View allAll Photos Tagged generating
Generate London 2015, the conference for web designers, presented by net magazine and Creative Bloq.
17 and 18 September 2015 at the Grand Connaught Rooms in London.
Generate London 2015, the conference for web designers, presented by net magazine and Creative Bloq.
17 and 18 September 2015 at the Grand Connaught Rooms in London.
The (mostly unused) Spencer Generating Station in Denton, TX, viewed from the Katy Trail through some trees.
Taken with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G lens.
Generate London 2015, the conference for web designers, presented by net magazine and Creative Bloq.
17 and 18 September 2015 at the Grand Connaught Rooms in London.
The Mesh Files
A folding-experiment-series of user generated and computer aided mesh structures with semi flexible material. An originally flat and planar surface is bent as a result of force based deformation.
Resulting folds in the presented artifacts are formed in response to temporarily applied compressive stresses to different sections of the surface. Due to the non-fluid characteristics of the surface, it is not able to deform like an ideal fluid but instead bucks and forms folds.
A two dimensional mesh grid is generated by a custom made software. the amount of cells per gird is based on the amount of cells when folding paper xy-times into half - that is 2 to the power of x for all columns and 2 to the power of y for all rows. Each rectangular cell is divided into 2 triangles by adding a diagonal edge. The mesh now consists of n-amount of edges and m-amount of vertices.
The software allows the user to displace individual vertices of the mesh based on a given set of rules. The vertices located at the boundaries of the mesh can only be moved along its corresponding axis. This restriction allows the mesh to maintain it's original rectangular shape.
Foam board 3mm white is used as source material. Foam board consists of three layers. Enclose the core foam layer is enclosed by 2 layers of paper. The computer generated mesh is projected onto each foam board. During the process of making, the foam core and one paper layer is cut with a pen-knife for every edge of the applied mesh.
Generate London 2015, the conference for web designers, presented by net magazine and Creative Bloq.
17 and 18 September 2015 at the Grand Connaught Rooms in London.
Generate London 2015, the conference for web designers, presented by net magazine and Creative Bloq.
17 and 18 September 2015 at the Grand Connaught Rooms in London.
B.C. Cobb Generating Plant at Muskegon Michigan. The gravel piles are on another pier opposite the power plants's coal warf. 1000 footers discharge coal here.
Photographed using a Nikon F5 and a NIkkor 80-400 VR lens on Kodak Ektar 100 film
This is quite a celebrated building, being the former Bristol Tramways electricity generating station. I would dearly love to look inside it before it is totally transformed as part of the Finzel's Reach redevelopment.
I would guess that the building we see must have been the machinery hall, containing the generator sets. Perhaps a high-pressure, high speed vertical cylinder reciprocating engine, with a low pressure Parsons turbine set? From memory, the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry has a reciprocating engine generator set, although I can't find a decent picture. Machinery halls are usually tall buildings (as this is) with an overhead travelling crane that can lift part of the machinery up and over the rest. So is the building steel framed to support the crane? There must be some kind of structure inside to support a crane.
And there would have been a boiler house as well. This prewar aerial view shows the chimney from the boilers, although it's not clear where it starts. There must also have been a means to deliver and store coal, perhaps a crane to unload it from the floating harbour. The floating harbour would have provided cooling water for the condernsers and (probably) feed water for the boilers. I would guess that offices and administration would have been in the main building.
So, great that the architecturally important main building is being saved, but a (small) shame that the building's context will be obliterated when the conversion to flats is finished.
(Colour version here.)
Generate London 2015, the conference for web designers, presented by net magazine and Creative Bloq.
17 and 18 September 2015 at the Grand Connaught Rooms in London.
The Mesh Files
A folding-experiment-series of user generated and computer aided mesh structures with semi flexible material. An originally flat and planar surface is bent as a result of force based deformation.
Resulting folds in the presented artifacts are formed in response to temporarily applied compressive stresses to different sections of the surface. Due to the non-fluid characteristics of the surface, it is not able to deform like an ideal fluid but instead bucks and forms folds.
A two dimensional mesh grid is generated by a custom made software. the amount of cells per gird is based on the amount of cells when folding paper xy-times into half - that is 2 to the power of x for all columns and 2 to the power of y for all rows. Each rectangular cell is divided into 2 triangles by adding a diagonal edge. The mesh now consists of n-amount of edges and m-amount of vertices.
The software allows the user to displace individual vertices of the mesh based on a given set of rules. The vertices located at the boundaries of the mesh can only be moved along its corresponding axis. This restriction allows the mesh to maintain it's original rectangular shape.
Foam board 3mm white is used as source material. Foam board consists of three layers. Enclose the core foam layer is enclosed by 2 layers of paper. The computer generated mesh is projected onto each foam board. During the process of making, the foam core and one paper layer is cut with a pen-knife for every edge of the applied mesh.
HISTORY
Blackburn Meadows electricity generating station was built by the Sheffield Corporation in 1921,mainly to support the steel industry in the Lower Don Valley. The station was expanded in the 1930s, requiring the construction of Cooling Towers 6 and 7 in 1937-8 to supplement earlier square cooling towers to the north east.
These new hyperbolic shaped towers were designed by LG Mouchell and Partners. This was the same partnership responsible for the first hyperbolic cooling towers in the country (built in Liverpool in 1925) and some 150 towers subsequently built across the United Kingdom. Blackburn Meadows was one of those power stations nationalised to form part of the National Grid after the Second World War. It was decommissioned and mainly demolished in the 1970s.
ASSESSMENT
The Blackburn Meadows cooling towers are nationally rare surviving remains of pre-nationalisation large scale electricity generation. They are thought to be the only pre-1950 hyperbolic cooling towers surviving nationally, with nearly all the other 500 or so towers in the country dating to 1960or later. In addition to their early date, the association with LG Mouchell, the design features such as the banding and the thinness of the shell all give the towers interest. The addition of the spray coating of concrete following the 1964 disaster at Ferrybridge adds further interest by showing a development in the industry.
Even without the clouds of steam that signify operational examples, the cooling towers are also very prominent landmark features, providing a visual indication of the former scale and importance of the Sheffield steel industry in the Lower Don Valley.
However the two hyperbolic cooling towers are just one component of an extensive complex that formerly existed. The plant at Blackburn Meadows generated electricity by using steam turbines to turn electric generators, with the steam produced using coal fired boilers, the coal supplied by rail.
The railway system, coal handling plant, boiler complex, turbine and generating halls, as well as the switchgear for connecting the plant to the electricity grid and the earlier square cooling towers have all been lost. Water used by the steam turbines would have been maintained within a closed system, the steam leaving the turbine then passing through a condenser to change it back to hot water before being reboiled to produce steam to turn the turbine.
The cooling towers were used to cool water circulating in a separate system that was used to cool the condensers other equipment.
With the demolition of the rest of the generating station, the surviving cooling towers have lost their context so it is difficult to see how they functioned as an integrated part of a much wider plant.
Functionally, cooling towers still in use consist of far more than just the shell of the tower that survives at Blackburn Meadows. In operation, water is piped into the lower portion of the cooling tower into a complex network of pipes or troughs ending with sprinklers.
A fine mist of water is then sprayed on to a timber or asbestos lattice of staging and screens filling the lower 4-5m of the tower, with the water being cooled via natural evaporation aided by air being drawn upwards by the tower above. Any water droplets carried by this updraft are intercepted by a layer of louvers positioned above the sprinklers. In addition, operational cooling towers have a network of maintenance access ways. All bar one pipe in one of the towers has been stripped out from the cooling towers at Blackburn Meadows, leaving very little indication of how the towers actually functioned.
The Blackburn Meadows cooling towers are thus not only a very partial survival of an electricity generating station, they are also only a very partial survival of a pair of cooling towers. Even given the national context of the highly fragmentary survival of the pre-nationalisation power generation industry, designation of the Blackburn Meadows cooling towers cannot be justified.
The rest of the generating station has been lost, depriving the towers of their functional context and the loss of pipe work, staging, screens and access ways means that a highly significant part of the interest of the towers as cooling towers has also been lost.
www.tinsley-towers.org.uk/pages/english_heritage.pdf
If you’ve ever driven into Sheffield from the M1, you’ll be familiar with the Tinsley Cooling Towers - a piece of industrial landscape that’s become one of the city’s most famous landmarks. For now at least.
Three quarters of the public want them saved
The BBC online poll established www.bbc.co.uk/southyorkshire/content/image_galleries/tins… that three quarters of the public want them saved. This makes more than half a million supporters in Sheffield and Rotherham alone. E.ON’s own poll was flawed by a mix-up of criteria.
English Heritage wrote www.tinsley-towers.org.uk/pages/english_heritage.pdf that the Towers, built in 1938, are the oldest surviving hyperbolic Cooling Towers in the UK and that their prominence provides a visual indication of the former scale and importance of Sheffield’s steel industry.
My video card glitches out more frequently than it should. But it does yield some interesting compsotions.
Mosaic generated from views extracted from my equirectangular panoramas with Metapixel.
The rectilinear views were generated in Mathmap as 20 square views with 60° field-of-view with following the geometry of an icosahedron. Over 400 equirectangular panoramas were used (including the bracketed versions of some of them), producing a bit more than 9000 source images.
The input image is the Château de Maupas, scaled 12 times, and the tiles are 128x128. The minimum distance is 20 (meaning each image can not be reused less than 20 positions away from itself - this creates the strange banding you can see in the sky on the right for example). The final image is 48,000x32,128, i.e. 1.5 gigapixels. You can view it online in Gigapan.
On flickr you can download a downscaled version of the photomosaic, "only" 12,000x8,032 (the file is 12.4MB and it may slow down or crash your browser).
