Nonstop High-Speed Trains Enabled by Docking Trams

Moving Platforms is a completely inter-connected rail infrastructure where local trams connect to a network of non-stop high speed trains enabling passengers to travel from their local stop to a local address at their destination (even in another country) without getting off a train.

No matter how fast a high-speed train travels, it still has to slow down to 0 mph to pick up additional passengers. That problem has been solved by a designer who dreamed up a way for high-speed local trams to catch up to those speedster trains, picking up and dropping off passengers without requiring the express train to stop.

Designer Paul Priestman of UK-based Priestmangoode puts it succinctly in the video below: “Moving platforms is a new concept to allow people to travel from their street to another street in another city in another country by train without stopping.”

Moving Platforms from Priestmangoode on Vimeo.

Priestman adds, “I’m under no illusion this is a big idea. But we have to think big. The world is going to a be a very different place in 10 to 20 years’ time and we have to think of alternative ways of travel.”

Listen to Priestman talking about problems with our current transportation infrastructure and the way his new train feeder system could revolutionize rail travel like the Internet revolutionized communication:

Moving Platforms from Priestmangoode on Vimeo.

Original in: http://mashable.com/2011/06/23/nonstop-high-speed-trains/#17803Speed-equalization

New New Babylon

Scenes from a digital detournement of Constant's New Babylon: A documentary on the encounters of several drifters, as the remains of their paralyzed memories, as much as one can remember in such rapidly and constantly changing environment, providing a glimpse of a new future world; a new life of endless drifts and endless desires, realized by its habitants.

Credits:
Recorded live from New New Babylon by Ali Dur
Architecture & Video by Ali Dur
Music by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
Research by Ali Dur & McKenzie Wark
Produced by Ali Dur & McKenzie Wark
Words by Constant Nieuwenhuys

New York, 2011

New New Babylon from ali dur on Vimeo.

Mass Motion Visualized

(MassMotion is the next generation of advanced software for simulating pedestrians and analyzing crowds. MassMotion is the only tool that can predict the movement of tens of thousands of individual personalities in a complex 3D environment.

It's been used in the design of multi-billion dollar projects like airports, stadiums and office towers because it saves time and money like no other software can.)

Created by Oasys Software Channel

We are going to look at some of the visualization tools that help infrastructure project take shapes. The idea is that data could be "materialized" as part of the architectural design strategy.

Bernard Tschumi and Infrastructure

(video produced for Architectural Record by Bryant Rousseau, McGraw-Hill Construction's digital media editorial director)

Grand Central was way ahead of its time in its use of a double-envelope design. Tschumi takes us on a very rare visit inside the walls--to a glass catwalk that has inspired his own work. Tschumi also tells us that he admires how Grand Central functions both as a monument--and as a living piece of architecture--the "archetype of the city building... the epitome of urbanity." And lessons for today's architects? The building serves as a prime lesson, says Tschumi, that architecture is "not only about what it looks like, but really about what it does."

(video produced for Architectural Record by Bryant Rousseau, McGraw-Hill Construction's digital media editorial director)

Watch as Tschumi takes us on a tour of this turn-of-the-last-century bridge, whose "hypnotic repetition" of forms and "relentless scale" make it an "infrastructure cathedral". His favorite detail? How the juxtaposition of scales between major infrstructure and everyday architecture coexist beautifully--just as they did in Roman times. Tschumi also uses the bridge, which makes an extraordinary urban space, as an example of why it's often unnecessary to make any distinction between engineering and architectural projects.

"Architecture is the materialization of a concept."