Citizen Brooklyn

“The waterfront no longer places a limitation on city expansion, in fact it is the new frontier!”

Dear New Yorkers, if you happen upon a massive dome floating down the Bronx River, you are not hallucinating. It’s just a stunning public art project.

Architects and designers from 20 different countries are thinking about the same difficult issues.

Coined ‘Centipede Cinema’, this structure was conceived by Professor Colin Fournier in collaboration with artist Marysia Lewandowska, and designed with a team of graduates from the Bartlett School of Architecture who now work in the design firm Neon.

… the design team …approached the project by layering a series of spaces — defined by materials and use — to create a structure based on concepts of balance and autonomy from Taoist philosophy and French thinker Michel Foucault.

…Solar Decathlon Europe, where the rest of the world competes “to design and build houses that consume as few natural resources as possible and produce minimum waste products during their life cycle. Particular emphasis is put on reducing energy consumption and on obtaining all the necessary energy from the sun.”

Mycologists have worked long and hard to dispel so-called “fungi-phobia,” and inventor-artist Philip Ross is another visionary soul who has dedicated his life to mushrooms — specifically quick-growing mycelia — cultivating, drying and developing them as a potential building material which, says Inhabitat, “makes it stronger, pound for pound, than concrete.”