This car is pretty exciting. Borne out of the British love of all things sleek and fast and out of the new sense of environmental duty is this electric sports car designed and built by the Lightning Car Company in England.
The design of the car is stunning, with flowing lines that wouldn’t look out of place on an Aston Martin, but with a slightly more futuristic feel, mainly on the rear of the car. But looks are only a small part of this machine’s draw.
Only the second electric supercar to have been built, the first being Telsa’s delightful Electric Roadsters, the Lightning breaks automative convention to match it’s gasoline powered counterparts. The main problem with electric motors is they simply just don’t have as much get-up-and-go as petrol ones. the Lightning tackles this in a unique way. Rather than burden a single engine with moving the mechanics in the car and the car itself, each wheel has it’s own motor, removing unnecessary mechanics and providing much more power than would usually be available from a single engined vehicle. Plus, the lack of an engine reduces the components that can go wrong, essentially making a maintenance-free motor.
The Lightning Car Company explain:
Hi-Pa Drive™ from PML Flightlink Ltd. is a revolution in motor technology and it’s a British innovation to boot! With its integrated motor and drive electronics in one single unit it produces an ultra high power density - up to 20 times more than conventional systems.
The compact, energy-efficient, electric wheel motors produce unrivalled levels of torque with internal heavy-duty tapered roller bearings that can withstand heavy radial loads for robust use. Yet they achieve the power to weight ratio important for the performance sports car capability of the Lightning.
Other features include total weather proofing, total energy transfer and several levels of redundancy, so any single failure will not prevent the vehicle from operating safely.
The car claims to out accelerate a Porsche and has a top speed of somewhere in the region of 130mph. Who said that going green meant the end of fun motoring?
Good design always seems so simple. The Jardín Botánico de Medellín in Colombia by Plan B is a great example – it takes a pretty basic program (a canopy in a botanical garden) and a pretty straightforward idea (hey, why not emulate the surrounding trees) and makes something pretty elegant. Made of reclaimed pine, the tree-like structures shade the garden courtyard, collect rainwater, and glow like lanterns at night. See video below.
Following on from our Stacked Living piece, and a big thanks to Kim at Nomadhome for sending us the information on this, is this solution to modern living. The Nomadhome responds to the transient and nomadic nature of our modern lives by providing a beautiful living space that is both mobile and temporary.
The idea behind the Nomadhome was to develop an efficient modular concept with a maximum of flexibility and to bring this unique product to standard production without losing its stylish form & high-class complexity. The beauty of the Nomadhome is that the unit can be transported, assembled and then disassembled and transported to a new location without any degredation in form, making it a truly versatile design.
Construction time is only 3 days. massively reducing the cost of building a permanent home, and can be dismantled in just 1 day. The unit is completely changeable and expandable to meet the needs of the indivdual it is housing. This is perhaps one of the strongest points of this design - it’s flexibility. The design of the home fits around the indivdual’s lifestyle as opposed to changing your lifestyle to fit the unit.
The units uses are as varied as the potential of the layout, as the creators of Nomadhome explain:
The NOMADHOME is a chameleon. Even its facade is changeable and available in many various designs, colors and surfaces. The easy change of NOMADHOMES outside makes it perfect for companies who need to change their branding from time to time.
Nomadhome’s high-class quality interior materials guarantee a very comfortable living or working-atmosphere with pleasant acoustics.
A brilliantly exectuted solution, unique in it’s design and flexibility, and perfect for those of us constantly on the move yet wanting our own space. I’m saving up for one.
This year’s Tile of Spain Award in Architecture went to José Durán Fernández for his inventive use of ceramic tiles to literally and figuratively brighten a forsaken but busy street in Burriana. Each year this competition seeks entries that display how the traditional ceramic tile can be used in modern ways, whether is urban, exterior or interior design. This was the first year that an urban design has won the first prize. Similar to the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz, this year’s winner shows how linked segments of yellow, blue, green, orange, purple, and red tiles can create a modern pathway between the Plaza Mayor and the Carmelite Church. More information about some of the other winners can be found at http://www.spaintiles.info/awards/
I’ve never been a huge fan of the work of French architect Jean Nouvel - most of it seemed interested in being provocative and little else. That being said, his design for a 75-story residential building in New York is really pretty brilliant. The tower grows skyward like a glass and steel tree, contorting to fit the confines of the City Zoning setbacks to create a drop-dead gorgeous form that is completely logical. Predictably, the neighbors hate it – but as yet the project is moving ahead.
This one is an interesting concept. A pre-fab house with a host of eco-credentials, that can be put together in a matter of days. The Perrinepod design is quite retro, oblong shaped with rounded edges. The idea behind the design is to counter our over-cluttered existence and create beautiful and useable living environment that can adapt to any setting. As the architect, Jean-mic Perrine states:
“My design is about appreciating the beauty of simple, uncluttered space.” The perrinepod is very functional, very sexy, very simple, with the form of the spaces inside following the function, there’s no pretense, just simple, beautiful designs. It’s a really cool thing to have no falseness - for example, the bathrooms are simply designed as a place to wash, backed up by quality materials.
Living spaces have become as transient and irrelevant as clothes. It’s no longer a look for a generation, the look of ‘now’ only lasts for a three to four year period.
That approach is not sustainable and people are putting themselves under a lot of unnecessary pressure trying to keep up. The Perrine Pod is the antithesis of all of that - simple design, beautiful materials that will remain classic. It’s not a ‘look at me’ statement, but a home that is comfortable, stylish and above all, functional.”
A great idea if you ask me. The design is also stackable, giving the option of a larger, family home. The time-lapse video below shows just how quickly these things can be put together.
Mention green energy and most people think of solar panels or giant wind turbines. Well, think again. Researchers are developing new technologies to harvest the power of ocean waves – like this 200 meter rubber tube called the anaconda. See video below.
Congestion… pollution… cars are nothing but problems. But not for long. The brain trust at MIT’s Media Lab is currently developing a shared commuter vehicle system that combines the clean efficient driving of an electric car with the ingenious stackable parking of a Pringles can. See video below.
Maybe it was Al Gore. Maybe its skyrocketing fuel costs. But something’s changed and we all know it– we’ve got to move in a new direction on the environment. And maybe nothing’s more symbolic of this change than the High Line project in New York City. Designed by Field Operations in association with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the project renovates a 1-1/2 mile stretch of abandoned rail line into an elevated, linear park, perhaps the largest and most significant urban renewal for the city in a hundred years.
We know it’s hard for Brad Pitt to get publicity, so we’d like to give a shout to his Make It Right initiative. Founded after the botched recovery to Hurricane Katrina, the association is intended to develop low-cost sustainable dwellings for New Orleans. Twenty world famous architects have contributed their time and talents to design housing prototypes which cost less than $200,000. See the link below for designs.
This blog is brought to you by the team at Diseño Earle, International Architects. Diseño Earle specialise in modern design and work on projects all over the world in places such as Dubai,Spain,Morocco and Tunisia.
Diseño Earle also publishes a monthly magazine Modern Design, which is also available as a free PDF download.Modern Design highlights the finest examples of modern design, architecture, art, fashion and more.
