#reconfigurability and service-oriented architecture

[modulusconsulting]

Why Your Construction Business Needs BIM Services in 2025

As construction projects grow in scale and complexity, the need for smarter, data-driven solutions has intensified. Building Information Modeling (BIM) has emerged as a critical tool for businesses aiming to remain competitive. Simply put, embracing a reliable BIM Service has become a necessity for firms, offering benefits such as:

Enhanced Collaboration in Construction Projects

One major challenge affecting construction projects, especially mega-projects, is miscommunication among stakeholders. With paper-based documentation, for instance, there are bound to be delays due to misinterpretation of plans and slow information dissemination. Additionally, a lack of collaboration can lead to issues such as expensive rework and potential safety concerns.

Fortunately, BIM improves collaboration among stakeholders, enhancing project outcomes in the process. For instance, all team members work within a shared environment, ensuring that everyone is viewing the latest, most accurate project digital data. If a structural engineer modifies a beam size, the BIM model instantly updates, ensuring the architectural and MEP teams adjust their designs accordingly. With cloud-based collaboration, teams can work together seamlessly, even from different locations. The smooth collaboration offers many benefits, including:

Faster decision-making

Automated clash detection which reduces rework

Improved project transparency

Improved Design Quality

Traditional construction workflows are prone to errors. Even minor mistakes in architectural plans can result in costly rework, material waste, and scheduling setbacks. For instance, if an architect designs a conference hall with large glass windows, but the structural engineer is unaware of this, the issue might only be discovered during construction, requiring expensive reconfigurations. BIM ensures a high level of design accuracy by allowing stakeholders to create, analyze, and refine a comprehensive digital representation of a project before construction begins. This approach minimizes design changes during construction, reduces material waste, and ensures the final build aligns with stakeholder expectations.

Sustainability and Energy Efficiency

Sustainability is no longer optional in construction—it is becoming a legal necessity. With governments worldwide enforcing stricter energy efficiency regulations, the construction industry is under increasing pressure to reduce carbon footprints, optimize resource usage, and minimize environmental impact.

One of BIM’s most valuable sustainability features is its ability to simulate and optimize a building’s energy performance before construction begins. For example, it enables designers to analyze how different materials, orientations, window placements, and HVAC systems impact a building’s energy consumption. Optimizing natural light and ventilation reduces reliance on non-renewable energy sources.

BIM extends sustainability monitoring into the operational phase. For instance, BIM’s digital twin technology provides real-time data on energy consumption trends, water usage patterns, and HVAC system performance. As a result, facility managers optimize building operations, reducing unnecessary energy expenditure.

Cost and Time Efficiency

Construction projects often suffer from budget overruns and schedule delays. Traditional project management methods rely on manual cost estimation, fragmented communication, and reactive problem-solving, which can lead to wasted resources and missed deadlines. BIM ensures that construction projects are delivered on time and within budget.

BIM’s clash detection software automatically identifies conflicts in the design phase, preventing costly mistakes during construction. This is particularly crucial for complex projects where multiple teams work simultaneously. Additionally, BIM allows project managers to visualize the construction sequence in real time. Delays are minimized because tasks are clearly assigned, with automated progress tracking.

Embrace BIM and Get It Right in 2025

With the construction industry becoming increasingly digital and data-driven, embracing BIM is no longer optional—it’s essential for businesses aiming to stay competitive. BIM enhances collaboration, improves design quality, and reduces construction costs. Additionally, it drives sustainability and energy efficiency in construction projects. For the best 3D BIM Modeling Services, trust Modulus Consulting.

[atplblog]

Price: [price_with_discount] (as of [price_update_date] - Details) [ad_1] Service-Oriented Computing is a paradigm for developing and providing software that can address many IT challenges, ranging from integrating legacy systems to building new, massively distributed, interoperable, evaluable systems and applications. The widespread use of SOC demonstrates the practical benefits of this approach. Furthermore it raises the standard for reliability, security, and performance for IT providers, system integrators, and software developers. This book documents the main results of Sensoria, an Integrated Project funded by the European Commission in the period 2005-2010. The book presents, as Sensoria's essence, a novel, coherent, and comprehensive approach to the design, formal analysis, automated deployment, and reengineering of service-oriented applications. Following a motivating introduction, the 32 chapters are organized in the following topical parts: modeling in service-oriented architectures; calculi for service-oriented computing; negotiation, planning, and reconfiguration; qualitative analysis techniques for SOC; quantitative analysis techniques for SOC; model-driven development and reverse engineering for service-oriented systems; and case studies and patterns. Publisher ‏ : ‎ Springer-Verlag Berlin and Heidelberg GmbH & Co. K; Illustrated edition (9 May 2011) Language ‏ : ‎ English Paperback ‏ : ‎ 737 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 3642204007 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-3642204005 Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 kg 40 g Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.49 x 4.29 x 23.5 cm Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ India [ad_2]

[storeinteriorconstruction]

Top Interior Design Contractors in Japan

Whether you are building your dream home or revamping your existing space, hiring the right interior design professional can make all the difference. These professionals are experts at distilling your style into a cohesive layout that fits perfectly into your space. They can help you with everything from planning a functional floor plan to finding the perfect pieces and finishing touches.

Located in Tokyo, this studio specializes in the interior design of stores, furniture and products. They believe in a customer-oriented design approach where the first step is to truly understand what your needs and vision are. This is then translated into a functional, three-dimensional concept design that will bring life to the space. Check their site to know more details 店舗内装.

This company is known for its innovative designs that are both functional and environmentally conscious. They use natural materials to create spaces that are both modern and timeless. Their work is also rooted in Japanese culture, which is evident in their unique aesthetics and attention to detail. Their projects have received international recognition, including a feature in Time magazine’s projection of 21st-century innovators.

Japan’s top apparel brand is expanding globally, and Gensler has been tapped to lead their retail design and architecture teams in each market. They help Uniqlo develop global standards and guidelines to ensure consistency across stores and provide local expertise to support project teams throughout the world.

This firm is renowned for its fusion design, which incorporates western styles and textures with traditional Japanese design fundamentals. Their projects are full of elegant details and a range of materials, from wood and polished nickel to textured stone and white-enameled hammered steel. The result is a clean and refined style that appeals to both young and old alike.

Established in 1963, this firm was founded by architect Arata Isozaki, who is renowned for his unique ability to combine a sense of movement with highly reconfigurable spaces that utilize the maximum amount of available space. This approach to space has a great deal of relevance in today’s high-density urban environment.

The design team at this firm is well-versed in a variety of architectural and design styles, but they are most renowned for their ability to create highly flexible and adaptive spaces that take advantage of Japan’s limited land resources. Their designs often include sliding walls and reconfigurable seating arrangements that allow residents to adapt their homes to changing circumstances.

This design firm specializes in office interiors, hotel renovations, and restaurant designs. Their services are also available to private clients. They offer a wide range of services from furniture and lighting to landscape design, and they have won numerous awards for their designs. They have been featured in many publications, including the “Financial Times” and “The Wall Street Journal.” In addition, they are a member of the American Society of Interior Designers. Their portfolio includes a number of hotels and restaurants in Tokyo. They have a reputation for their high-quality designs and excellent customer service. Their offices are located in the heart of Tokyo.

[chughp]

How supply chain operations need to evolve to support Innovation agenda in Food & Beverages industry

These are disruptive times for the Food & Beverage (F&B) industry. The new consumer is looking for organic, ethical, sustainable and diet foods. They expect more convenience, more personalization, and more innovation. While there is new competition, there is also new opportunities to rewire the value chain. On one hand, retailers are launching their private labels; on the other hand, demand for direct-to-home meal kits is skyrocketing. There are also innovative suppliers emerging, such as vertical farms popping up in places like New York City.

 Supply Chain - The new frontier of innovation in the Food & Beverage industry: These emerging disruptions will create the next generation of successful companies. These companies will innovate not just in what they sell, but every aspect of their operating model. And most of all, they will repurpose their supply chains.

Supply Chains are at the heart of F&B operations and can be very complex – companies need to manage cold chains for perishables, provide end to end traceability, follow GMP and comply with a myriad of regulations from the FDA and USDA in the US, 178/2002 in Europe, and similar such in other countries. They need to build their Supply Chains to support various categories of materials, from packaging materials to raw materials for small-batch R&D and commercialization operations. All this makes Supply Chain operations very complex, but a vital function in the F&B industry.

How companies pivot their supply chain capabilities in the coming decades will become an important source of competitive advantage. To design supply chains that meet their aspirations in the emerging competitive landscape, companies will need to look at opportunities holistically – from kitting, warehousing, fulfillment & distribution, packaging, delivery to reverse logistics etc.

 Fortifying traditional measures of supply chain performance:  

The health measures of supply chain in food and beverage industry will become more important than ever before. To fortify those, companies will need to be more comprehensive in their approach and will need to build a much wider set of capabilities:

Efficiency: Improvements in cost profile of supply chain operations will fund new innovation, experimentation and expansion. Companies will need to find opportunities to more aggressively weed wastage across the entire cost bar e.g., through shrinkage elimination, packaging innovation, improving sourcing costs, reducing transportation costs. This would require a very granular view of the costs and ability to comprehensively model the impact of cost elimination initiatives

Velocity: Their ability to move material and information fast as companies receive their demand signals will need for them to look at their strategies such as for inventory placement and improvements in signaling speed across supply chain

Predictability: Their ability to know with reasonable certainty when and where the activities and material movements will happen. This would need improved forecasting, better end-to-end visibility and better ecosystem coordination

Agility: Their ability to quickly ramp up and down. This will be driven through creating the right capacity modeling across the supply chain and through improved planning for base and volatile loads. Companies will also need to better capture demand and supply signals and do better end-to-end integrated planning

Resilience: How the Supply Chains react to unforeseen breakdowns, for example when company can’t source ingredients from a country under outbreak of a disease. A breakdown of the key supply line. This would need improved “what-if” planning and the design a network of options.

 Beyond: The three new frontiers of differentiation:

While the traditional measures of Supply Chain will continue to be important, they will not be sufficient in the new F&B landscape. There are three new frontiers on which companies will differentiate – Malleability of Supply Chain operations, its ability to support personalization at scale and its ability to support solutions for consumers

Malleability: As companies launch new product categories, through new channels and to new markets, the supply chains would need to adapt easily. Companies would need to source new materials, create a new trucking plan and new warehousing approach. The ability of the supply chains to allow the experimentation and eventual launch of new products will become increasingly important. Malleability would need to be designed into the supply chain strategy. It would require a set of capabilities that have traditionally not been looked at including ability to design, model and visualize the end-to-end chain for the new product extension, category or business model 

Support ‘solutions’ for the consumers: The supply chains will need to pivot, from moving food to supporting solutions for consumers. We know that consumers consume food to address different unstated needs, for example feeling healthy, enjoying a friend’s company, stress busting or saving time in their busy lives. While products and branding messages are often designed to target these needs, it is rare for the supply chains to be designed with these needs in mind. Typical approaches apply ‘User Centric Deign’ to design systems that support supply chains. A more robust approach would also use Design Thinking to incorporate ‘Consumer Centric Design’. This would for example determine how food is delivered to the consumer, what is the acceptable level of stock out and how the food is sourced from the farms. There will be a clear linkage in the supply chain to the ‘intent’ i.e. the solution it is solving of a consumer 

Support personalization at scale: As consumers demand more personalized food options, the ability of the supply chain to support a wide spectrum of personalized needs for the customers will become very important. This would need supply chains to be configured to support very granular and fast-moving demand signals. However, this will need to supported without losing scale economies. This would impact how various algorithms aggregate and disaggregate demand, inventory, production plans, supply, transportation routes etc. at various stages in the supply chain

 Embracing the new digital tools to drive the Supply Chain transformation: The traditional set of capabilities and the three additional aspects will become extremely important as F&B companies pivot their business models. So how do the companies weave these capabilities in their supply chains? The current digital platforms may not suffice in supporting these new capabilities. Companies will need a much more evolved digital tools that intrinsically supports these capabilities.

First, this would require platforms that improve access and quality of supply chain data. The technology platforms will have an ability to discover, ingest and mine these datasets to continue to improve supply chain capabilities. This data could also come from external partners and data syndicators such as IRI and Neilson. The platforms will also allow consumption of ever-evolving machine learning capabilities improve the predictive power of the supply chain

Second, such platforms would granurly and fluidly join the dots to improve end-to-end visibility across the supply chain. Traditionally, the flow of information from one node to another can take time, is often incomplete or unreliable. With digital technologies, from IOT to Blockchain, it is now much easier to connect the dots in a reliable way, thus improving the end-to-end visibility, from farm to plate. Technologies such as Graph database allow a more fluid way of connecting various components, thereby allowing insights that were not earlier possible

Third, unlike traditional platforms, the digital platform for supply chains would not be hardwired but would be based on a modular service-oriented architecture. This would allow easy reconfiguration of the supply chains as the business models evolve. Furthermore, they would allow experimentation, e.g., by quickly deploying algorithms and scaling subsequently.  

And finally, such a platform would connect the other operational capabilities to create an end-to-end picture of organization’s operations. This would need an ability to connect with on one hand systems for CRM, campaign management etc, and on other hand systems related to design & development and manufacturing.  

 Embracing the new digital tools to drive transformation: Supply Chain capabilities that Food & Beverage firms need for competing in tomorrow’s world will be much more evolved and, in many ways, very different than today’s. Transforming supply chains can be overwhelming especially since companies have to continue to keep their lights on with the current business as they evolve. The best way to start is by defining the blueprint of the future supply chain. Then one could create a roadmap that starts with quick and easy wins and then build the momentum for bigger next steps.

  Food & Beverage companies have a reason to be excited. As the industry evolves, new opportunities will emerge. Those who are able to morph their supply chains to take advantage of these opportunities will drive the next wave of success in the upcoming decades

[eclipstek-blog]

What is an Industrial Cellular Modem?

You might be unable to answer the question, “what is cellular IoT?” But probably you’re familiar with the underlying technology. Cellular networks connect your iPhone to Google Maps, Instagram, and Email; they carry your voice through the air. As we connect to our friends and family, we’re also seeing the value of connecting with the physical objects around us: the streetlights, parking meters, and hospitals that occupy our everyday urban lives, or the myriad industrial applications like manufacturing and agriculture that connectivity can enhance.

The same cellular technology behind your smartphone is empowering the next wave of innovation in the dawning “Internet of Things” (IoT). In this ever changing technological world, more and more devices are getting connected together and building internet of things (IoT) architecture across the world. In fact, all the internet devices will be connected in future. IoT is a key facilitator of this possibility by delivering machine-to-machine and machine-to-person communication on a huge scale. FMI predicts that there will more than 30 billion connected devices by year 2024. But what is “cellular IoT” and why should you expect to be hearing a lot more about it?

What is Industrial Cellular IOT?

Cellular IoT offers advanced connectivity technologies similar to the technology behind your smartphone that connect billions of devices and sensors to the Internet across the globe. Instead of needing to create a new, private network to house your IoT devices, they dwell on the same mobile network as smartphones. These advanced technologies include 3G, 4G, 5G, and LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) cellular technologies such as NB-IoT and LTE-M. Cellular IoT offers global coverage, reliable connection of IoT devices, and low-cost hardware that is required for cellular IoT connections.

Cellular networks capable of facilitating massive flows of data are now widespread around the globe, so we don’t need to build any new physical infrastructure to support cellular IoT. Cellular networks provide the backbone for much of what we know, allowing us to access the internet, get rides, connect with friends, shop, watch videos, and much more. In addition to the personal benefits we’re all familiar with, cellular networks also serve a critical and growing role in many Internet of Things applications. Although connectivity technologies continue to be improved, ultimately, there will always be a tradeoff between power consumption, range, and bandwidth. Cellular connectivity has historically been focused on range and bandwidth at the expense of power consumption.

It’s called a cellular network because the network operators split up areas into “cells”. Each cell has a cell tower that operates at a different frequency than adjacent cell towers. The area of each of these cells depends on usage density. In a city, each of these cells might only have a range of a half mile, while cells in rural areas may have a range of up to 5 miles. As users move between cells, their frequency is automatically changed to switch over to new cell towers (called a handoff). You’ve almost definitely heard terms like 3G or 4G before. These refer to the 3rd and 4th generations respectively. Each generation is a set of standards and technologies that are defined by a standards body call the ITU Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R). Starting with 1G systems, which were introduced in the early 1980’s, a new generation has been introduced about every 10 years since. Each generation has brought new frequency bands, higher data rates, and new transmission technologies (which are non-backwards compatible).

2G, 3G, and 4G, new cellular technologies like NB-IoT and LTE-M are aimed specifically at IoT applications. The next generation of cellular connectivity (5G) promises to be revolutionary, offering speeds of up to 100Gbps (compared to the 1Gbps of current 4G). This massive bandwidth will be a critical enabler for many applications of the future including autonomous vehicles, augmented and virtual reality, and more.

Perhaps one of the most transformative effects of 5G will be that it can serve as a substitute for physical cable. Instead of the time and resource intensive build-out of cable infrastructure, cities and businesses can use 5G to meet their needs. This also opens up new applications to using the cloud, which might have previously been limited by the amount of data that needed to be sent, instead relying on local processing.

In addition to high bandwidth, 5G also promises ultra-low latency and a high degree of reliability, making it an enabler for industrial IoT applications as well. The factories of the future can forego wired Ethernet in industrial production environments to become dynamic and reconfigurable factories that change with new demands and requirements.

Consumer IoT vs. Industrial IoT – What are the Differences?

Although most ink dedicated to discussing the Internet of Things (IoT) has gone towards discussing the concept’s consumer variant, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is beginning to capture significant attention for its role in helping manufacturers and industrial companies optimize processes and implement remote monitoring capabilities that would have been considered almost impossible just a decade ago.

But what exactly is the industrial IoT and what distinguishes it from consumer-oriented applications such as smart fridges and air conditioners? Here are some important distinctions to help delineate the boundary between the consumer and industrial IoT ecosystems.

IIoT     devices are built to be industrial strength deployment need to be able to     survive environments that simply wouldn’t be encountered by consumers.     Such conditions include extremes in power, humidity and temperature and     environmental conditions as such.

IIoT     Systems must be designed for scalability. Because IIoT systems can result     in the generation of billions of datapoints, consideration also has to be     afforded to the means of transmitting the information from the sensors to     their final destination – usually an industrial control system such as a     SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) platform.     In order not to overwhelm these centralized systems with data, IIoT     manufacturers are increasingly devising hardware that can carry out     preliminary analytics directly at the device-level rather than on a     program running in a cloud-based server

IIoT     devices have unique communications and power requirements. IIoT sensors     are often installed to measure parameters at remote infrastructure that is     difficult to physically access. Such infrastructure can be situated below     the surface (for example, at oil and gas facilities), atop high terrain     (for example, at water reservoirs), offshore (for example, on oil wells),     or even in a remote stretch of desert not accessible by roadway (at a     weather station).Deploying technicians to inspect these assets is     difficult and expensive. To minimize the amount of field visits required,     IIoT devices need to be engineered to have the maximum possible battery     life, which is often achieved by building them with industrial-grade     batteries.     IIoT’s unique, low-power, low bandwidth requirements have spurred the     development of a series of nascent network families such as LPWAN and NB-IoT that     are the primary means of connecting these devices to central servers.

IIoT     must meet unique cyber-security standards. Cyber-security is an important     challenge facing the Internet of Things (IoT) with 70% of the most     commonly used IoT devices containing vulnerabilities,     according to Hewlett Packard research.

Unlike     even sophisticated mass-market IoT products such as smart washing     machines, IIoT solutions often need to be white-labelled and tailored to     the individual usage requirements of the purchaser.For that reason, IIoT     technologies are often made available through a variety of means that     allow heightened customization and integration with other software     systems. This includes APIs or Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.

Industrial Cellular IOT Applications

Because of machine-to-machine communication and machine-to-person communication, humongous amount of data will be generated. For the proper functioning of IoT network, there is a need of data storage, data interpretation, and data transfer in real time at minimal cost and cellular networks are fulfilling this particular need of the market. Cellular technologies such as GSM, WCDMA, LTE, and future 5G have evolved with new functionality and new radio access technology narrowband IoT tailored to from an attractive solution for emerging low power wide area (LPWA) applications.

Segmentation on the basis of vertical: • BFSI • IT and Telecommunications • Healthcare • Retail • Energy and Utilities • Transportation • Others

Kaynak: https://eclipstek.com/what-is-an-industrial-cellular-modem/

[pannimanagementteam]

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[incoherenci-blog]

Testing the waters: Russia explores reconfiguring Gulf security

By James M. Dorsey

Russia hopes to blow new life into a proposal for a multilateral security architecture in the Gulf, with the tacit approval of the Biden administration.

If successful, the initiative would help stabilise the region, cement regional efforts to reduce tensions, and potentially prevent war-wracked Yemen from emerging as an Afghanistan on the southern border of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf of Aden and at the mouth of the Red Sea.

For now, Vitaly Naumkin, a prominent scholar, academic advisor of the foreign and justice ministries, and head of the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, is testing the waters, according to Newsweek, which first reported the move.

Last week, he invited former officials, scholars, and journalists from feuding Middle Eastern nations to a closed-door meeting in Moscow to discuss the region's multiple disputes and conflicts and ways of preventing them from spinning out of control.

Mr. Naumkin, who is believed to be close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, co-authored the plan first put forward in 2004. The Russian foreign ministry published a fine-tuned version in 2019.

Russia appears to have timed the revival of its proposal to begin creating a framework to deal with Houthi rebels, seemingly gaining the upper hand against Saudi Arabia in Yemen’s seven-year-long devastating war.

The Iranian-backed rebels appear to be closer to capturing the oil and gas-rich province of Marib after two years of some of the bloodiest fighting in the war. The conquest would pave the way for a Houthi takeover of neighbouring Shabwa, another energy-rich region. It would put the rebels in control of all northern Yemen.

The military advances would significantly enhance the Houthi negotiating position in talks to end the war. They also raise the spectre of splitting Yemen into the north controlled by the Houthis and the south dependent on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“The battle for Marib could be a final stand for the possibility of a unified Yemen,” said Yemeni writer and human rights activist Nabil Hetari.

A self-declared independent North Yemen would potentially resemble an Afghanistan sitting on one of the world's critical chokepoints for the flow of oil and gas. North Yemen would be governed by a nationalist Islamist group that presides over one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, struggles to win international recognition, restore public services, and stabilise a war-ravaged economy while an Al-Qaeda franchise operates in the south.

The Russian initiative also appears geared to take advantage of efforts by Middle Eastern rivals Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, and Iran to reduce regional tensions, get a grip on their differences, and ensure that they do not spin out of control.

Russia seems to be exploiting what some describe as paused and others as stalled talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran mediated by Iraq. Iraqi officials insisted that the talks are on hold until a new Iraqi government has been formed following last month’s elections. The discussions focused at least partially on forging agreement on ways to end the Yemen war.

Mr. Naumkin suggested that the Russian initiative offers an opportunity to carve the Middle East out as a region of cooperation as well as competition with the United States in contrast to southeastern Europe and Ukraine, where US-Russian tension is on the rise.

In the Middle East, Russia and the United States "have one common threat, the threat of war. Neither the United States nor Russia is interested in having this war,” Mr. Naumkin told Newsweek.

A State Department spokesperson would not rule out cooperation. “We remain prepared to cooperate with Russia in areas in which the two sides have common interests while opposing Russian policies that go against US interests,” the spokesperson said.

The Russian proposal calls for integrating the US defense umbrella in the Gulf into a collective security structure that would include Russia, China, Europe, and India alongside the United States. The structure would include, not exclude Iran, and would have to extend to Israel and Turkey.

UAE efforts to return Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to the Arab, if not the international fold, although not driven by the Russian initiative, would facilitate it if all other things were equal.

Inspired by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the proposal suggests that the new architecture would be launched at an international conference on security and cooperation in the Gulf.

Russia sees the architecture as enabling the creation of a "counter-terrorism coalition (of) all stakeholders" that would be the motor for resolving conflicts across the region and promoting mutual security guarantees.

The plan would further involve the removal of the “permanent deployment of troops of extra-regional states in the territories of states of the Gulf,” a reference to US, British, and French forces and bases in various Gulf states and elsewhere in the Middle East.

It calls for a “universal and comprehensive” security system that would take into account “the interests of all regional and other parties involved, in all spheres of security, including its military, economic and energy dimensions.”

In Mr. Naumkin’s reading, Middle Eastern rivals "are fed up with what's going on" and "afraid of possible war." Negotiations are their only remaining option.

That seems to drive men like UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, his Saudi counterpart Mohammed bin Salman, Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Iranian leader Ebrahim Raisi to reach out to one another in a recent flurry of activity.

“These are talks between autocrats keen to protect their own grip on power and boost their economies: not peace in our time, only within our borders,” cautioned The Economist.

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon, and Castbox.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and scholar and a Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.

[architectnews]

Climat Planète Research Center, Grenoble

Climat Planète Research Center, Grenoble Building, French Architecture, Images

Climat Planète Research Center in Grenoble

7 Nov 2021

Design: Serero Architectes

Location: Grenoble, France

Climat Planète Research Center

A climate research platform with laboratories, data center and its digital computing virtualization room.

The Climat Planète building is a extension of the CERMO building on the Universitary campus of Grenoble Alpes (UGA) in Saint-Martin d’Hères. We reused the DNA of the existing building: articulation of volumes by vertical circulation, an architecture organized by the structure of the building, a plan of the building in “branches” perpendicular to each other. Our goal is to offer a building that can quickly build and foster a community of researchers around the building’s research infrastructure, its Data Center, and its digital computing virtualization room.

An “exchange hub” between researchers At the junction between the 2 buildings that form Climat Planète, a fully glazed volume shows trays suspended on 3 levels. They include the hall, the conference room on the ground floor and the meeting rooms on the upper floors. This “HUB” is a space for networking and connection between researchers and the image of building activity towards the outdoor space. On the east and west facades, a stainless steel woven metal mesh protects these glazing over its entire height.

The office floors are entirely free and structured around an enlarged central circulation which constitutes a service strip, integrating informal discussion areas, waiting areas, reprography and natural ventilation shafts.

Structures in wood and concrete walls cast in place and stamped The structure of the building consists of cast-in-place concrete post-beams and timber framing. Concrete “cores” integrate vertical circulation and sanitary facilities and effectively organize the building. This structure makes it possible in particular to offer the best possible scalability of spaces, with a minimum of walls, necessary for the structure of the building under seismic stress. The exchange Hall / HUB is made up of a large-span honeycomb slab and connects the two buildings without any intermediate bearing wall.

The data center and the virtualization room: A free platform that can be reconfigured at will In response to the rapid evolution of quantum and digital computing machines, we imagined the Data Center as a large platform free of any structural descent with a technical floor. The supervision room and the machine preparation room create airlocks for this large platform and a technical room on double height allows the installation of technical equipment for ventilation and cooling of the platform, with direct air intakes on the exterior, by powder-coated aluminum louvers.

An aluminum and concrete facade which dresses the ITE (External thermal insulation) Aluminum panels and architectural concrete continuously cover the external thermal insulation of the facades. This insulation is a bio-based hemp type insulation. We have developed a system of “frames” which underline the structure of the building, and whose geometry, angles and transparencies are adjusted according to the orientations of each facade. Vertical aluminum sheet solar shades offer solar control for the EAST and WEST facades. This is supplemented by the installation of light shelves in the upper part of the glazing which reflects the light in the depths of the offices. Brightness control is also provided by motorized orientable solar shades. The ambience of offices and laboratories can thus be adjusted to the uses of each space.

Passive building: an intelligent energy management system The environmental concept of the building implements bioclimatic principles with an energy management system allowing strong interactivity between the building and its environment. These principles implemented by BET Wimagine are as follows:

1- A natural ventilation system that covers 90% of ventilation needs. The objective is to limit the energy consumption of blowing and air treatment while using the thermal inertia of concrete floors to cool or preheat the incoming air from the outside. In summer and mid-season, ventilation is achieved by the temperature difference between the air under the building and the solar chimney on the roof which concentrates heat and increases the natural draft of stale air. In winter, the premises (offices and rooms) of the building are ventilated by high performance double flow ventilation with energy recovery. The recovery is ensured by a high efficiency wheel recuperator (efficiency up to 80%). The management of the fresh air flows will be carried out by measuring the CO² level of the room.

2- The ground water allowed the creation of geothermal wells, to draw water at an average temperature of 16 ° C to guarantee the interior temperatures of the building and the Data Center and participate in summer comfort in offices and meeting rooms. It will allow the cooling of the servers, the cooling of the underfloor heating / cooling hydraulic network, the cooling of the incoming air during hot periods.

3- The installation of a passive heating / cooling floor in the offices by circulating groundwater with reduced energy consumption.

4- A system of diffusion and solar protection by light shelves allowing light diffusion in the depths of the offices and solar protection by solar shading to the South, East and West

5- Cooling of server rooms and high density computing room by direct free-cooling. This solution consists of injecting filtered outside air into the front of the servers, and expelling the hot air drawn from the back of the servers to the outside.

These devices, along with exterior insulation and high performance airtightness, make the Climat Planète research center the first positive energy building on the campus

Climat Planète Research Center in Grenoble – Building Information

Design: Serero Architectes

Address: Campus Saint-Martin-d’Hères, Grenoble, France Program: Construction of the Climat Planète research center consisting of research laboratories, a virtualization room, data center and auditorium

Client: Université Grenoble Alpes Project management: SERERO Architects: David Serero, Marc Serena, Anna Fojcik, Pedro Coello, Mahdi Derakshkan, Michael Drevet, Antoine Loyer, Eric Dufour, David Serel Bet facade and energy: Wimagine

Surface: 3200 sqm (10,500 sq ft) Calendar: 2017 – 2021 Delivery: 2021 Cost: €4,430,000 excl. Tax

Photo credits © Didier Boy de la Tour

Climat Planète Research Center, Grenoble images / information received 071121

Location: Grenoble, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France

Grenoble Building Designs

Grenoble Building Projects – Key Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Architecture Projects:

La Maison des Etudiants Grenoble

ZAC Beauvert Design: AKTIS Architecture et Urbanisme picture © theNood ZAC Beauvert Grenoble

Amplified Music Hall Design: Hérault Arnod Architectes Grenoble Music Hall

New Buildings in France

French Architectural Projects

French Architecture Design – chronological list

French Architecture News

French Architect Offices – design firm listings

French Architecture – Selection

Zenith Music Hall, Amiens Massimiliano Fuksas Architecture photo : Philippe Ruault

Limoges concert hall Design: Bernard Tschumi Architects photo : Christian Richters

French Architect

French Buildings

Comments / photos for the Climat Planète Research Center, Grenoble page welcome

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[jeremystrele]

A California Bungalow Reconfigured For Light And Practicality

A California Bungalow Reconfigured For Light And Practicality

Architecture

Amelia Barnes

The new structure is visually in contrast to the façade’s original design features, materials and colours, and instead incorporates recycled brick, charred timber cladding and metal perforated screens. Photo – Glenn Hester.

Efficient planning means less of the site is now occupied to allow for a larger backyard. Photo – Glenn Hester.

A driving factor of the design was the need for more light to mitigate the southern orientation of the site. Photo – Glenn Hester.

Large glazed doors at the rear disappear entirely into the wall cavity to connect the interiors directly to the backyard as required. Photo – Glenn Hester.

Significant re-planning was also undertaken in the rest of the house to enable a more rational and functional layout. Photo – Glenn Hester.

Timber veneer features in the dining area of Project 12 Architecture’s Northcote home design. Photo – Glenn Hester.

Architect Aimee Goodwin attributes the success of the project to the trusting and open relationship formed between the client (who were living overseas throughout most of the build, the contractor and her team. Photo – Glenn Hester.

Economical white laminate kitchen cabinets are used alongside more luxurious materials in the kitchen. Photo – Glenn Hester.

Project 12 Architecture designed a new two-storey addition featuring a skylight void to invite in natural light throughout. Photo – Glenn Hester.

‘Considered planning sets up adjacencies between utilitarian and service spaces, prioritising light and connection of the main living areas,’ says Aimee Goodwin. Photo – Glenn Hester.

The brief was to provide a comfortable, light-filled spacious home for the young family owners. Photo – Glenn Hester.

The existing front door now functions as a more formal entry leading past the master bedroom, study and utility rooms. Photo – Glenn Hester.

The original California bungalow facade has been maintained in the renovations. Photo – Glenn Hester.

There are unfortunately plenty of poorly extended period homes on Australian streets, but this project shows all hope is not lost! Project 12 Architecture have successfully redesigned a California bungalow that maintains its weatherboard façade, while introducing more natural light and practical spaces.

Home to a young family, this property is a considered, functional home that ‘surprises, delights and is a joy to live in,’ according to Project 12 Architecture principal, Aimee Goodwin.

A driving factor of the design was the need for more light to mitigate the southern orientation of the site. In response, Project 12 Architecture designed a new two-storey addition featuring a skylight void to invite in natural light throughout. ‘We removed the oddly planned 80s rear extension to provide a two-storey volume that would accommodate the key living spaces on the ground floor with two bedrooms, bathroom and study area above,’ Aimee says. This new structure is visually in contrast to the façade’s original design features, materials and colours, and instead incorporates recycled brick, charred timber cladding, and metal perforated screens. Large glazed doors at the rear disappear entirely into the wall cavity to connect the interiors directly to the backyard as required.

Significant re-planning was also undertaken to the rest of the house to enable a more rational and functional layout. For example, a discrete mudroom entry has been added, providing an immediate, practical home for bags, scooters and general daily mess associated with family living! The existing front door now functions as a more formal entry leading past the master bedroom, study and utility rooms. These ‘adult’ spaces are physically and acoustically separated from living zones and children’s bedrooms. ‘We wanted to make sure we gave our clients a home that responded to the demands of the daily routine of work, kids, and the clutter they bring, and was an easy and calm space to live in,’ Aimee says.

Not only is the renovated home more practical than ever, efficient planning means less of the site is occupied to allow for a larger backyard!

Aimee attributes the success of the project to the trusting and open relationship formed between the client (who were living overseas throughout most of the build), the contractor and her team. 

[smithsonianlvm]

Welcome Latino Museum Studies Program 2017 Fellows

The 2017 Latino Museum Studies Program fellows. (Photo by Adrián Aldaba) The Latino Museum Studies Program started on July 3, 2017, welcoming a new cohort of 12 graduate students coming together for a six-week summer fellowship in Washington, D.C. The fellowship provides professional development to emerging museum professionals and scholars while looking at museum studies through a Latino lens. It provides a unique opportunity to meet and engage with Smithsonian professionals, scholars from renowned universities, and with leaders in the museum field. As with each year, each fellow will participate in a practicum project at one of the various Smithsonian Institution museums, cultural and research centers. They will share more information about their projects and interests in a series of upcoming blogs posted on this website. In the interim, let’s take a look at what each of them presented on their first day as fellows!

Christina Azahar, Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of California - Berkeley, following her introductory presentation at the Smithsonian Latino Center. (Photo by Diana C. Bossa Bastidas)

Christina’s dissertation research examines gender, mobility, and spatial politics in Chilean popular music scenes, focused specifically on the music and political work of Ana Tijoux, Pascuala Ilabaca, Francisca Valenzuela, and Carolina Ozaus. She has also published work on cultural memory and protest song in El Salvador since the end of the country’s Civil War, and regularly serves as a teaching assistant for classes on African American, Asian American, and Chicano music. Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, she received her B.A. at the University of Georgia in Music (saxophone) and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. After graduating in 2013, she spent the summer interning with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, where she became interested in pursuing museum curatorial work and programming.

Christina will be working with María del Carmen Cossu, Program Director for Latino Initiatives at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service on the practicum - Traveling Exhibition Development for Dolores Huerta: Revolution in the Fields / Revolución en los Campos.

Mayela Caro, Ph.D. candidate in Public History at the University of California, Riverside, following her presentation on Hollywoodisms: Latinx in Hollywood Films 1932-1945. (Photo by Diana C. Bossa Bastidas)

Mayela’s research field is in 20th century United States cultural history and digital humanities.  She focuses on the representation of gender and Latinidad in various forms of popular culture of the 1930s and 1940s. Her Master’s thesis entitled, “Hollywoodisms: Latin American Images in Hollywood Films, 1933-1945,” analyzes the manner in which Hollywood represented Latinx actors and how the images that conveyed Latinidad shifted with the implementation of the Censorship Code and the onset of WWII. Her passion for Latino Studies derived from a young age. 

Mayela will be working with Taína Caragol and Leslie Ureña, Museum Curators at the National Portrait Gallery, on the practicum -“Piecing Together” Latinx Art and History in the 19th Century.

Shakti Castro, a May 2017 graduate of the Public History Masters program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, following her presentation titled “Do Puerto Ricans Speak Puerto Rican? Boricuas in the Barrios and Beyond”. (Photo by Diana C. Bossa Bastidas) Shakti Castro is a Puerto Rican Diaspora historian born and raised in The Bronx. She received a B.A. in media studies and English literature from Hunter College at CUNY, where she spent four years at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies as a research assistant and oral historian. During her time at the Center, she was a research assistant who helped launch the Center's latest oral history initiative, Centro Memorias. As part of Memorias, Shakti conducted over 30 oral history interviews with artists, educators, and leaders within the community. This May, she received an M.A. in History with a graduate certificate in Public History, from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. During her time at UMass she worked with the university's new Oral History Lab assisting with workshops and hosting listening parties.

Shakti will be working with Katherine Ott, Museum Curator at the National Museum of American History on the practicum - Health Modalities and History in Latinx Communities.

Jonathan Cortez, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies at Brown University, following their introductory presentation at the Smithsonian Latino Center. (Photo by Diana C. Bossa Bastidas) Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. Jonathan received their B.A. in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and Sociology from The University of Texas at Austin in 2015. They received their M.A. in Public Humanities from the John Nicolas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage in route to their Ph.D. Their work focuses on Latinx history, 20th-century agricultural labor, comparative/relational ethnic studies, and public humanities. Specifically, Jonathan focuses on the construction of locally- and federally-funded labor camps and the lived experiences of laborers in these camps through issues of race, gender, health, and immigration.

Jonathan will be working with María Martínez, Program Specialist; and Antonio Curet, Curator at the National Museum of the American Indian on the practicum - Contextualizing Museum Archaeological Collections: The Case of Pre-Columbian Mirrors.

Maeve Coudrelle, Ph.D. candidate in the Art History Department at Temple University, following her introductory presentation at the Smithsonian Latino Center. (Photo by Diana C. Bossa Bastidas)

Maeve Coudrelle is a Ph.D. candidate and University Fellow in the Art History Department at Temple University. Her dissertation focuses on biennials, print culture, and theories of cultural contact, looking specifically to global print exhibitions from 1950 to the present in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. Focusing on regions with colonial pasts and a connection to the print as protest, her dissertation will highlight the role of exhibitions in positioning the identity of a city or nation on the global stage. She hopes to make clear not only the potential of visual objects to re-orient our understanding of human interaction and encounter, but also to underscore that exhibitions exist as theoretical arguments, rather than unbiased histories. Maeve will be working with Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Museum Curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, on the practicum - Research of Black and Latino designers.

Stephanie Huezo, Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington where she is studying Latin American and Latino History, following her presentation on “Maestros populares and the Narrative of Liberation in El Salvador and in the U.S. – Salvadoran Diaspora (1980 – 2009)”. (Photo by Diana C. Bossa Bastidas) Stephanie Huezo is a Salvadoran-American and New York native. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington studying Latin American and Latino History. Her dissertation focuses on the community-based education in El Salvador, critically examined everyday experiences of students to raise consciousness of the oppressed. She analyzes how teachers used popular education as a tool for resistance, as a strategy for survival during the civil war (1980-1992), and its impact on the U.S. Salvadoran diaspora. Stephanie will be working with Ranald Woodaman, Director of Exhibits and Public Programs (and LMSP Alumnus), at the Smithsonian Latino Center on the practicum - Latino DC History Project: Interpreting Central American Women’s Work.

Ismael Illescas, Ph.D. candidate in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, following his presentation on “Born to Create: Graffiti, Street, Art, and Patial Politics in the Post Industrial City of Los Angeles”. (Photo by Diana C. Bossa Bastidas)

Ismael Illescas is a Ph.D. candidate in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His interest in graffiti and street art stems from his involvement in the subculture growing up in South Central Los Angeles during the early 2000s. His research registers Latin@s contributions to the making of graffiti and street art in Los Angeles, and examines the contradictions concerning its celebration in museum and gallery spaces and its criminalization outside of those spatial confines. He has a B.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara as well as an Associates of Arts degree in Liberal Arts from Santa Monica College.

Ismael will be working with Melissa Carrillo, Director of New Media & Technology (and LMSP alumna) at the Smithsonian Latino Center on the practicum - Latinos in the 21st Century: A Digital Experience for All.

Daniela Jiménez, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chicanx Studies and a first-year student in the MLIS program at UCLA, following her presentation on Exploring Relational Chicanxs Studies/U.S. Latinx through Popular Culture and Japanese Cultural Productions. (Photo by Diana C. Bossa Bastidas)

Daniela Jiménez is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chicanx Studies and a first-year student in the MLIS program at UCLA. Most recently, she is completing a graduate certificate program through the Urban Humanities Initiative --an interdisciplinary effort to explore urban space and cities as artifacts through the fields of architecture and design, urban planning, and the humanities. Her research interests include the reconfiguration and reinterpretation of Chicanx and U.S. Latinx in European and Asian countries, the role of social media in intercultural exchange, community-based archives, and archival theory and practice. Outside of her graduate work, Daniela is involved with the revitalization of Third Woman Press. Daniela will be working with Alison Oswald, Archivist at the National Museum of American History, on the practicum - Documenting Spanish Language Television through Archives.

Verónica Méndez, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, following her presentation on Locating Tejanas in Nineteenth Century U.S. – Mexico Borderlands. (Photo by Diana C. Bossa Bastidas)

Verónica Méndez was born in Mexico, and raised in San Antonio, TX. She completed her graduate training in the Midwest and is currently living in New Haven, CT. She is a first-generation immigrant, mama scholar and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Working at the intersection of Borderlands Studies, Chicana/o Studies, Latin American and U.S. History, her dissertation interrogates questions of sovereignty, race, gender and citizenship across shifting regimes in nineteenth century San Antonio, Texas. Her focus centers on how Tejanas experienced and negotiated their in/exclusion from imperial and national constructions of citizenship and subject making.

Verónica will be working with Mireya Loza, Curator (and LMSP alumna) at the National Museum of American History on the practicum - Documenting and Collecting Spanish-language Television.

Rudy Mondragón, Ph.D. candidate in Chicana and Chicano Studies at the UCLA, following his presentation on “That’s Totally Disrupting”: Ring Entrances as Sites of Resistance. (Photo by Diana C. Bossa Bastidas)

Rudy Mondragón is a Ph.D. candidate in Chicana and Chicano Studies at the UCLA. His research intentionally responds to Jorge Iber and José Alamillo’s call upon scholars to examine the racialized, gendered, class-based and transnational dimensions of sport among Mexican American and Latina/o experiences. Rudy’s research utilizes the sport of boxing as a site to interrogate representations of race and ethnicity, masculinities, immigration, and citizenship. His focus is on the ways boxers of color use spatial strategies to negotiate their position within and beyond the neo-liberal structures of boxing to creatively claim space, perform resistance, and disrupt the status quo. Methodologically, Rudy is interested in textual analysis of media, archival work, participation observation, and in-depth interviews. Rudy will be working with Margaret Salazar-Porzio, Curator at the National Museum of American History on the practicum - Latinos and Baseball: In the Barrios and the Big Leagues.

Pau Nava, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan’s American Culture program, following their introductory presentation at the Smithsonian Latino Center. (Photo by Diana C. Bossa Bastidas)

Pau Nava is a self-identified Art Queerstorian. Pau’s research centers on visual representations of queer Latinidad. As a genderqueer person of color, Pau’s social location is a driving force for their consideration of gender within transgender studies that interrogates the limits of the gender binary. They received their B.A. in Art History and Latinx studies, and as a native of the Chicagoland area, spent their undergraduate career researching mural history in Chicago’s Mexican-American neighborhood of Pilsen through the McNair Scholars program.

Pau will be working with Josh Franco, Collection Specialist at the Archives of American Art on the practicum - Research & development of Collection Plan for a target area of the United States.

Carlos Parra, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Southern California American Culture program, following their introductory presentation at the Smithsonian Latino Center. (Photo by Diana C. Bossa Bastidas) Carlos Francisco Parra is a doctoral student in the University of Southern California’s Department of History. Inspired by his experiences growing up in a bicultural border town, Parra is fascinated by the issue of cultural identity formation among Mexican Americans in the greater U.S.-Mexican border region. His research focuses on the cultural, political, and economic development of that international boundary as well as the formation of identities and communities along the border. Prior to his doctoral work, he attended the University of Arizona (B.A. in Secondary Education) and the University of New Mexico (M.A. in History) and also served as a public high school history teacher in his home community in Nogales, Arizona. Carlos will be working with Kathy Franz, Curator at the National Museum of American History on the practicum - Documenting and Collecting Spanish-language Television.

Follow the #LMSP Fellows via instagram @smithsonian_lmsp @slc_latino, the Smithsonian Latino Center Facebook page or via twitter @SLC_Latino.

[raystart]

Technology, Innovation, and Modern War – Class 8 – AI – Chris Lynch and Nand Mulchandani

We just held our eighth session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy.

Today’s topic was Artificial Intelligence and Modern War.

Catch up with the class by reading our summaries of the previous seven classes here.

Some of the readings for this class session included What The Machine Learning Value Chain Means For Geopolitics, How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape The Global Order, An Understanding Of Ai’s Limitations Is Starting To Sink In, and The Panopticon Is Already Here.

AI and The Department of Defense In our last class session General Shanahan, described the mission of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (the JAIC) which is to insert AI across the entire Department of Defense. He also said, “The most important hire I made in my time at the JAIC was the chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani.” Nand changed the culture of the JAIC, bringing in Silicon Valley tools for product development, product management and for the first time a culture that focused on UI/UX, MVPs and continuous integration and deployment.

In this class session Nand Mulchandani, JAIC CTO who just completed an extended stint as Acting Director, continued the discussion of AI and the role of the JAIC.

In addition to Nand, the class also heard from Chris Lynch, founder of the Defense Digital Service (DDS), now the CEO of Rebellion Defense, a new vendor of AI to the DOD. One of the main purposes of the class is to expose our best and brightest to DoD challenges and inspire them to serve. Chris’s story of why he started DDS and how he built the team is a model for how you create a movement.

I’ve extracted and paraphrased a few of their key insights below, but there are many others throughout this substantive discussion, and I urge you to read the entire transcript (here and here) and watch the video.

—-

Nand Mulchandani

How the JAIC is Organized The JAIC is a tiny team, yet we have a product directorate with 32 products that we’re building across six verticals – all the way from warfighter health to Joint warfighting to Business Process automation, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, cybersecurity and predictive maintenance. And we own the AI autonomous weapon systems ethics and policy for the DOD.

We have an acquisition arm and Congress is probably going to give us acquisition authority this year. And we have a missions team headed up by a one-star Flag Officer with six O-6 level officers (Colonels and Navy Captains) heading up the different missions.

Selling JAIC Like Enterprise Sales When General Shanahan brought me in a year and a half ago, we were focused on building one-off products that in some sense were what I called “using a peashooter against a tank.” One product at a time wasn’t going to change the trajectory of the DOD. This is where I brought in the thinking of how we build businesses here in Silicon Valley. We needed to be building leveraged business models in scale. Leverage is a key part of how you change a 3-million-person organization through technology.

Everything that we do at the JAIC has to be built and done with leverage in mind. I organized my missions teams like an enterprise sales team. We took all the colonels and the captains and said, “You are now going out there and finding the repeatable customer patterns. You’re not finding the one-off custom projects to come build. Instead you need to find the patterns, where I can build a single piece of IP or technology and then “sell it” to all the combatant commands and services equally.” Because doing one-offs is never ever going to change the DOD.

JAIC Is Applied AI – Focused on Impact AI is not a single technology. It’s picked up every piece of technology in statistics and regression and we’re dealing anywhere from string data to numeric data to audio, language, still image things, full motion video object recognition.

But we take this technology and apply it to a particular set of customer problems and focus on the impact. I take a very practical approach to this. I’m an entrepreneur and an implementation guy. So, my focus is on practical ways of moving this big rock, in a in a tactical, tangible way, slowly and surely, while big thinkers will the work on the broader theoretical pieces.

For instance, inside the DOD we have aging equipment and we have a number of business processes that are really less than optimum. How do we tackle those with AI which can become quick wins so that success begets success?

However, using AI for new warfighting capability that’s much, much more complicated. That’s the stuff that Rebellion and Anduril and a number of other companies are helping us with.

Connecting Systems End to End We’re applying AI across the board. Take a look at the diagram below. On the left is the Pentagon with  highly connected data centers with high bandwidth. And on the right, you’ve got the tactical edge, where we’ve got UAVs, tanks, spacecraft, etc.

At the JAIC we’re focusing on what we call the autonomy space – close combat, AI for small unit maneuvers, around things for SOCOM, and what the Marines and others are going to have to do with the new National Defense Strategy and new operational concepts.

And then we’re also focused on autonomy. The magic words – Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) – are the automation pieces. How do you connect all of our systems end to end? That requires targeting logistics, fires, everything else. Today, it’s a process that’s half manual, half PowerPoint, half Excel, half whiteboard, and half a bunch of lieutenants, majors and colonels all drawing stuff and cobbling it together. If we agree that the next generation of warfare is going to be fought at the speed of software, you need these end-to-end systems all connected together in a backplane, a platform.

Now the problem is, in the diagram below on the left, this is what our DOD architecture looks like today. It’s a bunch of vertically integrated snowflake applications with a mouse and a keyboard and a screen. Applications are developed in silos, making it impossible to enable centralized functionality.

And for students of economics, you see the cost curve. The graph on the left just doesn’t work. Your marginal costs and your average costs of building software do not go down over time. What’s ironic is that software is one of the few businesses where the more you build, the cheaper it gets, it should.

The curve you want is on the right – lower marginal cost per application, rapid development, increased developer productivity, etc. And the only way you’re going to get there is through building common platform services and the application architecture that internet-scale companies do today. And in the DOD that discussion and ideas are completely missing. And so we continue to build stuff as it is on the left. The discussion we’re having in the Pentagon is how do we move things from left to the right.

Moving from Vertical Silos to Horizontal Platforms Enables “Software defined warfare” Our observation is that the architecture of DOD systems is vertically scaled. What that means is that for that last few decades the goal for every weapon system is about how does each generation get a bigger and bigger version of the same weapon system?

Today that means we just made our targets bigger for our adversaries. Think of a giant aircraft carrier sitting out in the ocean with a hypersonic missile targeted against it. It’s like a giant, vertically scaled data center that we used to have 15, 20 years ago. The architecture changes we need to make in our design for the next generation Combat Systems are precisely the same things that we had to do to change the way we operated data centers. Which is moving from stateful, long running, individual systems, to horizontally scaled, stateless systems. We need them attritable, able to work in denied and degraded environments.

This is what we’re thinking when we call it “software defined warfare.”

However, AI as a services-oriented architecture has to get built out on top of an infrastructure platform. The biggest problem is that no one in the DOD owns running that. So while others can run the JEDI cloud for the DOD, nobody owns running application services for the DOD. And the JAIC can’t run them because we’re not an operational software organization.

Joint Common Foundation One of the biggest mandates we’re focused on now is the Joint Common Foundation, the JCF. It’s an AI development and data environment for the DOD that democratizes access to compute and data.

The vision is a tactical team sitting out in one of our remote bases. Imagine if they can power up a secure laptop, crank out 30 lines of Python code; and grab a set of services – logistic services, mapping services, targeting services, etc,– that are DOD wide available directly through the JCF; and crank out a piece of code that they get into production, use it for a month and then throw it away.

That is the reconfigurability and speed that we need to have at the DOD. So if we are ever in combat, the reconfigurability of our infrastructure, whether it be hardware infrastructure at the tactical edge or a back end systems to react, that is the level of game that we have to have, or we’re toast. That’s it. It’s that simple.

—–

Chris Lynch Culture and the culture of change – Getting the Job to Run the Defense Digital Service In 2015, the Chief Technology Officer at the White House, Todd Park, mentioned I ought to meet with the Department of Defense who were thinking of creating the Defense Digital Service, a DOD version of United States Digital Service. The goal was to bring modern, private-sector tools, technology, and talent into the DOD to solve high-impact challenges.

And Todd Park said, there’s going be a lot of people who want to do this, who want to lead innovation and a lot of people are going to come through, they’re going to pitch their version. I thought about the job like a startup. I came in with a pitch around a “SWAT team of nerds,” one that would work on problems of impact and things that matter. I remember the first time I walked into the waiting room for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. It felt like “Shark Tank.” There were a bunch of other people all going in to do their pitch and talk about their idea for what they wanted to build. Some of them had presentations, and all of them had things printed out of course, because it’s the Department of Defense. Here, we’re talking about technology and innovative ideas, and doing things different with technology and software, and of course, nobody was able to do an actual presentation with a computer.

I chose to show up that day representing what I thought was the culture of what it had to be from the very beginning. That if we tried to build the bridge by being what they were, it wasn’t going to be right. It wasn’t going to be authentic. And we would never attract the best people into the most important mission in the entire world – the mission of defense and national security.

So I showed up in a hoodie and I showed up as me. I didn’t print off a presentation. I pitched the idea, let’s do the SWAT team of nerds. And, and I can remember it felt really, really, weird standing in that office with people in suits and people in uniform in the military. It was just such a different world, completely and totally unlike anything that I had ever seen.

And you know, that’s what they wanted. And that’s what I wanted to be in that part of the story. Because I felt it was important that we actually get people to show up to do the mission. I think that that’s probably one of the most critical things that became the basis of how I thought about what we were building.

Recruiting for the Defense Digital Service I told people, I want you to leave your job where you’re paid more than what I’m going to pay you. I want you to leave your job, where you’re getting free meals, where you’re living and working around a bunch of other software engineers. And I want you to come into a place that is going to be so unbelievably difficult, frustrating, sometimes demoralizing, and very, very difficult. I want you to come into that.

And I want you to give me six months to one year. But I also just want you to be you.

And when you leave, if you do your job here, if you do the thing that we showed up to do, and if we are successful in what we’re trying to accomplish, it will change your life until the day you die. You’ll never be able to get it out of your blood. And that’s the place that we built. I think that that’s the culture, I think that’s the right place to be.

Because it allowed us to show up in what we were comfortable wearing, we became known as, the people in hoodies. And you would have the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff doing a presentation for newly minted generals. And they would show a slide with a picture of me with orange tennis shoes on. And it just became our uniform. And it also made it really easy to be like, “Oh, that’s Chris Lynch. He’s a nerd, right? That’s the person that I want to talk to.”

And that was the culture that we decided to build. Just keep focused on results and not getting caught up in sizzle. But getting caught up in real things, in building real tangible stuff. And I think we were successful.

Starting Rebellion Defense When I left the Defense Digital Service, I felt like I was standing at the shore of this vast sea of all the things that I might do next.

Rebellion Defense was built around the idea of let’s do something spectacular. Let’s continue that mission, but at a scale that would be impossible inside the DOD. And we would be able to bring in incredible new people who wanted to work on something meaningful and impactful.

Surprises from Being Outside the Government Selling In It’s funny, one of the things I never had to worry about on the inside of the Pentagon was budget. As it turns out, finding who has a budget and can allocate funds is a lot more complicated than you’d think. Just because you find someone who has a budget, they have to find a contracting office to do the buy.

My second point is, if you simply believe that you’re going to show up with an awesome product and awesome technology, guess what? That doesn’t mean anything. if you’re selling this customer technology you already lost. The DOD is a mission-driven organization. Which means you have to understand what they are doing. If there’s a person saying, “Oh I need more AI and ML,” they’re likely not the person who has the budget at the end of the day.

Next, this space has a lot of companies in it that have been here for much longer than you. And you probably don’t know anybody in this space. They do. They know them all. They previously have occupied the jobs that the current people in those roles are doing. And so they have all those relationships. That’s a moat.

And incumbents and competitors say they do pretty much anything that you will say that you do. They’ll say, AI and Machine Learning? We do AI/ML on quantum clusters with Cheddar cheese. And literally, I have had people who send me the most random word-salad construction of words and phrases, I don’t even understand what you’re saying. I get that all the time. I can’t tell you the weird stuff that I get sent my way.

So you have to find that partner that has a belief in solving a problem. They have to know what is real and what is not.

How Will AI Be Used? Why Should Silicon Valley Engineers and Our Students Get Involved?

We either show up or we cede our ability to influence and decide on that policy.

If the world’s greatest technologists do not show up and build the systems for the Department of Defense, to lead in this area and decide the ethical and moral boundaries that we believe in, and that we as a nation are comfortable with, somebody else is going to show up and lead in the way that those technologies are built. And they will decide how they’re used and that will be the definition of ethics and morality.

So you have one very, very simple choice: Show up. If you don’t show up, then you don’t get to play a part in the discussion. Because if other countries who do not share your beliefs become the leaders in how these capabilities are used in a military context and they deploy them, it doesn’t matter what you think. That becomes the norm.

I believe that technologists – people like you, and people like me – we can’t give that up to somebody else. I don’t want somebody less capable than the best in this country to show up and build those systems.

Postscript

The Department of Defense awarded a $106 million contract to build the JAIC’s Joint Common Foundation to… Deloitte Consulting.

Read the entire transcript of Chris Lynch and Nand Mulchandani talks here and here and watch the video below.

If you can’t see the video click here

Lessons Learned

 Nand Mulchandani

The JAIC acts like DOD’s AI service bureau, building leveraged business models in scale.

It’s working on a portfolio of 32 products in 6 verticals across the DOD

It’s looking for repeatable customer patterns

It’s applying AI to both autonomy and automation applications

For example, the Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS)

The DOD needs to move from vertical silos to horizontal platforms

AI needs to become a services-oriented architecture built out on top of an infrastructure platform

Hopefully the Joint Common Foundation will do just that

Chris Lynch

Built the Defense Digital Service as a SWAT team of nerds

How he motivated his team is inspiring:

“If you do your job here, if you do the thing that we showed up to do, and if we are successful in what we’re trying to accomplish, it will change your life until the day you die. You’ll never be able to get it out of your blood. And that’s the place that we built.”

Surprises at Rebellion Defense included:

How to find customers with a budget

Competing with incumbents who came from the revolving door

Competing with other companies who claim “we can do that, too”

Why work with the DOD on AI?

“If the world’s greatest technologists do not show up to lead and decide the ethical and moral boundaries that we believe in, and that we as a nation are comfortable with, somebody else is going to show up and lead. And they will decide how they’re used and that will be the definition of ethics and morality.”

Show Up

[delhi-architect2]

Journal - Zaha Hadid Architects Designs “Fully-Customizable” Housing System for Honduras

Architects: Showcase your next project through Architizer and sign up for our inspirational newsletter.

Zaha Hadid Architects has partnered with International engineering consultant AKT II and Hilson Moran Partnership to develop a modular housing project for the Caribbean island of Roatán, off the coast of Honduras. Called Roatán Próspera Residences, the project takes an innovative and sustainable approach to home development.

Zaha Hadid Architects’ Computational and Design Group has created a digital architecture platform that allows residents to customize the size, arrangement and furnishings of their prospective homes. After a floor plan is finalized, the structure will be algorithmically generated according to parcel size.

Each home can range in size from one to five “voxels”, which is the name for a cubic area of 376 square feet that’s 13 feet tall. This will allow for 15,000 unique home arrangements, with each sharing common design elements and similar service locations to make installation easier.

“This digital platform adapts varying configurations of standardized parts to create individual residences that suit each homeowner,” said the firm. One of the key aspects of the Roatán Próspera Residences is its close connection with the surrounding ecological and social context. The design team, partnered by developer Honduras Próspera LLC, are heavily prioritizing the project’s sustainability.

Residences will be composed of locally sourced timber, harvested from sustainably managed forests on the mainland. It will then be processed, transported and assembled off-site to cut down on embodied energy in the construction process without disturbing the local environment. In doing so, Zaha Hadid Architects aims to establish a localized supply chain in order to make the project more eco-friendly.

A number of passive strategies developed with Hilson Moran are also intended to reduce the project’s energy consumption. This includes a dehumidifying system that collects water vapor and filters it for use in the residences along with shading canopies with solar panels. Additionally, each module will be shaded and oriented towards the water to encourage passive ventilation.

Roatán Próspera Residences will also offer a great degree of flexibility. The timber supports will be able to be taken down and reconfigured if more or less space is required. This also includes communal modules, including play areas and shaded structures, each inspired by palapas. 

Zaha Hadid Architects’ latest project aims to take a comprehensive, sustainable approach to construction. It is designed to provide homeowners with a new sense of agency, placing them in close proximity to the local community. The design process for the complex seeks to minimize waste, placing less stress on the surrounding environment. Whether or not the project is successful in achieving these goals will become clear in the months and years after its completion.

Roatán Próspera Residences is set to break ground later this year.

Architects: Showcase your next project through Architizer and sign up for our inspirational newsletter.

All images via Zaha Hadid Architects

The post Zaha Hadid Architects Designs “Fully-Customizable” Housing System for Honduras appeared first on Journal.

from Journal https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/stories/zaha-hadid-architects-honduras-housing/ Originally published on ARCHITIZER RSS Feed: https://architizer.com/blog

[anniversary-magazine]

Portland Residence by Atelier Barda — a Full Renovation with Classic, Timeless Lines

The Portland Residence is a historical stone house located in the Town of Mount-Royal, a “model city” built in the early 20th century. The architectural firm Atelier Barda entirely renovated the property and created a custom furniture collection through its new Foraine par Atelier Barda division.

The architects’ mandate was to renovate all the spaces in the three-story house, totaling 3,000 square feet, and to add an extension at the back. Important considerations in the redesign were the house’s location in the heart of the garden city and a desire to respect the heritage value of the surrounding built environment. The main living area on the ground floor has an open layout that sets it apart from the upper floors. The partitioned layout of the original residence was entirely reconfigured to allow for fluid, intuitive circulation.

A central service block, around which family life revolves, was designed in the form of a black rectangular box connecting the different levels. It includes a closet and powder room, along with kitchen appliances and equipment, and provides access to the stairs and a bookcase. It also serves as a transition between the private spaces (bathrooms, bedrooms) and common areas (living room, entrance hall, kitchen, family room), thus freeing up the peripheral space for occupants’ use. The anthracite oak finish contrasts with the light tones of the rest of the space.

The materials selected for the project help to create a soft atmosphere. The chevron parquet in natural light oiled oak and clean-lined moldings strike an elegant balance between the house’s original features and new architectural elements.  

The thicknesses of the materials are concealed to obtain sharp edges where surfaces meet, playing with perceptions of volume and juxtaposition. The curved surfaces are not only a reference to the house’s original architectural features; they also promote fluid transition between spaces.

At the back of the house, a series of glass curtain walls were added, providing an unobstructed view of the garden and filtering diffuse, natural light over the entire floor. Fine black steel mullions conceal a high-performance thermal insulation system adapted to Quebec’s challenging climate.

Notable interior architectural details include carefully selected materials, curved walls and custom elements such as the stone mantlepiece, kitchen hood and stair railing.

In the living room, an iconic de Sede sofa faces the fireplace, helping to hierarchize the space and orient movement. Throughout the home are pieces of classic-lined furniture in solid anthracite oak (dining table, bench, coffee table, end tables, night tables). All of the pieces were designed by Foraine par Atelier Barda.

On the next floor are the bedrooms and a private office. In the bathrooms, a classic lime and tadelakt plaster finish with marble countertops and flooring create a peaceful environment. The skylight above the staircase allows abundant natural light to reach as far as the bedrooms.

This innovative redesign has freed the building’s spirit from its original constraints, giving it fresh expression in a setting that is both classic and resolutely contemporary.

All images © Alex Lesage

Courtesy of Atelier Barda

[architectnews]

2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion

2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion, Event + Exhibition Building Architect, UAE Design Project Images

2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion Design

ADUNIC: Event + Exhibition Architecture, UAE design by LAVA Architects

post updated 27 September 2021

The German Pavilion @ Expo 2020 Dubai opens on 1 October for six months.

Photo taken in September 2021:

image courtesy of architects practice

2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion Opening

German Pavilion design embodies message of sustainability

LAVA’s design of the German Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai is an ensemble of suspended cubes, a forest of steel poles, covered by a floating roof, opening on 1 October. And behind these visually exciting design elements everything from intelligent use of local climatic conditions to materials reuse to connectedness is sustainable.

“The key question was how to design a temporary exhibition and event space for up to three million visitors in a desert environment that was sustainable. LAVA’s solution linked the Expo theme of connectedness, with our approach of ‘more with less’, with humans interacting with nature and technology at its heart,” said Tobias Wallisser, director of LAVA.

Photos taken in August 2021:

1. BUILDING AS EXHIBIT: Social Sustainability

“The building design is part of the exhibition, a tool to connect people.”

“We wanted to address the Expo motto ‘Connecting Minds, Creating the Future’ and so the team chose to represent Germany as a ‘campus’, an open place for exchange of knowledge, ideas and innovations. Rather than placing the buildings horizontally across a site, three suspended cubes are assembled vertically. This loose, porous stacking of volumes, an ensemble rather than a single form, suggests interconnectedness,” said Christian Tschersich, project director, LAVA.

The positioning of the cantilevered cubes generates a spacious central atrium for gathering and events. At the heart of the visitor experience this covered vertical space visually connects all functional areas with one another, helps with way-finding, creates diverse visual relationships and access points, and assists with management of large visitor numbers.

The visitor route brings people continuously onto terraces (on top of the cubed spaces). They can see their past and future trajectory, engage with other people, and enjoy vistas out to the Expo site. The exhibition spaces inside the cubes (Energy Lab, Future City Lab, and Biodiversity Lab) feature individual immersive experiences, whilst terrace exhibitions invite group interaction.

Rather than a traditional exhibition hall the campus metaphor sees the whole building as an exhibit, not merely a canvas to display, but a tool for connecting people and content, and a place to experience German innovations.

2. BUILDING AS EXHIBIT: STRUCTURAL SUSTAINABILITY

The actual structure is the message.

“We incorporated the principle of sustainability right from the start by using the minimum amount of material to create maximum volume. LAVA’s ‘more with less’,” said Tschersich.

Three cubes were stacked on top of a plinth with other functions (restaurant, pre-show, office, back-ofhouse) formed as an abstract landscape. This created a large volume at the centre, and a roof creates shade and comfort – a technical cloud. A sandwich of three parts: landscape – stacked cubes – roof. People between nature and technology.

The clever positioning of the stacked cubes is driven by local climate and features passive energy-saving features that reduce the impact of direct sunlight, generate natural shade, decrease the heat load and optimise the indoor climate. This intelligent creation of shade by the building elements also makes “hybrid” air conditioning possible. It also referenced the design of the local courtyard house, with closed exterior facades and rooms oriented towards an inner airspace that open up to each other.

A hybrid facade minimises the sense of building bulk and creates an iconic framing of the space. At the upper level a dynamic arrangement of 900 vertical steel poles, a forest of trees swaying in the wind, creates movement. With gradually changing angles they frame the central atrium space and modulate light.

An opaque, trapezoidal single-layer ETFE membrane can be opened and closed, responsive to different climate conditions during the six-month Expo period, such as sandstorms and cooler days, and minimises the need for air conditioning. The pavilion’s outer shell also includes 1.5 metres wide glass elements that can be rotated and opened, allowing the building to breathe.

The visually striking technical cloud roof creates shade and comfort. It allows daylight into the interior through multiple small openings, similar to sunlight penetrating a forest canopy, creating an ever-changing visitor experience. Mirror surfaces reflect direct sunlight against the roof skin, a dynamic interplay of light. At night, a field of LED lights integrated in the ceiling make the building radiate from within.

Resource consumption and the circular economy were also major design drivers and are reflected in numerous passive and active sustainability features – from Design for Disassembly (DfD) to “Mine the Scrap”, “grey energy”, sustainable and reusable building materials. The building will be repurposed after the Expo is finished, with standardised building elements such as steel poles dismantled and reconfigured into different geometries.

LAVA’s bottom-up approach focussed on visitor comfort, technology in the service of humans. “At LAVA we’re always looking at the interaction between people and the physical environment they inhabit. Sustainability requires that environments are adaptable and changeable,” added Wallisser.

The transition from hot exterior to inside was carefully considered. To reduce temperature shock and save on energy costs the architects designed a transitional space where visitors entering the building, with lengthy queues, will be cooled by a gentle water mist emanating from steel poles allowing them to gradually acclimatise. The central atrium is cooled by cold air expelled from the air conditioned exhibition spaces, thereby reducing energy usage and improving visitor comfort.

“An efficiently stacked volume of space, responding to the local environment with an intelligent climate management system. This project shows how buildings can be optimised, made intelligent, be reconfigured, can adapt to changing users, environments, temperatures, acoustics, and light,” said Alexander Rieck, director, LAVA.

Chris Bosse LAVA Director added: “Functional requirements, visitor experience, climate and environmental concerns are all resolved thorough this clever multi-performative design.”

Added Wallisser: “Architecture isn’t purely a façade. Of course we wanted the building to be Instagrammable! But also innovative, thought-provoking, with an effective experiential quality. The hardware of the building creates a journey for visitors from around the world.”

The concept continues innovation in pavilion design, from London’s Crystal Palace to Germany’s history – Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion at Expo ’29 in Barcelona, Frei Otto at Montreal’s Expo ’67.

The German Pavilion houses a three-level restaurant, VIP spaces for business meetings, an auditorium for events and performances, plus work spaces for 50 staff. It is located in the sustainability section, close to Al Wasl Plaza, which forms the heart of the Expo site. Expo 2020 Dubai 1 October 2021 to 31 March 2022 is divided into three districts: sustainability, mobility and opportunity, with exhibitions from 190 countries.

The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy commissioned Koelnmesse GmbH to organise and run the German Pavilion. The “German Pavilion Expo 2020 Dubai Consortium”, comprising facts and fiction GmbH and NUSSLI Adunic AG is in charge of concept design, planning and realisation. Facts and fiction is responsible for content, exhibition and media design, and the pavilion was built by NUSSLI Adunic, with architecture and spatial design by LAVA.

2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion UAE – Building Information

NAME OF PROJECT German Pavilion Expo 2020 MINISTRY Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) MANAGEMENT Koelnmesse GmbH LOCATION Dubai, UAE CLIENT CONSORTIUM facts and fiction with NUSSLI ADUNIC STATUS Built 2021 SIZE 4,600m2; building height 27 m PRACTICE CREDITS LAVA: Tobias Wallisser, Alexander Rieck, Chris Bosse with Christian Tschersich Project Team: Maria Pachi, Ahmed Rihan, Niklas Knap, Daniele Colombati, Wassef Dabboussi Competition team: Maria Pachi, Christina Ciardullo, Courtney Jones, Jed Finanne, Benjamin Riess, Joanna Rzewuska PARTNERS: Concept design, planning and implementation – facts and fiction/NUSSLI Structural engineers – schlaich bergermann partner Climate – Transsolar Reuse – Certain Measures MEP – energytec Fire – Steinlehner Light – Kardorff Ingenieure DRAWINGS © facts and fiction | NUSSLI Group| LAVA IMAGE CREDITS: © German Pavilion Expo 2020 Dubai / Björn Lauen; NUSSLI Group

Previously on e-architect:

9 Nov 2018

2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion Building

Design: LAVA Architects

2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion Building Design by LAVA

A vertical campus of nature and technology

LAVA’s design for the German Pavilion Expo 2020 Dubai is a vertical campus of nature and technology, taking cues from the local architecture and Germany’s history of outstanding lightweight pavilion design. Demonstrating the Expo theme, everything from intelligent use of local climatic conditions to materials reuse to construction is sustainable.

On behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Economy and Energy, Koelnmesse GmbH is responsible for the organisation and operation of the Pavilion, with Consortium German Pavilion EXPO 2020 Dubai facts and fiction GmbH and ADUNIC AG (concept design, planning and implementation) and LAVA (architecture/spatial concepts).

CONCEPT The airy construction is an efficiently stacked volume of space. A visually striking freeform roof encloses a spacious volume and an intelligent ensemble of interlinked floating cubes housing exhibition and event spaces. The contrast of enclosed air space and immersive exhibition experiences generates an exciting exchange between interior and exterior spaces. The open structure is formed from abstract elements and surprising materials, a composition of repetition and differentiation.

The concept continues German innovation in Expo pavilion design by using new ways of forming space – from Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona 1929 to Frei Otto’s Montreal 1967 to Fritz Bornemann’s spherical concert hall Osaka 1970.

It also responds to the local climate and references the local courtyard house with closed exterior facade and rooms oriented towards an inner airspace.

ROOF An opaque trapezoidal single-layer ETFE membrane creates a large volume of space with a minimal enveloping surface and highly efficient material. The metallic skin lets light rays into the interior through many small openings, similar to sunlight penetrating forest foliage, creating a continuously changing visitor experience.

Mirror surfaces reflect direct sunlight against the roof skin, a dynamic interplay of light. At night, a field of LED lights integrated in the ceiling make the building radiate from within. Supported by vertical steel cables, the cloudscape roof keeps out the heat and controls light and temperature in the atrium. It reduces production energy, optimises resources by weight savings and creates the technical conditions for a pleasant visitor experience.

ATRIUM A central atrium, a green, open space, connects all visitor areas and allows many surprising perspectives. The composition of exhibition spaces, event area and restaurants are interwoven through these manifold visual relationships. The pavilion tour brings visitors continuously onto the terraces of the open atrium, providing an overview of their location within the pavilion, the variety of topics and social interaction with other visitors. Native German plants hang from the terraces and roof creating comfort in the atrium and special light.

LAYOUT The vertical campus courses between a landscaped layer on the lower two levels and the cloud roof. The rear east is a vertical backbone with technical facilities and service functions, and the front western side houses exhibition and restaurant spaces layered horizontally. The sequence of stacked seemingly floating building elements is a journey through the campus learning experience – from enrolment to learning curriculum to graduation. The ‘laboratories’, purposedesigned for exhibition, performance and dining, are grouped around the atrium.

SUSTAINABILITY The design continues LAVA’s philosophy of sustainability at multiple levels, a strong visual symbol and example for visitors, by:

1. Material-optimised construction based on nature’s geometries. 2. Passive energy saving measures applied at the very outset in the design – for example the stacked building elements not only trap vertical airspace, but also minimise direct sunlight creating a sheltered atrium with minimal solar input and optimised climate. 3. Intelligent arrangement creates different spatial situations, not through complex technology, but rather through digitised production processes. 4. Minimisation of grey energy and operational energy. 5. Graduated climatic zones of individual areas allow reduced energy use, whilst supporting the diversified room experience for visitors. 6. Reuse of building parts and materials – using algorithms to reduce waste. 7. Barrier-free access.

Tobias Wallisser, LAVA director, said: “It exemplifies LAVA’s work with natural geometries to generate efficient and beautiful structures and space through intelligent skins using integrative technology and cutting edge materials. And how buildings perform at many sustainable levels – environmental, structural and social.”

Alexander Rieck, LAVA director said: “The project continues LAVA’s expertise working in desert environments (Masdar Plaza UAE and more recently the university masterplan and headquarters for KACST in Saudi Arabia.) The integration of local climatic conditions, innovative use of recyclable materials and ground-breaking climate control technologies demonstrate how one can build and operate in harmony with the location.”

LAVA Director Chris Bosse said: “The challenge is: how does a country physically represent itself in an exhibition like the Expo? World exhibitions give a glimpse of the future from the perspective of their time. Our pavilion design shows Germany’s contribution to that view of the future. The sequence of different spatial areas encourages visitors to have fun whilst learning.”

“The building itself is part of the exhibition, a tool for connecting people and content, both a model of sustainability and a place to discover German innovations and solutions on this important topic,” added Christian Tschersich, Project Manager at LAVA.

The Expo 2020 theme is “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future” and it runs from 20 October 2020 to 10 April 2021.

IMAGE CREDITS: (c) facts and fiction | adunic | LAVA

LAVA

2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion Building images / information received 081118

20 Aug 2018

2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion

Design: LAVA Architects

2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion

Cologne, August 2018 – EXPO 2020: Cologne creativity and Swiss construction expertise for Dubai

facts and fiction and ADUNIC win German Pavilion bid

In a key milestone on the road to EXPO 2020 Dubai, Germany has decided who is to design and build the German Pavilion. The bid was won by a consortium comprising Cologne-based agency facts and fiction and Swiss construction company ADUNIC, with architecture to be designed by Berlin firm LAVA.

While facts and fiction will be responsible for content, exhibition and media design, building the pavilion will be ADUNIC’s job. facts and fiction specialises in spatial communication and ADUNIC are specialists in the construction of temporary buildings. As well as matching both companies’ profiles, the brief reflects the essence of Expos, which are all about giving those who visit during the short six months of the event an Expo experience that stays with them forever. “We’re delighted to have won the German Pavilion contest,” says Dietmar Jähn, a managing director at facts and fiction, commenting on the selection committee’s decision. “It’s a dream come true and a great honour for us to have our concept chosen to represent Germany at the EXPO in Dubai.”

An EU-wide notice of tender was published back in September 2017, inviting teams to apply to design the concept and to plan and build the interior and exterior of the German Pavilion for EXPO 2020 Dubai. The brief also included the technical management of the pavilion during the World Expo from 20 October 2020 to 10 April 2021 and the dismantling of the pavilion after the event.

Initially, applicants were asked to draw up a high-level concept. This was followed by a second phase, in which a 17-member selection committee (made up of representatives of various federal ministries, trade/industry associations and experts on Expo and regional matters) chose five interdisciplinary teams to put through to the next phase – the design of a detailed concept for the German Pavilion.

“The awarding of the contract to facts and fiction and ADUNIC marks the end of a ten-month process. We are happy that things can now progress and building work can start on our plot in Dubai next year,” says Dietmar Schmitz from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. As Commissioner General of the German Pavilion, Mr Schmitz is responsible for the country’s presence in Dubai. He is head of the “Policy on fairs and exhibitions, expo participations” division at the Ministry and has been involved in World Exhibitions across the globe over the course of many years.

The two partners in the German Pavilion consortium are no newcomers to Expo either. facts and fiction designed the Monaco and Kazakhstan pavilions in Milan in 2015 as well as the German presence at EXPO 2012 in the Korean city of Yeosu. ADUNIC built a number of the pavilions in Milan in 2015.

New to Expo is LAVA, an international team of architects with offices in Berlin, Stuttgart and Sydney and a wealth of experience, having worked on a wide variety of major projects around the world. In the Middle East, for instance, LAVA helped plan the Masdar eco city in Abu Dhabi and also designed the architecture for the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

facts and fiction and ADUNIC were selected on the basis of the tender criteria. The main requirement was to take the EXPO theme of “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future” and the sustainability subtheme chosen by Germany and translate them into a pavilion concept that will grasp visitors’ interest and hold it from start to finish while also creating a seamless marriage between the pavilion’s architecture and its content.

But all has not yet been revealed. The concept will not be presented in Germany until a press conference at Koelnmesse in Cologne on 4 September 2018, to be followed by a second press conference at the Steigenberger Hotel Business Bay in Dubai on 19 September. Koelnmesse is the company that will be organising and running the German Pavilion at the 2020 World Expo in Dubai on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

For more information, visit www.expo2020germany.de and on the YouTube channel

LAVA

2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion images / information received 200818

Location: Jebel Ali, Dubai, UAE

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Comments / photos for the 2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion page welcome

Website: 2020 Expo Dubai German Pavilion

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