Tag: upper

When Designers Can’t Get Their Way: Photographs of a Mega-Library in China

In Tianjin, China is this massive Tianjin Binhai Library, designed by Dutch architecture firm MVRDV and the Tianjin Urban Planning and Design Institute. Photograph by Ossip van Duivenbode Photograph by Ossip van Duivenbode The massive structure is some 363, 000 square feet and houses over a million books. Photograph by Ossip van Duivenbode Photograph by Ossip van Duivenbode The sphere you see in the center of the space is an auditorium. Photograph by Ossip van Duivenbode Photograph by Ossip van Duivenbode The structure is intended to serve not only as a library, but as a social and cultural community center. Photograph by Ossip van Duivenbode The five-level building contains extensive educational facilities, arrayed along the edges of the interior and accessible through the main atrium space. The public program is supported by subterranean service spaces, book storage, and a large archive. Photograph by Ossip van Duivenbode Photograph by Ossip van Duivenbode One thing you’ve got to be wondering is how the heck the patrons access those books on the upper tiers.  Photograph by Ossip van Duivenbode Photograph by Ossip van Duivenbode The designers came up with a clever way to do this, but, disappointingly, the idea could not be realized due to time constraints: The library is MVRDV’s most rapid fast-track project to date. It took just three years from the first sketch to the opening…. The tight construction schedule forced one essential part of the concept to be dropped: access to the upper bookshelves from rooms placed behind the atrium. This change was made locally and against MVRDV’s advice and rendered access to the upper shelves currently impossible. The full vision for the library may be realised in the future, but until then perforated aluminium plates printed to represent books on the upper shelves. Photograph by Ossip van Duivenbode Fake upper books aside, it’s still a magnificent structure! Via PetaPixel

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When Designers Can’t Get Their Way: Photographs of a Mega-Library in China

Some of Earth’s oxygen escapes to the moon every month

The Earth and the moon share more than an orbit around the Sun. Turns out that bits of atmosphere manage to travel the 240, 000 miles out to our nearest celestial neighbor, and have been for more than 2 billion years, according to data gathered by Japan’s moon-orbiting Kaguya spacecraft. In a study published on Monday to the journal Nature Astronomy , planetary scientist Kentaro Terada of Osaka University observes that ionized oxygen particles escape from the upper atmosphere for five days every month to bombard the surface of the moon. Terada’s data suggests that oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere are first ionized by ultraviolet light and then accelerated into the magnetosphere , the planet’s magnetic envelope. The magnetosphere extends more than 370, 000 miles away from the Sun, fully enveloping the moon’s own orbit around the Earth. For five days every month when the moon passes through the magnetosphere, it is blasted with these ionized particles. The Osaka University team estimates that every square centimeter of the moon’s exposed surface is struck by approximately 26, 000 oxygen ions every second over the five day period. While this isn’t enough for the moon to develop a breathable atmosphere of its own, this discovery suggests that the moon’s surface could hold clues to Earth’s ancient atmosphere — much like ice cores being dug out of the Greenland and Antarctic permafrost. Source: Science News

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Some of Earth’s oxygen escapes to the moon every month