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.

Thesis Breakthrough?

Today I had an idea to add some interesting spatial features to my design. I was upset in how orthogonal the building was becoming, so I decided to play with the angle created by New York Ave. at the north end of my site. I applied this angle to the pavement pattern at first, and this idea started to manifest into the skin of the stadium as well. With the skin and pavement going one direction and the structure and playing field going in another, an interesting dichotomy is created. I started to sketch out ideas of the pavement pattern and saw that if horizontal strips are used, a plethora of different materials could be installed (solar panels, led screens, glass, concrete, etc...). Development is in process.....

Testing Testing

Some test renders of my stadium in 3DS Max:





Midpoint review in six days......

Time to start designing

So after weeks of working with site analysis and precedent research, I can finally start designing!!! I definitely need to start modeling different transformative ideas in my site, basically putting both my site analysis and precedent research to good use. I stumbled across this stadium being built in China. The architects associated with the project are NBBJ.





The stadium has giant green walls that begin to blend in with the beautiful landscape. This leave the stadium pretty open to interact with said landscape. The way the diagrams are drawn inspired me to feel that these walls could fold back down into the earth, creating public space. This idea would work well in my site, allowing the public to reclaim some of the space that the stadium now takes up. During events, the green walls could fold up and become seating.





I begin to design Monday, after I work on my Urban Design Presentation all day Sunday(after the Ravens game).