stay tuned for the next kolelinia-slackline…

Many people think that the only direction for the development of the modern world is for it to become even more complicated, difficult and confusing. I think that only the simplification, the slowing of pace and a return to the human scale are the way to a harmonious life. New York is probably the most dynamically developed city. Huge amounts of capital and various cultural layers have passed through it, therefore it could lead the change.

The urban grid has two basic elements – the buildings and public space between them. The buildings are privately property, they are massive, and therefore they cannot be easily altered. The orthogonal street system is used successfully for thousands of years and is based on the linearity of the streets. The size of the margins between the streets is the result of the functional size of the building rather than the need for automobile streets.
At the dawn of the industrial revolution, the streets were a shared space, which incorporated with equal rights pedestrians, horses and the first cars.
At one point the cars become more powerful, more dangerous and numerous. Pedestrians retreated and all streets became automobile streets. The junctions are too many and require complex regulation and monitoring. The Industrial Revolution was based on a sterile pursuit of economic growth rather than of human values.

The car culture was born. People gradually became addicted to cars, encapsulated themselves, became antisocial and radically changed their lifestyle (home-car-office-shopping centre-car-home). The car became an extension of our body, even a sign of status. It was important to be fast, not be happy. Do we manage to experience more things during one life when we are in a hurry or does life just go by faster?

I think it is time to gradually seek new models for our public spaces. Technologies advance at a rapid rate, while the car and car traffic are frozen in the same place for many years. Every day there is a huge quantity of fuel burned to move millions of tonnes of iron, which in most cases is not necessary.

Diogrid is a proposal for a simple human parallel social and transport infrastructure.
What would happen if we evenly take away part of the automotive grid and put in its place a new parallel grid, more human and fun? In the new grid there would circulate pedestrians, cyclists and people with ultra-light electric individual mobility vehicles independent of the automotive grid. What would happen if the state allowed public space in those areas to be used by the private sector? Investors would be able to use the underground level in accordance with specific rules for parking lots, shopping centres or warehouses and would be required to manage public spaces at ground level. The lanes would be compact, and at the intersection points there would be light bridges and all of this would be in a high percentage of green area.

Two grids, two ways of life. The choice is yours…

I had the pleasure to participate in the main exhibition La ville mobile of the International Design Biennial in Saint Etienne. Here are some photos and info from the event:

The Biennial:

The theme of the 2010 biennial is around teleportation. It intends to explore paths of discoveries that will tend in their extreme expression to lead to a possible teleportation as the dematerialization of movement which appears to be an incredibly revealing notion of our era.

The Saint Étienne International Design Biennial is a event in the domain of design, due to the exhibitions shown as well as the diversity of its attendees. The Biennial democratizes design and makes it accessible to all kinds of audiences, proving that this creative discipline can take many forms, and is often driven by human aspects, including its uses by humans.

The Biennial is very different from a commercial fair. It is built on exhibitions, out of a strong will to promote contemporary creations. All objects, images, and services exhibited to the visitors may either question serious issues or show unexpected visions.

The exhibition La ville mobile:

How environmental challenges influence our transportation modes? In a constantly moving world, where can we spend time wasting it? How do the applications of the digital revolution shape new urban behaviours? How can designers, urban planners, or elected officials act on such moving organisms as cities?
All these questions are in the field of urban culture. The exhibition keeps questioning this, in an attempt to picture what future cities will look like.

The exhibition entitled La Ville mobile is intended as a trip within modern, expanding big cities, in which the rules and requirements related to mobility imply a novel view of our environment.
Through hundreds of pictures, atypical objects, and ambitious projects, the six-step exhibition invites us to dive into our own world in perpetual motion.

The city – a thrilling, collective, and shared space
Millions of people meet, live, work, and move within cities every day. Cities are not only living environments; we seize them collectively, in regular or exceptional big symbolic events. Marathons across New York or Paris, music festivals, carnivals, Gay Pride: all these activities contribute to defining the identity of cities, and help inhabitants appropriate their own cities.

Despite overcrowded streets, enjoy moving around in cities
In saturated big cities, where public transport does not always meet all expectations, and where driving depends on the traffic, the need to move around cannot be reduced to a limited activity. City-dwellers can choose many different transport options, according to their wishes and time schedules. Hybrid vehicles, eco-friendly innovating public transport, bicycles, urban sports, etc. – all these options make mobility a new field of freedom.

How cities impact our perception of time
Urban space is the field of a race for time efficiency. Distances are no longer calculated in kilometres, but in amounts of time. This capitalistic approach leads to designing ever faster and efficient transport solutions. So do new technologies. Couldn’t we imagine some kind of “slow motion”? Moving around in cities would not be an obligation any longer. We could enjoy contemplating urban landscapes, strolling around the streets, doing physical exercise. Current urban policies do comply with this demand. Pedestrians are the main focus of many ongoing projects: open spaces, parks, banks, and urban walks are enhanced.

Reviving the essence of public space – a place for sharing, meeting people, free of charge
In cities, you can enjoy meeting people by chance. Dwellers regularly appropriate public spaces, enjoying their free access. Spontaneous football games on squares, the Centre Pompidou esplanade turning into a street stage, chairs on Broadway during summertime. Squares change with what happens on them: markets, pétanque games, outdoor cinema, etc. Although malls and train stations are the new urban centres, squares still symbolise cities as places of conviviality and collectivism. Designers and architects do their best to make it welcoming. A city should also offer opportunities for a lunch break, between appointments, or a nice and quiet spot to do some work.

Public space and street furniture policies
Although the street seems to be the last truly free space, it is still not a place where everyone is free and equal. Debatable choices are made in public policies, between the need to supply pedestrians with the necessary equipment for life in an urban environment, and the fear of seeing populations deemed as undesirable taking hold of such equipment. Dissuasive furniture, VCR, and authoritarian signs make the street a space where bodies have to keep moving. Some artists and designers highlight the need to consider these marginalised populations, by denouncing their exclusion and offering mobile accommodation or shared space solutions.

How can we act on cities?
Interfering in the city atmosphere does not only happen by installing new structures or furniture. The relation to cities is changed sensibly through slight, diffuse signs of courtesy and care given to inhabitants by policy-makers. Beyond the infrastructure already in place, occasional interventions here and there, or quiet signs on micro-phenomena insure the success of urban projects. Designers are observers. Their projects are successful when resulting from good comprehension and good understanding between them and cities.

Feasible utopias
Cities have been the objects of dreams, scenarios, and fantasies through the ages. From Albert Robida’s aircrafts hung on the Saint-Jacques Tower to Archigram’s Walking Cities, from futuristic American illustrations in the 1950s to enhanced reality, cities initiate amazing inventions and critical fictions. Even though some of these visions may sound senseless to us, they are a hotbed of future ideas and utopias, some of which could come true…

more photos coming soon

A project made for the international competition “Seoul Cycle Design Competition” organized by Designboom and the Seoul Design Foundation. It was chosen among the 462 shortlisted projects from more than 3078 participants in the competition.

HALFBIKE is an attempt for drawing on new meaning to the understanding of what a classical bicycle is, suggesting a new experience in urban transportation. The result is an extremely compact and a rather-cheap bike. The low cost is an inherited function of the bike’s small dimensions and the usage of very few typical bike-parts for its construction. Thus the bike is both suitable for city bike sharing systems and for users with smaller budgets. The short horizontal distance between the handle-bar and pedal’s axis makes a standing body position quite comfortable and creates the illusion of jogging on pedals. It also helps breathing better.

halfbike project is under creative commons license (cc)

I’ll participate with 2 posters for the two projects and a scale model, a fragment of a future city, in which the Kolelinio system will be integrated. You can see it here:

Kolelinio, when flying into the city is not only science fiction…

We live in a strange world! Nowadays the technological achievements are great, but at the same time the means of conveyance evolve extremely slow. We drive vehicles that are about 20 times heavier than our bodies and we build expensive roads with heavy materials. We are all waiting to run out of petroleum and then to live in a cleaner world, but this won’t happen soon!
What if we change the streets in the city center with taut wires? What if our vehicles are compact enough to carry them with us as a bag?

Kolelinio is a concept for creating a completely new weightless layer for transportation on a higher level, based on steel wires and compact individual transportation electric devices. Kolelinio system is a low-cost solution, the individual backpack device has very simple construction and it consumes a little energy. The line changes heights based on the ground condition. For instance, in a dense traffic zone, the line is elevated quite high off the ground and it returns to the ground level after bypassing the crowded intersections.

The project was officially presented at the TEDx conference in Thessaloniki 2010

kolelinio project is under creative commons license (cc)

Video from the conference coming soon…
TEDxBG 2010 Official Photos

Is it possible to achieve a completely new level of transportation with minimum resources?
Kolelinia is a concept for riding our own bikes on a new type of bicycle-lanes, based on steel wires. It aims to create a new type of transportation experience, and to be installed using a minimal amount of resources.

The Kolelinia midair bike lanes consist of steel cables suspended above city streets at a maximum of 4.5 meters and over pedestrian zones at between 2.5 to 3 meters. Commuters’ bike tires are slotted into a steel furrow up to 14 cm deep and anchored to the two horizontal steel cables, with a third safety cable strung at about saddle height. The butt of one handlebar is also clipped to this third cable. Riders are clipped into the cable system via a special mechanism and a safety harness. The system is not intended to replace ordinary biking, only to relieve congested zones. Of course it is too early to talk about mass use. At the beginning it could be a special designed adventure line or a touristic line in the city.

We are born to move and this makes us alive. Transport is not just transport, it has to be an experience. The quality of this process reflects directly on the quality of our life.

The project Kolelinia was officially presented at the TEDx conference in Sofia

kolelinia project is under creative commons license (cc)

The line, something simple and at the same time powerful.

It can be border and can divide things…

…it can be connection.

Just such a connection is the LOB. It connects on a higher level with minimum of mass and resources. Four lines, two directions, one bicycle lane.

Before I go in details I want to separate two categories for the possible applications. The first one solves city transportation problems and the second one refers to tourism entertainment and sports.

Let’s begin with the first category. LOB can be a particular bridge. One single segment can pass over a problematic or high-traffic zone, being quite independent of it.

Another obstacle which can be overpassed with the help of LOB are the channels or rivers in urban areas.

The second category is tourism. Special routes can be constructed which pass between remarcable sights of the towns. In this way the tourist can see the town from quite different point of view.

These tourist’s bike lines can also pass over ancient ruins – an opportunity to see the past from above.

LOB can be extreme sport for those who are looking for high adrenaline.

At the end I want to mention that LOB can be experimental installation. For instance it can be a pavilion for the Olympic games or an EXPO, or even for advertising.

And now a more detailed look on the system. The bike moves in a special furrow. It’s stabilized by a security rim, which doesn’t allow the to bend to the left and to the right. The bicyclist fixes the rim to the pipe of the seat by a special locking mechanism. The security belts are fixed on the rim, they can be 2 or 4. There is a system with a spring, which absorbs the dynamic tensions. At the top there is a roller, which is attached to the stabilizing cable.

This is the detail of the furrow in which the wheel moves. Two stretched cables, covered with a flexible material.

I was looking for photos of bicyclists in the Internet and what was my surprise when on the photo I recognized who else but the American President Obama. So, the first word which came to my mind was – CHANGE, which in fact could be a good motto of my project. People need symbols, which to provoke them and make them believe that always there is an alternative in life.

Please secure your bike, fasten your seat belts and prepare to ­fly…

The finalists

1. George Dimov (ACO) 2. Animish Kudalkar (Finalist) 3. Neven Sidor (Judge) 4. Edward Jones (Chair Judge) 5. Amanda Baillieu (Building Design) 6. Ian Pieterse (Finalist) 7. Anna Grancharova (ACO) 8. Dirk Krolikowski (Judge) 9. Wolf Mangelsdorf (Judge) 10. Matthew Wells (Judge) 11. Martin Angelov (Finalist) 12. David Adar (Finalist) 13. Richard James (Finalist) 14. Stewart Kearney (Finalist) 15. Alastair Parvin (Finalist) 16. Peter Ridgway (ACO, Sponsor)

Everything started in the summer of 2008. I decided to participate in the international architectural competition „Line of Site” on the „City Transportation Interchange” brief. The first crazy idea which came to my mind was to make flying bicycle-lanes, using steel wire, something like ski lift but working on the opposite principle in which the wire is static and it doesn’t need electricity. Ultimately I sent only a pencil sketch and the idea placed for the final, which was held on February 2009 in London.