The snow storm, this Great Artist

A lighthouse near Cleveland, Ohio, has been turned into an ice sculpture as spray off of Lake Erie has frozen.

The eastern side of the United States has experienced unusually cold weather with temperatures well below normal.

Heavy snow off the Great Lakes has fallen on northern Ohio, western Pennsylvania and western New York, and forecasters are predicting the big chill will continue for much of the week.

 

mini ... Mini Cooper!

By itself, the Mini  Cooper is a small car. 

However, if the owner decides to zoom out, then talk to a real mini ... Mini Cooper!

The  67 years old Lester Atherfold spent about three months to shrink the classic Mini Cooper from 3 to  2.10 meters.
The main reason for this venture was the desire to carry in the boot of the caravan and have it whenever and wherever they need it.

Having cut about half a meter from the middle, shortened the chassis and the substance "cornered" the new gearbox, clutch and instrument panel, the Mini Cooper he could "board" in a caravan.

This conversion cost just 96 pounds and develop the car even on old rates, and the machine remained unchanged.

"It's fantastic. It gives us complete freedom when we get a camper for vacations and we have with us for our walks. We can do and see things that otherwise would be impossible, because what other cars will fit on the bed beneath us? " he  said.

LIGHTING system with fiber optics

19 December 2010

Prescribing a lighting system with fiber optics

The fiber optic lighting have now matured as a technology and an extremely useful tool for professional lighting designers.

By Theodore D. Kontorigas

This technology offers great potential for implementing designs for indoor and outdoor spaces that would remain in the realm of fantasy with conventional lighting systems. 

For each application lighting system fiber is essential to study such an early stage of construction, which includes both the system design and detailed specification of the required equipment. Unfortunately, even today, suppliers of fiber optic systems and undertake the preparation of such techno-economic 'study', which appears to be restricted to products that each company sells, with all that this entails. 

The award of the design to a professional lighting designer who works independently of commercial practices, can have significant benefits in design and specification of the highest quality equipment in the event. You should ypogramisthei that architectural lighting systems with optical fibers are not ready, but special products custom-made applications to be precisely adapted to the specific requirements of each project.

System Performance Specifications 

For systems with fiber optic lighting show final (end-emitting) specifications should include:

- The area you wish to illuminate. 
- The desired level of brightness (luminance) and / or light surface (illuminance). 
- For large areas, where the uniformity of lighting is important. 
- Specification of the lamp in the life of the chromatic index of performance and temperature 
color and if necessary, direct ignition by the opening of the source. 
- Maximum and minimum temperatures.

For systems with fiber optic lighting show linear (side-emitting) the main criteria should include the diameter of the fiber and the desired level of brightness.

Photometric Calculations 
In the past, the difficulty of manufacturers of optical fiber to produce accurate photometric data on the performance of their systems was an important factor in delaying the spread of this technology in general lighting applications. Nowadays, these problems have long become obsolete and the standardization of information on system performance, allowing designers to choose the appropriate system for optical fiber depending on performance and make decisions rather than empirical, but after a series of calculations accuracy. For this purpose, fiber optic systems to broadcast the final lighting (end-emitting) should be tested so that their performance can be classified in a manner appropriate to the conventional lighting. The optical fiber systems show linear lighting (side-emitting) should have at least formally cut 1200 mm tested so that the photometric data can be presented in a manner similar to those of fluorescent lamps. Information should be given for a standard length of optical fiber so that the absorption of light along the fiber can be accurately predicted and calculated as a separate item in the study of light. The light is absorbed and passes along the optical fiber, a process sometimes called depreciation. Fibers of different lengths emit different amounts of light, whether emit light at the end or linear. This rate of loss of light per meter should be taken into account in photometric calculations. Many are the manufacturers of lighting with fiber optics that provide all this information even in electronic format together with specially designed software photometric calculations.

Equipment specifications

The specifications for the light power source should include at least the following:

- Accurate description of the lamp type and required performance. 
- Levels of noise and operating temperatures. 
- Diameter opening reception connector (adaptor).

The light source is placed in front of one or more optical fibers, which are grouped in bundles and delivers the appropriate amount of light within them. Each set of implements to the light source with a special link. The number of optical fibers in a bundle depends on the diameter, the choice of which depends on system usage and levels of illumination is desired to achieve. The compact light source and the precise optical control of light are key requirements for passing the maximum amount of light in an optical fiber. The light sources commonly used low-voltage halogen lamps with a special reflector lamps or metal halides vapor when a higher level of illumination. The lifetime of these lamps ranges from 2,000 to 6,000 hours. The lifetime of tales and the color rendering index, color temperature, performance and especially the size of the arc are factors that should be taken seriously in any lighting design systems with optical fiber. The light source is also possible to filter infrared and ultraviolet rays, alternating colors, adjust the intensity of emitted light and creating other visual effects. The programmability of the light sources through the DMX 512 communication protocol and the synchronization of two or more light sources to perform the same program is also possible.

The specifications for the system of transmission of light with fiber optics should include:

- The rate of decay of white light. 
- The material of the fiber. 
- How to create random connections in the package. 
- The actual diameter of the fiber that carries light. 
- The exact length of the fibers. 
- The ending (size metal ring termination, diameter and whether it is Multithreaded or smooth).

Optical fibers are transparent and consist of the core (Core) through which the transfer of light and a mantle surrounding it. Both the core and the shell are usually the same material that is either glass or plastic (usually metacrylic Polymethyl methacrylate, PMMA).The indicators are reflective of the core and the shell is such that the fiber be in conditions of total reflection and the light propagates along the left until the end. The diameter of the fiber optic cables ranging from 0.093 to 18 mm. Plastic optical fibers have good life, filter part of the infrared and ultraviolet rays and can withstand temperatures from-25 ° C to +70 o C. The glass fibers are the best choice in applications where the quality of emitted light, both in intensity and in terms of color rendering is required to be high. They have extremely long life, higher brightness of the synthetic filter out ultraviolet and infrared part of the while withstanding temperatures from-60 ° C to +2000 C. The quality of light produced by an independent optical fiber depends on the type of light source, length, diameter and damping coefficient of this fiber.

Finally, the specifications for the terminal luminaire should include:

- The material of construction. 
- The color and finish. 
- How to support it.

The terminals lights are made of aluminum, brass or plastic, adapted to the terminals of optic fibers and their role is controlled transmission (diffusion or concentration) of light that reaches the tip of the fiber. The shape of lights depends on the use and the particular circumstances of the application. Common types of lighting such type is the spot with a fixed or mobile lines, the decorative crystals that add sparkle to a room u. If the lights in the form of spots fixed or mobile lines should be clearly defined if required locking of the lamp in the selected location and the desired opening of the beam.

Theodore D Kontorigas MBA MSc PLDA SLL 
I. Kontorigas and Associates Architects Lighting 
Captions photographs: SM, Neues Licht, Crescent Lighting, Rafer & Staer.

Sand art and something more

Sand art...........


but also, art with flour.......!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Scaffolding for dinner

SCAFFOLDING FOR DINNER

LONDON

Studio East Dining, the temporary restaurant designed by Carmody Groarke, came to earth on the roof of a multi-storey car park overlooking the site of the London Olympics. Edwin Heathcote reports on what he found there

Abitare 508

Edited by Fabrizio Gallanti
Text by Edwin Heathcote
Photos by Luke Hayes

To digest a place

It can be easy to fetishise the aesthetic of the building process. The materials which, like some great cocoon woven by the caterpillar of construction, suspend an interior in transformation until it is able to emerge as a butterfly. From theatre production and fashion catwalk to art installation and shop windows, the ad hoc elements - scaffolding, rough-sawn boards, tapes and pipes - have become a ubiquitous shorthand for work, for the idea of construction yet without aesthetic imposing judgement. It allows a designer to bypass style and create the most elemental of structures, a skeleton.
Carmody Groarke’s Studio East restaurant for London pop-up specialists Bistrotheque however had a sting in its tail. When the cocoon was removed, the restaurant was gone, it left nothing of itself except the ghost, the memory of a captivating, luminous space.

Carmody Groarke are a young London practice who have rapidly made a considerable name for themselves with projects which engage the public realm and pose serious questions about how people move through and use the urban structures of memory. Their 7/7 Memorial in London’s Hyde Park (commemorating the 2005 bombings) is a poetic, serene monument which manages to capture something of the crucible of heat, the moment of making in its form, a stark, raw reminder of the tragedy in a classically modernist intervention.

Their Osnaburgh Street Pavilion makes a left-over urban space into a piece of real London streetscape using a forest of impossibly attenuated columns which attract you in to wander and wonder. Studio East could hardly be a more radically different proposition, temporary, crowded, deliberately coarse and unfinished; it is instead a magical conjuring trick, a beguiling building produced seemingly from nothing.
On plan the restaurant resembles nothing more than a bunch of planks dropped randomly to the ground, but the image is misleading. In fact the extruded boxes from which it was formed are carefully aligned for both views and function, facilitating a blend of efficient service and a degree of intimacy. The arms flared out toward their ends so that the windows appeared huge yet the ceilings above the tables were kept low enough.

Those windows framed a series of remarkable views of the 2012 Olympics site. Each tentacle ended in the hanging strips of a plastic curtain, of the sort found in industrial food processing plants, the too-cool London air occasionally trickled, occasionally gushed through into the equally cool space.
The restaurant sat atop a multi-storey car park 35 m above the ground, its extended arms seemingly able to grab moments of the cityscape. The language of construction found its echo in the muddy site, the cheap framing of the stadium and the dried-noodle mass of scaffolding enveloping Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Centre. And there is a reason for the correspondence: Everything here, every length of board and light fitting, every pole and pipe returned to the morass of a site below.
This is about as sustainable a building as it is possible to imagine.

The interior was a complex web of scaffolding, timber planks form walls in a rough and ready approximation of a panelled dining space and they appeared again cobbled into the long refectory tables which radiated out from the complex centre. The plan is like some mad blend of prison and cathedral, nearly a panopticon but not quite - the arms remained surprisingly intimate and private, nearly aisles and transepts - but there was no altar except a cocktail bar.
Chandeliers were made by bunching together yellow construction lamps - there was a nod here to Rody Graumans’ wonderful Droog fitting, but this was so cheaply achieved it feels genuine. The complex structure was sheathed in polyethylene, which created a translucent skin so that during the last few hours of sunlight the interior was bathed in a gentle light, but as twilight falls the building itself became a construction lamp, glowing above the city.

In this and in every other way, this was a hugely theatrical project, a moment of short-lived drama intended to kick-start or spark into life a placeless, peripheral site which has somehow yet to work itself into the London psyche. For the moment this remains a site and not a place - a car-park servicing a giant mall for Australian developers Westfield, the perfect illustration of the dangers which await Stratford in not becoming like everywhere else, but instead retaining something of the strange, post-industrial landscape that this so short a time ago still was. In its brevity, its intensity and its moment of brilliance, this little restaurant has already begun to make this site a real place.

The restaurant from space

Since 2006 the Bistrotheque restaurant has been organising ghostly if short-lived apparitions to light up London’s night-life, in the form of temporary restaurants in places not usually associated with eating-out. Studio East Dining, the third of its forays, was designed by the up-andcoming Carmody Groarke practice.
The increasing importance of food and dining-out in British culture materialised on the roof of a multi-storey car park on the edge of the huge site that will soon host the London Olympics. For just three weeks in June this year, guests sat at long refectory tables to savour recipes devised by chef Tom Collins. Though based on seasonal vegetables, they offered diners a modern take on traditional British cooking. The layout and orientation of the multi-space restaurant suite struck a happy balance between intimacy and conviviality reminiscent of such London restaurant chains as Waga Mama.

Nothing is thrown away

The pavilion was made entirely from building materials borrowed from construction sites in the area. At the end of the restaurant’s brief life, the 2000 caisson planks and 3500 scaffolding tubes used for the frame and inside panelling were returned to the sites. The outer skin was made of a 100% recyclable industrial polyethylene membrane. The key to the design was its layout. Around the perimeter of the central hall (complete with piano!) were seven prisms, each with a dining-table, and three rooms for the kitchen and bathrooms.
The happy-go-luck morphology of the spaces, each with different roof, made for greater intimacy and individuality, while panoramic views and lavish use of (almost) blinding white set the restaurant clearly apart from the surrounding area, especially at night, when the translucent skin glowed beacon-like in the dark.