 |
|
|
|||||
On an unremarkable vacant lot in Atlantas West End, a proposed rowhouse construction project could soon become a milestone of modern design. The building itself is not particularly special; its 17 units have attractive geometrical facades, large picture windows, and will be affordably priced. More notable than the design of the project itself is how it was designed. To an uncommon degree, artificial intelligence was used extensively throughout the design process, from market analysis and conceptual design to regulatory compliance and material selection. The building, which is going up for zoning approvals this week, could be one of the first projects designed largely through AI to actually get constructed.The project was designedor, perhaps more accurately, codesignedby Cove Architecture, an arm of the technology services firm Cove, which offers AI consulting to architects and designers. Founded by two trained architects, Cove uses AI to optimize project planning, design, engineering, and bidding for architecture and developer clients around the world. Through Cove Architecture, the company is now using the AI tools its been building since 2017 to pursue AI-designed building projects in-house.Cofounders Sandeep Ahuja and Patrick Chopson say AI was used to greatly accelerate the Atlanta project, achieving a 60% reduction in design timelines, early-stage cost estimates that hit 95% accuracy, and a 40% cut in design iteration expenses. Instead of it taking six months, were doing it in a month, Ahuja says. Speed is the superpower.[Image: Cove Architecture]The little detailsWhile many architects were quick to embrace the visualization powers of generative AI, using it to pump out conceptual designs and lightning-fast renderings, a recent report showed that only 6% of architects are actually using AI regularly. Chopson says Cove Architecture is using AI for all the tasks that underlie the design.[Image: Cove Architecture]Complying with zoning codes is one major use case. The city of Atlantas zoning code is very complex. It has a lot of tables and different regulations. Youve got to go to different spots to understand what you really can do, and then you also have to look at what the city has approved in the last year, says Chopson, whos been a practicing architect for more than 20 years. All that analysis can take a few weeks, but we can do that in a few days.[Image: Cove Architecture]The company does this through several specialized AI agents that analyze site conditions, cost parameters, local regulations, structural approaches, floor plans, and exterior designs. We have all of these agents talking to each other, Ahuja says.That creates a set of guidelines that Cove Architectures team then uses to fine-tune a design. We get to spend more of our time as artists working on the art of it and less time chasing down all the little details, Chopson says.[Image: Studio Tim Fu]A technological push and pullThose little details can make or break a project. When London-based architecture firm Studio Tim Fu was hired to design a series of luxury villas in a historical area on Lake Bled in Slovenia, the client had already had a few previous proposals denied by the local heritage agency. The firms founder, Tim Fu, who previously worked at Zara Hadid Architects, used several AI agents, a large language model, and consultations with local designers to navigate the specifics that would help the project meet the heritage agencys requirements. He says the AI tools helped define the constraints of the site, allowing the design to comply with regulations about the height and slope of the villa roofs, as well as maximizing daylight through window and building orientation.[Image: Studio Tim Fu]We have an extensive list hat we tick, and every time you tick those boxes that are conceived together with the local architect and the large language model and our research, the heritage agency is happier, Fu says. There are very strict things that helped us to develop a project of such heightened luxury at such a controlled site, which is nearly impossible.[Image: Studio Tim Fu]Fu says the designers and the client (an undisclosed Slovenian philanthropist) are confident that the AI-designed building will meet the heritage agencys approval and begin construction in the next year or so.Fu says AI is being used for more than just checking regulatory boxes. His firm has integrated bespoke and commercial AI tools to shape design concepts that are then refined by human designers. For example, they will train an AI model to perform a task like designing around specific roof requirements. Those design concepts will then be fed into a generative AI tool to create renderings that are adjusted by architects using Photoshop and the studios own built-in AI tools. Those drawings then go through more rounds of revisions using data sets specific to the site, the local market conditions, and the clients requests.As specifics are narrowed down, AI-generated concepts are further refined by human architects. We remain a critical eye on this whole process to make sure that the machine doesnt go haywire, Fu says. We obviously have to fact-check and double-check everything to make sure that we are making the best decisions and there are no hallucinations from any part of the process.[Image: Studio Tim Fu]A freethinking co-creatorThe end result is a mixture of human and AI design. Fu calls AI a freethinking co-creator that feeds into a complex, almost conversational design process. Its so intertwined that its like another member of the team. And were at a point where its hard to distinguish between what we did and what the AI did, he says. We dont see it as a distinct tool.This blurry line means that its not really accurate to say Fus project is an AI-designed building, or that its fully designed by humans. Cove Architecture sees this blended approach as the future mode of architecture. Were going to scale up thousands and thousands and thousands of buildings in this new methodology, Ahuja says.Chopson sees the integration of AI as simply allowing software tools to do the tasks that take humans too long to doand which arent very enjoyable parts of the process anyway. You spend all your time trying to figure out, is the thing that I want to do going to work? The AI allows us to leap forward by weeks to get to the part thats fun, where you get to think about how am I going to make this look beautiful?
Category:
E-Commerce
Artist and industrial design icon Ross Lovegroves work has always looked like the space-age futureand he has now partnered up with SpaceX on a project that sees him revisiting one of his most famous pieces from the past: The Bernhardt Go chair. CreativeWorkStudios is a company that fosters collaborations with an eye toward art, science and philanthropy. Having worked on a project that connected artist Refik Anadol with the NASA-funded Translational Research Institute for Space Health, CreativeWorkStudios turned to Lovegrove for its next endeavor, a partnership with the Polaris space missions to raise funds for St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital. Ross Lovegrove [Photo: J Harry Edmiston/courtesy CreativeWorkStudios] Lovegrove created the flowing Bernhardt Go chairprobably my favorite objectat the turn of the millennium. With its absence of straight lines and legs that are seemingly reversed, it has a futuristic aesthetic that has landed it a spot in the film Passengers and other sci-fi projects. Which is perhaps why his partnership with the space exploration company feels so immediately organic (and causes you to momentarily forget who owns SpaceX). Using data from the landmark Polaris Dawn mission, Lovegrove is now retrofitting the Bernhardt Go into its next evolution: The $6,500 Polaris Go. A Magnesium-Injected Innovation Its apropos that Lovegrove is working with SpaceX on a project involving this particular chair. Years ago, he was invited out to the company to possibly become its design directorand when he got there, he discovered a couple hundred Bernhardt Go chairs in the canteen. [Photo: courtesy CreativeWorkStudios] While the first Polaris Dawn mission last year yielded a few firsts, such as the first commercial spacewalk, the Bernhardt Go scored one of its own when it launched in the early 2000s. Lovegrove originally designed the chair in aluminum, but found it to be too heavy. So he decided to use pressure die-cast magnesium, which weighs about 30% less without compromising strength. Thing was, it had never been done before, and has not been done since (the chairs were sealed and powder-coated, and are safe). How can I say itit wont burst into flames, but its highly flammable, Lovegrove says with a laugh. It took us a while to find somebody who would take that risk. The Bernhardt Go was hit, with TIME citing it as one of 2001s best designs, and various museums adding the chair to their collections. [Photo: courtesy CreativeWorkStudios] After partnering with CreativeWorkStudios and the Polaris team for the new project, Lovegrove reached out to Bernhardt, which had 210 originals leftand he says the company handed them over. I mean, to suddenly give up your whole stock is pretty remarkable, Lovegrove says. And it’s because of the St. Jude’s component. Which is not cynicalit’s incredibly sincere. Earth from Polaris Dawn [Photo: Jared Isaacman] Taking a New Seat Polaris mission commander (and current nominee to lead NASA) Jared Isaacman has a history of raising funds for St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital, which the Polaris program has partnered with for its trio of missions. Lovegrove says its a cause close to him, as well, owing to a number of family members he has lost to cancer. As he devised ways to update the chair for the project, Lovegrove homed in on the seat pan insert. He decided to utilize data from the shockwaves of the launch to create a pattern emerging from four corners. [It] is a metaphor about the co-joining of forces for the crew membersso, the four coming together form a total balance, and a kind of dynamic unity that comes from the abstract forces of nature. [Photo: courtesy CreativeWorkStudios] Lovegrove says he wanted to find a U.S. supplier linked to the space program to make the inserts, which he was able to do. He could have created it with, say, a 3D-printed polymerbut that doesnt exactly represent space. So instead, the team used an aerospace-grade aluminum alloy, which is laser-cut to a finite dimension and then pressed incredibly thin so as to not impede the weight of the chair. The names of the four astronauts, meanwhile, are set to be laser-engraved onto the pans. Ultimately, I’d like to even look at anodizing those, possibly in other colors, so that we could do a limited edition as we roll this out, he says. In a philanthropic way, we have to sell these we have to appeal to people. [Photo: courtesy CreativeWorkStudios] The chairs are priced at $6,500 and are available for preorder on the project website, with 50 percent going to St. Jude. Lovegrove adds that this is the start of a larger project with CreativeWorkStudios and Polaris, where hell take more data and interpret it in various ways, particularly around the physical impact of space on the human bodies. If you look at space programs now, all the space adventure and business development, I think it’s going to pull [the human race] forward. I think it’s going to pull everything into a whole new mindset, Lovegrove says. They always say the most abstract thing that mankind can ever do is go into space, because we’re absolutely not designed to go into space. And then engineers come up and say, Hey, we’re doing it. As for that forward momentumits always been visually evident in the chair since the start. Has that always driven him? Everything that we do has an implied energy in it, he says. I don’t like static things.
Category:
E-Commerce
On January 15, a group of utility companies wrote a letter to Lee Zeldin, then president-elect Donald Trumps nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. We provide the electricity for millions of homes, businesses, and institutions across the U.S., create thousands of good-paying jobs, and drive economic progress and American prosperity, the letter stated. After the polite opening, they got right to their main request: Two matters in particular call for immediate action: (1) regulations on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from existing coal-fired and new natural-gas power plants that mandate a carbon capture technology that has not been adequately demonstrated and (2) the unprecedented expansion of the federal regulation of coal combustion residuals (CCR). The companies contend that the federal government has overstepped its authority in its enforcement of these two areas of regulation. The letter asked Zeldin to go easy on themby delivering the regulatory authority back to states and rescinding a 2024 rule that mandated cleanup of coal ash at inactive power plants. What the power companies call coal combustion residuals, and describe as a natural byproduct of generating electricity with coal used for beneficial purposes in U.S. construction and manufacturing, is known more colloquially as coal asha toxic mixture of heavy metals like arsenic and mercury, which, because coal plants are usually built near bodies of water, often comes in contact with groundwater when it is buried in an unlined pit. Over the last century and a half of American coal power generation, power companies have dumped coal ash at hundreds of active and inactive power plants across the country. Zeldin is now the administrator of the EPA, and it appears the power companies are getting their wish. Amid a barrage of press releases that, on March 12, proposed 31 deregulatory actions, were two that seem designed to significantly weaken enforcement of coal ash regulations, environmental attorneys told Grist. Zeldin called it the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. In the first, the EPA announced that it will encourage states to take over permitting and enforcement of the coal ash rule. When states are delegated the authority by the EPA to issue their own coal ash disposal permits, they’re supposed to adhere to standards at least as stringent as the federal rules, but in some cases state environmental agencies have simply gone rogue and flouted this requirement. Georgia, which received the authority to issue its own permits for coal ash disposal in 2019, has controversially approved plans at several coal plants for the utility Georgia Power to permanently store millions of tons of coal ash in unlined landfills that are partially submerged in groundwater, despite being notified by EPA that this violates the federal rule. In neighboring Alabama, state regulators sought the same delegated authority that their counterparts in Georgia had been granted, but last year the EPA denied their application because they planned to issue permits to Alabama Power that violated the federal rules in the same manner as Georgias. Alabamas was the first application for a state-run coal ash program that the EPA has denied; so far, only Georgia, Texas, and Oklahoma have been approved. But new approvals may be coming soon: EPA will propose a determination on the North Dakota permit program within the next 60 days, the release said. The EPA also said it would be reviewing a rule it finalized in 2024, under president Joe Biden, that closed a longstanding loophole by extending coal ash regulations to cover so-called legacy coal ash ponds at shuttered power plantswhich werent covered by a landmark 2015 rule that regulated coal ash disposal only at power plants in active use. The EPAs review of the 2024 legacy coal ash rule will focus on whether to extend the deadlines for compliance with the rule. Lisa Evans, senior counsel at Earthjustice, said the time frames in the rule as written were already far more lenient than was necessary. Industry already got major concessions from the Biden EPA to establish deadlines that are far in the future, she said. Because coal ashs peak contamination levels arent reached until some 70 years after waste is dumped, longer deadlines can only mean less effective cleanup. The longer you ignore those sites, the worse the pollution gets, Evans said. In the second announcement related to coal ash, the EPA said it will revise a list of its top enforcement priorities that was announced in 2023 and applied to the fiscal years 2024 through 2027. The list of National Enforcement and Compliance Initiatives, or NECI, included six priority areas for action, one of which was Protecting Communities from Coal Ash Contamination. The EPA now intends to align the agencys enforcement priorities with President Trumps executive orders. It said this would be accomplished by immediately revising the NECI list to ensure that enforcement does not discriminate based on race and socioeconomic status (as it has under environmental justice initiatives) or shut down energy production and that it focuses on the most pressing health and safety issues. No further details were provided regarding what this meant for the agencys actual enforcement actions. But a fuller picture is found in an internal agency memo, which was sent by Jeffrey Hall, the acting head of the agencys enforcement and compliance division. The memo, seen by Grist, outlines the ways in which the NECI list was to be updated. Halls memo said that the priorities are under review to ensure alignment between the NECIs and the Administrations directives and priorities, and it laid out a series of directions that applied in the interim to all EPA enforcement and compliance actions. These include a blanket directive that environmental justice considerations shall no longer inform EPAs enforcement and compliance assurance work and another declaring that enforcement and compliance assurance actions shall not shut down any stage of energy production (from exploration to distribution) or power generation absent an imminent and substantial threat to human health or an express statutory or regulatory requirement to the contrary. With respect to coal ash, the memo argues that the NECI priority list focuses in large part on perceived noncompliance with current performance standards and monitoring and testing requirements and is motivated largely by environmental justice considerations, which are inconsistent with the Presidents Executive Orders and the Administrators Initiative. Accordingly, the memo stipulates that enforcement and compliance assurance for coal ash at active power plant facilities shall focus on imminent threats to human health. p>Due to the wording of the memo, Evans said in an email that it would be entirely possible for EPA to justify avoiding any enforcement whatsoever of the coal ash rule under the NECI. This would be a dramatic reversal of the heightened enforcement that ramped up under the Biden administration. In 2024the first year of the coal ash NECI prioritythe EPA conducted 107 compliance assessments of coal ash sites across 18 states. While only five enforcement cases (orders or agreements by which EPA requires companies to take certain actions) were filed in that year, Evans said it is likely that EPA will find reason for enforcement action at many of the other sites if the investigations are allowed to proceed. Evans said the requirement that enforcement only take place in cases of an imminent threat to human health effectively restricts the agency from enforcing aspects of the coal ash rule designed to prevent imminent threats by requiring proper management and monitoring of toxic waste sites before damage and spills occur. For instance, Evans said, the directive would prohibit the EPA from requiring a utility to repair a faulty groundwater monitoring system. Utilities have gamed the system at some plants by designing monitoring systems that intentionally miss detecting leakage from a coal ash dump, she said, citing a 2022 report by Earthjustice and the Environmental Integrity Project that alleged a widespread practice among power companies of manipulating monitoring data to downplay the extent of contamination. Power companies are supposed to dig wells to assess the groundwater quality at coal ash dumps, and in order to gauge their contamination level they compare it to what should be uncontaminated water samples nearby. But the 2022 report documented examples like coal plants in Texas, Indiana, and Florida where the EPA found that the background wells used for the purpose of providing baseline samples of water quality were dug in contaminated areas near the coal ash dump. The report also documented the practice of intrawell monitoring, or simply analyzing the data from each well in isolation, in order to assess changes in contamination levels over time, rather than contrasted with uncontaminated wells. This method doesnt work unless the wells arent contaminated to begin with, and is prohibited by EPA guidelinesbut the report found it was in use at 108 coal plants nationwide. These practices could essentially be given a free pass under the new enforcement guidance. While these are very significant violations (because contamination is not discovered and cleanup not triggered), they may not rise to an imminent threat, especially if there are no data revealing toxic releases, Evans said. The section of the memo dealing with coal ash also stipulated that any order or other enforcement action that would unduly burden or significantly disrupt power generation requires advance approval from the assistant administrator of the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurancethe politically appointed position temporarily being held by Hall. The memo justifies this requirement on the basis of the Trump administrations stated intention of unleashing American energy. But to Nick Torrey, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, it has little to do with energy productionand more to do with utilities bottom line. Theres nothing about cleaning up coal ash that affects power generation; those are two separate activities, Torrey noted. So what it sounds like is theyre prioritizing polluters interests over peoples drinking water. Gautama Mehta, Grist This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||