JDS Architects' Beijing Green Visitor Center is a Sustainable Building You Can Walk On.

JDS Architects' Beijing Green Visitor Center is a modern architectural marvel that welcomes visitors to walk right on top of it. The sloped structure is slated to be built in front of a new sustainable industrial park in order to connect the parking area with the rest of the facilities. The building's envelope can be manipulated to minimize energy loss from the climate and the sun, and it will be able to generate its own energy via a rooftop photovoltaic system.

JDS Architects recently unveiled their plans for the Beijing Green Visitor Center, which will sit at the entrance to a new sustainable industry park. The building serves as a welcome area for visitors and employees and joins the existing car park to the R&D centre and the park loop. Inside the 5,000 sq m (53,820 sq ft) visitor center are multifunctional and exhibition spaces along with a reception area, VIP room, a shop, a cafe and a children’s area. The building’s volume is based on a serious of manipulations to protect it from its environs. In this way, the original rectangular box is pushed and stretched to create an undulating roof, which is characteristic of JDS Architects’ design style.

This undulation is topped with a building integrated photovoltaic system on the portion that faces the south. The stretching of the roof also serves to protect the interior from direct sunlight, glare and overheating, while still allowing for natural daylight to to enter the space. Moveable photovoltaic louvers on the south side further block direct light by absorbing it and generating energy. In the winter, the sun is low enough to reach into the interior and heat up the floors that act as thermal mass and distribute warmth throughout the interior. Rainwater is also collected and stored in an underground cistern for use in the toilets and the park. Visitors and employees can enter through the building or bypass the interior by walking over the top and gaining a different view of the surrounding park and landscaping. The sloped roof can also serve as seating and an amphitheater when required.

 

 

Facebook Commissions Frank Gehry to Design New Green Menlo Park Campus

Facebook just announced a huge expansion to their Menlo Park campus, and have commissioned Prizker-Prize winning starchitect Frank Gehry – best known for his shiny, titanium-clad icons of blobitecture – to design the expansion. Even more surprising is that we’ve seen the designs, and so far they don’t appear to include Gehry’s trademark incomprehensible piles of eye-scorching titanium curves. The proposed design is quite eco-friendly, with a massive park-like, tree and grass-lined green roof featuring a ‘park benches’ and a ‘walking trail’ on top! In addition, Facebook submitted proposals to the city to allow its 6,000 planned new workforce to travel between old and new campuses to via a tunnel designed for pedestrian and bike traffic. Perhaps an eco architect like Bill McDonough might have been a better pick to design the giant green roof, but it seems Facebook was going for icon status here, and no architect is better known than Frank Gehry.

Zuckerberg’s team have made few changes to the former Sun Microsystems building they have occupied since their move in last summer. This area, the East Campus, cover 57 acres and about 1 million square feet of office space. The new plan proposes the creation of a 22 acre west campus, which will be able to house their proposed hire of over 6,000 people in the next six years.
In Gehry’s architectural models of the West Campus plan show a green roof extending over all of the planned building space. The plan will also conform to Menlo Park’s the Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance which requires that turf area shall not exceed 500 square feet. In the non-turf areas, the ordinance state that at least 80% of the plants be native plants, low water using plants, or no-water using plants, and the roof top will be peppered with eating cafes and kiosks, such as sushi bars, as well.

More than a third of the new workers will be engineers, and Everett Katigbak, Facebook’s environmental design manager, is making sure the new building takes this into account. “At every step of planning the new building, Frank has taken into account our engineering culture” says Katigbak in a Facebook post. “It will be a large, one room building that somewhat resembles a warehouse. Just like we do now, everyone will sit out in the open with desks that can be quickly shuffled around as teams form and break apart around projects.” The new offices will also include cafes, mini-kitchens, and comfy break spaces. The tunnel connecting the two campuses can be seen in site plans submitted in 2011 to the City of Menlo Park. The path creates a transit route for people and bikes underneath the Bayfront Expressway.

Frank Gehry is such a big name in architecture that inevitably, his buildings all seem to become ‘icons’, so we expect Facebook is hoping for a Bilbao moment here with their new campaus. Though Gehry is best known for his swooping, technically challenging, titanium-clad facades, we’re noticing that his more recent works heavily promote bioscaping. The Panamanian Museum of Biodiversity, L.A.’s Grand Park, and Chicago’s Millennium Park all capture Gehry’s uniqueness of form, consideration for the native plant-scape, while creating spaces that draw people outdoors. If Gehry’s team applies the same attention to detail to the Facebook West Campus, future Facebook employees should be happy campers. Strolling on the roof park of your office building while nibbling on sushi sounds pretty idyllic!

 

http://inhabitat.com

Wheaton College's Mars Center for Science and Technology Awarded LEED Gold Certification!

The Mars Center for Science and Technology at Wheaton College has been awarded LEED Gold Certification from the U.S. Green Business Council for its environmentally-friendly design and extensive use of sustainable building strategies. The $42 million facility features a 1,300-square-foot green roof, energy recovering air-handling units, and extensive solar shading, which enabled it to meet one of the nation's highest green building and performance standards.

The Mars Center for Science and Technology has 12 teaching labs and 23 research labs as well as a rooftop observatory and greenhouse. The building’s green features include a 1,300-square-footgreen roof, drought-tolerant plants that conserve water, glass curtain walls to maximize interior daylighting, solar shading on glass and brims to reduce solar heat during the summer and interior lighting sensors to reduce energy consumption. The building also features energy recovery wheels in the air-handling units, which significantly reduce heating and cooling loads.

The entire campus is a testament to green design. as the green roof and landscaped plantings cover more than 65% of the project’s site. Native and adaptive species also account for more than 40% of the plants.

Speaking about the centre’s achievement, President Ronald Crutcher said: “This award reflects the commitment of the entire Wheaton community to excellence in every endeavor. The Mars Center is an exceptional facility—as a place for learning and research as well as a model for  sustainable development.”

“Our goal was to achieve silver certification,” the president added. “We exceeded that goal thanks to the support of our donors, the vision of our faculty, attention to detail of the college’s staff and our builder’s representative, The Rise Group; the expertise of our architects EYP; and the follow through of the general contractor, Bond Brothers.”

China's Green-Roofed Samaranch Memorial Museum Was Inspired by the Olympic Rings

While the 2012 Olympic Games are taking place in London, construction of a new green-roofed Olympic museum in Tianjin, China is also underway. Dedicated to former International Olympic Committee (IOC) chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch, the new Samaranch Memorial Museum will feature exhibits to commemorate his legacy as well as the influence of the Olympics in China. Dutch firm HAO and Beijing firm Archiland International designed the museum, which will be surrounded by a lush new park and will feature 5 Olympic-inspired rings, a rooftop photovoltaic system, and geothermal heating and cooling.

HAO and Archiland International won first place earlier this year with their Olympic-themed museum. Working with the concept of the 5 Olympic rings, the firms formulated a plan composed of a two-ring figure eight-like building surrounded by 3 sunken ringed buildings. The first ring of the main building is slightly raised so visitors can walk through the entrance courtyard and into an exhibition space dedicated to the influence of the Olympics on China. The second ring is dedicated to the work of Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was a strong supporter of the Beijing Olympics.
Surrounding the main building are three sunken spaces that provide more space for events and rotating exhibitions as well as administration and research. The museum will be located in a newly constructed park with other symbolic rings representing the 204 IOC members. To minimize impact, the figure eight-shaped museum will topped off with photovoltaic panels to generate up to 76% of the building’s energy needs. Additionally, a geothermal heating and cooling system will reduce energy used for hot water and climate control. Construction began this summer in Tianjin and the project is expected to be completed in 2013.

Google’s New Super-headquarters in London

 Google has gone to great lengths to make their offices fun for employees, but those working at the new super-headquarters in London have the best deal of them all. Not only are the enormous 160,000 square foot facilities decked out in re-purposed furnishings designed to recreate the comfort of a London townhouse, but the 9th floor rooftop garden features small allotments that allow employees to grow veggies and herbs! This is not the first Google project undertaken by PENSON, but it is certainly their most sustainable - just a few requirements shy of meeting LEED Platinum.

 Located in Renzo Piano’s Central St. Giles Building in Covent Garden, the new super headquarters feature a series of indoor and outdoor workspaces, a gymnasium and dance studio, along with several restaurants, cafes and comfortable rendezvous areas. These are all themed spaces that feature many recycled furnishings that allowed the designers to keep costs low. Also, in keeping with Google’s in-house policy, no toxic materials were used and many of the floors and trimmings are comprised of certified wood.
Among the workspaces are outdoor balconies or “secret gardens” fronted by trimmed hedges that provide a solar screen and some privacy (not to mention some good old-fashioned greenery!) But talk to anyone on the street and they’ll tell you that the rooftop allotments are among the most enviable feature of this new corporate headquarters. Employees have to sign up for a waiting list to use the allotments, and anyone who neglects theirs will be booted out. But once they’re in, they can nurture root vegetables and herbs in small tubes made from responsibly-sourced timber and cook them at home.

The Fantastic Machine That Found the Higgs Boson....Pics 2

Precision work is performed on the semiconductor tracker barrel of the ATLAS experiment, on November 11, 2005. All work on these delicate components must be performed in a clean room so that impurities in the air, such as dust, do not contaminate the detector. The semiconductor tracker will be mounted in the barrel close to the heart of the ATLAS experiment to detect the path of particles produced in proton-proton collisions.

The huge ATLAS Toroid Magnet End-Cap A is transported between building 180 to ATLAS point 1 on May 29, 2007.

Lowering of one of the two ATLAS muon small wheels into the cavern, on February 15, 2008. The tunnel runs as deep as 175 meters (574 ft) underground. 

View of the Compact Muon Solenoid cavern with its impressive dimensions: 53 meters long, 27 meters wide and 24 meters high.

A major milestone in the assembly of the ATLAS experiment's inner detector. The semiconductor tracker (SCT) and transition radiation tracker (TRT) are two of the three major parts of the ATLAS inner detector. Together, they will help determine trajectories of particle collisions produced when the LHC is switched on. February 22, 2006.

he electromagnetic calorimeter, completely assembled, is a wall more than 6 m high and 7 m wide, consisting of 3,300 blocks of scintillator, fibre optics and lead. This huge wall will measure the energy of particles produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC when it is started in 2008. Photons, electrons and positrons will pass through the layers of material in these modules and deposit their energy in the detector through a shower of particles. May 17, 2005. 

Integration of the ALICE experiment's inner tracker in 2007.