superwoman.

Natalie Jeremijenko, an inventor and engineer, produces work that focuses on the design and analysis of tangible digital media. She bridges the technical and the art world. She is the director of the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic. The Environmental Health Clinic develops and prescribes locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems. This progessive self sustaining strategy produces measurable and mediagenic evidence and coordinating diverse projects to effective material change.

URBAN SPACE STATION Sofia, Madrid 2008 from cesar harada on Vimeo.

Her Urban Space Station project is quite remarkable. Cesar Harada worked on this as well. (He's just amazing.) This portable piece of architecture is intended to improve the quality of air in the surroundings. It sits on the roof and filters air, grows food and re-uses organic waste for inhabitants. Very Inhabitable Organism! It's goal is to improve the health of people around it as well as tidy up our environment. A conscious receptacle of wastes that transforms them to food per say. This is a light weight answer to heavy construction green roofs, not to deter any one from using them. If the urban space station was packaged right , it could be the next big hit from IKEA or any other vernacular store where people could feel apt and capable to application of them. You too can have one on your roof!

let's talk about fuel baby, let's talk about nano and me...

mmm Do you smell something? Oh wait, it's just the fuel. I know this isn't directly related to bioarchitecture but one might need a biocar to park in a biogarage, and well you get my drift.

So, in an article I was reading on Ecogeek, they were saying how researchers at University of Dayton have been able to use an array of carbon nanotubes to perform the same catalytic activity that Platinum produces in a standard fuel cell. Platinum is good at splitting up the oxygen (O2) molecule into two oxygen ions (O+) at the cell’s cathode. Platinum is a pricey metal if you were not aware and for a typical passenger car, the platinum catalyst can cost about $4,000. That's quite pricey.

The carbon nanotubes are doped with nitrogen. The full name of these wonders are nitrogen-containing carbon nanotubes, or VA-NCNTs. The Nitrogen prevents the carbon from reacting with oxygen to form CO, a process called “poisoning”. The CO builds up on the surface, and reduces the effectiveness of the catalyst over time. But these VA-NCNTs keep carbon unreactive, and thereby prolong the catalyst’s lifetime.
Go carbon!

I want to know though what will the wastes then be? And how can we reuse them?