Harvesting Energy from the Public

The auxiliary building's program have been on my mind for some time. I have been leaning towards making them a community/ fitness center. One of the ideas I have been tossing around was allowing the public to actually generate some of the electricity for the stadium.



ReRev is a company that specializes in refurbishing exercise machines with generators. They take the kinetic energy produced by humans and harvest it so that it is usable by the rest of the building.

http://rerev.com/howitworks.html




Another company is Henry Works, which invented a stationary bike that harvests kinetic energy and converts it straight into your electrical system. All you have to do is plug in the bike, and the energy is converted. By taking some of these machines and ideas, I hope to allow the public to interact directly with the building's power grid. This will allow the public to adopt the building as a neighborhood organism; a living building that grows with the community, making both the building and the community better. By having some of the building's power being generated by the public, the membership fee will be able to be lowered as well.






On another note,oomorrow is the last first day of school I will ever have. It is a sad day, but I have come to realize that it is time for me to move on. Who knows, maybe I will come back to academia in the future. Wish me luck that I will finish strong.