RAINING BUILDING - H2O/sprawling city = O2
Amongst the issues raised for incoming times, this of global warming turns out to be one of a highly critical importance and at the same time a complex and even blurry question when striving to sort out precise interconnected human causes and determine effects on the environment depending on geography and time.
Climate change is a continuous process whose recent increase is being watched by scientific community as a worrying disturbance likely to provoke so called natural catastrophes and dramatic meteorological contrasts and to threaten wildlife and human settlements.
We chose to deal with global warming considered as a migration of local climatic situations; it is not only a shifting of different weather conditions, but also a reconstitution according to specific sites and variable human activity.
In the sprawling cities, stagnation of air pollution is mostly caused by heavy traffic, which is reinforced in winter by meteorological phenomenon of thermal inversion whereby a stable layer of warm air holds down a colder air close to the ground. It causes high levels of smog and air pollution to be trapped and concentrate down on the city.
Rain remains the most efficient agent to counter the air pollution. The project is a building bringing down rain
Due to thermal inversion, layers of warm air are staying in upper levels. The envelope of the building is a refreshing skin composed of humidity sensors. Like the forest in the desert, the building is able to catch humidity from its surrounding atmosphere. Vaporous water is captured and led to a tank via a hydroelectric station producing electric energy. The water tank is then electrolyzed to produce hydrogen, which is injected in a h² engine. Both electrolysis and engine generate oxygen directly rejected in the atmosphere. The buildings are erected nearby traffic critical zones and may spread water over it to limit pollution peaks.
The main parameter for efficient humidity capture is the surface area: the upper part of the building spread to get it multiplied. Moreover, this shape makes wider rain falls possible.
The base has been scooped out to avoid an excessive impact in the neighborhood, which moreover reinforces the sense of a levitating mass.
The building takes an over scaled presence of an abstract sculpture in the city. The blurry sprawling urban fabric gets consistency in a revealed relationship with the whole landscape, the mountains and the sky.
