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From New Scientist.
Buildings with integrated wind turbines could generate at least 20 percent of their own energy needs, and perhaps all. They would be more power efficient than ordinary wind farms or solar powered constructions, say UK researchers.
I fucking love this:
An international team of architects, engineers and aerodynamicists has come up with a design for a multi-tower office building or block of flats with wind turbines fitted in between. ... Curved towers would funnel wind towards the turbines and improve efficiency, the researchers say. Preliminary testing on a seven-metre prototype, designed by Mecal Applied Mechanics in the Netherlands and erected at the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, indicates that the design could be twice as efficient as a stand-alone wind power generator, despite the fact that it does not move to face the wind. Wind speeds in urban areas are typically about two thirds of those in rural areas, so the extra efficiency is vital, says the team....
Architects at the University of Stuttgart have created a prototype design for a two-tower 200-metre tall building with three integrated turbines. Each turbine would need to be 30 metres in diameter to generate a minimum of 20 percent of the energy needed by a building of this size.
This has all the things I like in design: epic scale, a noble purpose, highly visible "guts," a determination to treat form and function as being of equal aesthetic importance, an underlying concept that is at once out-there and forehead-slappingly obvious. And it looks like the Future, you know? Not a dull, drab, concrete-canyon future, but a bright shiny Art Deco 1939 World's Fair vision of the future.
Drawbacks: noisy, potentially dangerous to birds, kites, small planes. |
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