Fascinating.

From Jetson Green, this announcement contains an amazing little kernel that will likely become one of those things in the future where people look back with wonder and ask, "They seriously didn't think of that before?" Kind of like with wheels on suitcases.

Masdar, which I mentioned before, has picked a Chicago firm to develop its 'headquarters' (kind of ominous if you ask me - why can't it be a city hall? Is Masdar going to be a quasi-corporate entity?) which is being billed as the world's first positive energy, mixed use building. Jetson Green follows up with a number of stats that it may or may not achieve, like generating more energy than it consumes, using 70% less water than similar buildings, etc. Impressive and imperative, but those will be accomplishments of scale and process, not in my mind nearly as surprising as one of their other bullet point achievements: They intend to "be the first building in history to generate power for its own assembly, through development of its solar roof pier before the underlying complex."

What a cool idea, and I bet it's one of the first to harness biomimicry from this direction. Everyone is trying to use structural and chemical biomimicry to develop better materials, and reexamining natural processes to tease out better ways of dealing with production and treatment cycles, but this goes right to the source by realizing the simple truth of how life propagates itself sustainably using what is around it, and providing only the seed, which is just an algorithm for future development using those available resources as efficiently as possible. Obviously this is only a first step and won't be fully realized in the immediate sandy environment, but just the fact that people are thinking this way is a huge step. Add in concepts like self-constructing buildings that synthesize micro-local materials (neighboring abandoned buildings?), and you've truly got the cities of our future.

More pix available at the Jetson Green site, from which I borrowed this one.