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Sol of the City DB: It sounds like a lot of these collaborations came out of networking at the IDSA. Are there other groups that you've found useful in terms of resources and people? AA: Well, we already mentioned the NYS ERDA. Around the time I was getting involved with the IDSA, we also formed the New York chapter of O2. At the time, O2 was a European based environmental design organization. Now there are chapters in several cities. DB: One of the great things about O2 is their philosophy of sharing information and collaborating. AA: Exactly. Wendy Brawer, who co-founded O2NY, also put together the team for the Liberty Science Center project, so it was very much about collaboration. Wendy and I won the competition, having made the proposal together, and then it was more my job to actually build the thing. LG: What is the Liberty Park project about? AA: SolSpherica an interactive outdoor exhibit arranged like a giant compass with each direction representing something. At the north point, there's a house-shaped box containing the control center for the 1 kilowatt photovoltaic system. At the east, there is a panoramic view of New York City, where we show how the city might look if it were "polarized." We calculated that it if you put solar panels on 26% of the city's surfaces, you could power all of Con Ed's portion of the city. At the south is a solar tracker with a joy stick so you can take the panel off track and see how the energy drops. And at the west, there's a solar powered Theremin [the instrument that made all those eerie sounds in early sci fi movies]. They each represent a level of scale. The Theremin represents the Galaxy. The angled box represents Home, the city view is Community and the solar tracker is the Earth. DB: Who else do you work with? Do you do all these projects collaboratively? AA: Almost always. There's really only a point that you can work to alone, and then you have to really bring other people in, for production and other things. And, it also makes it more fun… |
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