Dutch stylist Helly Scholten is interested in living sustainably, so when the chance came to move herself and her family into an experimental sustainable house designed by Rotterdam University students and researchers, she jumped at it. Essentially an oversized greenhouse, the house was built to explore sustainable methods of living and will serve as the family's full-time home for three years.
Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has unveiled a luxury apartment building planned for Huajuco Canyon, Monterrey, Mexico. The original brief for the Esfera City Center project demanded 12 residential towers. But presumably an architect with Hadid's clout can choose to do what she thinks best, and she designed a nine-story complex comprising a total of 981 apartments spread over 136,000 sq m (1,463,891 sq ft) instead.
Last week, architect Adam Kushner presented updates on his plans for a 2,400 square foot 3D-printed house, pool house, and car port to be built in Gardiner, N.Y. 3DPrint reported on Kushner’s speech at 3D Print Week NY, where the designer showed more details of the planned home.
The builders will be learning on the fly during some parts of the project. They intend to be able to embed rebar into the printed material as it emerges, but discussions on how to do that are still going on. Giant 3D printers, 5 meters on each side, will be used to print the components in sections. The mind behind those printers is Enrico Dini, owner of a company called D-Shape which specializes in printing large items reinforced with a magnesium-based binding agent. The process of including rebar or steel-reinforced concrete in the printed material will have to be completed before the third stage of building the estate, the construction of the car park, can be completed, but in the meantime, the D-Shape printer and bonding agent can hold together simpler structures.
The base material will be native sand; the D-Shape printers are designed to use resources already present at the site in order to make residential 3D printing as easy as possible. Kushner’s planned house does not so much blend in to the surrounding environment as introduce a completely different, weirdly organic shape, as if coral had begun to grow in the forest.
The site was prepared for construction in August of 2014, but Kushner said in April of 2015 that construction is yet to begin. Compliance issues with the local building department have slowed down the process somewhat, and the 3D printer is being held by NATO, as it needed to be shipped into the country from D-Shape in the United Kingdom.
OFTEN the trickiest part of being a corrupt bureaucrat is not how to find new ways to extort money or accept bribes, but how to hide the ill-gotten gains. No one wants to end up like “Uncle House”, as a district official in the southern province of Guangdong was dubbed by internet users. He was outed two years ago by online anti-corruption activists after acquiring 22 properties that on his salary he clearly could not afford.
However, research by Hanming Fang of the University of Pennsylvania, and Li-An Zhou and Quanlin Gu of the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University suggests that the housing market is a source of illicit riches, as well as a place to park them. The authors find that Chinese bureaucrats consistently pay less when buying houses, receiving on average a 1% discount.
The authors examined over 1m mortgage contracts, which contain detailed statistics on the applicant, such as his income and employer, and the house in question. They then compared the average price paid by bureaucrats with that paid by those in the private sector. These estimates probably underestimate the corruption as they do not cover houses purchased by the spouses or children of bureaucrats.
