UTOPIA SERIES
discover this city embarked on a sustainable journey for the last decade to develop the world's first net-zero energy green print urban living and doing the honors to a rapidly growing clean-tech cluster. masdar city is working hard to thrive in a groundbreaking community where today's ideas become tomorrow's reality.
every step you take will let you create incredible stories.
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city(e)scape
harvests the energy of sun in harmony with the circadian rhythm of life
masdar is a 21st-century urban laboratory, not only with its energy and sustainable policy but also urban and environmental approach. masdar would be a sustainable, efficient, high tech, but also the innovative proud face of our century. technology is not always and only the most efficient way of creating optimum solutions for urbanism and the environment. it should be touching ‘the souls of the population’ and generate a ‘communication’ with ‘inhabitants’ and remind that “we are living here together”. with this sense of humor, solarCLOUD offers ‘a place for the community’ ‘a gathering place for all’ while creating energy for electricity and also creating energy for life within the biologic rhythm of earth, connecting the anima of earth and sun to the ‘neighbourhood’ also with the possibilities of ‘an attraction point’ which may become the ‘heart of the city’ that everyone can find something to relate.
year
size
location
theme
status
2009
22.500 m2
usa
manhattan
public space
landmark
competition
the cities are designed around a center to gather people together, for thousands of years. from ancients to rome, and today's most crowded and demanding cities, squares, open spaces, parks, voids, attraction points making the cities alive and they are all indispensable parts of the cities. today ‘experience’ is one of the most important element to form new urban life in future cities. our project creating a strong ground level, shaded and climatized by a ‘solar cloud’ at day time, turns into a ‘media cloud’ hosting many artists and artworks all over the world, bringing a great experience for its visitors.
there are too many ways of harvesting the sun. we are planting 1500 solar ‘balloons’ on our field of community, covered with a ‘solar fabric’ which is one of the latest products of the solar industry. once planting a balloon on the site, it would behave like a crop, growing daily and catching the sun for ‘electric energy’.
how can a plaza be shaped into a public gathering and attraction point of its own, providing shade against a harsh sun for multi-use functions, and producing renewable energy for the city grid at the same time?
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like ‘sunflowers’ triggered by the ‘sun’ and followed it every day like a ‘moving sculpture’, ‘solar balloons’ also start to ‘rise’ by using the heat of the sun to catch more daylight to generate electric energy from the sun, also triggering the ‘roller’ for mechanical energy. it would generate an ‘endless variations of cloud’ every single day, also generating and providing a moving shade underneath.
while the cloud is hunting sun at daytime and shading for the podium, nighttime balloons descend to a specified height, after losing their heat energy inside, and becoming individual ‘pixels’ of a 1500 balloon ‘media cloud’. solartcloud is a programmable digital platform, which would become an open-air ‘new media museum’ that host many artists all over the world, scheduled for a ‘changing and refreshing content’ monthly, weekly and daily programs from different artists.
in this era of internet and digitally enhanced IoT technologies, a community fosters not only in actual spaces but also in virtual ones, and sometimes more than easily.
this place could serve as an interface for both, even living a double simultaneous life of dark and light in the realms of cyberspace and masdar at the same time. new technologies can be promoted. mixed reality applications could also be of service in special events or festivals.
while 1500 solar balloons harvest energy in the daytime behaving as a kinetic sculpture, they conduct as pixels that perform an enormous linked screen together for digital arts at night, hosting various artists to fluctuate the color of the night, and gather people under for numerous reasons.
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