Sea Glass wins AIA Award

Sea Glass of Sanibel, created by Benchmark General Contractors, received the 2010 Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects Florida (AIA) in the Unbuilt Design category. In the picture above, Martin Gold, Director at the University of Florida’s School of Architecture (center), accepted the award on the team’s behalf from AIA President Richard J. Logan (left) and AIA Immediate Past President Gerald Steven Jernigan

Mark Anderson, owner of Benchmark General Contractors, and business partner Ron Rosen announced that the design for Sea Glass of Sanibel, a 12-acre sustainable residential community, received the 2010 Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects Florida (AIA) in the Unbuilt Design category. The award was presented recently at the AIA convention in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.



The jury of architects, chaired by Kirsten Murray, AIA of Olsen Kundig Architects and the 2009 AIA Firm of the Year, said AIA is excited to see this type of project in Florida.



“The use of new urbanist ideas is ideally suited to this climate and informal lifestyle,” Murray said.



In collaboration with the University of Florida’s School of Architecture and the Florida Community Design Center (FLCDC), the neighborhood includes approximately 12 single-family homes along Periwinkle Way on Sanibel. The property was previously the site of the Old Schoolhouse Theater and the home of the Sanibel Landscape Company, the first landscape nursery on the island.



Other highlights of the eco-friendly community include allocated nature areas, cluster development, a civic green promenade, butterfly meadow, water harvesting, and a community building dedicated to environmental education and shared resources.



“Our unique, groundbreaking lifestyle concept will reduce our footprint on the environment, an environmentally sensitive design that could become a model for future coastal communities in our region,” said Anderson.



Martin Gold, director of the University of Florida’s School of Architecture and executive director of the FLCDC, leads the design team which has submitted the schematics that integrate coastal ecologies, social connectivity, permaculture and sustainability as core principles of the neighborhood planning and architectural design.



Building is expected to begin later this year.

Copenhagen Wheel

It is not easy to reinvent the wheel, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are giving it their best shot.

The Senseable City Laboratory at MIT has designed a wheel that captures the kinetic energy released when a rider brakes and saves it for when the rider needs a boost. While technically sound, the wheel’s true challenge may be in winning over cyclists. For centuries, bikes have been beloved for their simplicity, not their bells and whistles.

But, said Carlo Ratti, the laboratory’s director, “biking can become even more effective than what it was”. What the lab is working on, he said, is “Biking 2.0”.

The new wheel uses a kinetic energy recovery system, the same technology used by hybrid cars, like the Toyota Prius, to harvest otherwise wasted energy when a cyclist brakes or speeds down a hill. With that energy, it charges up a battery inside the wheel’s hub.

The sleek red hub, called the Copenhagen Wheel, was to be unveiled on Tuesday in Copenhagen. It can be retrofitted to any bike’s rear wheel, and it includes sensors that track air quality, a meter that logs miles and a GPS unit to track routes. All that data can be sent via Bluetooth to a rider’s smartphone and shared with others.

The laboratory is trying to eliminate the clunkiness of other electric bikes with heavy batteries and unwieldy wires by placing all the technology into the wheel, said Christine Outram, the project’s lead researcher. “It’s a technology that can get more people on bikes,” she said.

This is a period of change in the bicycle design world, said Jens Martin Skibsted, a Danish designer who owns the biking company Biomega and the design firm Kibisi. Skibsted believes that over the next few years several popular new designs will emerge to serve an increasingly urban population trying to wean itself off cars.

In such periods of change, he said, “the winner will seldom be the one that’s most functional, but rather the one that can become an inherent part of our culture”.

“This wheel looks nice,” he continued. “Whether it will be long lasting, I cannot say.”

Back at MIT, another research group is hedging its bets on a different wheel model, spurning regenerative braking as an excessive addition. “Regenerative braking hardware adds mass, complexity and cost, and the energy efficiency gains from it turn out to be surprisingly limited,” said William Mitchell, who runs a lab at MIT called SmartCities.

One of Mitchell’s doctoral students, Michael Lin, is also building an electric bike wheel, but it has to be plugged in to charge. Lin is considering adding regenerative components as an external accessory, but not as a component embedded into the wheel’s hub.

Reprinted from CopenhagenWheels.com