific use of the space which means to precise social and economic circumstances, cultural attitudes and trends.

The arrangement of the façades witnesses the sensitivity and attention to a sustainable development or to speculative choices. Today we are all able to design efficient buildings that contribute to a general improvement of our habitat, but there are often heavy economic restrictions which endanger the quality and performance of the buildings.

The built-up areas are a mix of buildings which are often private and inscribing a private place behind an external “skin” which marks the boundary between what is private and what is public so the image of public places is largely featured by the skin of private buildings.

The quality of our towns is made by the total of the different ways of life of the people whose buildings overlook public spaces such as squares, museums, libraries, parks……

Our communities are the sum of each personality, similarly a urban environment is the sum of the images of the ways its inhabitants live.

It is necessary to deploy all our knowledge and planning skills to project urbanized places in coherence to a sustainable development and able to meet those requirements which depend on the values embodied in the society we are aiming at.

Luciano Pia

Luciano Pia, "Considerations on Residential Landscape"

Since we are aware of being part of an infinite living organism which is constantly self regulated, a fraction due to the conjunction of elements, we also know that humanity won't survive to the natural evolution and to the constant changes of the “organism” as a whole, unless we act as to avoid damaging ourselves and, consequently, the complex system that by selfregulation enables our lives.

From this perspective, we can serenely deal with the fundamental questions about what is really essential to our lives and ways of living and what are our real needs.

Our cities have grown at a frantic speed, thus causing enormous operating problems and, likely, a lower quality of life together with the rising of social costs which sometimes have become unaffordable.

Today in a global economy, we deeply feel the need for a new tight relation with nature and a better quality of life to be achieved also through an environment which shouldn't be built in accompliance with a will of mere exploitation of the land. Today we know that social tensions worsen in deteriorated build-up areas which have a part in leading to the escalation of violence in a spiral of general decay.

We have realized that we can't go on growing endlessly and thus destroying more and more land. We are part of nature and without the natural environment our lives are inhuman, cold and fruitless. We can't deeply modify our megalopolis, which have overspread regardless of the fragility of the territory, but we can minimize the negative impact that improperly built-up areas have on our souls by a riappropriation of a direct relationship with the natural landscape.

/.../

For centuries we protected the countryside being conscious that it was our source of life and sustenance. But with the Industrial Revolution and the shift from a rural economy to an industrial one the distance between Man and nature, cities and land obviously grew deeper.

Where do cities end and the natural landscape start? What is the boundary of that landscape and how do we act upon it? What do we do to blend the built-up with the natural landscape? Which landscape are we aiming at recreating for our towns? These are the basic questions which need new answers to recreate an urban environment where the green plays a fundamental role for our wellness. There are scattered signs of a new Renaissance where Man and the quality of life are the core of our thoughts.

From this perspective architects should conceive their projects as the prosecution of the natural lanscape, when possible, and the projects should be fully integrated with the green.

Today there is an interest in enhancing a process opposed to the one which led to the morphology of contemporary cities resulting from a progressive consumption of soil. It is important to re-use dismissed sites making them be part of the natural environment once more. Landscape planning means complementing and merging with the urban architectural design as to lead to a single integrated project where both aspects are indivisible.

Not long ago, the green was sometimes a kind of camouflage to projects defaults, but it is becoming the pivotal element round which building projects are to be conceived.

There are residential projects aiming at melting with the natural surroundings, the choice of materials and shapes is more organic and the relation between the interior space and the exterior space becomes the most relevant element.

It is a radical change in attitude where buildings are part of a natural process: we are part of nature and everything we build cannot be unlinked or regardless of the landscape.

Moving from the first attempts of making “green” buildings by bidimensional green elements (vertical green), today there is a new trend for a more substantial and tridimensional green, I would say a “less designed” green in favour of a more natural green as a result of a new sensibility.

When we work in “unurbanized” areas, it is certainly easier to integrate the project into the natural landscape in order to prosecute the work of nature by using local materials, by saving energy, by respecting both proportions of what is built and its surroundings in a humanscale. We should be fully aware of our responsabilities in saving the environment and its resources .

In conclusion “context generates form”: a respectful relation with the landscape fosters better spaces which can positively modify our way of living and thus our daily life.

Luciano Pia

A House In A House

A current design meme: the concept of "A House In A House": see more in http://www.yellowtrace.com.au/house-in-a-house/
Courtesy: www.yellowtrace.com.au

Luciano Pia: 9 Personal Rules (+1)

See more at: http://ge.tt/9VNR2W82/v/0

Lorenzo Matteoli, "My vision for Midland"

The basic driving force for any type of real estate or urban development: if you want success the place must have residential, everyday living appeal. Morning, noon, afternoon, evening and night time.

Success meaning that people want to live there, have their kids live there, buy property there, invest their money there. There is no other romantic or sentimental drive but environmental, urban, social, architectural appeal and consistent quality services. (education, shopping, entertainment, sports, culture, food, theatre, health, performing arts, music, dance, cafès, urban landscape…architecture).

That is where the money goes, and you want to be where the money goes, and you want to design an urban context, a built environment context, a set of amenities and services that will yield precisely that result.

The leading feature to support and contain all these things is urban landscape a landscape made of buildings, gardens, greens, useful urban gadgets (energy technologies?) social gathering spots, lookouts.…beware of monuments (they can be really dull).

Midland now is ANYTHING but that.

It’s an ugly place, with an ugly set of decaying industrial buildings, with an ugly wide railway track crossing it, with old closed decaying pubs and huge squallid parking lots for commuters deserted at nights, deserted during the week-ends. Hot tarmac wastelands under the WA brilliant sun.

Nothing now in Midland could be conceivably more far away from a desirable place where to live.

Urban Landscape

The landscape of a “future city” no sprawl, no ugly little boxes on 300 square meters lots, with miserable “green” spaces two meters wide around.

Tall buildings, high density (8 to 12 storeys high), spatially organized in a mode that I would call “aerial”, volumes connected by bridges, terraces, pensile walkways, pensile gardens, pensile trees, may be water falls (do not be shy go for it!), wind generators above, look out spots and overhanging balconies.

All parking lots to be underground and above them buidings or gardens. Most of automobile circulation underground. Above cycle paths and pedestrian walkways winding around artificial hills.

A HUGE lake conceived to be a climate control tool and designed for swimming and surfing (an artificial wave? Or the surfing waterfall. Check the pool with artificail wave in Phoenix Arizona).

The huge problem is the bloody railway: cover it with a long garden overpass? A shopping mall? Whatever ….? It is really ugly and maybe the cost of covering it is less than the cost of diverting it around the Helena River (??) or wherever…

Your guys can elaborate on this if you like it. Do not need to quote me: take what you want throw way what you do not like.

Remember the first title of this exercise: off the beaten track.

It’s a Christmas present! 

Lorenzo

(to be continued)  

Block 3

This is the only picture inside Block 3 I have been able to find. The place is not accessible now…one needs to have permits and ask the Midland Workshop Management. The Block is empty now.
Cheers,
Lorenzo