XICUI Entertainment Center

Simone Giostra & Partners [my former Thesis instructor]. He gave a lecture to our class about his work and I remember this project...

Beijing, China

http://www.sgp-architects.com/

FROM MY COMMENT IN REGARDS TO THE LAST POST:
also, what about embedding the lighting within some of the hexagons [in addition to the rings of light within the skin]? - like each hexagon could be thought of like a pixel. we could project images and possibly advertisements along the skin of the silos. and these pixel hexagon lights could also reflect the storage capacity in their intensity. [see the next post for reference images]

of course, the scale of our silos is not as grand. but i still find the concept to be very strong and innovative.

More reclaimed bike racks

This is the rack that is at the vegan bakery just down the street from my house in Ohio.

I like the use of rims as well as frames although I don't know if this is the best design possible.

...Bike Silo (in the nick of time)

Hey,
I managed to make use of my boss' absence today and bang out a plan and section of the bike silo in CAD. Check it out---->


(click to check out the largeness)

This is a nine story tower of bikes and has a maximum capacity of 270 bicycles (30 per level)!!!! This one is nearly eighty feet tall from the top of the giant cog to the ground; but obviously it can be made lower in conformation with the surrounding structures..

Unfortunately I'm not going to have time to print this out for tonight so I'm e-mailing out a PDF copy of it so we can at least look at it on the computer... Its 1/4"=1'-0" scale on ARCHD paper (24x36)

RFID

I was writing back and forth with my brother and he has explained to me the infeasibility of GPS units in the bicycles. This is because of several good reasons:

1. cost prohibitive; the cost of outfitting a bike with GPS cound cost more than the bike itself.
2. not maintenance free; how would you service it if it was embedded in the frame for theft reasons?
3. power; establishing a way to provide enough power to send/receive data requires more than a hub generator... lights only take a few watts but GPS is a different story.

So we started chatting about RFID as he began to convince me of the negatives associated with GPS technology and after ward I did some research about different frequencies of Radio Frequency IDentification.


This company I found, SMARTRAC, makes different RFID products for handling information as simple as a serial number to as complicated as bank account information. Lamenting the impracticality of GPS (which would be a really cool, though cliche) I had an idea:

At races of all kind RFID is used determine the exact start and stop times of individual racerswith sensors over or next to the roadway.... Why don't we do the same thing here. like cellphone relay boxes, a powered RFID reader could ascertain in real-time the number and information of bikes passing that point. This isn't nearly as cost prohibitive of a system as GPS in thousands and thousands of bikes that will all conceivably somewhat different (especially if we dredge bikes out of the harbor). They could be attached like parasites on the sides of lamposts, that would feed a multitude of information (speed, direction, time, density relative rideable lane width, etc...) to a central database, as well as function with our zip-car styled share network online.

It could be like the bike counter that was mentioned here a while back


Also, I hate to plagarize, but the latest post about a bike parking area in DC uses a really clever rack system whose function is very clever... this pic pretty much says it all:


Anywho, thats what I've been doing recently, sorry about not making it last night... see y'all sunday.

(Research)

Feel free to post plenty of things found, such as many of the links we've already emailed. also images and whatnot. a preliminary organization system is in this post's labels.