Teknè  blog tecnologi

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DENISE DE LUCA
LEARNING FROM NATURE
BIOMIMICRY: INNOVATION INSPIRED BY NATURE

Janine Benyus coined the term “biomimicry” in 1997 when she published her book Biomimcry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Benyus, an ever-curious biologist and captivating storyteller, describes biomimicry as “the conscience emulation of nature’s genius.” A less eloquent but perhaps more pragmatic definition is that biomimicry is a sustainable design tool based on emulating strategies used by living things to perform functions that we want our technologies to perform –
everything from creating color to generating energy. The goal of biomimicry is to design products and processes, companies and policies — new ways of living — that are well adapted to life on earth over the long haul.
If you haven’t heard the term biomimicry before, you probably have seen biomimicry in action. Velcro, for example, was designed by emulating the strategy used by burrs to cling to animal fur. Corrugation emulates the strategy used by scallops to create strength with less material. Solar panels emulate the strategy used by leaves to convert sunlight into a useable form of energy. Biomimics around the world are learning how to extract nature’s best ideas and turn them into sustainable design solutions. These innovators are learning to adhere like a gecko, cool buildings like a termite, make fiber optics like a sea sponge, repel microbes like kelp, and run a business like a redwood forest. Like them, we can all learn to look to nature as a model for innovative design solutions.
We can also look to nature as a measure of the sustainability of our designs. Biomimicry applies an ecological standard to judge the “rightness” of our innovations. These standards are expressed in what we call “Life’s Principles”. The idea is that after 3.8 million years of evolution, nature has learned what works, what is appropriate, and what lasts here on earth.
The more we can design our technical world to function like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone. For many, the true beauty of biomimicry is that it allows us to look beyond the drawing table – sometimes for the first time. “Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valuing nature,
based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it.” (Janine Benyus). This suggests that as designers we can look at nature not as a reservoir of natural resources, there for our exploitation, but rather as a reservoir of knowledge, of information, of inspiration. We can look to nature as a mentor that teaches us how we can fit the natural world.

R E E N A  T I W A R I
INTEGRATING THE MARGINALIZED
TOWARDS A CONNECTED CITY

Making liveable cities and addressing demands of sustainability, peak oil and climate change are same concerns. City thinkers need to come up with cogent solutions to resolve these urgent issues. However, it will be to no avail until the city collective is mobilised to make cities liveable – safe, secure, environmentally responsive and beautiful. Emerging disconnections between people and their city environments is becoming apparent in cities dealing with identity-crisis, crisis of consumerism and with social polarization. Currently almost 3 billion people live in cities. Of these, about a third live in slums. According to the UNHabitat report, that number is likely to double to 2 billion in 30 years’ time unless serious action is taken. In Indian mega-cities, nearly 30-60% of city dwellers live in slums. 93% of all employment and 64% of all savings comes from the informal sector of which slums are a huge part (NSSO, 2002). This informal economy re-introduces neighbourhoods and households as spaces for the production of goods and services while strengthening community relations in these districts. Yet, the people who live in slums are completely marginalized by the mainstream of the city. Where do they belong? Since they develop and operate beyond the formal control of the state, they are not legally part of the city, neither do they belong to other organised structures such as villages. They inhabit a liminal zone which can be spatially characterised as between order and chaos, and between permanence and impermanence. The marginalised survive and evolve with a minimum or complete lack of infrastructure (water, electricity, sanitation, education and transport). Attempts to integrate this informal urbanism into the mainstream have included on-site redevelopment which has introduced new spatial morphologies resulting in social disruption.
Another approach has been the complete displacement of these communities to new sites that lie on city peripheries thus shifting the problem elsewhere. In this context, questions remain on whether there are other ways of working within existing spatial morphologies and troubleshooting problems through democratic participation and empowerment.
With fast growth of slums it becomes critical to address and explore these existing and new geographies of the marginalised and the main stream – of urban poor and rich – in our cities. Will the Technology City of Future with increased global migration and global dependence increase polarization? Alternatively is there a way to utilise strengths of the technological ‘hardware’ and human ‘software’ of the marginalised and the mainstream to create a City of, for and by the people that responds to issues of rapid urbanization and migration.

ALEXANDROS  N . T OMBAZIS
ECO-TECHNOLOGIES IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
IS ECO-LOGICAL DESIGN SOMETHING DIFFERENT?

Vernacular architecture is of great importance for architects in today’s world of globalization, as it is an immense source from which to learn but not to copy. Copying would be meaningless except possibly from a purely aesthetic point of view. It is after the first oil crisis in the mid 70ies that so-called solar architecture came into being with its main emphasis on energy conservation. However, due to its very rudimental design, it did little to influence mainstream architecture. In the 80ies and 90ies we see a broadening of issues with a more holistic design approach.
I have tried through the years to motivate colleagues in the line that “Less is beautiful”, meaning that bioclimatic design is not only a matter of economy and sustainability. I now believe that we have no more time to wait. With the climate change facts that we know so much about, it is also a matter of our obligation to design and think in an eco-logical manner, which after all should not be an architecture of its own. In our present-day world of extreme morphocracy and morphocompetition the element that will be able to bring things together once more could well be an ecological approach to design as a complementary facet of what is from many points of view so positive: globalism.
The presentation will be complemented with examples of work by A. N. Tombazis and Associates.

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EDUARDO DE OLIVEIRA FERNANDES
RE-THINKING SUSTAINABILITY
SUSTAINABLE CITIES: HOW TO TACKLE THE UNREACHABLE

With people as the ultimate addressees, cities are called upon to process all resources, in particular, energy for assuring well being and productivity conditions. More than 50% of the World population and, most probably, over 70% of the so called developed World live in cities. So, cities can be seen as proxies for the majority of people’s interests and needs. Population growth and urbanization put a particular challenge to the new cities still born in the heart of the ‘oil era’ i.e., in a context of an energy culture with no future. The greatest challenge will be though not ‘what’ to do to make cities fit the future but ’how’ to operate the transition regarding the change of paradigm from fossil fuels to the Sun and this, bearing in mind that a large part of the World cities are already there.
Every human activity represents some stress for the environment. The novelty of our times is that environment acquired a global dimension. Most of our today’s energy is the solely environmental pressure factor with a direct link between the individual behavior of the energy user and its impact on the global environment. So, future cities cannot be thought without due consideration being paid to the energy resources used: firstly, by setting the amount of resources actually needed to build and rebuild the city as well as to maintain it and to assure its operation; and, secondly, by identifying where the resources come from caring about the impact of their use on biodiversity and controlling the carbon CO2 emissions equivalent.
Sustainability is a rather new universal three fold – environmental, social and economic – value that cannot be avoided when dealing with the future. But, as it occurred for many other universal values such as justice, sustainability won’t be accomplished overnight. And yet its consideration becomes rather crucial in the transition period when the generational ethics and the sharing of food and other goods are critical and the economics system of values seems, itself, to have a need for some readjustments. Sustainability is holistic, integrative and inclusive and not circumstantial, partial or local. That is why, literally, ‘sustainable cities’ do not and cannot exist. Instead, they must be an expression of solidarity with the sustainability of the whole Planet. In a World and at a time of performance criteria, assessment and benchmarking everywhere, it is not indifferent what and how sustainability, i.e., solidarity is valued by cities. In such a context it is particularly critical to anticipate how sustainability can be tackled when dealing with the future cities.

Z H E N G S H I L I N G
URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS IN EMERGING MEGALOPOLIES
EXPO 2010 SHANGHAI AND THE CITY’S FUTURE

In the history, Shanghai was one of the world metropolis which is always in a rapid development course. There are three glorious periods in the history of the city, 1200s, 1930s and 1990s. Since 1990s, Shanghai is again in a rapid urban development which has been reflected in the urban area sprawl, urban infrastructure improvement, a large scale building construction and historical areas’ conservation. From 1978 to 2007, 662.2 million m2 of buildings have been built, among them 391.66 m2 are housings. Many high-rise buildings have changed the skyline of the city. By 2007 there are already 13114 high-rise buildings and among them 777 are more than 100 meters high. Today there is a super high-rise of 632 meters under construction, the highest in Asia.
Three fundamental factors will affect Shanghai’s future development with the restructure of urban industry and urban space, i.e. the opening policy of Pudong New Area, the EXPO 2010 and the suburb development since 2000. The 1990s development has brought World EXPO to Shanghai, a milestone of the city’s future. The theme of EXPO 2010 is “ Better City, Better Life” , an issue never paid enough attention before. EXPO 2010 is a locomotive for the building of world class city, due to the preparation of EXPO a comprehensive urban renewal is in excecution. The historical areas and heritage architecture are conserved, the urbanscape has been put more and more attention for a better urban environment.

J A I M E L E R N E R
TRANSITION TIME TO A RESPONSIBLE CITY
CITIES ARE NOT PROBLEMS, THEY ARE SOLUTIONS

The 20th century was, par excellence, the century of urbanization. Around the world the supremacy of rural populations over urban ones was reversed and cities have experienced an accelerated growth, often beyond the desirable. They have been through unthinkable transformations, which left a fantastic array of challenges and possibilities as a legacy. If the last century was the century of urbanization, the 21st will be the one of cities. It is in the cities that decisive battles for the quality of life will be fought, and their outcomes will have a defining effect on the planet’s environment and on human relations.
There are those who portray an urban world in apocalyptic colors, who depict cities as hopeless places where one cannot breathe, move or properly live, due to excess population and automobiles. I, however, do not share these views. My professional experience has taught me that cities are not problems, they are solutions. It is necessary to change the negative lenses through which we view cities to positive ones, and focus on the incredible potential for transformation that they harbor. For instance, if it is in cities that up to 75% of carbon emissions are generated – due to construction techniques and materials, energy consumption, ecological footprints, amongst others -, it is precisely there that most effective results can be achieved. It is in the conception of cities that the largest contribution towards more sustainable patterns of development can be made.
The fundamental tenant of my conception of cities is that we must see them as an integrated structure of life and work, together. The best metaphor to embody this idea is the turtle – ‘Vita’. The turtle is the ultimate example of integrated living and working and circulating – key aspects in terms of urban sustainability.
In order to improve the quality of life in cities and their relationship with the environment three issues must be addressed: sustainability, mobility, and solidarity.
Live close to your work, or bring the work closer to home is one of the touchstones of sustainability. Reduce the use of the automobile, separate the garbage, give multiple functions during the 24 hours of the day to urban equipments, save the maximum and waste the minimum. Sustainability is an equation between what is saved and what is wasted. The more you save and the less you waste, the more sustainable the equation is.
In terms of mobility, every city has to make the best out of each mode of transportation that it has, be it on the surface or underground. The key resides in not having competing systems on the same space, and using everything that the city has in the most effective way. The surface system has the advantage of, with the right features (such as dedicated lanes, on level and pre-paid boarding, and high frequency), achieving a performance much similar to the one of the underground train at a cost that is affordable to virtually every city, and much more quickly. A healthier city happens where the car is not the only comfortable option of transportation; where the energy of unnecessary displacements is saved; where walking along its streets, parks and avenues in encouraged. Cities are the refuge of solidarity. They can be the safeguards of the inhumane consequences of the globalization process; they can defend us from the extraterritoriality and lack of identity effects. On the other hand, the fiercest wars are happening in cities, in their marginalized peripheries, in the clash between wealthy and deprived ghettos. A city must foster in its territory integration of the urban functions, of income levels, of age groups, ethnicities. The more you mix it, the more human the city will be. ‘Sociodiversity’ is a key issue to coexistence. Finally, a city is a collective dream. To build this dream is vital. Without it, there will not be the essential involvement of its inhabitants. Therefore, those responsible for the destinies of the city need to clearly draw scenarios – scenarios that are desired by the majority, capable of motivating the efforts of an entire generation.

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G A R Y L A W R E N C E
LOCAL AND GLOBAL IN THE MANAGEMENT OF CITIES
SUCCESSFUL CITIES

Successful urban places are political choices supported by data: they are not the accumulation of data. There has to be a
translation factor between the information collected and the people who need it. The real purpose of any city should be to
optimize conditions for human development over time.
Because major infrastructure systems that support urban development have such long life spans, coupled with the reality that the future is random and chaotic, not determined, one of the key issues for planning any urban place is the capacity for adaptation. A city’s ability to adapt is intrinsically linked to the political necessity of getting its citizens to consider the future as something to be embraced, not feared. This means overcoming such emotional drivers as nostalgia, fear, or pursuit of happiness.
The world’s complications and the tortuous interrelationships of systems in our built environments are becoming clearer through the problems we’ve created for ourselves.
One of the fundamental issues in our approach to decisionmaking is that as we focus on a particular problem, we examine it in ever-greater depth. In so doing even the best-intentioned mind ends up building silo walls around the issue. As a society we are not predisposed to take the time to explore an issue in
breadth, to think about how the issue we are studying may relate to, or indeed even be caused by, another issue that is not on the table. Our inexorable descent into ever more siloed solutions has led to the creation of transportation systems that do not consider land use, land use regulations that do not account for energy needs, waste systems that fail to reintegrate wasted natural resources through positive use. In the context of a city this is exacerbated by the reality that so many of the systems we depend upon at a local level are under regional or even national control.
The issues our society faces today are highly technical. Climate change is an accepted reality, although the consequences are still unknown. We are struggling to manage dwindling water supplies, rapid urbanization and re-urbanization, and demographic shifts, causing us to look much more specifically at the engineering, scientific and technical aspects of projects. Our search for solutions cannot afford to ignore the needs of people now, and in the future. In the public sector this means we must manage the human side of change by trying to balance data and information with equally compelling issues like fear, nostalgia, avarice and the pursuit of happiness

LEE SCHIPPER
TRANSITION OF URBAN MOBILITY SYSTEMS
CITIES AND URBAN TRANSPORT IN THE FACE OF THE CO2 CHALLENGE

In the next 25 years, the number of people living in urban areas likely will double to more than 5 billion people or about
two-thirds of the world’s population. The speed and enormous scale of urbanization puts pressure on resources, infrastructure and institutional capability to sustain city development particularly in the developing world.
At the same time transportation, the circulating system of cities, has collapsed in most Asian and Latin American countries because of the rapid pace of individual motorization, the decay of collective transport systems, and the marginalization of feet and pedals as ways of moving locally as a small minority of travelers, those in individual vehicles, can tie up most of the road space available and slow down the majority under their own power or on busses. Prominent side effects from the chaos are both direct inhalation of poisonous fumes from vehicles as well as longer-term exposure to photochemical smog. An increasingly worrisome challenge, however, is the CO2 emissions from fuel use.
The transport challenge, however, is not simply to lower CO2 emissions per kilometer of vehicle travel, rather to create a city where access is so good that high distance traveled is not necessary and more amenities are accessible to each person by foot, pedals, or mass transit. While an organized collective transport system is necessary, it is not sufficient.
The city must also be safe, offer jobs, open space, education, leisure, clean water and other collective amenities as well as economic opportunity. Without these attractions, cities wither away as those who can afford to flee to suburbs.
With theses amenities, cities become great magnets for even more people and prosperity. This places even more challenges on transportation to serve, not sever, economic development.
If the CO2 problem is understood in the context of transportation, and transport challenges are faced as part of clean and
sustainable urban development, then strong and vibrant cities will grow without leaving CO2 and other transport problems for present and future generations to flee.

GEORGE KUNIHIRO
AN ARCHITECT’S DISCOURSE ON THE CULTURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
THE POSSIBLE CITY: THE CASE OF ASIAN CITIES

21st Century is the century of reassessment for the human society. The industrial revolution accelerated the consumption of natural resources and critically offset the balance of our planet during the “Century of Modernization”. Progress of science and engineering, fuelled by the self-centered attitudes of our contemporary human society, had almost taken our planet to the point of “no return”. We are now at the crossroads.
Suddenly, after almost 40 years of repeated warning by the experts, the threat of the global warming had touched off a
major environmental movement by the global society. Although, education of the youth and the public, in general, is still an urgently needed task to tackle, finally, it seems that serious efforts are being staged to regain the balance in the
man-nature relationship.
On the other hand, there is yet another element of sustainability that we must address to: the question of “Cultural Sustainability”. The issue here is: how to maintain the balance of the past and the future. Historical monuments and cities are well conserved, thanks to the efforts of the UNESCO World Heritage Program. However, we are faced with the problem of continuity. Progress in the past century had been so rapid, that the potential 20th Century heritage has had no time to be recognized for its cultural contribution. In the developing regions of our planet, such buildings and landscapes are being wiped out just as we speak. Globalism is a powerful force and it can be beneficial to our society, but we must also look at the microcosm of local cultures and its heritage and protect and nurture them so that our generation can transmit them to the future generations.
Kunihiro’s presentation will feature the activities related to the cultural and environmental sustainability in the regional context of Asia.
From the efforts of a network of architects working to identify and to revitalize the 20th Century urban and natural cultural heritage in Asia, to the Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee’s proposal to execute an environmentally sustainable 2016 Olympic Games, to one local property owner’s personal mission to pass-on the cultural heritage of his land and his ancestors for the benefit of his local community. Kunihiro will illustrate, both in macro and in micro environmental scale, the undertakings of those concerned with the mission to pass-on the heritage of our nation and our planet.
The paper will aim to make a contribution in a discourse on the cultural and environmental sustainability, from the local and regional to the global context.

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Opening Statement
Febbraio 4 – 5 , 2009 Milano

The debate that Cityfutures 2009 launches, and the contributions which our keynote speakers and discussants will table, deal with the most radical and formidable turnaround in the history of human kind: the epochal shift from a society based on fossil fuels to a society based on renewable energies.
This change will see cities and large metropolitan regions on the front line: the places of maximum potential for the change with the highest environmental, social and economic frailty. They will be the possible prime movers of the shift, but also the places where the slow catastrophe is most likely to start.
The strategy will challenge the next three or four generations, but today’s generation, has the responsibility of setting it out.
The next ten years will decide if what is in front of us is a slow, irreversible catastrophe or the birth of a new civilization for Homo Sapiens.
The city of the future, the livable future in our cities, is a multigenerational project that cannot be tackled without a strong political will and a clear political program.
But there is no future for any political program that does not take this project as a core commitment.
This is why the focus of our work this year will be the Transition and its tools: vision, macro-economy, information, strategies, technologies, materials, components, services and grids. Design.

Lorenzo Matteoli
General Rapporteur

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Auditorium, Service Center Milano Fair
4-5 February 2009

One of the few certainties we have today is that ‘cities’ will still be here in 2050. However, not much can be said about what they will look like, what kind of life they will foster, how people will move within them, think, grow, study, work, have fun, suffer and die. What sort of architecture, design and technology tools will be used?
We need ideas, vision, architecture, design, conceptual tools, and technologies for the future of cities. This is the debate that the Italian Association of Architectural Technology (SITdA) has started with a selected group of experts and scientists from all over the World, to explore the “vision” and the tools for the transition from the city today to the city in the year 2050 and beyond. The results of this debate will be presented in Milan at the MADE Expo 2009 during an international conference called CITYFUTURES.
The problems associated with large metropolitan regions: energy, environment, transportation, social pressure, quality of life are now well beyond sustainability. Answers must be devised and supplied in a short time. The whole complex industrial system that serves the settlement process is challenged. Given the continuity of the transition process towards possible futures, some of the answers to these problems are in some way already available today, though hidden, elusive and unreadable. Some of the problems have not yet been placed on the table. Some known unknowns and some unknown unknowns!
CITYFUTURES wants to offer a vision and suggest the tools for the transition, the “know-how”, in accordance with the attitude of the technology experts members of SITdA. The debate and the research that are proposed will be institutionalized: to achieve that cityfutures will have a permanent structure: an international committee of experts and scientists, an international award for significant projects and scholarships for young researcher active on critical topics. cityfutures will connect with formation and information of the professions through the Italian Association of Architectural Technology.

CITYFUTURES è il contributo che MADE expo intende dare al grande sforzo di visione e di impresa
che vede impegnata la città di Milano con Expo 2015.

CONFERENCE OPENING CITYFUTURES
SITdA e MADEexpo
4 Febbraio 2009, 11.30

Session 1 – 4 February 2009, 14:30
cityfutures: Governance

Speakers:
3 International keynote Speakers
4 discussants

Topics:
Local and Global in management of cities
Macroeconomics of the transition
The Possible City

Session 2 – 5 February 2009, 9:30
CityFutures: Vision

Speakers:
3 International keynote Speakers
4 discussants

Topics:
Global Energy Network
Urban Transformations in Emerging Megalopolies
Transition towards a Responsive City

Session 3 – 5 February 2009, 14:30
CityFutures: Technology

Keynote Speakers:
3 International keynote Speakers
4 discussants

Topics:
Biomimicry
Ecology of marginalized communities
Eco-technologies in Architecture Design

PROFILES KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Gary Lawrence (USA)
Gary Lawrence is an internationally recognized expert in urban strategies and sustainable development. He provides thought leadership for strategic urban development throughout Arup’s 92 offices in 37 countries. A significant milestone in Gary’s career was his leadership of “Toward A Sustainable Seattle”, the first sustainability-focused municipal comprehensive plan in the world. Gary’s speeches and lectures have formed the basis for the development of much of the current thinking on sustainable development and he is acknowledged by the former UN Secretary General of Habitat as having authored “the single most important contribution to the entire Habitat II process”. Gary’s senior advisory roles include service with the Clinton Administration’s Council on Sustainable Development, the US Delegation to Habitat II, the Global Environment Center, the US Agency for International Development, the Brazilian President’s Office, the British Prime Minister’s Office, the European Academy for the Urban Environment, and the Organization for Economic and Community Development (OECD). In the US he is actively involved with the Urban Land Institute, the American Planning Association, the US Smart Growth Leadership Council and he is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.

Lee Schipper (USA)
Lee Schipper is co-director of EMBARQ, the Center for Sustainable Transportation and the World Resources Institute, Washington DC. He was a guest researcher at the Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris and at the Shell International Petroleum Company, London. From 1995-2001 he was senior scientist at the International Energy Agency, Paris. He was on leave from his post as a staff senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), University of California, Berkeley, from which he retired in 2001 after 24 years of service. He is also a member of the U.S. Transportation Research Board’s Committee on Sustainable Transport and a senior associate of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Trained in both music and physics, Lee was a faculty member of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (1971-1981). He is a jazz vibraphonist and pianist.

George Kunihiro (JP)
George Kunihiro is an architect-activist and Professor of Architecture at Kokushikan University in Tokyo, Japan. He was born in Tokyo and moved to the United States in 1964. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974, and his Master of Architecture degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1976. He has taught architectural design at the Universities of Yale, Columbia and Harvard and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. George Kunihiro had his private practice in Los Angeles and New York for 15 years before returning to Tokyo in 1997 to set up his practice in Asia. He has been invited to speak in Asia, Europe, the United States and Gulf Region. Currently, he is the Vice Chairman of the Architects Regional Council Asia, Vice Chairman of the modern Asian Architecture Network, a non-profit organization, and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects, Japan Chapter.

Eduardo de Oliveira Fernandes (PT)
Eduardo de Oliveira Fernandes, born in 1943, professor at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal, PhD on Applied Sciences at the Federal Institute of Technology (Lausanne, Switzerland) in 1973. He was Secretary of State for Environment – Portuguese Government (1984-1985) and again in 2001-2002 Secretary of State to the Minister of Economy for Energy and Innovation in Portugal. Devoting the last 25 years of his career to teaching, research, consulting and public activities on various topics related to energy and environment, he was the founder of an RTD group on Building Thermal Physics with major pioneering activities in Europe on Passive Solar Technologies in Buildings, Indoor Air Quality, and Energy and Environment in the Urban Space. He was the author of the Energy concept for the EXPO’98 urban site and was consultant to several sustainable cities projects in Europe. He is a member of various international scientific organizations (ISES, ASHRAE, and ISIAQ). Since 2006, he has been President of the Energy Agency of the City of Porto.

Zheng Shiling (China)
Zheng Shiling is one of the leading Chinese architects and theorists. He was born in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan Province in 1941. He was promoted as a professor at Tongji University In 1993. He has been a member of the International Committee of Architecture Critics, UIA since 1994. In 1996 he was elected as the President of Shanghai Architectural Society and as the Vice President of Architectural Society of China. He was elected to be a Member of the Académie d’Architecture of France (1998), of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2001). Over the years he has been invited to lecture at universities and forums in the U.S.A., Canada, Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Spain, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 1998, he was nominated by the Shanghai Municipality Government as the Director of the Urban Space and Environment Committee, Shanghai Urban Planning Commission and a Member of the Superior Consulting Committee of Science and Technology Association.

Jaime Lerner (BR)
Jaime Lerner is an architect and urban planner. As a three-time mayor of Curitiba (Brazil), Lerner led the urban revolution that made the city renowned for urban planning, mainly in public transportation, environment, and social programs. Lerner was also twice Governor of Parana State, and conducted an economic and social transformation that greatly improved the quality of life in the cities and in the country. Lerner has received several international awards, including the highest United Nations Environmental Award (1990), Child and Peace Award from UNICEF (1996), the 2001 World Technology Award for Transportation and the 2002 Sir Robert Mathew Prize for the Improvement of Quality of Human Settlements by the International Union of Architects. He has also lectured at important conferences including the 53rd Annual United Nations Conference (2000). When not in public office, Jaime Lerner is intensely engaged in architecture and urban planning work.

Denise DeLuca (USA)
Denise is a registered professional engineer in Montana and a LEED AP. Denise received her bachelor in Civil Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she grew up, and her masters in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Montana State University in Bozeman. Denise has over 15 years of experience in both the public and private sectors in projects related to surface and groundwater quantity and quality modeling and analyses, environmental compliance, alternative waste management, and green building strategies. Most recently, Denise has been member of Emergent Solutions, an independent consulting service which focuses on strategies for sustainability. Denise is excited about her most recent project, developing The Biomimicry Resource Handbook, and her new position with The Biomimicry Institute developing outreach materials and programs, particularly targeted at engineers, architects, and designers.

Reena Tiwari (Australia)
Reena Tiwari is an urban designer, city-thinker and an academic in the Departments of Urban & Regional Planning and Architecture at Curtin University of Technology Perth, Western Australia, a member of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Urban Design Institute of Australia, Institute of Urban Designers, India and the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. She is Course Coordinator for Masters Program in Urban Design and Chair for the Design Stream in the Planning Department. She has developed a framework of city-enquiry, underscoring a critical engagement with the embodied and expressive aspects of city life. Her work for marginalized communities both in India and Australia provides a ground for a comparative exploration of the needs, lifestyles, questions of identity and change for these communities. She has a PhD in the area of Urban Studies, a Masters in Urban Design and a Bachelor Degree in Architecture. She received Australian Award 2006 for her outstanding contribution to student learning.

Alexandros Tombazis (GR)
Born in India in 1939, Alexandros Tombazis spent his early childhood in India and England before moving permanently to Greece. As a child he wanted to be a painter, and it was his art teacher who first suggested the idea of his becoming an architect. Architecture was then something abstract for him and difficult to comprehend, but once the decision was taken, he never regretted it. His interest in technology and the first oil crisis made him turn towards the use of solar and alternative energy sources, which have become an integral part of his architectural design. Today, Alexandros Tombazis divides his time between his office, which employs about 60 people, and travelling. Alexandros Tombazis has been awarded prizes in more than 110 national, international or invited competitions. In 1991 he was elected honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects, while in 2006 he was awarded an honorary PhD by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

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FONDAZIONE TARGETTI
established and sponsored by Targetti Sankey Spa to promote, support and develop the culture of light, art and architecture, is a point of meeting, integration, and cultural exchange for specific skills, in order to share the knowledgefrom individual research channels and establish a network ofexcellence capable of offering a precious opportunity for professional enrichment.
The Foundation is headquartered at La Sfacciata, a fifteenth century villa near the Certosa monastery of Florence. It conducts its work through distinct programs:
LIGHTING ACADEMY
Training in lighting technology has its raison d’être in the growing awareness of the importance of light in a project with high added value, and in the ongoing technological developments that lead to innovative lighting solutions.
Lighting, therefore, is no longer a mere technical problem and necessity. It is one of the greatest occasions in which practical knowledge must be flanked by an understanding of cultural, psychological and perceptive issues.
The Lighting Academy training program is dedicated to all those who want to acquire specific knowledge for a more correct and effective use of light in their projects. Courses are offered at different levels.
The teaching is done in cooperation with the Istituto Nazionale di Ottica Applicata, universities, members of the  major lighting design associations, and professionals from Italian and international lighting companies.
THE PORTAL OF LIGHT:
www.lightingacademy.org
Light can interpret a single space in a thousand ways. It can create a thousand atmospheres, a thousand feelings, a thousand sensations of balance. There is a special place for those who love light: the Lighting Academy portal. With millions of images and information that is updated daily, it offers architects and lighting designers an overview of the best lighting projects from the past, present and for the future.
Curiosities, news and scientific articles are presented in a digital magazine that is a delight to read and a pleasure to access. It is always full of stories, facts and faces……
…the thousand faces of light.
OSSERVATORIO SULL’ARCHITETTURA
(Observatory on Architecture) was established as a series of meetings for monitoring, surveying and analysing the processes connected to the intricacies of contemporary architecture and the related complex urban phenomena.
Opportunities for considerations on the health of cities and architecture, as well as a tool for studying the continuous interplay and interactions between architecture and science, technology, the arts, philosophy, sociology, human sciences, economics and politics.
Important critics, artists, sociologists and well known architects have been protagonists of the first series of meetings, that has been carried out since 2004 under the direction of the Architect Pino Brugellis.
TARGETTI LIGHT ART COLLECTION
Villa La Sfacciata is the permanent home of the Targetti Light Art Collection, a collection of contemporary artworks that is the brainchild of Paolo Targetti. It springs from the awareness that light is such a fascinating element that it cannot be limited by its technical-functional roles. Amnon Barzel, the artistic director – and former curator of important European museums – has selected some of the major artists on the international scene (Zorio, Rinn, Poirier, Nagasawa, Messina, Mei, Liv, Klotz, Jones & Ginzel, Ionda, Eliasson and Corneli) and commissioned them to create “light pictures.” These are installations that share a common denominator, artificial light, and they have been created in the most varied of ways. The technical consulting provided by Targetti’s experts helped the artists select the most suitable luminous instruments for heighten the expressive potential of their works.
An itinerant exhibition of the collection made it possible to display the artworks in Florence, Milan, Ljubljana, Rome, Buenos Aires, Ferrara, Lyon, Warsaw, New York and Wien.

The headquarters of the Lighting Academy at Villa La Sfacciata occupies nearly 2,000 square meters and is equipped with:
• 100 seat multimedia auditorium
• 24 seat classroom
• Lighting Technology Laboratory
• Computer room with stations for computerized calculations
and simulations
• Meeting room and library

www.fondazionetargetti.org