Crazy and Outrageous Buildings of 2010

2010 has thrown up some buildings and developments that are out-of-this world, spectacular, outrageous, and even absurd. All despite the worst recession in thirty years. Here's a look at some of the best, courtesy of GOOD magazine.

The tallest freestanding structure on the planet, the Burj Khalifa, will open in Dubai in January, standing 2,717 feet above the desert. Designed by Adrian Smith, the tower is the centerpiece of a $20 billion development named Downtown Dubai, but it opens at an ominous time. The tower itself, known as the Burj Dubai, is re-named after Sheikh Khalifa al-Nahyan, the President of the United Arab Emirates, who gives it the economic bailout necessary to complete it. Dubai is plagued with financial problems, and in October, only 825 of the 900 apartments are rented, overlooking a city where cranes hang motionless across the sky.

Meanwhile, a few months later in China, the new tallest tower in the world officially opens in Guangzhou, Guangdong. Designed by Information Based Architecture with Arup, the Canton Tower twists up 1,968.5 feet (beating out Toronto's CN Tower) into a hyperboloid (or double-ellipse) structure. An observation deck is planned for its rooftop. Meanwhile, Nanjing Greenland Financial Center and the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong are also completed this year, meaning China secures the titles of the second and third tallest buildings in the world.

After years of speculation about the future of the Santiago Calatrava-designed Chicago Spire, which would rise 2,000 feet over Chicago's waterfront, a foreclosure suit threatens to end construction for good. If ever completed, it would be the tallest building in the United States, topping the neighboring Willis—formerly Sears—Tower in Chicago. But since 2008, the construction site (literally a huge hole in the ground) has been abandoned, symbolic of the nation's waning power in the skyscraper race.

It officially opened in late 2009, but 2010 sees the completion of the final phase of CityCenter in Las Vegas, a spiky, fantastical, starchitect-studded collaboration featuring hundreds of A-listers like Daniel Libeskind and Cesar Pelli. The $8.5 billion project is the largest privately funded development in U.S. history, and one of the largest LEED-certified projects in the world. Yet reviews slam the development for its faux-urban nature, and suffering Vegas hotels blame its 6,000 new rooms for glutting the market. In November, Norman Foster’s troubled and still uncompleted tower, the Harmon, is slated for demolition. Um, what does that do to the LEED ratings of the other buildings?

At the Shanghai World Expo this year, plenty of architects had a chance to flex their muscles while designing the various national pavilions. While the U.S. architecture was a dismal failure, there were otherstandouts from countries like Denmark, who featured a working bike track, equipped with bikes, that wound through the Bjarke Ingels-designed sculpture. But nothing tops Thomas Heatherwick's Seed Cathedral for the United Kingdom, a stunning tribute to biodiversity. More than 60,000 fiberoptic rods showcase specimens from Kew Gardens' Millennium Seedbank, which will hold 25 percent of the world’s plant species by 2020. Which makes it even more fitting that it was nicknamed "The Dandelion."

In October, official renderings are revealed for Park51, an Islamic community center that plans to occupy the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory in Lower Manhattan. Instead of the design by SOMA Architects, the media focuses on the fact that it's three blocks away from where the 9/11 attacks took place, inaccurately dubbing it the “Ground Zero mosque” (even though it's not a mosque, and there are already other mosques in the area). Although there's no explicit commentary about what the design means, the exteriors seem to evoke an Islamic star pattern while flooding the interiors with daylight.

Also in October, a family of five finally moves into what's widely regarded to be the first billion-dollar house, a private, 27-story tower in Mumbai that's built for India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani. Designed by Perkins+Will, the "house" has a health club with a gym and dance studio, swimming pools, a 50-seat cinema, three helicopter pads, a garage for 160 vehicles on the ground floors, and 600 full-time staffers to maintain the house, which is widely regarded to be the most expensive permanent residence in the world.

In December, after perhaps the most ambitious World Cup proposal in history, the tiny Middle Eastern country of Qatar wins its bid to host the 2022 games. Its radical plan to host millions of soccer fans in 130-degree heat include building 12 stadiums that will later be disassembled into 22 new stadiums for neighboring countries, and mysterious solar-powered air conditioners that will keep even open-air stadiums cool. Well, at least they’ve got 12 years to figure it out.

Via: GOOD

New Innovations on Electric Bikes Promise to Increase their Market Share

The first promising new electric bike model comes from German industrial designer Christian Vollmer. This bike uses a "pedelec system", meaning it has no need for a chain. Instead, it has a toothed belt which transfers clean power from the engine to the rear wheel. Read all about it on the green design blog Inhabitat. 

The second model has been released by Volkswagen at the Auto China Show. Dubbed the bik.e (yes, that’s how it’s spelled), the sleek portable cycle is capable of folding down to the size of a spare tire and has range of 12.5 miles and a top speed of 12.5 mph (the fastest speed allowed by electric vehicles for passengers to go without helmets in Germany). Volkswagen has announced plans to actually roll out the bike as a “mobility enhancer” option on their autos, as the bike can be replenished by a vehicle’s DC current.
 

Volkswagen's electric bikes are most likely to be first commercialized in China, where they were released at the Auto China Show, and Germany, where there is already a sizable consumer market for electric bikes. No word yet on when this new VW model will be available in the United States. 

Via: Inhabitat, Fast Company, and Good.

Check out the video from the Auto China Show 2010 - just be sure not to miss the undersea dancers straight of Zoolander!

Electric Bikes Garner Media Attention in the Pacific Northwest

The online news forum Crosscut has recently published an article exploring the possibility of facilitating electric bike infrastructure in major urban areas of the Pacific Northwest.

While China has a long-established mass culture of bicycle transportation (though it has certainly waned in recent years), cities such as Seattle and Portland and elsewhere in the United States have a long way to go to make electric bicycles a part of the everyday American commute.

It is estimated that while 100 million Chinese use electric bikes as part of their daily commute, only about 58,000 Americans do. Major factors for this enormous discrepancy include the lack of electric vehicle charging infrastructure in most American cities, the lack of shoulders and bike lanes on most arterials, longer commuting distances and lower densities of urban neighborhoods that make bicycle transportation impractical.

Alan Durning of the Sightline Institute, a prominent Seattle think tank has recently published a series outlining the promises and struggles of creating an electric bike culture in the Northwest.

Three primary trends favor the rise of electric bikes as part of the low-carbon, "green" transportation infrastructure of the future, thanks in large part to the large amounts of the stimulus funding now available for such projects.

1. Technical innovation keeps improving electric bikes. To give one example, the Japanese firm Sanyo has designed the Eneloop eletric assist bike which promises to change the electric bike market in the US permanently. The bikes are sleek and cost-competitive, available for $2,300 at Best Buy. American manufacturer Trek has also introduced a competitive electric model, the Ride+.

2. Electric bikes are catching on like wildfire not only in China, where 120 million users are expected by late 2010 (a massive increase from just 56,000 in 1998) but in Northern Europe, India, and New York City. Although the American market numbers less than 200,000, according to David Goodman's article in the New York Times the number is projected to rise in the coming years. Two types of electric bikes are emerging as contending popular models. The first, most popular in the US and Europe, is similar to a typical manual-powered bicycle with an auxiliary motor that can be engaged on command or when the cyclist pedals.

By contrast, in China, electric bicycles have evolved into bigger machines that resemble Vespa scooters. They have small, wide-set pedals that most cyclists do not use as they travel entirely on battery power. The bikes move at up to 30 miles an hour, with a range of 50 miles on a fully charged battery.

Best Buy has recently released electric bike models for sale at many of its outlets in the Seattle and Portland metro areas, some for as little as $899.

3. Electric bikes are more energy-efficient and easier to charge than electric cars. According to the Sightline Institute's Durning,

Simple physics favor e-bikes over e-cars. Bicycles, even ones loaded with batteries, weigh less than their riders. Electric cars, in contrast, weigh many multiples as much as their drivers. Consequently, most of e-bikes’ battery charge can be spent moving the mass of the rider, but most of electric cars’ charge must be spent moving the bulk of the car itself. What’s more, part of e-bikes’ energy comes from leg muscles, again reducing the required battery power. In auto parlance, e-bikes have human-electric hybrid drives.

Despite these trends that favor an explosion of electric bike production in the urban US (some estimates predict sales of 1 million e-bikes annually by 2016), there are four obstacles that stand in the way of a truly viable electric bike culture.

1. Immature Technology - relative to electric cars, e-bikes still have a long way to go before the technology of installing, charging, and cleaning the bicycles' batteries is seamlessly integrated and convenient for consumers, as DL Byron pointed out on the e-bike blog Bike Hugger. 
2. Bike Culture - In Asian and Northern European cities, bikes are ubiquitous forms of transportation, nearly as commonplace as automobiles in many. However, in North America, bicycles are seldom used for purposes other than recreation. Especially in the urban Northwest, the local bike culture has defined itself in opposition to the automobile, and its point of pride is that bicycles are "trendy" because they are hard work to commute with using only muscle energy. The individualism and identity that come with car ownership in American culture also work heavily against electric bikes.
3. Inefficient Distribution - There is a very segregated bicycle sales market in the US - the high end that sells racing and commuter bikes, comprising 25% of all sales, and the low end selling primarily childrens and recreational or mountain bikes, comprising the other 75%. Neither sector has adapted to the rise of e-bike technology, and as such very few American bike shops today have the technology or expertise to help customers with their electric bikes. 
4. Safety - Few American cities have provided the bicycle infrastructure needed to make e-bikes a viable option for most commuters. According to Jonathan Maus of the Portland bike blog BikePortland, “Our current lack of a connected, separated, and comfortable bike network makes many people afraid to even try biking — and simply giving them motors won’t change their minds.”

According to the Sightline Institute's Durning, the market contexts of electric bikes are very different in China and the US, and therefore expanding the American market and its associated infrastructure has very different policy implications.

The economic context of e-bikes is radically different in China than in the Northwest. In China, most buyers of electric bikes are stepping up in vehicular speed and comfort from heavy, low-performance bicycles. They are opting for electric bikes not in place of cars but in place of bicycles, motorcycles, or scooters. In the North America, e-bike buyers are stepping down in vehicular speed and comfort from the automobile. (Actually, they’re mostly buying an additional vehicle, to use in place of their car some off the time.)

Electric bikes, as the forerunners of electric cars and trucks, have tremendous potential, but they’re unlikely to win more than a toe-hold in a marketplace long dominated by petroleum-powered vehicles. Unless public policy makes petroleum-powered vehicles far less attractive, as China did for motorcycles. Petroleum is just too phenomenally effective and (still) cheap. Electric bikes will inch upward in market share in the Northwest, becoming less like novelties and more like regular bikes in their prevalence. But they will not sweep through the population as they have in China, unless we act through public policy to make their fossil-fueled competitors less competitive and cycling in general much more attractive. Specifically, we can:

• Enact climate policies that put a price on carbon through a carbon tax or a fair cap and trade system.
• Make dramatic progress in threading a complete network of continuous, separate, named, signed, and lighted bikeways through our communities, so that cyclists (pedal and electric) are shielded from auto traffic.

Electric Bikes May Ease China's Urban Air Pollution - For Now

The BBC reports a dramatic rise of Beijing residents who commute around the city by electric bike. China was, until the mid-1990s, an almost monolithically bicycle-driven society. Along with a decade of spectacular economic growth, however, Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai have vastly shifted from bicycles to private cars. The result, not surprisingly, has been unprecedented problems with urban air pollution that threaten both the environment and public health.

With car traffic congestion at all-time highs in many Chinese cities, many residents have chosen electric bikes as a commuting option offering both speed and the opportunity to escape the traffic quagmire.

Legally, "electric bikes" are bikes that are smaller and lighter than motorcycles, traveling at speeds under approximately 15 miles per hour. Electric bikes have been so popular that their popularity in the past year has grown even faster than the leading Chinese car companies.

How long this boom in electric bikes will last depends on long-term Chinese cultural trends. If the Chinese continue to invest in a growing consumer car culture through highway spending and tax incentives, then these bikes may lose cachet with the status-conscious Chinese middle class. However, cities in China and other countries -even those in the developed world - can make use of these electric bikes by integrating them into established bike-sharing programs and improved bicycle infrastructure. If bike infrastructure becomes as lasting and integral a part of the built environment as highways and arterials, then we will be able to forge a path to long-term solutions for greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.