Hasta La Ideas

It’s crazy, when you think about it: You park your car in a hot parking lot. Come back later and the car interior is absolutely baking, thanks to the sun’s passive energy. So you then spend fossil fuel energy cranking up the A/C to get the interior back down to a habitable temperature. It would make more mathematical sense, and be more ecologically sound, if we intelligently used the sun’s energy to cancel itself out, by powering the car and the A/C.

That may be a long way off, but we’re getting closer to that ideal, as evidenced by Synthesis Design + Architecture’s Pure Tension, a collapsible pavilion designed to showcase Volvo’s V60 Hybrid Electric Diesel. SDA’s design was the winner of a Volvo design competition to create a pavilion to merely showcase the car at traveling events, but principal Alvin Huang and his team took things further: The crazily flowing shape of the Pure Tension is covered in fabric-embedded photovoltaic panels that absorb energy, from either the sun or artificial lighting indoors, which can then be transmitted to the car. In other words, it’s like a huge sunshade that you can plug the car into.

It also fits handily into the trunk when broken down. Yes, you still need a crew to assemble the thing, but this isn’t intended to be a practical, ready-to-buy solution; it’s a pure exploration of what’s possible using current technology and fabrication techniques. It also handily incorporates the “dynamic mesh relaxation” process—”a real-time digital form-finding process that utilizes computation to simulate physical forces in materials to discover form/force equilibrium” that SDA has been independently researching. It’s something like “tensegrity” on steroids, or what Buckminster Fuller could have done had he had access to CAD.

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