Cornell wins contest to design campus on Roosevelt Island

 The task of building an applied sciences and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island is certainly a tough one. Stanford shelved the project just within three days. But it seems that Cornell has come out as a winner in this remarkable feat as Stanford thought the project was not feasible. Winning is certainly good news for Cornell, and in addition the institute has also bagged a $350 million prize for this accomplishment. For this project, Cornell forms an alliance with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. More than $2 billion will be spent to build the 2 million square feet campus on Roosevelt Island.

Cornell plan is for an SOM-designed campus with four acres of solar panels

The island located in east of Manhattan is about 2 miles long and will house around 2500 students for its masters and doctoral programs. Although students will start to enroll from the next year, the

Dongxin St. Conceptual Master Plan

The master design is for the re-development of the Central Business District of Kunshun by Dongxin St. The site will mainly be responsible for protecting and promoting the key canal systems and also enhancing it. It will also make use of renewable energy sources. This site will mainly be dedicated to activities relating to leisure. In order to make this site a redeveloped and sustainable one and also a river front site, Boyd designed a plan where, one-third of the river front will be used for recreational purposes and the remaining for economic and financial purposes like office and commercial buildings. The entire site will sustain on renewable energy resources.

Masterplan for penglai

This is one of the hottest destination for domestic tourism in China. So, in order to cash on the new interest, Penglai is being planned to allocate the reserve lands and also develop it for holiday homes. The firm that has designed this idea is the Arcas Europe. They have planned to have a golf course, a tennis complex and also adopt the ECC approach. By designing the city through ECC model, the firm is making an attempt to balance the economic and social sustainability of Penglai. The green architectural design for the city is to keep the Marina town as the center and have many small neighborhoods all around it. This will have around 60,000 housing units that includes cottages, flats, courtyard homes and terrace homes.

Church Made From Cardboard

 Come next year, and construction will set out in full swing for Christchurch Cathedral in New Zealand. So, you would be wondering what’s so special about this. Well, the church will be entirely made from recyclable cardboard materials. Earlier this year, the church was substantially damaged by an earthquake. So, it had been an absolute necessity to repair the church since it had become a potent threat to the civil life of the city.

Shigeru Ban Architects, an architecture firm located in Tokyo, is the one behind this entire concept. The firm choose cardboard because of some of its awesome features including its easy availability and ability to recycle. As against concrete buildings, cardboard based buildings are less vulnerable to

Home Energy System

 Since the blueprints for devising consumer solutions have been transmogrifying to render efficiency in extreme, manufacturers are certainly hammering away at adopting the green approach. Although we have witnessed almost plenty of devices that throw light on the environment, the new concept vows to stand out from the rest. Surfaced recently, the novel Torus Design emerges to be the first home that focuses on utilizing the cold fusion generation.

Inspired by the famous movie Thrive, the unique house concept showcases the different ways of helping the surroundings establish prosperity across the globe. Since the environment has been facing problems due to the insufficiency of energy, the wisely outlined Torus Design puts forth an affordable and sustained energy medium.

Masterplan for Nanjing, China by CK Designworks

Although it is an ambitious proposal, CK Designworks have designed a grand plan of a 20 sqkm city in the Pukou district in Nanjing. It plans to house a population of two million and also include industrial and commercial areas. The design will include the Chinese cultural elements and plans to showcase a Chinese way of life. The design has ten very important structures which includes a 5-star hotel that will achieve the highest certifications of LEED.

LEED Platinum building

 Israel is all set to become an international example when it comes to housing environmentally friendly buildings. The country will house a LEED Platinum certified building in Tel Aviv University (TAU). Around three years back, Geotectura, an architectural firm focusing on sustainable architecture, won a competition of international repute together with Chen Architects and Axelrod-Grobman Architects for designing a green building for Porter School of Environment Studies (PSES) located in TAU. And now, the trio have started laying ground work for the building.

LEED Platinum Eco Building by Geotectura

The building would take the advantage of Israel’s location. With sunlight pouring in bounty, the building will garner solar energy by using a 50KW photovoltaic solar arrangement. And you need not worry about the temperature inside, for a cooling technology, better known as the chilled beam technology