Picture It: Once Upon a Midnight Dreary

colleenb — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:23:44 -0700

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Protesting the Weather: Climate Change Activists Storm Capitol

CitizenSugar — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:50:34 -0800

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Midday Muse: Flooded London

CasaSugar — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:00:44 -0700

Some climate change models indicate that many of the planet's coastal regions will be underwater in the next 50 to 100 years. Deciding to put a positive spin on this rather dreary prediction, media production company Squint/Opera used a combination of photography and digital modeling and manipulation to create an altogether surprising vision of the future.

The company's images, which were presented as part of London Festival of Architecture 2008, show Londoners fishing from parking structures, playing near submerged sidewalks, and completing high dives from St. Paul's Cathedral. What's your take on these images?

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Casa Verde: Designing For Climate Change

CasaSugar — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:30:14 -0700

Architect Vincent Callebaut has designed a city that floats on the ocean and can house 50,000 people. Why? Given the projections for rising ocean levels due to melting ice caps, a lot of land, especially coastlines, will be under water in the 21st century. As Callebaut explains,

According to the less alarming forecasts of the GIEC (intergovernmental group on the evolution of the climate), the ocean level should rise from 20 to 90 cm during the 21st century with a status quo by 50 cm (versus 10 cm in the 20th century). The international scientific scene assesses that a temperature elevation of 1°C will lead to a water rising of 1 meter. This increase of 1 m would bring ground losses emerged of approximately 0.05 percent in Uruguay, 1 percent in Egypt, 6 percent in the Netherlands, 17.5 percent in Bangladesh, and up to 80 percent approximately in the atoll Majuro in Oceania (Marshall and Kiribati islands and step by step the Maldives islands).

To combat this loss of livable terrain, Callebaut proposes building his rather brilliant floating cities, called Lilypads. Each Lilypad can support up to 50,000 residents, and relies on a type of design called biomimicry, which uses shapes found in nature (such as the nautilus) and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. In this case, the Lilypad design is inspired by the shape of the water lily. It is half terrestrial and half aquatic, and includes features such as lagoons that purify rainwater. The city relies on renewal technologies such as solar and wind power, and is designed to float on gulf coasts. Even cooler? The city's tiatium dioxide "skin" is designed to process CO₂ in the atmosphere, thus helping to reduce climate change.