If things go as planned, the Aircruise might just be the future’s slowest way to get around. For now, however, the 265-meter-tall airship isn’t a finished product; an announcement the other week billed it as a “visionary transportation concept.” Seymourpowell, the design firm working on the project, and Samsung C&T, the construction company helping to develop the idea, present the Aircruise as a luxury cruise, or a hotel in the sky. The decadent dirigible would stay in the air using hydrogen and solar power. Since the physics of keeping such a structure afloat require a large volume with little weight, the concept necessitates vast spaces and few passengers: a recipe for luxury designed to “appeal to people looking for a more reflective journey.” Our bet is the design won’t get built anytime soon, but who knows—there’s always a chance it could get off the ground.
The Tata Nano, on display now through April at the Cooper-Hewitt, looks a lot like a Smart Car, though it’s sold for about a fifth of the price. The Nano is billed as “the People’s Car,” mostly because it retails for around $2,500, and while it’s currently designed, built, and marketed exclusively in India, Tata expects to roll out versions for the European market as early as 2011. It’s likely that the versions of the Nano sold in Europe, and eventually in America, will look more like the car displayed at the Cooper-Hewitt than the ones that have become popular in India; the yellow Nano in the museum’s lobby is the LX version, an upgraded model that has retained many of the features—air conditioning, leather seats, a music system—that were jettisoned to keep down costs in the original. The luxury version is still relatively bare-bones, but a fuel economy of around 54 mpg might make the Nano attractive even to skeptical American consumers.
In my recent Q&A with Ryan Chin, of MIT’s Smart Cities research group, we talked about the similarities between his team’s proposed Mobility on Demand systems and the Vélib’ bike-share program in Paris. Basically, Mobility on Demand will be a souped-up version of Vélib’—using electric vehicles instead of bicycles and a sophisticated fleet-management system that incorporates GPS tracking. But developing the vehicles and pioneering the software is only part of MIT’s challenge, as an article in last Saturday’s New York Times made abundantly clear. Read more…
A rendering of the CityCar on the streets of Manhattan. Image: William Lark, Jr., Smart Cities
When I first saw computer renderings of the MIT Smart Cities research group’s CityCar a few years ago, I thought I was looking at a pie-in-the-sky vision of a distant (and idealized) future. This compact, stackable electric vehicle is supposed to dock at charging stations throughout a city, allowing lucky urban dwellers to simply swipe a card for an instant, on-the-go rental. But it turns out that a system like this—dubbed Mobility on Demand by the MIT researchers—could become a reality in the tantalizingly near future. The Smart Cities team has already developed three concept vehicles, including the CityCar—it’s currently working with General Motors on a drivable model—and it has an initial pilot program, using an electric bicycle, tentatively lined up for Boston next summer. Ryan Chin, a PhD candidate in the Smart Cities group, predicts that a full-fledged system will happen within the next five years. (A $100,000 prize awarded by the Buckminster Fuller Institute last June should help here.) Recently, I spoke to Chin about the principles of Mobility on Demand, his team’s fleet of lightweight electric vehicles, and the differences between car development in Cambridge and Detroit.
So what exactly is Mobility on Demand?
Mobility on Demand, at the highest level, is a very sustainable personal-mobility system for urban environments. How it works is you have a fleet of lightweight electric vehicles that are placed at charging stations throughout the city. And at each of these charging stations you can pick up or drop off one of these vehicles. You have either an RFID reader or an access card or a credit card that releases the vehicle to the user. And then you are allowed to drive any one of these vehicles to any other station in the city. So these stations would be distributed throughout the city at convenient locations, within reasonable walking distance. And the whole idea is that you can pick up vehicles and drop them off anywhere; you don’t need to return it back to the location you took it from. Read more…
The parking garage is the Rodney Dangerfield of building types, the troubled snag in the urban fabric, the Gordian Knot of design. But for all the ugly-red-haired-stepchild car parks of the world and the many generic, bunker-like auto warehouses, there are also stunning examples of man-and-machine triumph that incorporate both function and aesthetics. And they are about to be celebrated in an exhibition that opens tomorrow at the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C.
Based on the book The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Formby Shannon Sanders McDonald (Urban Land Institute, 2008),the show highlights the driving designs of such standout architects as Santiago Calatrava, Louis Kahn, and Eric Owen Moss, among others, and plumbs the building type’s history. Originally adapted from the design of stables, early garages offered a similar kind of “curry” service: You could get your car gassed, tuned up, and washed while it was parked. The future of parking brings some of the same, with plans for “smart” garages where you can get your electric car charged inside a building that sports environmentally friendly features like solar panels, green roofs, and (in something of an ecological irony) LEED certification.
If McDonald’s exhaustive tome isn’t enough, you can always check out Simon Henley’s The Architecture of Parking(Thames & Hudson, 2007), which, in addition to using case studies to discuss design theory, delves into how the auto garage has influenced the designs of such buildings as the Mercedes-Benz Museum by UNStudio, as well as designs by Rem Koolhaas, David Chipperfield, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Metropolis’s senior editor, Kristi Cameron, is contributing semi-regular posts on issues regarding livable streets in a feature we’re calling The Street View. Click here to read her previous posts.
I’ve suddenly developed a mild case of urban envy of…Washington, D.C. That’s right, as of today the not-exactly-progressive town has something New York is sorely lacking: a bike station. Funded by the District and the U.S. Department of Transportation and built by Mobis/Bikestation, the 1,600-square-foot facility offers secure parking for 130 bikes, a changing room, lockers, rentals, and repairs. An annual membership costs $100, or you can buy a daily pass for a buck. Cities like Seattle, Santa Barbara, and Long Beach, California, (where Mobis/Bikestation is based) have already had success with these facilities, but the D.C. station is the first of its kind on the East Coast. Which raises an important question: How useful is a bike station sans showers during warm, humid eastern summers? Perhaps I should reserve my jealousy for Chicago, whose McDonald’s Cycle Center offers showers and towel service. I could get used to the name.
About 350 train enthusiasts weathered this past Sunday’s thunderstorms to board the New York Transit Museum’s vintage Independent Subway System (IND) fleet Nostalgia Ride. The tour began at the Transit Museum’s headquarters in downtown Brooklyn and made its way up the A line to the MTA’s 207th Street overhaul yard in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The Transit Museum conducts these exclusive vintage-fleet tours a few times during the summer (although the next one isn’t until June 2010, you can expect surprise runs in December) as a way for the community to experience what old New York was like—with overhead fans swinging, electric circuit smells galore, and clever advertisements. Check out more photos from Sunday’s tour after the jump. Read more…
Every Thursday we’re posting excerpts from notable 2009 Next Generation proposals that didn’t quite make the final selection featured in the May issue of the magazine. (Click here to check out previous selections.) This week’s proposal is a little different—called World Wide Rail: A Tale of the Necessary Future, it takes the form of a comic strip (!), in which the authors, Copenhagen’s Stig Hessellund and Jacob Bro Knudsen, envision a zero-carbon society linked by a worldwide rail system. Click the image above to begin a slide-show presentation of their proposal—and, as always, leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments form below.
(Note: Next week we’ll be taking a break from our regular Thursday Next Gen posts to prepare a final roundup of the remaining 2009 Notables. Stay tuned for that story in early August.)
David Sokol sits on one of the planters that run along Broadway between 35th and 34th Streets, a block recently closed to automobile traffic.
I’ll admit I was dubious when the gravelly painted areas popped up overnight around Broadway and 23rd Street last year. I was happy that the eight lanes of traffic that I frequently had to cross (but could never manage in one traffic light) were now down to five. But I had doubts about anyone wanting to sit in the middle of traffic. I was wrong. All summer long people gathered around the café tables, lounging just a planter away from speeding cars. So when I heard about the DOT closing sections of Broadway around Times Square and Herald Square, I was ready to celebrate. In fact, I asked writer David Sokol if we could meet in Herald Square so I could take it all in for myself. I had, prematurely, visions of Broadway as a grand pedestrian boulevard running the length of the city. But despite the weekend celebration with movies and beach chairs in Times Square, what we found at 35th Street today was just a road blocked off by traffic barrels. Instead we grabbed a spot in the preexisting pocket park, beneath a clock monument to James Gordon Bennett, where we could at least watch the activity, or what there was of it, on Broadway. Here’s the extent of the dialogue that the project inspired in its current incarnation:
David: “It’s anticlimactic, but there’s hope.”
Kristi: “Right now, it’s just about redirecting traffic. There’s no reason for people to be in the street. But first you have to claim the space, then you can convert it. People are at least using it to cross.” Read more…
Last Sunday, despite the nonstop rain, Metropolis’s associate art director, Dungjai Pungauthaikan, and its picture editor, Sarah Palmer, joined an estimated 30,000 other hearty souls on the 42-mile TD Bank 5 Boro Bike Tour. The ride began in Lower Manhattan and made its way into the Bronx, through Queens and Brooklyn, and, finally, over the Verazzano Bridge into Staten Island. The tour traversed bridges, roads, and highways not normally accessible to cyclists, and provided exciting views and a sense of community rarely felt in the crowded streets of New York City. Here, Dungjai and Sarah present a slide show of images from their water-logged trek.
The tour kicked off Bike Month NYC, which includes such events as National Bike to Work Day, commuting and repair workshops, and a variety of other tours in New York City and beyond.
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