Rotterdam-based architects MVRDV recently won the Gwanggyo City Centre Competition with their design of an incredible new city just south of Seoul, South Korea. Envisioned as a verdant acropolis of organic ‘hill’ structures, the proposed complex is a fully self-sufficient city for up to 77,000 inhabitants.

The Dutch firm MVRDV has designed a fully sustainable city in the center of Gwanggyo, which is located near Seoul in South Korea. The project, Gwanggyo Power Center, looks like something from the movies: is a series of large hill-shaped structures, with outdoor terraces and plantations for storing water. The vertical design and landscape will improve the climate and ventilation and reduce energy use and water. The concept provides space for housing, offices, shops, and educational facilities. An internal irrigation system stores extra water from the buildings and uses it to sustain these green facades.

The Gwanggyo Green Power Center is completely self-sufficient, and can accommodate 77 thousand inhabitants. Also, the project will also be effective in reducing dependency on automobile or train travel and building a strong sense of community. The estimated budget and deadlines are still not defined, but the project’s completion is scheduled for 2011.

The project is innovative and intriguing, and although it may seem a bit far-fetched, this city centers may become a new future trend. It is important to stress the need for self-sustainability and energy efficiency in our future cities, and the Gwanggyo Green Power Center is a great start.

More Info:

• http://www.mvrdv.nl

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The world of marketing and advertising will soon be at our fingertips, with a new Super Barcode called QR, made in Japan by Denso Wave. With these barcodes, people will be able to send messages, and obtain all sorts of information right from a cellular phone.

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QR, which stands for Quick Response, is the new Super Barcode. Developed by the Japanese research lab, Denso Wave, these small barcodes are capable of containing a lot of information in a tiny space. On chopsticks, in magazines, inside buses, on billboards, they are already everywhere. We will be able to read these barcodes using a simple software program that we can download onto our cell phones, enabling us to take a picture of the barcode and decipher what it says.

Well, that software is now available. You can download it with some of today’s smartphones and begin to read these types of barcodes. In Japan kids use them to send messages to each other, in Germany the young people post them everywhere to play games, in the United States they can be used as an advertising and marketing tool. But nonetheless, you too can get a quick response on your phone.

Imagine the potential for these things! You see something in a store you like, but no price tag, just a barcode that you “scan” with your phone. And voila, all of the item information is available to you, right up to how many they have available in the store and in what color. You can even link things to websites using the barcodes. So in this way, a company can automatically link you to other items online that you may like, or marketers can use it to link clients and customers to websites that the customer could find interesting. The possibilities are endless—and always portable right on your cell phone.

So look out for these stickers next time you’re walking down the street. In Japan they’ve already been put on T-Shirts. So who knows, you too might have your own personalized T-Shirt and message in the near future. So download the software onto your phone too and get ready to get your “Quick Response” from the super barcode of tomorrow.

Jane Poynter tells her story of living two years and 20 minutes in Biosphere 2: a completely natural and alternative micro world. Her experience has provoked her to explore how we might sustain life in the harshest of environments. This is a demonstration of the necessity to be conscious of our impact on the world we live in for a better future.

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In Oracle, Arizona there is a 3.15-acre complex unlike any other. Known as Biosphere 2, this structure is a man-made, materially-closed ecological system, built to explore the complex web of interactions within life systems. Jane Poynter, president of the Paragon Space Development Corporation, tells the story of her insightful, and sometimes difficult, two-year experience in Biosphere 2.

Biosphere 2 contains almost everything that planet earth does, but on a much smaller scale: a rainforest, an ocean, marshlands, savannah grassland, and a fog desert. Although it might seem like a fun experiment, Jane Poynter, an environmentalist who spent two years and 20 minutes inside of Biosphere 2, explains how challenging the experience could sometimes be.

The name Biosphere 2 comes from Earth’s biosphere, Biosphere 1, which is the only biosphere currently known. Biosphere 2 was built with to help give environmentalists a better understanding planet Earth, as well as to re-energize movements concerned with space travel and life on other planets. Poynter was one of the eight crew members to give up a substantial portion of their lives to live in Biosphere 2.

Poynter’s experience was eye-opening in many ways. In her testimonial, she points out: “In Biosphere 2, I totally understood that I had a huge impact on my biosphere, everyday, and it had an impact on me, very literally”. Scientifically, the experiment was enlightening; the scientists were able to gain invaluable hands-on experience with malleable life systems in a closed environment. Poynter had direct impact on the biosphere not only through the physical labor, but also just by breathing and circulating the oxygen and carbon-dioxide.

However, life in Biosphere 2 was often hard work, and things did not always run smoothly. In fact, at one point the structure started losing oxygen at a dangerous rate, and the crew had to resolve the situation before they ran out of oxygen altogether. Nonetheless, her experience had a lasting impact on her life – after Poynter finally emerged from the structure, she had a completely different outlook on the human existence.

Hopefully Biosphere 2 is only the beginning of these types of experiments. In the future, if we plan on exploring Mars and beyond, it is imperative that we are able to sustain life wherever we end up. Furthermore, these types of experiments help expand our knowledge of basic life systems and how we all fit into Earth’s composition.

More info:

• http://www.janepoynter.com/
• http://www.b2science.org
• http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_poynter_life_in_biosphere_2.html