nfl jerseys wholesaleThis solar-powered Dutch barge, currently moored in London, has awakened those yearnings once more.
Dubbed the Bauhaus, after both the band and the design school, the barge features ample natural day lighting, a full kitchen, bedroom and a lovely looking living room, it looks a lot more spacious than most London flats I have visited. But it’s the 1.7kw PV system, combined with the electric motor, that make this really interesting. In fact its owner claims you can live and even cruise entirely off the power of the sun, so long as you do so efficiently:
The boat is solar powered using a 1.7kw PV system which provide you in the current setup (London within zone 2) with enough energy to cruise or live pretty much carbon neutral throughout the year. Different to a sailing boat you have a choice to use the energy harnessed, in this case electricity for motion/cruising, to power electric gadgets or to cook. There is no gas on board and you cook with the energy the PV system generates. In cold winter months you heat with the wood burning 1930s Bauhaus school stove or if a wind turbine is added, compensating for little energy the PV system produces in the winter months you will not even need carbon neutral wood to heat.
Kaid Benfield of the NRDC Switchboard and Steve Mouzon of the Original Green are the two writers that have most influenced my thinking and writing on planning, urban design and architectural preservation over the last few years. So it is particularly heartwarming to see a Valentines Day love-fest going on at both of their sites; Perhaps I shall turn it into a mnage trois.
In his Original Green thesis, Mouzon cites four attributes that buildings need if they are going to last: they must be lovable, durable, flexible and frugal. He starts, controversially, with lovable:
Any serious conversation about sustainable buildings must begin with the issue of Lovability. If a building cannot be loved, then it is likely to be demolished and carted off to the landfill in only a generation or two…. Buildings continue to be demolished for no other reason except that they cannot be loved.
Steve prefers to link sustainability with lovable rather than beautiful, because he acknowledges that there is a cold sort of beauty that can be hard to love, and ultimately it is lovability that will lead to the care and retention of buildings. Im adding places to buildings, but I am confident that Steve would agree with my addition.
Many of my colleagues who are classicists have long insisted on beauty as the highest standard, whereas many of my colleagues who are Modernists have long disputed that stand, preferring grittier or more industrial aesthetics while claiming that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We’ll never get agreement between these two groups on beauty. Both of these groups recoil, however, at a term so unprofessional as “lovable.” “That’s barely a step above ‘cute,’ or even worse, ‘precious,’” they might say. But ask any non-architect, and they have no problem at all talking about lovable buildings and places, and they’d really like it if we were to design more of them.cheap abercrombie bikini
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