ROXY is a dome for your home!
Italian designer and architect Giulio Neri is producing a simple spherical lamp based on the plywood domes construction method. The lamp can be purchased as a kit for self assembly or ready made. It can be recycled and uses low consumption bulbs.

This piece of furniture shows how simple geodesic structures can be. It's intention is to bring geodesic structures at home, to delight us with their beauty, in useful furniture elements.

Meet ROXY @
www.giulioneri.com/design/roxy.html

from futurefeeder.com on Wednesday, August 24th, 2005



The winning entry to the Cradle to Cradle C2C Home Competition is an incredible single family dwelling by Matthew Coates and Tim Meldrum that goes right to the core fundamentals of the Cradle to Cradle principles. Not only does the building run a photosynthetic and phototropic skin made with spinach protein, but it also produces more energy than a single family’s needs, allowing the excess to be distributed to neighbors. This radical shift, from centralized energy systems today, fosters community interdependence as neighbors benefit from the resources of others.

ENERGY is neither created nor destroyed.  It is collected and returned.  This design utilizes timeless passive solar strategies by shielding unwanted summer sun and absorbing heat from low winter sun through its thermal mass.  Active solar collection provides the main source of necessary electrical energy.  The core extends vertically, clad with a super-conductive photosynthetic plasma cell skin that is able to generate 200% more electrical voltage per area than contemporary photovoltaics.  Building on current research involving extracted spinach protein, this living skin is photosynthetic and phototropic it grows and follows the path of the sun, generating electricity in excess of single family needs.  excess power is distributed to neighboring homes and street lighting infrastructure.

WATER is a crucial resource to life that should be enhanced by future development. This design integrates building with landscape, a vegetated roof system collects and filters stormwater into the building core.  The core collects and supplies all household plumbing elements contained within it. Black and grey water are released to a primary septic tank below the core and eventually released as effluent to the "living garden". Garden beds along the entry receive irrigation and  nutrients to provide site-yield vegetables.  This system is engineered to accept and treat residential wastewater from neighboring homes in addition to the primary residence to lessen off site dependency. 




MATERIALS should enable, not consume.  Earth acts as a primary insulator and reduces building material use. Rapidly, renewable soy-foam wall panels offer superior thermal resistance with minimal embodied energy.  Reconstituted concrete with striated polymer mesh reinforcement efficiently supports the open building plan, allowing a flexible arrangement of partitions and spaces to accommodate present and future users.

VENTILATION is fundamental to comfort in southern climates.  Prevailing summer wind from the southwest flows freely up the length of the site toward the upturned earth plane.  The building form and contour increase the speed of wind while the roof overhang captures the breeze and directs it through operable louvers to the interior.  The core serves as a stack ventilation tower, allowing a controllable flow of hot air up and out of the house by the positive pressure being created within the house.  Shaded outdoor space provides comfort choices for users and interaction with neighbors.

COMMUNITY underlies all technological success.  No advances in residential building design and technology truly matter if single families remain isolated and independent of one another.  This design suggests that community interdependence is the necessary foundation for future growth.  One home shelters one family, but creates a resource that benefits many.  Excess energy is distributed to offset conventional power production while communal waste is retained on site, collected and treated to nurture common garden space.  In time, this seed of shared resources spreads through common design to create a fundamental link between individual and whole.

Design office, New York City

Hoberman Associates, Inc. is the originator of transformation technology, and we lead this new field of making objects that change their size and shape. We create innovative products, structures, and environments. We have comprehensive design capabilities, integrating transformation technology into diverse applications such as medical, architectural, consumer products, and more.


Our inventive approach provides our clients with original and practical solutions to their needs. The results are demonstrable: over the years our product designs have sold many millions of units and our installations have been seen by many millions of viewers.

Hoberman Associates' work is centered on the fundamental idea that a designed object can transform the way a natural organism does. While the smooth transformation of size and shape is ubiquitous in the natural world, it is rare among man-made objects. The creation of transforming objects requires a new design theory, a conceptual framework that draws on mathematics, mechanics and structural engineering to integrate change as a basis for design.

Through years of exploration and experimentation we have identified critical parameters for the successful creation of transforming objects. The process of transformation should be:

• Complete & fully three-dimensional
• Smooth & continuous
• Reversible & repeatable

These attributes result in functional benefits for products, such as ease of use, fluid responsiveness and adaptability. They lead to an integrated design approach where structure and mechanism are combined, which offers the ability to build transforming structures at both large and small scale.



Over the years we have developed a number of systems for rapidly deployable shelters. Our designs for tents and temporary structures quickly and smoothly unfold from a compact state into large structural coverings.

» Click here to check out the Hoberman site

The mission of the Eden Project: "To promote the understanding and responsible management of the vital relationship between plants, people and resources leading to a sustainable future for all."


"The greatest moment in the Eden Project's history since the opening of the world's biggest plant Biomes has dawned with the unveiling of the monumental, £15 million education centre known as The Core."

The Core — The Eden Project's new education centre

The [Core's] design is based on the fundamental rule of how plants grow, incorporating a central trunk and canopy roof that shades the ground and harvests the sun. It has been designed and built by many of the same team who delivered the Humid Tropics and Warm Temperate Biomes, and will now take its place alongside them as a global icon.
Eden's chief executive Tim Smit said: "I hate exaggeration so I'll tell you the simple truth. This is the finest modern building in the world, and anyone who says they can show me a better looking one is either a liar or clairvoyant. I could give you a lot of guff about inspirational education and the success of the Eden project, the genius of the architects and the artists involved, but it boils down to one thing. This building is a cathedral and it moves you and fills you with awe."



"The new building will be home to exhibitions, events for all, and Eden's pioneering schools programmes."

The Core has taken two years to construct at a cost of £15 million. Major sponsors are the Millennium Commission (£10.5 million), South West Regional Development Agency (£2.9 million) and Objective One (£1 million), with the balance coming from a number of smaller contributors.

» Click here to find out more

by Peter Jon Pearce, Architect and author of Structure in Nature is a Strategy for Design My book, Structure in Nature is a Strategy for Design, was published by The MIT Press in 1978. This book was based upon work that I undertook in 1965, supported by a fellowship from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies. The title of my original proposal to the Foundation was, Structurally Autonomous Geometrically Adaptable Cellular Systems.

It was an effort to forge a theoretical basis for the design of high-performance building system using Nature as a model. My interest at that time, as it still is today, was the design of adaptive energy efficient buildings.

In those early years the most dominant influences on my work, from the field of design, were Charles Eames, Konrad Wachsmann, and Buckminster Fuller. With respect to Fuller's influence I was particularly interested in his building experiments and their relationship to his "Energetic Synergetic Geometry." As I became more familiar with this work in the early 1960's, I could not help but wonder what the next step might be beyond the Geodesic Dome and other of Fuller's building design efforts. Of course, this was relative to my search for a more expansive and rational view of architectural and building possibilities. This search was directed towards a concept of high-performance design that I had been harboring for years.

I undertook to develop an understanding of spatial geometry and its structural implications beyond what Fuller had presented in his "Energetic Synergetic Geometry". As I became more informed in the area of spatial geometry, Fuller's approach seemed to be more of a philosophical treatment than an exhaustive examination of spatial geometries. That is not to diminish the significance of Fuller's work in this area, I just thought of it as a starting point - an important precedent - but not an end game.

In the process of this pursuit I was able to develop the theoretical underpinnings for my later work in structural design, manufacturing, and construction. This work, along with other building systems developments resulted in over 80 architectural projects completed over a 15-year period from 1980 to 1995. Perhaps the most well known of these projects is the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona.

The research that I had undertaken with the Graham fellowship also gave rise to some original geometric and morphological developments. These developments, which are reported in my book, include the invention of the saddle polyhedra based upon minimal surfaces (later investigated by others) and some discoveries concerning optimized cell shapes in naturally occurring structures found in the morphology of plant and animal cells. On this latter subject, scientists have independently discovered similar phenomena in the late 1990's that I had reported in my book from work I had done nearly 30 years earlier.

An interesting aspect of the subject of morphology, which I would define as the systematic study of form, is that it is a subject that is not linked to particular time frames. The geometric content of morphology is so fundamental that it is not subject to "new" scientific discoveries such that the obsolescence of principles is an issue. As an example, the topic of cell shapes in plants and animals, which is still an active area of investigation, references work back to the 19th century. The work of Lord Kelvin (AKA Sir William Thompson) is still a prime reference on the subject of optimum cell shapes. Of course, the study of polyhedra goes back to Plato, and even earlier.

The unexpected result of the publication of my book is that I have received much more acknowledgement and citations from the scientific community than from the design/architecture community. Indeed, other than a few book reviews in design magazines there has been virtually no discernable interest from the design/architecture community. This is particularly perplexing, even troubling, to the extent the fundamental content of the book was driven by design intentions, not scientific discoveries and insights.

This suggests that from the point of view of book sales, or perhaps even the validation of my work in morphology, that it might have been better if the book had been directed towards a broad scientific audience (and marketed by The MIT Press accordingly). After all, the book is essentially about morphology as a cross-disciplinary endeavor. Back in the 1960's, I did participate in a few scientific conferences concerned with morphology and crystallography. Although I might have pursued the purely scientific aspects of this work, I saw this as an important opportunity for the advancement of building construction directed towards high-performance results.

I worked for many years, working with architects, building many architectural enclosures with advanced technology through the aegis of my company, Pearce Structures, Inc. Although there were "moments of glory" along the way, and certainly an amazingly useful "learning curve", in the end I was not able to get beyond the fundamental conservatism that dominates protocol, methodologies, and the limited design visions that constrain the design of buildings in our culture. There was a disheartening lack of interest in high-performance design - with what is now loosely referred to as sustainability. And this is still true, with some notable exceptions (mostly European). Certainly many of the most iconic architects of our day continue to exhibit little interest in design for sustainability.

My design strategy has been driven by a restless quest to discover and understand first principles. In any given problem-solving effort, what are the underlying and immutable principles, independent of cultural bias, that truly govern optimum design possibilities. My book, Structure in Nature is a Strategy for Design, is about this effort to discover and understand first principles. It is a strategy that continues to guide my design efforts today.

» after being out of print for a long time, several new copies of Structure in Nature is a Strategy for Design are now available from the BFI store