Mushroom-shaped Solar Evaporators

These mushroom-shaped solar evaporators (the Umbrella project) were the winner of the Los Angeles Cleantech Corridor and Green District Competition, sponsored by the Architect's Newspaper and the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). The competition was supported by the Office of the Mayor of Los Angeles and the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles, which established the Clean Tech Corridor, a planned 2,000-acre mixed-use development zone near downtown.

Mushroom-shaped solar evaporators have taken the first place prize in a competition asking architects, landscape architects, designers, engineers, urban planners, students and environmental professionals to create an innovative urban vision for a several-mile-long development zone on the eastern edge of downtown Los Angeles.

The Umbrella project, by Constantin Boincean, Ralph Bertram, Aleksandra Danielak from Oslo, Norway, features a series of umbrella-like structures designed to take black water from city sewage and clean it in a dome through a process of solar evaporation. The clarified water would then be distributed and released to benefit the surrounding flora.

The Umbrella entry, took home $5,000 in the professional category of the competition, which attracted 70 entries.

L.A. residents will not likely be seeing giant mushroom-shaped dome structures popping up in the Clean Tech Corridor anytime soon, but the competition seemed to attain its mission to provide an open forum for ''provocative, even revolutionary, new visions of LA's urban fabric and infrastructure.''

Source: gizmag