Can you imagine doing more than 100kph in a yacht?

How about a lot more?

This extraordinary vessel is called a Vestas Sailrocket. And there really isn't any advertising licence being used in that name, because this this really does move like it has a rocket on board. But it's 100% wind power.

Watch it achieve the outright sailing world speed record:



65.37 knots. 1.852 kilometres per hour per knot makes that an amazing 121 kilometres per hour!

But it doesn't always go that well:


Find out more about their record chase.

Why have architects forgotten about acoustics? A good point, raised via TED.

Are you sick of coming away from a night's dining with a croaky voice from trying to hear yourself over the "ambient noise"? Or getting virtually nothing from a talk - because you really couldn't hear what the speaker was saying?

We seem to have forgotten about how to include acoustic considerations in building design in recent years. Aided and abetted by a tendency for interior design towards hard reflective surfaces.

While it is understandable that many public places need surfaces that are easy to clean and keep that way (homes too!), this makes it all the more important that designers consider mitigating measures such as wall furnishings, and ceiling treatments that absorb rather than reflect sound.

Is Elon Musk our real-life Tony Stark? Now he wants to build bullet trains!

Seriously? Is Elon Musk just the coolest billionaire in the world?

This guy made a motza out of Paypal. Then he turned he attention to Tesla - making electric-powered sports cars, followed by SpaceX, flying nicely now after a successful launch to the International Space Station. All companied worth in excess of a billion dollars.

And now this guy is toying with the idea of a superfast rail link between LA and San Francisco, running some three to four times faster than Japan's famous Bullet trains, via DVice:

Serving sliced Sauber - stunning sight!

Take one Sauber F1 race car. Run a band say down the middle. And this is what you get.

It's a very revealing ultimate cutaway diagram!

Sauber say it took two years to produce this - likely two years to assemble discarded parts they were prepared to sacrifice. Anyway, it's a great project. Bit disappointing that they went and put an entire driver in there though!

27 dead in US tornadoes. Have they heard of housing codes over there?

It's tragic to read of so many people killed in yet another devastating tornado season in the US. But when you see pictures like this of homes torn into kindling it really makes you wonder about housing regulations in the US...

Darwin was similarly wiped out by a cyclone. But within a couple of years, serious cyclone rating regulations were introduced for all new housing right across the northern half of Australia.

And it has paid off.

So what's going on in the good ol' USA?

CSIRO builds a strawbale house and torches it...

The CSIRO put strawbale building to the bushfire test today. It took a licking but it's still ticking!

First they had Joost build their structure - strawbale walls with steel frame:

Awesome 'digital rug' - 30 second video *totally* worth viewing!

You'll be knocked out by this one:



The possibilities are endless...

And we used to think the stairs that played piano notes was clever?

via @ChasLicc

Watch in awe as a 30-storey apartment block goes up in just two weeks.

We've had pre-fab homes for years, so why not do the same thing for high rise?

This is an amazing timelapse video of just such an exercise in China. An earthquake-proof (to 9.0 on the Richter scale) and energy efficient building in 360 hours, not including the foundations. Note the way that all the bits and pieces for each floor are loaded onto the individual floor panels for that level and lifted in one hit? That alone must save hours of crane work.



Incredible.

Via Treehugger

Greens bill is good news for renters

Crispin Hull is on the money with why Shane Rattenbury's draft bill on better housing for renters is a good thing:

Tenants suffer as market fails on energy

Posted: 08 Apr 2011 11:11 PM PDT

HERE we go again: another slug on landlords in addition to ever-increasing land taxes, stamp duty, development fees, planning rules, environmental-efficiency ratings, tree-protection orders, verge-protection plans and the list goes on, I can hear the property owners wail.

The wail this week it was the Greens plan to force landlords to pay for housing upgrades to meet energy-efficiency ratings and to provide deadlocks on all doors to improve tenants’ security.

Small wonder, they say, rents are so high. If government were serious about housing affordability for buyers and renters it would remove all these taxes, charges and red tape and let the market sort it out.

The landlords, real estate agents and property investors have a point, up to a point. But so do the planners and environmentalists.

Over the past 20 years or so, the property sector has squealed at every change to the building code that has mandated more energy-efficient dwellings. Every time, they have pleaded that the new rules would make dwellings less affordable. Every time, they have pleaded that the market should dictate change.

World's largest timber structure - just because?

Those Spaniards love their big stunning architecture...

According to Inhabitat, they were set to build a big carpark on this site in Seville, but found archeological remnants, so they built a museum instead. With a whopping great timber lattice 'parasol' over the top. Just because...

Not sure that it sits so well in the ancient city layout:

But then, is there anywhere other than an empty field that such a stunning structure would sit well?

HIA exaggerating again on camapign against star ratings

More outrageous claims from the HIA about mandatory energy ratings in the Canberra Times.

Are we really expected to believe that the move from a 5 to 6 star minimum would add another $100,000 to an average $400,000 home build?

The HIA has opposed every single energy efficiency initiative around Australia for years. In 1999, they damned Queensland's first 3.5 star minimum as imposed by Maroochy Shire Council when I was a Councillor there, outraged that it would make it virtually mandatory that ceilings were insulated. In Queensland!

A zero emissions house?

CSIRO, together with developers, have opened an 8-star home they claim will produce zero net emissions in Doreen, near Melbourne. Perhaps the rating could have been even higher had the designers provided some shading over those windows??

Featuring largely off-the-shelf materials, the home also has a state-of-the-art computerised management system.

No doubt having a six kilowatt photovoltaic power generation system on the roof would help off-set the day-to-day operational emissions - that's four times the 'standard' rooftop 1.5KW system size.

CSIRO will monitor a family living in the home for a year.

They say that 13% of Australian emissions come from household energy consumption, so building better homes is a most worthy pursuit.

A bike helmet with a rear view mirror

Now that's something that has to take off.

Any rider would know that a bike's mirrors are hard to use at the best of times, needing you to tuck your elbows in for a good view. Byut when braking, the rider's body comes forward, blocking almost all bike mirrors. It was in this way that my view of the car about to hit me (back in 1999) was completely blocked. Had I been able to see it coming and not braking, I could have powered away to safety.



This helmet uses a simple passive mirror system up over the head to a "mirror" just above the faceshield.

If I return to riding, it will be with this sort of helmet for sure.

180 sq metre blocks

It's not just in Gungahlin then...

This report from the old stomping ground shows the development industry across the board, aided and abetted by local authorities, is waging war against the backyard:

IT was British band Manfred Mann who recorded the 1960s classic hit Semi-detached Suburban Mr Jones.

It described the ordinariness and friendliness of a sociological landscape redolent of the “Mother Country” in the early to mid-twentieth century.
But now “terraced housing” is coming to a suburb near you – Bellvista, to be precise – with lots as small as 180 square metres, though no doubt the styling will be a little more 21st century, and promising a different tune.
And just how many storeys they might consist of is as yet unknown.
Development behemoth Stockland intends to introduce the “product” as part of a massive extension to the Bellvista master-planned community, should it get the tick from Sunshine Coast council.
Overall, the application involves around 750 dwelling units consisting of about 550 detached houses and 200 semis.
The 180 sq m lots would have a width of between seven and 10 metres.

My hypothesis is that they fall into the trap of opponents to "urban sprawl" because they don't want to get serious about providing rapid and efficient public transport. For so many of our policymakers, grasping vision for public transport seems beyond them...

Treehugger global award to Australian magazine Sanctuary

This sustainable design fan's one must-buy magazine - the brilliant Sanctuary - has won an award from the global sustainability blog Treehugger. Sanctuary has been judged Best Shelter Magazine in Treehugger's Best of Green Awards 2010.

Some of what they said about Sanctuary:

Shopping with a swoop

Italy prides itself on being the purveyor of style. And if they can do this for the humble district shopping centre, then it will be a reputation well-earned. Such a gorgeous organic shape - leaves your garden-variety Woollies Marketplace gasping...

dvice reports that this centre - designed by award-winning architect Zaha Hadid - will be built near Venice Italy by 2014.

If the final product is close to this, while not being eroded by the commercial realities of marketing signage and hectares of bitumen carparking, and while also delivering a functional and exciting shopping experience on the inside, then it will be a major achievment well worth celebrating.

One thing for sure - the ubiquitous golden arches signage would blend in fairly well!

China does environment big

China may be copping it for derailing Copenhagen, but you can't deny they are already doing plenty of good things.

There's the world's largest solar-powered office building

The world's largest high speed railway, with an 1100km link just opened with average speeds of 350km/hr! And they plan to complete 18,000kms by 2012!

Then there is the world's largest solar power farm to start this year and be completed by 2019, to generate an amazing 2000 MW.

Not talking about it - doing it.

Not certain yet is this stunning plan for a 70-floor forest-office tower.

Could there actually be the vision and sensibility out there to build like this in cities?

What about in our cities??

Queensland's Sustainable Housing Declaration a poor solution

The Queensland Government has brought out a checklist that will be required of anyone looking to sell their home.

A checklist? Whoopy chook. There have been far better tools developed that the Qld Gov't could be using. The Sustainable Housing Code that was being drafted by Brisbane City Council's greenhouse team (on which I played a small part) on behalf of all the SEQROC councils was to provide a score for each key aspect of a house's makeup. The overall score would provide a better snapshot of the house, and even out aspects that the individual layout or orientation and environmental factors may not allow.

However, I also have little regard for the REIQ's Jean Hamer complaining about the cost of the scheme - no surprise there. There has been a constant stream of doomsaying from the development industry for decades. I recall attending a presentation by the so called "Environmental Advisor" of the HIA to their members in the late 1990s, in which he decried the absurd impost by the proposed Maroochy Plan 2000 that would require a minimum 3.5 star rating, and would force builders into the unnecessary measure of putting ceiling insulation into every new home they built.

Choosing windows for your house

One of the main questions I'm asked about sustainable home design is "what sort of windows do I choose? Is double glazing the only choice?"

Some basics are needed first to help understand the differing needs for glazing – advice that is unfortunately lacking among glazing retailers here (or so I found when product sourcing 2 years ago).

There are 3 types of heat transfer:

• Radiant is when the light itself hits something and warms it up. The visible light band is absorbed by that thermal body and re-emitted as long-wave or infra-red light, or put simply: heat.
• Conducted is where a body is heated on one side and conducts that heat through itself and emits it on the other side.
• Convected is where heat is transferred by the air itself being warmed and then moving (usually up). When radiant heat warms things up, then convection moves that warmth around the house – but it is fairly inefficient at warming up thermal bodies – which is why ducted heating doesn’t do much to warm the building fabric (particularly floors) making it quite inefficient.

So to glazing types:

Plain glass does nothing to stop radiant heat – it is clear for the very reason of letting light through. But this means it also lets not just visible light through, but also short-wave (ultraviolet) and IR. So the UV fades all your stuff, the IR conducts through the glass to then heat the air on the inside, and the visible light hits everything inside and is also converted to IR (heat). That’s in summer. In winter, it does a brilliant job at conducting all your heat outside. Single layer plain glass is a bad option for every single window in your house in Canberra (except in your garage).

Density debate redux

The debate arount density flared up again at the launch of Sustainable House Day at the CSIRO Discovery Centre on 8 September 2009, with the Australian Institute of Architects' ACT President David Flannery continuing his attack on suburbs in general and Gungahlin in particular. There was also a presentation by the ACT Planning and Land Authority's Director of Planning Services Kelvin Walsh on upcoming new suburbs.

I've previously spoken out on these issues, including on ABC's Stateline, and was invited to the launch to respond to these speakers. Following is the transcript of my responses.

Response to Australian Institute of Architects’ David Flannery:

There is much of the arguments put by the Australian Institute of Architects that is valid. There does need to be increased density in some areas closer to city centres—all of the city centres, not just Civic.

And there are certainly some areas of Gungahlin—altogether too many areas—that are truly cringe-worthy. There are places where I have to focus very intently on the road ahead of my while driving through them so as to avoid looking up in despair. But these areas are not our fault. They were created by politicians and planners and architects and builders both past and present. People bought them often because they were the only places available in a land-stock starved market.

But the AIA have mixed valid arguments up with an unfounded attack on the suburbs in which many of us choose to live.

As people who care about environmental issues, we get used to people from time to time calling us ‘greenies’. We don’t mind, our friends don’t mind, but the name callers are trying to invoke it as a derogative term, to somehow degrade the value or importance of those issues we care about.

So it is with the term ‘urban sprawl’. It’s used as a derogative to try to argue that suburbia is somehow evil.

But is it? Is the AIA’s call for more density based on solid evidence?

A 2005 study by Energy Australia found in fact that high-rise and medium density residential developments are far worse for overall greenhouse impacts than normal suburban housing.