Wilkinson Eyre created a dramatic lightwell and a rooftop reading room for its revamp of a Giles Gilbert Scott-designed library at the University of Oxford – one of the six projects vying for the Stirling Prize later today (+ slideshow). (more…)
Designer Richard Clarkson has created a small, remote-controlled cloud for the home that plays music and flashes while hovering a few centimetres from the ground (+ movie). (more…)
💙 Ginnungagap – Fire & Ice on Abraham Lake. on 500px by… http://ift.tt/1XsW7ln
You can significantly reduce your energy utilization and improve your home’s heating system through easy adjustments. You don’t even have to tamper with your central heating system. If you are wondering how, here are the five things you can do to create one of the most energy efficient heating systems in your neighborhood.
If you are considering the total absolute efficiency of your home heater, you should consider how constantly you use your hot water boiler. If you frequently use it, then it’s necessary to design and plan for a proper hot water system.
Tankless water heaters provide hot water only when you need it. They do not cause the standby energy loss you can find in traditional storage water heaters. By using this type of heating system, you can have a supply of hot water in your storage tank without the need to wait for the tank to get filled up.
See Also: 10 Important Home Features That Home Buyers Want
The efficiency of your heating and cooling system can be reduced to about 60% when you use HVAC. Repairing a bad HVAC or replacing an old one can improve your heater efficiency without having to scrape the central heating system.
Today, advanced HVAC systems are 95-96% efficient. If you cannot afford a new HVAC system, you can hire a plumber to repair your boiler and do a thorough and regular clean-up of your filters .
It is also very important that leakages are avoided in your home. Sealing up and insulating a home is one of the most reasonable ways to make energy efficient heating systems. Although it’s not necessary for you to hire a heating professional to do this for you, you should consider hiring a heating specialist to assess any leakage in the building. He can also suggest areas where repairs are necessary.
Here are some of the most common places where leakages can occur:
• electrical receptacles and outlets
• mail outlets
• holes around pipes and wires
• air condition spaces either on walls or windows
• dampers by the fireplace
• inadequate weather stripping around doors
• baseboards and window frames
Single-paned windows may heat up your home quickly during the day. However, this may add more workload on the AC when it comes to cooling the interior of your home. As a result, your energy consumption greatly increases.
You can reduce this energy cost by using energy efficient windows. These days, windows normally have double panes with insulators to make them heat resistant. With these airtight designs, you can rest assured that your home will not lose warm air in the winter and cool air during the summer.
The combination of smart meter and hive active heating in your home can make it more energy efficient because you only use your heating and hot water when you need to. You will be able to determine where you are using the most energy and how much it’s costing you as well.
At least 2% of your heating bill can be saved for each degree your programmable thermostat gets reduced in an 8-hour time frame. This means that turning down your thermostat from 75° F to 70° F can help increase the energy efficiency of your home without affecting your central heating system.
Power flush is a clean-up process you can do on your central heating system. This can help make sure that your system remains efficient and cost effective. This cleanup can restore the full circulation of your heating system and allow hot water to pass through the pipework, radiators and boiler easily.
The post 5 Ways to Become More Energy Efficient with Your Heating System appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
Apartment in Minsk is a residential project completed by I-project. It is located in Minsk, Belarus and was finished in 2015.
The Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology by Amanda Levete’s firm AL_A has opened to the public, coinciding with the start of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (+ slideshow). (more…)
From the architect. A small house on the coast of Norway, just next to the water, overlooking the neighboring islands and the Norwegian Sea. The house is part of the project Bygda 2.0, a rural development project on the island of Stokkøya, focusing on developing modern Norwegian houses into a dynamic village. Businesses and research activities are combined with places to live, work, enjoy and relax. Architecture, sustainability, and exceptional cuisine are in focus.
Our client, a chef on the same island, decided to settle down and to be surrounded by this beautiful landscape and concept. His dream was a small house where he could overlook the sea from all of his rooms. It turned into a house that co-exists in perfect harmony with nature. At night he can watch the full moon lighting up the sea, reflecting its bright light into his living room. He can enjoy the northern lights while taking a bath in his bathtub that is submerged into the rocks. He can even fish from his balcony.
The house is separated into two units. The lower unit consists of the entrance and bathroom, and the higher unit consists of the kitchen, living room and a loft situated over the kitchen. These two units are slightly offset to each other. This shift causes the front of the house to naturally have an inviting open space for the entrance towards the road, while creating at the back of the house, intimacy and privacy for the bathroom’s facade that is facing the water. The kitchen window, by the entrance, is framed with firewood storage possibility. There are smaller windows towards the road and large panoramic windows towards the water.
The house is constructed of wood and has a wooden siding that is incorporated not only on the outer walls but internally as well. The façade has to endure harsh weather and thus it is constructed with maintenance free burned wood, a traditional Japanese technique incorporated into the Norwegian context. Part of the house is standing on wooden pillars, overhanging the steep rocks that lead down to the water, and the other half is a concrete slab on solid ground. The roof is made of sedum grass, adding some greenery to the rocky landscape. The heating system is a modern wood stove with water jacket that works alongside a solar water heater.
Wooden panels with different treatments offer a variety of color for the interior of the house. Floor tiles enhance the entrance and the bathroom flooring. The bathtub is clad with the same tiles as the ones used for the bathroom floor. It is submerged into the floor to give an undisturbed and uninterrupted view of the nature outside giving a feeling of stepping right into the landscape. The trapezoidal metal sheets of the interior roof are left exposed giving a playful contrast to the warm wood while reflecting the light from the sky and the water into the building.
#328 is a private home located in Wolseley, Australia. It was designed by McKimm. Photos by: Derek Swalwell
The FutureLand Express departs once daily—three times on Sunday—in front of FutureLand, the information center of the latest extension of the Port of Rotterdam. The bus tours Maasvlakte 2, as the area is called, for seventy-five minutes, showing visitors 2,000 hectares of artificial ground for port activities and ‘nature’. The dredging of 240 million cubic meters of sand for land reclamation was just beginning in 2008; back then, this was, literally, future land. However, FutureLand’s promise of witnessing the future through a bus window goes beyond sightseeing record-breaking civil engineering works. Maasvlakte 2 is also home of the two most technologically advanced container terminals in the world.
Leaving the scale of the place aside—the ship-to-shore (STS) cranes are almost as high as the Erasmus bridge—to a distracted eye, operations at APM Terminals and Rotterdam World Gateway (RWG) container terminals might not seem out of the ordinary: cranes unloading containers from large vessels, followed by a relentless traffic of trucks. Nevertheless, as the bus tours APM Terminal’s premises, it becomes apparent that its blue cranes have no cabins; that driverless vehicles carry the containers, and no-access signs mark a fence around a large area where no person can be seen. Welcome to the workplace of full-automation.
Predetermined Future
In reality, a glimpse of that future had already been in sight in the Port of Rotterdam for years. In the neighboring Maasvlakte, the ECT Delta Terminal proudly announces itself as the first automated terminal in the world. In 1993, this undertaking introduced Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) that transport containers between quay and storage area, where automated stacking cranes handle them. Still, the process is not fully autonomous, as the STS cranes moving containers from vessels to AGV’s have operators on board.
ECT’s Euromax terminal followed the path of automation in 2008 with similar solutions, but the Port of Rotterdam eventually institutionalized the trend in its plans for Maasvlakte 2. With the port reportedly on the verge of reaching its growth limit, the Maasvlakte 2 expansion would underpin Rotterdam’s position as a logistical hub by giving room for container terminals to access the largest vessels. However, plans also stated that economic growth had to be combined with a strong commitment with sustainability.
For the port authority, sustainability was mainly a synonym of efficiency—efficient use of land, time and energy—and, as the argument went, nothing is more efficient that a fully-automated process. Full-automation would allow for rapid loading and unloading of an increased volume of containers and their stacking in logical sequences, while reducing idle times and energy consumption. The terminals would even “require a lot less light in the evening.” Thus, the port placed “strict demands” on the businesses aspiring to operate there. In turn, these companies have made the terminals at Maasvlakte 2 model workplaces of automation, both for robots and humans.
Scale Matters
The ultimate frontier for the full automation of port operations were the STS cranes, and the push for overcoming this limitation is a direct result of the leap in scale in container ships. The wide port entrance and deep fairways of Maasvlakte 2 were designed to afford the passage and docking of ultra large container ships (ULCS). Loading and unloading one of those huge high-TEU capacity vessels requires STS cranes that are higher and have a longer outreach. Hence, travel distances from ship to shore increase, and faster movements are needed in order to increase productivity.
According to ABB, the Swiss company that provided the remote control systems to both terminals in Maasvlakte 2, human nature imposes limits that place the attainment of higher performance at risk. First, crane acceleration and deceleration need to be restricted with a human operator on board; under increasing pressure, movements would become more abrupt and cause strain on the worker’s body. Further, human sight would hamper moving objects with precision from a cabin placed at an unprecedented height. Both would ultimately lead to work accidents and damage to the equipment and goods.
Automation allows the cranes to run faster and smoothly, shortening vessel-processing cycle times. Optical character recognition (OCR) safely identifies objects, and on board cameras offer a full picture of the process to the remote operator in real-time, who additionally gains a more ergonomic workspace. Similar to what happens to other unmanned, automatic devices, operators supervise the crane cycle in a control room, located in an office building on site, just outside the container handling area.
In contrast the RWG, which keeps operators cabins on the STS cranes as a vestige—or maybe as a backup—those at the APM Terminals get by without them. The commitment of this company to automation is irreversible. According to Jouke Schaap, Head of Commercial at APM’s Maasvlakte 2 operations, the company does not contemplate any “backup scenario”. There is no possibility of turning back to manual control.
Operating System and Devices
Aside from constant supervision, there is no need for human intervention in the whole process of loading, unloading, stacking, organizing, and transferring containers. At its core, a so-called Terminal Operating System (TOS) provides computerized coordination and management of cargo and unmanned machines. The system optimizes everything in real-time, from travel distances and crane schedules to the utilization of the yard space “in order to handle growth without adding new land.”
On top of that, additional software translates the commands of the TOS into specific movements and driving paths that are then sent to the robotic equipment. TEAMS, as this program is called, automatically avoids collisions and deadlocks. Supervision and intervention, when necessary, is facilitated by means of a visual interface showing the exact position of any piece of equipment on an operable 2D/3D overview of the terminal.
The result is an incessant mechanical choreography. Once the electric STS crane automatically places the container on a battery-powered Lift Automated Guided Vehicle (Lift AGV), this driverless wheeled platform follows its predetermined path towards the storage area, positioning itself in space in relation to a transponder grid. Special storage racks and its integrated lift system allow the Lift AGV to drop its cargo autonomously. When its battery is low, the vehicle drives to a charging station. Back in the stacks, an Automated Rail-Mounted Gantry Crane (ARMG)—also electric—approaches the rack and takes its load to its most optimal position with regard to its departure schedule. When that moment comes, the ARMG drops the container automatically either onto a truck, identified previously through OCR, or in another Lift AGV that moves it to the rail yard area. Once there, another automated crane places it on a cargo train heading to the hinterland. In the meantime, if no ship is docked, the ARMG cranes do not stay idle, but further optimize the storage area in preparation for the next vessel. All of this happens within a fenced perimeter, as, according to APM Terminals, none of the machines have sensors to detect human presence.
All in all, automation is still a pioneering endeavor, and it takes some time to refine the terminal operation system. APM Terminals says they expect to reach full potential in 2018. A second phase, which would double the size of the terminal, will come later. By then, the company anticipates its replication will be as easy as “copying and pasting.”
Control Room
Away from the noise, vibration, and danger of the fenced off robot workplace, operators perform their tasks in an environment that boasts all sorts of human-centered design features. ABB calls its design concept ‘operator in focus’. This is based on the principle that the design of the control room should support the company’s operations by facilitating the ‘natural’ immersion of the employee in their tasks and responsibilities. Designing a pleasant environment for an “operator as a human being” pays off with employee “alertness, productivity, collaboration and occupational health.”
The guidelines suggested by ABB touch on all aspects of the control room. These range from recommendations on how to manage flows of people and locate additional programs—meeting rooms, lockers, and dining room—to avoid operational disturbances, to the specific characteristics of the furniture. Natural light gives operators “a reference to time” and the right selection of materials help control noise levels. Workstations should be placed at an optimal distance from each other, inviting collaboration and communication without cluttering. Most importantly, data should be presented only in the right place at the right moment: that is, contextual information should be provided in just a few monitors in the field of view of the operator so as to avoid information overload.
Such emphasis of ABB on achieving well-being and performance through ergonomics has also influenced the main human interface device in the automated process: the remote control console. Designed by No Picnica—a Swedish design agency—and awarded a Red Dot Award in 2014, the control console is a cool, compact, Nintendo-looking device. Joysticks and buttons, colored lights, icons and a visual user guide are carefully laid out to assist the remote operator’s workflow. Video game-like interfaces will change the preconceived notion society has of port workers: images of manly stevedores manually operating machines are being replaced by those of young professionals, men and women, working with camaraderie in an inviting environment.
Obviously, remote control might have far more implications for the spatial organization of work and global division of labor than ergonomics. Currently, outsourcing the supervision of all terminals of a global operator to a centralized control room is a possibility only limited by concerns about network safety and bandwidth reliability. Improved automation and artificial intelligence will eventually reduce the need for continuous human supervision. Then there will be “no limit to how remote remote-controlled operations can be.”
Transitions
With their electric-motor robots running entirely on renewable energy, and their teams of humans working collaboratively, the terminals at Maasvlatke 2 anticipate the built environment of the Third Industrial Revolution. The case evidences the fact that a strong planning and policy vision can guide how private actors shape the built environment, aligning economic growth with the development of zero emission, off-grid autonomous and sustainable infrastructures and working environments. It also shows how robots, with their bodily presence in space and their limitations in how they interact with humans, are already defining how territories are managed and organized for work, bringing in new modes of spatial segregation and inclusion.
Not surprisingly, there are also losers in this transition. As it happened with the arrival of the first grain elevators in 1905, port workers in Rotterdam today fear redundancy. Seeing their livelihoods and bargaining power threatened by the future towards which the port is heading, they were able to strike an agreement in job security. FNV Havens, the main union of port workers, declared that their struggle is not against automation—which they admit is an inexorable fate—but for guaranteeing a fair transition into the new economic landscape. In fact, decidedly pushing for automation with responsibility urges planning and policy to integrate innovative answers to one of the questions posed by Jeremy Rifkin and others: what to do with those “wage earners of the industrial age” whose work has been rendered obsolete by technological and economic decisions, and replaced by others with different skills?
With a final expected cost of 2.6 billion Euros, Maasvlakte 2 will also include projects for environmental compensation and new areas of nature and recreation amounting to 300 million. Despite the fact that the sixty-five-million Euro social compensation plan secured by the union pales in comparison to both figures, moving into the future with ad hoc solutions for the social issues of automation seems unsustainable. Certainly, the Port of Rotterdam Authority has not ignored the fact that the port workers of tomorrow must be more agile and resilient. While initiatives such as the RDM Campus aim at educating the future generation of technical workers for a constantly changing future, envisioning additional projects and spaces that proactively take advantage of the social capital of current generations and support a transition to a new economy should nevertheless be an integral task not to be ignored in an automated future. In this sense, the developments of Maasvlatke 2 to come should be taken as an opportunity to reimagine and test alternative models of transition towards new economic realities.
The author wishes to thank: the Research & Development Department at Het Nieuwe Instituut; Isabelle Vries and Wouter Buck, Port of Rotterdam; Jouke Schaap, APM Terminals; Niels Dekker, Rotterdam World Gateway; Mariëtte van Dijk, FNV Vervoer; Martijn Coeveld and Leo Klink, TBA.
References and Footnotes
[1] Hutchison Port Holdings (HPH), ‘ECT Delta Terminal’, 2015. At: http://ift.tt/2dMAVUC (accessed 27 June 2016)
[2] Port of Rotterdam Authority & Project Organization Maasvlakte 2, ‘The Sustainable Port’, May 2008. At: http://ift.tt/2d5cvIe (accessed 11 June 2016).
[3] Twenty-foot equivalent unit, used to describe capacity of container ships and terminals.
[4] ABB, ‘ABB to enable remote control of ship-to-shore cranes at Maasvlakte 2 container terminals in the Netherlands’, 25 September 2012. At: http://ift.tt/2dMAREe (accessed 15 June 2016).
[5] Personal communication with Jouke Schaap, Head of Commercial, APM Terminals Maasvlakte 2, on 28 June 2016.
[6] Navis, ‘N4: It’s time for more’, 2015, pp. 4. At: http://ift.tt/2d5bAHS (accessed 17 June 2016).
[7] TEAMS stands for Terminal Equipment Automated Management System, and was developed by the Dutch company TBA. TBA, ‘TEAMS: Real-time control for advanced terminal operations’, 2016. At: http://ift.tt/2dMAnxV (accessed 20 June 2016).
[8] APM Terminals. ‘Welcome to the Future of Global Trade: APM Terminals Maasvlakte II Media Kit’, 24 April 2015. At: http://ift.tt/2dMALwC (accessed 20 June 2016).
[9] Personal communication with Jouke Schaap, Head of Commercial, APM Terminals Maasvlakte 2, on 28 June 2016.
[10] Helen Karsten, ‘Pushing Automation to the Limit’, Generations. A publication of ABB Marine and Cranes, 1, 2013, pp. 1-4. At: http://ift.tt/2d5cO5U (accessed 16 June 2016).
[11] Clara Holmgren & Lena Nyberg, ‘Moving crane operations to the control room – What can we learn from process industries’, Port Technology International, n0. 58, May 2013, pp. 54-59. At: http://ift.tt/2dMASIn (accessed 16 June 2016).
[12] ABB, ‘Control room solutions for remote operations’, 2016. At: http://ift.tt/2d5bzDO (accessed 16 June 2016).
[13] Fredrik Johanson, ‘How remote can ‘remote’ be?’, Port Strategy, 10 October 2015. At: http://ift.tt/2dMDVQC (accessed 16 June 2016).
[14] APM Terminals, ‘APM Terminals Signs Contract for Wind-Power Generated Electricity’, 16 December 2014. At: http://ift.tt/2dMAIkh (accessed 17 June 2016).
[15] Wouter Vanstiphout, ‘Mechanization Takes Command’. In: Crimson Architectural Historians (eds.), Too Blessed to be Depressed (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002), pp. 209-224.
[16] Personal Communication with Mariëtte van Dijk, press officer FNV Vervoer [FNV transport], on 22 June 2016. In July 2016 the union succeeded in securing their demands.
[17] Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 265.
[18] Port of Rotterdam, ‘Overeenstemming over aanleg Tweede Maasvlakte’, 25 June 2004. At: http://ift.tt/2d5cSCL (accessed June 12 2016)
Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen
9.20am BST
David Anderson QC is coming to the end of his time as the government’s independent reviewer of terrorist legislation. And this morning he has decided to stir things up with an interview to the Today programme calling for a review and an overhaul of the controversial Prevent programme, which was set up to counter radicalisation. He said in Muslim communities it was almost seen as a “spying programme”.
He told the programme:
There is a strong feeling in Muslim communities that I visit that Prevent is, if not a spying programme, at least a programme that is targeted on them. In some cases it is even felt it is targeted not just Islamist terrorism or extremism, but at the practice of Islam. People who pray or who wear the veil, for example, are sometimes felt to be under suspicion.
Not, I’m sure those fears are exaggerated, and they are certainly not what the programme is supposed to be about, but the fact is that they are very real. So it is frustrating for me to see a programme whose ideals are obviously good falling down on the delivery to the point where it is not trusted in the community where it principally applies …
I would like to see three big changes. The first is much more transparency in terms of data, in terms of the underlying research, in terms of results, and some metrics for gauging success. Secondly, we need somebody or some group of people, completely independent of the programme, who can get in there, read the secrets, talk to everybody and report to parliament and to the public on how it is working. Then I think the third thing we need is better engagement from the government, including at national level, with the range of Muslim communities in this county. It is extraordinary to me that there is no dialogue, for example, between the government and the Muslim Council of Britain.
The government has to be more open about what it is doing, and it has to subject itself to some kind of independent scrutiny that can judge whether it’s effective or whether it isn’t.
Politics blog | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2e4AdGv
Sig Nordal 