a condensed village built up through a volcan would be cool
the whole 'integrated into nature'
At first I found the idea funny, but I remembered something: The diamond cooling system.
I saw something in a documentary a couple of months ago. Some scientist created artificial diamonds. They place a very very little piece of diamond in a sort of vacuum oven, and then they heat it when some gazes are blown inside. The gazes combine themselves on the diamond and "make it grow". Other diamond crystals start to grow on the first one.
With this method, they made some thin sheets of diamond, and they tried to replace a computer cooling system with these sheets. The diamond act as a heat lense. The heat litteraly get through the diamond as it was light and get out at the other end of the diamond sheet!! And between the heat source and the heat getting out, the diamond got no heat!!!
This could be applied for a kind of isolation from magma heat in 200 years if we think that what I'm talking about now is something already made.
But anyway hehe! If the volcano blows, all that blows too hehe! But it could be cool in Minecraft!
Blitzgrutel, your work is absolutely awesome.
I am not an Environmentalist, neither i like those elf-like buildings some folks are building. My own creative project is a futuristic city, composed mainly of skyscrapers, subways and other non-eco-friendly things. But your stuff looks both hi-tech and natural at once.
Keep on the good work
Wow, really thanks for your commment!!! I'm putting very big efforts to be able to embed the nature with building, with style. And it's very hard. "Narchitecture" is almost totally absent from our world, so I have to completely think outside the box.
But I will eventually build a city center with skyscrapers like you! So I'll have to think how to embed neture in that.... WITH style! That will be hard because I don't want most of the buildings to simply be underground to let the nature be there.
Ok so here's some screenshots!!! First, here's what's still in developpement:
The mall. So what you are seeing is the dome roof, and the little piece of wall that maintain that in place. Just under that will be other curves that will make the corridor around 8 blocks larger, and around 10 blocks deeper. So I will probably be able to put big oaks inside the mall:
Here's the top view:
The semi-submerged hotel. It's a very big and difficult task for me. I'm still not sure exactly how it will be like at the end. So what you are seeing here is a top view from very high to be able to see the underwater structures. There will be a center dome with tubes that separate in 3 to get to chambers. Each end will have 3 vertical cylinders with chambers inside.
Here's the side view:
Here's the new done houses!
cliff hanging house:
Semi-spherical house, very complicated to find a good design for this:
As far as Minecraft buildings go, you've produced some really beautiful things here, and have some cool ideas.
As far as realism goes, and my concerns with this as a student of architecture (and mind you, I'm no professional, nor do my current opinions reflect those of the majority in the profession):
Most of your buildings could not support things like running rivers and large groves of trees on their roofs; this is why the majority of "green roofs" that you see being built have gardens on top with grasses and maybe small fruit trees, but nothing like these large oaks you're putting in. It's just too much weight to be practical with the structure.
Using white as a main material. Blah. No. White is great if you're concerned with making things look super sleek and modern and clean. But if you want something that blends in with nature and really alludes to its environment, go for natural materials, like cobble that mimics the stones found in the river, or trees that mimic the forested environment. And these materials you're using can be just as eco-friendly as using white concrete (which is the material I assume you're using), because they'll attract wildlife and foster growth of the natural community more so than clearing a site to plop white buildings on.
Roads should not be done above ground. As another person stated before, if you're trying to be environmentally friendly, build your infrastructure below ground using a tunnel system, which is much less likely to affect the trees up top (given you go deep enough).
Useless features like "water as a design feature", or those twisty-turn-ey bridges you've got are entirely that: useless. They don't save anyone money or resources, or time or energy. Don't do it.
While we're on the topic of wastes of energy, resources, money, and time, let's talk about your houses. Individual houses like suburban are costly in real life, way more than an apartment in the city. The reason for that isn't just because they're privately built for private owners. It's also because they take up way more space and use way more energy to build and maintain than slotted housing in urban environments.
To sum up: The designs are really cool as far as Minecraft buildings go. But if you're really trying to be environmentally friendly, don't focus on de-urbanization. Urbanization is what works best for efficiency and ecology for people. Focus more on trying to refit the urban environment, rather than trying to dismantle the urban environment.
Thanks for the answer. You made a good fly-by of the current architecture notions. I know all these things because I've personnaly studied eco-friendly building, but I'm french and describing that is very hard for me, so I thank you also for that. So all that you are stating there is true, and it's from this that I start to try to imagine what it could be in 200 years from here!
Thinking that, I also try to consider that the humanity would not have consume the world as it did, and so not having to transit from the world current state to a more eco-friendly world.
So in 200 years, we will be inside the nano golden age for sure. So I will take each statement, and I will write what I think that it will be in 200 years. So I will use it as a base reference to make a more presice and pertinent talk!
As far as Minecraft buildings go, you've produced some really beautiful things here, and have some cool ideas.
As far as realism goes, and my concerns with this as a student of architecture (and mind you, I'm no professional, nor do my current opinions reflect those of the majority in the profession):
Most of your buildings could not support things like running rivers and large groves of trees on their roofs; this is why the majority of "green roofs" that you see being built have gardens on top with grasses and maybe small fruit trees, but nothing like these large oaks you're putting in. It's just too much weight to be practical with the structure.
Ok so what could be the materials in 200 years... With the help of nano technology, I think that we could have for example, rubbery concrete, or diamond hard plastic. We would be able to re-arrange molecules of any materials to make the structure more solid, and why not bendable at the same time?? We could create materials that could be 5 times the size of a bus, but being enough light to be pushed by a couple of mens.
Using white as a main material. Blah. No. White is great if you're concerned with making things look super sleek and modern and clean. But if you want something that blends in with nature and really alludes to its environment, go for natural materials, like cobble that mimics the stones found in the river, or trees that mimic the forested environment. And these materials you're using can be just as eco-friendly as using white concrete (which is the material I assume you're using), because they'll attract wildlife and foster growth of the natural community more so than clearing a site to plop white buildings on.
Ok so it would not be concrete. I think that it will be a special polymer that react to ions. What I mean is about vines. Some vines use parts of themselves to hang to a material. But some of them just "stick" on walls. To a molecular size, the plant is changing the ions of the cells that will touch the wall to magnetically stick!!! So I think that the material used in 200 years will be some sort of polymer that react to these kind of things, and any other nature thing that would try to climb, stick or live on it, just letting the surface completely sterilised of anything. Not destroying but just basically repelling living things.
Roads should not be done above ground. As another person stated before, if you're trying to be environmentally friendly, build your infrastructure below ground using a tunnel system, which is much less likely to affect the trees up top (given you go deep enough).
What I am thinking about this option is all that huge amount of earth that will have to be moved somewhere. The roads would have to let trucks pass. Just think about the volume of earth for just a small town... Where would we put all this earth?? Perhaps using it to make some new materials...
And also, but this is not some realty considering, it will take less time to build the roads like that in Minecraft.
Useless features like "water as a design feature", or those twisty-turn-ey bridges you've got are entirely that: useless. They don't save anyone money or resources, or time or energy. Don't do it.
Yea this is purely some aestetic idea from me and have no purpose other than making it cool for someone who plays Minecraft hehe!
While we're on the topic of wastes of energy, resources, money, and time, let's talk about your houses. Individual houses like suburban are costly in real life, way more than an apartment in the city. The reason for that isn't just because they're privately built for private owners. It's also because they take up way more space and use way more energy to build and maintain than slotted housing in urban environments.
I will build a city center. This place is something just beside a botanical garden and near a protected island. So with just a few houses because of some high level normes of zoning. I'm even thinking to destroy the domes pillar of the botanical and just let low height scattered houses. The city center, I've just started to build it, and it will be a real challenge hehe!
The designs are really cool as far as Minecraft buildings go. But if you're really trying to be environmentally friendly, don't focus on de-urbanization. Urbanization is what works best for efficiency and ecology for people. Focus more on trying to refit the urban environment, rather than trying to dismantle the urban environment.
Yea I have to think of a way to somehow balance the volume of constructions that will be in a city center, with nature, with style. I have a few ideas for now, basically for 1 building lol. I'll post some screenshots when I will have built enough of it.
Thanks for the answer. You made a good fly-by of the current architecture notions. I know all these things because I've personnaly studied eco-friendly building, but I'm french and describing that is very hard for me, so I thank you also for that. So all that you are stating there is true, and it's from this that I start to try to imagine what it could be in 200 years from here!
Thinking that, I also try to consider that the humanity would not have consume the world as it did, and so not having to transit from the world current state to a more eco-friendly world.
So basically, what you're saying is that "I'm only imagining some new time period in an entirely different universe where humans decided not to industrialize the world." With this logic, you could basically ignore anything up to this point, and really in this case, environmentalism doesn't matter at all, because environmentalism wouldn't be a thing if industrialization weren't a thing. Do you see what I mean? It's almost entirely useless to argue that your city is being environmentally friendly and all that if you're basically imagining an entirely new world.
So in 200 years, we will be inside the nano golden age for sure. So I will take each statement, and I will write what I think that it will be in 200 years. So I will use it as a base reference to make a more presice and pertinent talk!
Ok so what could be the materials in 200 years... With the help of nano technology, I think that we could have for example, rubbery concrete, or diamond hard plastic. We would be able to re-arrange molecules of any materials to make the structure more solid, and why not bendable at the same time?? We could create materials that could be 5 times the size of a bus, but being enough light to be pushed by a couple of mens.
Where are you getting this information from? Anything that's 200 years from now is purely hypothesis, and is really just science fiction. Think back to what life and technology was like in the early 1800s. People were using horses, and guns that held more than one bullet were still a fairly new invention. Cars weren't a thing, and neither was electricity. Gas-powered lighting was still the norm, and "environmentalism" wasn't even a word. Modern medicine and the germ hadn't been invented yet, and even Darwinian evolution (which is now considered outdated) hadn't come around until the mid/late 1800s). Therefore anything you're saying now is purely fantasy and has no basis against my architectural claims.
Ok so it would not be concrete. I think that it will be a special polymer that react to ions. What I mean is about vines. Some vines use parts of themselves to hang to a material. But some of them just "stick" on walls. To a molecular size, the plant is changing the ions of the cells that will touch the wall to magnetically stick!!! So I think that the material used in 200 years will be some sort of polymer that react to these kind of things, and any other nature thing that would try to climb, stick or live on it, just letting the surface completely sterilised of anything. Not destroying but just basically repelling living things.
This still doesn't get to the point. My point is that your idea is to have this ugly white building plopped down onto a natural landscape, which deters any life from it. Whether or not climbing vines will make their way onto it (because those already do that with pretty much any building nowadays) is irrelevant. With a heavy white building (made from whatever you wish to imagine), you're effectively dominating nature and claiming the land as your own. Does that not go entirely against environmentalism? For centuries, people did without concrete and steel, and made their homes and buildings out of the natural materials around them. Is that not more in the spirit of being environmentally friendly?
What I am thinking about this option is all that huge amount of earth that will have to be moved somewhere. The roads would have to let trucks pass. Just think about the volume of earth for just a small town... Where would we put all this earth?? Perhaps using it to make some new materials...
And also, but this is not some realty considering, it will take less time to build the roads like that in Minecraft.
All of the earth that you'd dig up in order to make underground tunnels could easily be turned around to make houses that are similar to adobe houses of old (i.e. take all of the clay and dirt you mined up, wet it, and turn it into bricks to build with). If you don't put your transportation underground, you'll be doing lots more damage to the ecology by having to mine out tons of iron and coal to manufacture steel beams, process tons of sand in factories to manufacture glass, throw tones of waste and smog into the air to produce cars people can drive, and ultimately put out tons of noise and smog pollution into the overworld.
I will build a city center. This place is something just beside a botanical garden and near a protected island. So with just a few houses because of some high level normes of zoning. I'm even thinking to destroy the domes pillar of the botanical and just let low height scattered houses. The city center, I've just started to build it, and it will be a real challenge hehe!
This totally ignores my statement. My point is that you use way more land, and way more energy to try to create small scattered housing for people than if you create condensed urban housing (such as an apartment complex, or the idea of collectivist housing that was popular in Russia in the 1920s). Imagine your current street. On my own street, there live maybe 150 or 200 people. For a whole street. If everyone were to live in a condensed apartment complex, we'd all still live comfortably and happily, but we'd take up only an 1/8 of the space, therefore saving the world of less pollution, less energy and resource consumption, and less land use and waste.
Ok so I'll just stop there because I don't want to argue like if I was in defensive against you. All that is pure fantasy from me so I'll just continue like that because anyway, you stated it, you think that I cannot possibly use your informations and what I know about the current nano technology to extrapolate what could be the future in a somehow pertinent discussion.
I'll post some screenshots and my method to get rid of water fast in a couple of days.
Ok so I've been working on my very first ever skyscraper in Minecraft for a while, and I've come up with the final design. The building you'll see will eventually be inside a city downtown located not too far, south from the individual housing part.
I first wanted to have less possible parts of the building touching the ground, and a space enough high under it to be able to make a tropical tree or a sequoia stand. So I made a half 63 block wide sphere on the ground that I carved with 4 round holes. That makes 4 stands. Then I created the outer curves for these stands.
After that I made an irregular outer wall for the ckyscraper, and I tried my best to smooth the surface to close all the thing.
After that I made 2 floors, and the second one, I created a garden on a round mega plate that is fixed on the building.
Then I got back from the building to see the whole thing.... dam this is a tree !!!!!!! lolololololol
And why not? If we think carefully about that, trees are structures that are roughly the same for now millions of years. They have the best ways to stand, grow, be tall, reach a maximum of light in the most efficient and easy way, etc, etc, etc. They basically have been "tested" for millions of years.
So here's the begining of the thing. The round plates with a garden will make a spiral once the building will be finished:
the whole 'integrated into nature'
- Michael Atreides
At first I found the idea funny, but I remembered something: The diamond cooling system.
I saw something in a documentary a couple of months ago. Some scientist created artificial diamonds. They place a very very little piece of diamond in a sort of vacuum oven, and then they heat it when some gazes are blown inside. The gazes combine themselves on the diamond and "make it grow". Other diamond crystals start to grow on the first one.
With this method, they made some thin sheets of diamond, and they tried to replace a computer cooling system with these sheets. The diamond act as a heat lense. The heat litteraly get through the diamond as it was light and get out at the other end of the diamond sheet!! And between the heat source and the heat getting out, the diamond got no heat!!!
This could be applied for a kind of isolation from magma heat in 200 years if we think that what I'm talking about now is something already made.
But anyway hehe! If the volcano blows, all that blows too hehe! But it could be cool in Minecraft!
- Michael Atreides
EDIT: to bad I'm on ps3.
Keep up the good work!
Wow, really thanks for your commment!!! I'm putting very big efforts to be able to embed the nature with building, with style. And it's very hard. "Narchitecture" is almost totally absent from our world, so I have to completely think outside the box.
But I will eventually build a city center with skyscrapers like you! So I'll have to think how to embed neture in that.... WITH style! That will be hard because I don't want most of the buildings to simply be underground to let the nature be there.
Ok so here's some screenshots!!! First, here's what's still in developpement:
The mall. So what you are seeing is the dome roof, and the little piece of wall that maintain that in place. Just under that will be other curves that will make the corridor around 8 blocks larger, and around 10 blocks deeper. So I will probably be able to put big oaks inside the mall:
Here's the top view:
The semi-submerged hotel. It's a very big and difficult task for me. I'm still not sure exactly how it will be like at the end. So what you are seeing here is a top view from very high to be able to see the underwater structures. There will be a center dome with tubes that separate in 3 to get to chambers. Each end will have 3 vertical cylinders with chambers inside.
Here's the side view:
Here's the new done houses!
cliff hanging house:
Semi-spherical house, very complicated to find a good design for this:
Rounded squarish house:
And here's a top map created with Minutor:
And how did you do submerged building? when I try building under water, it always takes forever.
As far as realism goes, and my concerns with this as a student of architecture (and mind you, I'm no professional, nor do my current opinions reflect those of the majority in the profession):
To sum up: The designs are really cool as far as Minecraft buildings go. But if you're really trying to be environmentally friendly, don't focus on de-urbanization. Urbanization is what works best for efficiency and ecology for people. Focus more on trying to refit the urban environment, rather than trying to dismantle the urban environment.
Thinking that, I also try to consider that the humanity would not have consume the world as it did, and so not having to transit from the world current state to a more eco-friendly world.
So in 200 years, we will be inside the nano golden age for sure. So I will take each statement, and I will write what I think that it will be in 200 years. So I will use it as a base reference to make a more presice and pertinent talk!
Ok so what could be the materials in 200 years... With the help of nano technology, I think that we could have for example, rubbery concrete, or diamond hard plastic. We would be able to re-arrange molecules of any materials to make the structure more solid, and why not bendable at the same time?? We could create materials that could be 5 times the size of a bus, but being enough light to be pushed by a couple of mens.
Ok so it would not be concrete. I think that it will be a special polymer that react to ions. What I mean is about vines. Some vines use parts of themselves to hang to a material. But some of them just "stick" on walls. To a molecular size, the plant is changing the ions of the cells that will touch the wall to magnetically stick!!! So I think that the material used in 200 years will be some sort of polymer that react to these kind of things, and any other nature thing that would try to climb, stick or live on it, just letting the surface completely sterilised of anything. Not destroying but just basically repelling living things.
What I am thinking about this option is all that huge amount of earth that will have to be moved somewhere. The roads would have to let trucks pass. Just think about the volume of earth for just a small town... Where would we put all this earth?? Perhaps using it to make some new materials...
And also, but this is not some realty considering, it will take less time to build the roads like that in Minecraft.
Yea this is purely some aestetic idea from me and have no purpose other than making it cool for someone who plays Minecraft hehe!
I will build a city center. This place is something just beside a botanical garden and near a protected island. So with just a few houses because of some high level normes of zoning. I'm even thinking to destroy the domes pillar of the botanical and just let low height scattered houses. The city center, I've just started to build it, and it will be a real challenge hehe!
Yea I have to think of a way to somehow balance the volume of constructions that will be in a city center, with nature, with style. I have a few ideas for now, basically for 1 building lol. I'll post some screenshots when I will have built enough of it.
So basically, what you're saying is that "I'm only imagining some new time period in an entirely different universe where humans decided not to industrialize the world." With this logic, you could basically ignore anything up to this point, and really in this case, environmentalism doesn't matter at all, because environmentalism wouldn't be a thing if industrialization weren't a thing. Do you see what I mean? It's almost entirely useless to argue that your city is being environmentally friendly and all that if you're basically imagining an entirely new world.
Where are you getting this information from? Anything that's 200 years from now is purely hypothesis, and is really just science fiction. Think back to what life and technology was like in the early 1800s. People were using horses, and guns that held more than one bullet were still a fairly new invention. Cars weren't a thing, and neither was electricity. Gas-powered lighting was still the norm, and "environmentalism" wasn't even a word. Modern medicine and the germ hadn't been invented yet, and even Darwinian evolution (which is now considered outdated) hadn't come around until the mid/late 1800s). Therefore anything you're saying now is purely fantasy and has no basis against my architectural claims.
This still doesn't get to the point. My point is that your idea is to have this ugly white building plopped down onto a natural landscape, which deters any life from it. Whether or not climbing vines will make their way onto it (because those already do that with pretty much any building nowadays) is irrelevant. With a heavy white building (made from whatever you wish to imagine), you're effectively dominating nature and claiming the land as your own. Does that not go entirely against environmentalism? For centuries, people did without concrete and steel, and made their homes and buildings out of the natural materials around them. Is that not more in the spirit of being environmentally friendly?
All of the earth that you'd dig up in order to make underground tunnels could easily be turned around to make houses that are similar to adobe houses of old (i.e. take all of the clay and dirt you mined up, wet it, and turn it into bricks to build with). If you don't put your transportation underground, you'll be doing lots more damage to the ecology by having to mine out tons of iron and coal to manufacture steel beams, process tons of sand in factories to manufacture glass, throw tones of waste and smog into the air to produce cars people can drive, and ultimately put out tons of noise and smog pollution into the overworld.
This totally ignores my statement. My point is that you use way more land, and way more energy to try to create small scattered housing for people than if you create condensed urban housing (such as an apartment complex, or the idea of collectivist housing that was popular in Russia in the 1920s). Imagine your current street. On my own street, there live maybe 150 or 200 people. For a whole street. If everyone were to live in a condensed apartment complex, we'd all still live comfortably and happily, but we'd take up only an 1/8 of the space, therefore saving the world of less pollution, less energy and resource consumption, and less land use and waste.
I'll post some screenshots and my method to get rid of water fast in a couple of days.
I first wanted to have less possible parts of the building touching the ground, and a space enough high under it to be able to make a tropical tree or a sequoia stand. So I made a half 63 block wide sphere on the ground that I carved with 4 round holes. That makes 4 stands. Then I created the outer curves for these stands.
After that I made an irregular outer wall for the ckyscraper, and I tried my best to smooth the surface to close all the thing.
After that I made 2 floors, and the second one, I created a garden on a round mega plate that is fixed on the building.
Then I got back from the building to see the whole thing.... dam this is a tree !!!!!!! lolololololol
And why not? If we think carefully about that, trees are structures that are roughly the same for now millions of years. They have the best ways to stand, grow, be tall, reach a maximum of light in the most efficient and easy way, etc, etc, etc. They basically have been "tested" for millions of years.
So here's the begining of the thing. The round plates with a garden will make a spiral once the building will be finished:
Edit: and here's my method to get rid of water:
And here's the light system in function!! The lights that does'nt open on the top are just not connected for the moment: