Solarpunk @thefutureissolarpunk-blog - Tumblr Blog

Posts

godesssiri

I thought I’d post more Luc Schuiten because I am in love with his work.

I mean, look at this:

Isn’t it beautiful? Here’s what it looks like inside:

Here’s a 3D model:

Imagine if all that glass was solar-collector glass. It’s stunning and it would generate huge amount of energy.

I’m just going to sit and sigh over this for a while.

relssah

70sscifiart

Jim Burns

thecreativesense

Noah Oasis - Vertical habitats from disused oil rigs

Oil rigs can be ugly things, and as they rust and decay they only become a worse blight on the ocean landscape. In an effort to change this, a group of Chinese designers - Ma Yidong, Zhu Zhonghui, Qin Zhengyu & Jiang Zhe - have produced a concept they call Noah Oasis; a vertical garden habitat that transforms rigs into something amazing.

While the habitats would be shelters from the devastating effects of oil spills and other blights, they would also function as centres for research. At the top of the tower there would be large scale structures to allow for forest growth and places for birds to nest, with residential spaces and research wings in the middle sections, while beneath the water line large absorption lines (for drawing in spilt oil) would allow for the formation of reefs.

They see their habitat functioning in three stages:

“1. Short term strategy: absorption of spilled oil when an oil spill incident happens, the floaters at the end of each pipe will immediately absorb the spilled oil covering the surface of the sea as an instant response. 2. Medium term strategy: habitat for marine life and migrating birds the collected oil will be transported through the root-like pipes underwater to the central processor attached to the original rig, where the crude oil will be converted into catalyst for coral reef and produce plastic as building material. The catalyst will be transported back to the pipe to booster the growth of coral reef on its surface and the plastic will become the building material of the plastic-twig structure with the help of 3D printing and the injector. In this way, the project will become a habitat for vertical bio-habitat and help revive the biodiversity. 3. Long term strategy: shelter from future disasters ultimately, when the sea level rises to a disastrous degree, the twig like structure would continue to remain above the sea level. Then the oil rig will become the noah oasis”

Whether the project is able to get off the ground or not remains to be seen, but this would certainly be a fantastic use of an otherwise decaying chunk of human waste. Can’t wait to see how it develops!

See more at: designboom

The Ark II TV series: Solar Punk?

I found out about the Ark II TV series today and some of it’s themes hark towards solar punk for me.

25th Century Earth is a barren medieval wasteland but three young people and a hyper intelligent chimpanzee (hey, it was the 70s) who have been trained by the remaining earth scientists travel around the world and reintroduce lost ideas.

I’m definitely going to check this out!

roguetelemetry

(via @380458239785b on DrawCrowd)

thefutureissolarpunk-blog

Mining the old human waste lands was dangerous but valuable. The recyclers were regularly attacked for reclaimed gold and plastic.

fragments-of-a-hologram-dystopia

thefutureissolarpunk-blog

Always wins

solarpunkarchivist-deactivated2

fragments-of-a-hologram-dystopia

thefutureissolarpunk-blog

Mother earth always wins

fragments-of-a-hologram-dystopia

thefutureissolarpunk-blog

Gazing across the bay, she wondered how they built these shrines? And what they were used for?

fragments-of-a-hologram-dystopia

farfalvinder-deactivated2017050

i also see a lot of solarpunks like “sew all your own clothes! factories are bad!”

i don’t get why a factory that runs entirely off solar power would be bad. factories are what allow us to make plenty of food for our population, clothe our entire population, etc. the means of production isn’t necessarily evil. thats not to say it doesnt need to be rethought but seriously, your theoretical solarpunk societies tend to have absolutely no means of production.

just get rid of emissions and make packaging more eco-friendly (check out these cool biodegradable packaging concepts, for example)

zero-emission solar factories for solarpunk is good. maybe reducing the amount of factories for things like clothes is good (to maybe help revitalize the garment industry and create more jobs?) but… still…

watsons-solarpunk

Clothes mostly aren’t made mechanically in factories – they’re made in sweatshops, because handling fabric and thread is still beyond our ability to mechanize affordably.

The question of where clothes should come from is a super complicated one, and definitely deserves a lot of sophisticated attention. But at our current technological level, mechanized factories aren’t an option.

Another issue with factories is that mass production of uniform parts is inherently wasteful: T-shirts that come in 5 sizes produced in enough surplus to always be available means we always make more T-shirts than are actually needed, that virtually all T-shirts use a bit more fabric than is needed, and because all T-shirts are slightly mis-fit, they wear poorly and need to be replaced more often than tailored clothes would be.

Making your own clothes isn’t necessarily always an option either: it’s a huge investment of time, and while it doesn’t take a huge amount of skill to make better clothes than you can get off the rack, it’s still a non-trivial investment in experimentation and learning.

I recommend Charles Stross’s blog post “The revolution will not be hand-stitched,” for an in-depth exploration of possibilities for a future of mechanized clothing construction. But on shorter timescales the answer to “How do we stop relying so heavily on sweatshops” has to be, at least in part, “Make some of our own clothes or make clothes within the community.”

Theoretical solarpunk societies usually trend, not toward “no means of production” as you put it, but toward distributed means of production: gift economies, widespread 3D printing, skillshares, etc. A lot of stuff either already doesn’t, or won’t for much longer, need to be industrialized: for example, anything made of plastic that can afford to be wrong on the scale of micrometers. (Think Command Hooks.) Or anything that can be produced in small batches given known chemical processes. (Think the sticky parts of Command Hooks.) As long as the amount of time it takes to make something is equal to or less than the length of time it would take to order it on Amazon Prime, we mostly don’t need to already have thousands of them on shelves in stores all across the country.

Centralized factories also mean environmental costs for transporting goods. It’s possible for this to be the most environmentally economical approach, but under the current circumstances, it never is: trucks and planes emit a lot of carbon, and trucking does a lot of long-term damage to our infrastructure. Whenever something’s manufactured in small batches in walking distance of the place it’s needed, we save on that.

Factories are a solution to the problem of providing sufficient resources given limitations that are less and less relevant: custom machines are less and less necessary, specialized knowledge is less and less specialized, and we become aware of new reasons just about every day that generalized solutions to individual life problems are often harmful as much as they’re helpful.

We likely couldn’t have gotten to where we are globally without factories. That means both things like the internet (which I’m strongly in favor of) and things like global climate change (which is, like, the opposite of the internet in terms of how I feel about things). Whether we should or shouldn’t have done all the stuff that’s already happened is a moot point, but we can choose to find better ways to solve the problems that we’ve solved in crude, generalized ways in the past.

archatlas

Vertical Gardens Patrick Blanc

Nobody is more familiar than Blanc with the secrets of the plants, from all over the world, that live on almost nothing, in the most unlikely situations, carpeting the forest understory in semi-darkness or clinging to rocky cliff faces. From Paris to Bangkok, from New York to Singapore, Blanc invites nature to flourish on the walls of museums, shopping malls, private homes, big hotels, and skyscrapers. His works have brought a breath of fresh air to urban environments, changing our view of the cityscape, orchestrating and bringing art into the heart of the city, transforming concrete walls into refuges for biodiversity.

L'Oasis d'Aboukir, Hymne à la Biodiversité

OCP Johnson-Pilton-Walker & Peddle-Thorp-Walker

Perez Art Museum Miami Herzog & de Meuron

Maître d’ Ouvrage : Compagnie de Phalsbourg

Düssmann KulturKaufhaus Alain Guigonis

Sofitel Palm Jumeirah MIRK

CapitaLand Rainforest Rhapsody

The Rainforest Chandelier Leeser and J+H Boiffils

Alaia Boutique Pierre Granger

the athenaeum Living Wall

Images via text via