http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Machine
This is the kind of alchemy that hooked me.
http://www.oceanarks.org
Interview with Toby Long from Living Classroom:
http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/03/23/int ... classroom/
Emily: So can you give me a quick overview of the building, from an architectural perspective?
Toby: We’ve made a very simple box, for all intents and purposes. The majority is an open space common area that will be used for a host of activities- and a smaller wing which is more utilitarian- bathrooms and storage mainly. It’s a fairly small building, 2100 square feet, and it is intended to teach about green. And it may be green building and lifestyle and nutrition and diet, and will benefit everyone from technical tradesmen to first graders. As a result, all of the green things being used in the building are intended to in one way or another be showcased. There are some key green things that are really unique to this project- this eco-machine and the fact that it’s totally off the grid, which is kind of unique to urban buildings.
Emily: And it sounds like this eco-machine is something that makes the building really unique, right?
Toby: The eco-machine has created the most difficult condition for the project. It’s a wastewater management and filtration system that takes care of all the waste on the site. So there’s no connection to the sewer line, it sits off all of San Francisco’s basic infrastructure with the exception of water. So you flush the toilet, etc, and the water goes into this machine which is biologically based. It decomposes and breaks down all of the waste into something that’s usable by plants. And it uses plants to encourage that process. It’s not grey-water in that you get to reuse it- we’re just managing it and discharging it out into the landscaping, and so it becomes irrigation. We’re not putting it back into the building- there’s too many political as well as health risk issues in doing that. It’s not potable.
Emily: So how does it work exactly?
Toby: This is a unique machine that we’re developing, and I’m still learning why and how it’s unique. Basically what we’ve done, or what Rana Creek has done, is they’ve taken two technologies and married them. One technology is a prefabricated wastewater filtration system that uses bacteria and biological processes to decompose waste. So imagine a big box, with an inlet and an outlet, with all these various chambers inside, etc. It’s a self-contained septic system, basically. And that’s a prefab, NES-approved technology that already exists in the world. We’ve taken that and unbundled it, so there are pieces of it now that aren’t in the box- they’re sitting aside as individual tanks so we can watch the process. So we can tell the story. And we want it to be interactive- we want real-time live chemical analysis so that when you’re there you can watch what’s happening in each tank and online so people can log on and watch.
The second technology we’ve coupled with this is a technology being developed by a man named John Todd, from Massachussets, and his company has made fully ecological wastewater management systems (Living Machines) that aren’t boxes that are self-contained, they’re actually wetlands. So it goes into wetland number one, and the plants do this, and then it goes into wetland two, and it uses an actual ecosystem to decompose waste. So one is more biotech, and one is a more landscaping approach. And we’ve tried to combine the two.
