Artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Sebastian Behmann’s firm Studio Other Spaces has enclosed a courtyard at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York with an intricate glass canopy. Drawing inspiration from the area’s sometimes intense weather patterns, the architectural art installation is defined by a stunning vortex-like funnel. Read more here
Worldwide, glass manufacturing produces at least 86 million tons of carbon dioxide every year. A new type of glass promises to cut this carbon footprint in half. – read more here
The Albert Einstein Education and Research Center (AEERC) is part of a larger hospital complex and measures 12,000 sq m. The outer skylight is made up of 1,854 ultra-transparent glass panels, coated with triple-silver solar protection to reduce heat gain, and printed with a pattern of translucent ceramic dots to shade sunlight,” explained the firm. “The glass has minimal reflectivity to avoid disturbing exterior reflections. The inner layer of the roof is a transparent membrane, micro-perforated to absorb noise and printed with a custom pattern of translucent dots that provide shading, but also glow in the sunlight. The increasing density of dots towards the East and West ends shades low-angle sun, while the center dome is entirely clear, allowing full sunlight to reach the denser planting in the center garden. As seen from below, the overlapping layers of dots, is like seeing dappled sunlight through the overlapping leaves of a tree, evoking the feeling of being under a tree canopy. Read more here
Ballards Smokehouse by Brightblue Studio – the glazed frontage is made from 40 Ford Transit van windscreens. Not your typical glazing job 🙂
Researchers at Oxford have developed a new smart window coating that can be tuned on the fly to emit or reflect heat from the Sun in different amounts, reducing the energy costs of heating and cooling by up to a third. The team says this new design should be relatively simple and inexpensive to implement, but of course it’s not quite ready for prime time just yet. Read more here
Download a narrated copy of Rob’s recent presentation re H1 changes (file is 28MB)
Read more here about the latest about Covid 19 Resurgence Support payments
One-off residence pathway provides certainty to migrants and business. Read more here
Usually, optical coatings either reflect or transmit a particular wavelength, not both. But now, the Rochester researchers have developed a new class of thin optical coatings that can do just that. Another solution in a lab – looking for a practical application. Read more here
With a staggered vent and mechanical ventilation this window at Singapore University achieves a fourfold reduction in terms of a human’s perception of loudness and achieves four times better ventilation than an open conventional window. Read more here