My entry to the Evolo 2010 competition was about HABITABLE UPDRAFT TOWER, using the technology of the updraft tower, and combining that with passive ventilation of tower habitation. Here include some snapshots, more to come!

In May, the Berlin Senate announced three equal prizes for the international urban ideas competition for the Columbia Quartier and the former airfield Tempelhof, Berlin.

At the core of our proposal is a participatory instrument enabling inhabitants and other stakeholders to creatively negotiate a processed-based development. The process is illustrated with three dynamic phases including practical design steps that create access to the whole site, the development of several new city quarters within the context of an international building exhibition (IBA) and new types of experimental landscape where technologies and nature merge.

The result is radical: an economic, social, cultural and political context to turn the whole area into an alternative powerplant. Tempelhof becomes a communal space which connects people, supplies renewable energy for the adjacent districts and implements the goal of the German government to lower Co2 emissions, in short an Energy Incubator.

Chora: architecture and urbanism/ Buro Happold: sustainable technology and infrastructure/ Gross Max: landscape architecture/ Joost Grootens: graphic design

In 15th March, CHORA has organised a Scenario Game in collaboration with Design for London under the funding of AHRC Grant. The aim of the Scenario Game is to bring together stakeholders to the Beckton Loop site and simulate relations and conflicts on the site, in order to develop the area as a whole as a long term low carbon development.

The project runs in parallel with a commission to Adams and Sutherlands Architects by Design for London for the overall research and development strategy of the site.

Participants to the Scenario Game:

Mayor’s Office, GLA / Buro Happold / LDA / TfL / Environmental Agency / Groundwork Trust / ZEF UK Ltd. / Port of London Authority / LTGDC / Thames Water / University of East London / London Metropolitan University

Design for London is currently working on the Beckton Loop Project, aiming to transform the former Cross River Park area into a Lifecycle Park, with routes that connects different areas, where Olympic relocations industries could enjoy efficient infrastructure. What happened now is little paving here, bench there, signage here, tree there.

Together with CHORA, we are proposing a more unrealistic but interesting strategy as a whole. We’d like to turn the Loop idea into an energy harnessing whole. A smart grid that connects infrastructure and industries with renewable energy generation. The loop would include open-fields of biomass, reed beds, green technologies that generates electricity, geothermal heat. These would all be running within the Loop, sharing between the users in a calibrated, smart meter system.

Chora has been chosen into the second stage of the idea competition for a dynamic plan at the recently closed down Tempelhof Internation Airport in Berlin. The aim of the competition is to develop a dynamic plan over 20 years that allows the Tempelhof area to undergo consistent change.

We have deviced a CLIMATE CHANGE INCUBATOR that incorporates renewable energy and climate change prototypes ranging from energy- efficient and energy-generating devices, to architectural programmes (IBA) and communal brands and programmes.

I was involved in CHORA’s entry to the competition is about a sustainable and complex- programme park landscape that serves as education - leisure - urbanism. The site unfolds with time, developing programme that facilitates the study of new energy sources that would replace oil when Ecuador is anticipated to run out in 2050.

The park is designed with a flexible system we called the ‘loom’. a set of parallel infrastructural lines that serves as integrated systems for electricity/ effluent/ information flow.

I have recently entered the competition organised by the Chicago Architectural Club on the concept for 2020 Chicago Union Station into a high speed rail hub for Midwest.

CHORA has done a competition for a Natural History Museum at Xinyu, Xiamen. The museum is developed through a bridge that links 2 sides of the valley, forming a ‘motherboard’ that plugs in machines and systems that generates energy. An Energy Farm. For post production and publication, some easy renderings and diagrams.

I am currently working with Raoul Bunschoten at CHORA, developing prototypes for reducing carbon emissions within large urban territory of the Cross River Park and the Thames Gateway. My work surrounds interviews with governmental officials and funding bodies, designing urban prototypes that reduces carbon emissions, as well as promoting interactions between stakeholders involved in order to push for the realisation of these prototypes.

City is a pocket, and within contains rhizomes of nodes, each breathing on its own, vast and boundless. Multi-centric, forming an endless network, operating under the efficiency of mass- creativity and optimum repercussion, minimal consumption.