desaturation through oxygen intake?

oxygen tanks for decompression and purification…?

Supposed to improve health and well-being, oxygen bars date back to the late 90s but it’s the need to get it at your doorstep that has been in focus recently. Where else but from the land of rising sun, you can expect the most ingenious methods to gain the most of Oxygen in our own dens. Like the black IDEA 02 Science tank from Adrect that along with providing O2, it also houses an internal phone, music system, and features faux leather trims. While the Dream-Plus from Kawasaki can be customized in colors and with graphics. And for your best friend, your pet dog, the O2 Doghouse will provide oxygen in a custom “dog hospital”.

5 sentences – cocoon colony description

Geographical, demographic and economic aspects have render LA as a place of excess and saturation.

The airport, LAX, occupies a territory that lies “in-between” LA and multiple global destinations, providing its own kind of saturation; one that amalgamates cultural features, ignores privacy boundaries, and allows for anonymity while your identity is scrutinized.

The project concentrates in this saturation, focusing in ways of control and regulation, and occupying that territory of the”in-between”.

By means of sensory deprivation and isolation, the encampment colony seeks to enhance the LA experience by individual de-saturation through immersion, offering a space in which the visitor deliberately opts for the reduction and removal of stimuli from the senses.

The cocoons function as a REST (Restricted Environmental Stimuli Therapy) Tank, while the outer surfaces serve as filters from the outside, framing an intermediate space that offers a territory devoid of outside influences.

Grapevines – rachis structural system

As an analog for the structural support of the human cocoons in the colony encampment, I am interested in using the stem structure of the grapevine.

The grapevine inflorescence is a complex, highly modified branch system containing reduced shoots and flowers.  The complete branch system is called the rachis. It is composed of a basal stem (the peduncle), two main branches (the inner and outer arms), and various sub-branches terminating in pedicles.   The shoot is the primary unit of vine growth.  They are stem-like green growth arising from a bud.  Primary shoots arise from primary buds and are normally the fruit-producing shoots of the vine. The main axis of the shoot consist of structural support tissues and conducting tissues to transport water, nutrients, and other photosynthesis products.  Arranged along the shoot in regular patterns are leaves, tendrils, flower and fruit clusters, and buds.  General areas of the shoot are described as basal (closest to its point of origin), mid-shoot, and apex (tip). The term canopy is used to denote the collective arrangement of the vine’s shoots, leaves and fruit.

The grapevine fruit and flower clusters develop opposite to the leaves, and often grow at the third to sixth nodes from the base of the shoot.  The shoot also produces tendrils, which are slender structure that coil around smaller objects to provide support for growing shoots.  Tendrils grow opposite to the leaf in the absence of a flower cluster, except the first two or three leaves and thereafter skipping every third leaf. During the growing season, each bud grows into a shoot which bears leaves and generally three clusters of grapes.

Mosses – Sponge-like Surface Structures

Mosses do not have roots and, in their absence, the plants anchor to a surface with rhyzoids attached to a substrate. Consequently,mosses can thrive on surfaces as dissimilar as rocks, concrete walks, and masonry walls. Mosses survive long periods of drought, dehydrate, and sustain prolonged dormancy, to then resume photosynthesis upon re-hydration. Moss infestations prevail as sponge-like bio-masses which, when microscopically viewed in cross-section, provide a densely packed labyrinth of minuscule voids and interstices. Given that the surface-to-volume ratios of voids vary inversely with size and shape, moss infestations comparatively interface to their ambient environment with an extraordinarily high biomass surface relative to volume. This key attribute, in the absence of root hairs to absorb water and leaf stomata to respire carbon dioxide and oxygen, serves to sustain photosynthesis by extended surface adsorption.

When moss first colonizes an area it produces a black, slimy mat across the area before the green vegetative structures form. The green structures grow into branch-like filaments called protonema. These are the threadlike structures that bud out and develop into the gametophyte. The protonema of mosses are extensive, resembling green algae, and may persist for months. Mosses can take many shapes and forms. Stems and leaves of moss are complex, most having conducting strands, midribs, and a great diversity of cell form. Shoots develop from tetrahedral cells, and this results in three leaf arrangements. Leaves may be grouped in pairs, threes, and even sets of five. In the majority of mosses, leaves are not arranged in regular rows. Except for the midribs, leaves are one cell thick, with most or all of the cells  containing chloroplasts.  There are essentially two growth forms for moss plants. In one the stems are basically erect, with just one upright stem per plant or with the initial erect stem producing some branches, depending on

the species, giving the individual plant a tufty or shrubby appearance. In the other growth form the moss will have mostly trailing stems. If the stems cling to the substrate the overall appearance, to the naked eye, will be of a creeping plant but in some species they hang, almost curtain-like, from branches .

Another common moss strategy for structural support is to grow very densely.  So, like academic communities, they grow progressively larger and denser, maintaining their continued existence by sheer bulk without having any real roots in the environment which supports them.

They have also developed elaborate designs for clinging to each other, so that the entire mass behaves like a foam rubber pillow – conforming to the slightest pressure, but springing back to business as usual when the pressure is removed.

Housing Colony Encampment – Human Cocoons

Los Angeles, CA can be defined as a place of excess and saturation (you can find some stats in the previous post).  Geographical, demographic and economic aspects have render LA as a condensed sprawl (the city is well spread out across the Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando Valley, however every square mile is saturated of people, cars, infrastructure, advertisement, waste, etc).  The airport, LAX, occupies an ambiguous territory in the city, being part of LA and multiple destinations at once, yet it is neither one at the same time.  It occupies a territory that lies “in-between”, and provides its own kind of saturation; one that amalgamates cultural features, ignores privacy boundaries, and allows for anonymity while your identity is scrutinized. 

The project concentrates in this saturation, focusing in ways of control and regulation, and occupying that territory of the”in-between”.  By means of sensory deprivation and isolation, the encampment colony seeks to enhance the LA experience by individual desaturation through immersion.

The encampment offers a space in which the visitor deliberately opts for the reduction and removal of stimuli from the senses. The cocoons function as a REST (Restricted Environmental Stimuli Therapy) Tank, in which a person floats in saline water that is the same temperature as the skin in order to deprive the skin of the feeling of hot or cold. The tank is without light, reducing the sense of sight, and is soundproof as well. The sense of smell is reduced by eliminating the use of chemicals with odors to treat the water.

The outer surfaces serve as filters from the outside, framing an intermediate space that offers a territory devoid of outside influences.  The skins wrap around the north and east side of the parking structure, utilizing the more isolated and least exposed areas, taking adavantage of the shadow offer by the building and, consequently, the lower temperatures.  The following diagram shows the behaviour of the skin, acting as an inverse function of the sunpath.

Using a moss strategy for structural support the surfaces grow denser in the areas that are mostly needed (Mosses developed elaborate designs for clinging to each other, making the entire mass behave like a foam rubber pillow, conforming to the slightest pressure, but springing back to business as usual when the pressure is removed).

Likewise, I wish the surfaces to behave like the mosses, wrapping the north and east facades of the parking structure.

At this point, I need to work on the structure of the beams to allow for a more ‘realistsic’ cantilever, and the cellular structure of the surface needs to be reworked, as it is now spread at constant intervals.

Energy Encampment

Saturated Los Angeles and LAX

Los Angeles Saturation Statistics

• Los Angeles is the second biggest city in the United States.

• Estimated 2006 population of 2,344 people per square mile (totaling 3,849,378) and 806 households per square mile.  The average population in the United States is 80 people and 32 households per every square mile.

• Los Angeles is home to people from more than 140 countries speaking 224 different identified languages. Ethnic enclaves like Chinatown, Historic Filipinotown, Koreatown, Little Armenia, Little Ethiopia, Tehrangeles, Little India, Little Tokyo, and Thai Town provide examples of the polyglot character of Los Angeles.

• Since the mid-1980s, Los Angeles has been a minority-majority city (this term is used to describe a U.S. state in which a majority of the state’s population differs from the national majority population of non-Hispanic whites) The average LA population can be broken down into the following percentages: 42.2% spoke English, 41.7% Spanish, 2.4% Korean, 2.3% Filipino, 1.7% Armenian, 1.5% Chinese (including Cantonese and Mandarin) and 1.3% Persian as their first language.

• Los Angeles is the largest major manufacturing center in the United States, with 500,000 workers in manufacturing activities in 2003.

• Los Angeles is the nation’s largest port in terms of value of goods handled and tonnage.

• The banking and finance industry in Los Angeles is one of the largest in the United States. More than 100 foreign and countless domestic banks operate branches in Los Angeles, along with many financial law firms and investment banks.

• Entertainment, in the form of film, television, and music production, is the best known industry in Los Angeles, focusing worldwide attention on the city and making Los Angeles a major tourist destination. Tourism employs more than 468,000 people in the entire metropolitan area.

• Los Angeles has not only one of the largest high-speed road networks in the world, but also the highest per-capita car population in the world.

• California holds the greatest concentration of cars with more than 26 million. This makes the Los Angeles metropolitan area, with roughly 1.8 cars per person, the world’s most car-populated urban sprawl in the world. There are more cars in California than people in any of the other states of the United States. The Los Angeles freeway system handles over twelve million cars on a daily basis. While L.A. holds the number one spot as America’s most congested and polluted roadways, surprisingly enough, it does not hold the title of most chaotic car city due to its enormous freeway infrastructure that allows the residents of the Los Angeles area to carry on their daily migration of over 300 million miles.
• Los Angeles suffers from air pollution in the form of smog. The Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando Valley are susceptible to atmospheric inversion, which holds in the exhausts from road vehicles, airplanes, locomotives, shipping, manufacturing, and other sources. Unlike other large cities that rely on rain to clear smog, Los Angeles gets only 15 inches of rain each year: pollution accumulates over many consecutive days.

• In 2008, the city was ranked the second most polluted and again had the highest year-round particulate pollution.

LAX Saturation Statistics

• In 2007 more than 61.9 million people traveled through LAX. LAX handled approximately 90 percent of the passengers, 80 percent of the air cargo, and 99 percent of the international passengers and cargo traffic in the five-county Southern California region.

• LAX is the fifth busiest commercial airport in the world and the third busiest in the United States.

Los Angeles Climate Norms, Means and Extremes Data

Location - Zone 6
Latitude: 33.93 N – Longitude: 118.4 W – Elevation: 110 ft

Climate Zone 6 includes the beaches at the foot of the southern California hills, as well as several miles of inland area where hills are low or nonexistent. The Pacific Ocean is relatively warm in these longitudes and keeps the climate very mild. Most of the rain falls during the warm, mild winters.

Basic Climate Conditions
Record High Temperature (1963) 110 degrees
Record Low Temperature (1949) 27 degrees

Summers are pleasantly cooled by winds from the ocean. Although these offshore winds bring high humidity, comfort is maintained because of the low temperatures. Occasionally the wind reverses and brings hot, dry desert air. There is a sharp increase in temperature and decrease in humidity as one leaves the coast. Sunshine is plentiful all year, so solar heating, especially for hot water, is very advantageous.
Climate Zone 6 is a very comfortable place to live and therefore requires the least energy of any region in California to achieve thermal comfort levels.

Climatic Design Priorities
Winter: Insulate
Reduce Infiltration
Passive Solar
Summer: Shade
Allow natural ventilation
Distribute Thermal Mass

Sun Path

Wind Path

For more wind info and charts follow the link below

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/lox/climate/46054_two_way.php

For precipitation charts and data follow the link below and select a month for which you want the info to be retrieved.

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/lox/main.php?suite=hydrology&page=historical

Los Angeles Electricity Metrics

Transition Interval