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Qi – Brilliant people doing EXTRAORDINARY things
September 28, 2009Thursday the 8th of October, 2009 from 18:00 to 23:00
BRILLIANT PEOPLE DOING EXTRAORDINARY THINGS
The opening conference will feature brilliant people, beautifully designed products and stunning art to inspire us to think differently about living in a way that is consistent with a healthy planet.
THE SPEAKERS
The people who strive through their thoughts, their writings, their design and actions for a more sustainable world. Who are these movers & shakers?
Willie Smits, Chairman of the Masarang Foundation
An eye opening talk about reforesting devastated land, increasing the well-being of communities, reducing temperatures and conserving wildlife in the process
Singgih S Kartono, Designer and Founder of Magno Design
A member of the Jury at International Young Creative Entrepreneur award 2009: “How do you make a successful business based sustainable principles?”
John Hardy, Jewellery designer and founder at the Green School in Bali
A maverick that moved from the world of fashion & luxury design to build a holistic education for children in a sustainable environment and starting a the first bamboo building company in Bali
Singh Intrachooto, Design Principal, Osisu, Thailand
Recipient of Thailand’s Emergent Designer of the Year Award, Elle Décor’s Designer of the Year as well as Top Environmentalist 2008 Award from Thailand’s Department of Environment
Kenneth Cobonpue, Industrial Designer
Kenneth has won global recognition for embodying the ideals of Asian design. Through innovation of production and materials, he seeks an alternative to the Western definition of modern design
Lone Droscher Nielsen, Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation Project, Borneo
The star of BBC and Discovery Channel who leads the largest primate rescue project in the world, with more than 600 orangutans in its care.
THE PRODUCT
During the event people can talk with designers and get to grips with beautiful products with Qi provenance. Attendees can learn about the production values and brand ethos and actually buy the products without needing to trawl the internet and wait for delivery. Many of the products are shown in Asia for the first time and sourced in partnership with Eco-Age, London.
THE PROGRAM
WELCOME
18:00-18:50 welcome cocktail with product showcase.
Qi PART ONE
19:00-19:10 Opening remarks
19:10-19:30 Willie Smits “re-foresting rainforests”
19:35-19:55 Singgih S Kartono “a successful sustainable business”
20:00-20:20 John Hardy “the green school: the future of education”
20:25-20:35 Introduction to the art, food and products
20:35-21:25 Main canapés and rainforest raffle sales.
Qi PART TWO
21:35-21:55 Singh Intrachooto “innovating design thinking”
22:00-22:20 Lone Dröscher Nielsen “a win-win future”
22:25-22:30 Closing remarks
22:30-23:00 Dessert & coffee/tea.
23:00 Raffle results
24:00 End
THE VENUE
National Museum of Singapore, 93 Stamford Road, Singapore 178897
REGISTER NOW!
More info and registration, please click here
STRANGER IN PARADISE FOR OCT’ 09
September 18, 2009
Just when you thought it was safe to send your children to Norway
“Green is the new Black” trumpeted the ridiculous Singapore Straits Times recently, just as uptight architects across the region started cladding their buildings’ walls with ground covers.
“Lean and Green” went out the cry at last year’s South Asia Architects’ Conference in Sri Lanka; sloppy hack David Robson (of “Beyond Bawa” fame) lead scores of villa designers up and down the Galle coast in search of the Green Grail. They all came back ‘refreshed’, I believe, but nearly all continued designing aquarium tank-like homes.
And my opinion on Bali’s stampede towards mindless modernism do not need repeating.
So what’s the upshot?
In Bali I am daily invited, via Facebook, to join some green initiative against Balinese plastic/stray dogs, or ozone-depleting beggar-women. I don’t join because I have always felt that by employing 200 or so gardeners, and by championing artful-natural garden design for 35 years ……is enough ‘green initiative’.
Well it’s not. It’s a cop-out. I need to do more.
Let it now be known that Bali, with all its environmental problems—most the result of inadequate education and unchecked urban sprawl, and the, now, imploding infrastructure—has two green warriors amongst the expatriate hill-tribes of Sayan, Ubud. Their example must be followed: they have shown us dilettante designers the light!
Jewellery czar and czarina John and Cynthia Hardy, the Bill and Melinda Gates of Banjar Baung, Sayan Kelod, have shown us―with their all-bamboo Green School, their own-gnome home and their hostelry the Villas Bamboo Indah―that they are the best news on the Bali environmental design scene since Empu Kuturan invented spring-fed bathhouses in the 12th century.
Adobe is to altruism what stainless steel is to hedonism.
Now read on:
21st August 2008: A spirit-lifting epiphany in the heart of Hippydom
I am invited to superstar N.Y. design guru Stefan Sagmeister’s Sayan Swansong at the Villas Bamboo Indah. I have heard of the beauty of the villas through my good buddy Tim Street-Porter―whose photographs of the Hardy’s Bali and New York spreads have graced the pages of the venerable Architectural Digest―but I have only tonight made the pilgrimage, out of respect for my Bamboo Queen, Linda Garland (in Bali one can only be in one ‘Bamboozled’ camp at a time).
I arrive at dusk to find a field of Californian Fried Buddhists—the inner circle of the hill tribe expatriate breeders―in all their glory. They are all milling and frothing―about their recent land acquisition and villa projects―all in the midst of the most stunning piece of environmental design I have ever seen!!
Welded-columns of giant bamboo land like elephant’s feet on exquisitely crafted packed-mud floors. A Sumatran long house garden ‘folly’ rises from a field of corn like the bow of the Mayfair. Everywhere rice field-water bubbles through boulders, and teenagers from the Green School—full of gait and armpit hair—gambol and frolic.
Beer is served by reformed beggar-women in bamboo tumblers. Quaint Javanese limasan huts—the compound’s pricey accommodation―sit in paddocks of chilli peppers and spring onions, which extend to the rice-fields below, and beyond, leading to an extraordinary Ayung River valley view.
At the centre of all of this rustic-romantic, pastoral-poetic beauty John Hardy holds court with numerous nubile housemaids in attendance. In this regards he has taken a page out of book of General Qadaffi’s: one can’t be too obnoxious or have too many female security guards.
Nearby, Stefan Sagmeister braids the hair of a blind acupuncturist with his feet.
As the island’s most noxious Garden Design Poobah, I am humbled to find such a pocket of loveliness, and such sustainability.
I now want to mulch all the Tropical Cotswolde acres I have created in the name of beauty and burn my shoes and return to my Hippie Roots!
19th August 2009: Mass Norwegian-Balinese Wedding in the Mountain
Hill tribe impresario Ketut Sadru has worked for me for over twenty-five years as a gardener, driver, tour guide and eventually as manager of the planting works at the hugely successful Four Seasons Hotel project in Jimbaran, 1996-97. His two daughters—sweet village girls—went to Denpasar Nurse Academy and upon graduation went to Norway to work. They each soon found big Norwegians to marry and today they have brought them home to their mountain village on Batur Lake for a glittering ceremony. The nuptials are held in the village temple and a reception is planned afterwards in Sadru’s ‘holiday home’ on the road to Tampaksiring.
As the girls’ godfather I knew nothing of these big Norwegians or the ‘holiday home’, for that matter, until yesterday.
But this is the Balinese way: serve big surprises piping hot!
I arrive at the village temple to find the grooms in full Balinese drag and make up: with their good bones and fine features and well defined lips they look like extras in one of Greta Garbo’s Nordic romance films. They girls are glowing with joy, as are Sadru and his wife.
With a household of Norwegians to feed its like all their Santa Clauses have come at once!
Over the morning, I have many earnest discussions with my goddaughters future family, and then I return south feeling very proud and normal-sized.
The last word on the beggar women
For hundreds of years the women of the far-flung East Bali mountain villages have come to South Bali in search of work and sustenance during the dry seasons.
The very healthy beggar women with Heinz babies at by-pass intersections are from these villages. A group of concerned humanitarian groups lead by Daniel Elber including Yayasan Masa Depan Untuk Anak―which is represented by Anak Agung Bagus Soerio Mataram from Ubud, and President, Asri Kerthyasa and Honorary Swiss Consul Jon Zurcher from Denpasar as founding member―is working together with Foundation Future for Children, Switzerland (as fundraiser), with Yayasan Dian Desa from Yogyakarta (as project manager), together with the Balinese and Karangasem Government, the University Udayana from Denpasar, the Rotary Club of Bali, Ubud and with the Members of the Bali Hotel Association.
They are all now working to dig 35 wells in these far-flung villages to hopefully stem the problem at its source.
Bravo!
25th August 2009: A diplomatic ‘Divertissement’ dilemma
“Malaysia must not use our Pendet Dance,” screams the banner headline on today’s Bali Post.
Many of my student friends are up in arms too. “Malaysia maling Asia,” they all chant: (“Malaysia, the thieves of Asia”).
I can’t really understand it: for years the mighty Malaysian Tourism Board has been running a highly successful ‘Truly Asia’ ad campaign full of images such as the Balinese Pendet Dance and the Javanese Reog Dance and Balinese resort architecture and such …… and no one has ever commented. We all know that Malaysia is just a beautiful place for ugly people.
In 1960s Indonesian President Soekarno wanted to chop it into little pieces.
Why can’t students and the Bali Post raise fists against the truly deplorable conditions tourists face at the international airport, or the fast disappearing ‘green belt’ on the new Eastern Distributor, or Australians drinking in the street of Kuta and Sanur during this Holy Month of Ramadan.
With its depleted culture, Malaysia gets around 20 million tourists a year while Bali, widely considered the world’s most gorgeous culture, gets only 2 million.
Perhaps some introspection is called for rather than beating a dead horse like the Tari Pendet, which any scholar knows is just a modern creation loosely inspired by the salubrious Malay Serampang 69.
That’s what I reckon!
Akuo Energy International
September 9, 2009Akuo Energy is a Europe-based developer, operator and investor of renewable energy plants across Europe, North and South America.
Akuo Energy invests in the development of projects across all of the proven areas of industrial renewable energy production and currently has management teams and subsidiaries focusing their development efforts on 3 continents.
Today, Akuo is actively developing several projects across a broad range of renewable energy sectors in Europe, USA and South America, including:
- Solar plants
- Wind Farms
- Hydro electric plants
- Biofuel plants
- Biomass energy plants
- Biogas plants
- Wood pellets production plants
The company is managed by an experienced which previously developed the 2nd largest wind-farm operator in France over a 4 year period (600 MW).
Akuo Energy originally began its activities in the wind energy sector, and today is one of the European leaders in this sector.
Below is a sample list of some of the reference projects that have been developed in the past or are currently in development:
• Perfect Wind France (sold to Iberdrola). This wind-energy portfolio was developed by the founders of Akuo Energy and consists of 130,9 MW in production, 61,0 MW under construction and 35,0 MW under development.
• Perfect Wind Turkey: Wind-energy portfolio consisting of 400 MW, with construction planned for 2008-2009.
• Perfect wind Poland: Wind-energy portfolio consisting of 150 MW with construction planned for 2008 and 150 MW under development with construction planned for 2009-2010.
• Akuo Energy USA: Akuo Energy is engaged in a joint-venture in Houston, Texas called AEM Wind. The joint-venture which will develop 2000 MW of wind-farms in the USA between 2008-2011.
• In addition, Akuo energy is evaluating the possibility of developing projects in various countries in South America, where the wind energy industry is relatively nascent in comparison to Europe and the USA.
For more reading, click here
John Hardy Presentation to the Association of Siamese Architects
June 12, 2009
John Hardy Presentation to the Association of Siamese Architects from John Hardy on Vimeo.
Depending upon your internet connection speed, video may be slow to begin. Please be patient.
Slideshow presentation given by John Hardy to the Association of Siamese Architects in Bangkok, Thailand on May 1st, 2009.
This is an informative and passionate talk on building sustainably with bamboo and the development of the revolutionary Green School in Bali, Indonesia. Not to be missed!
Bamboo cures earthquakes
May 11, 2009http://discovermagazine.com/2004/aug/bamboo-cures-earthquakes
Bamboo Cures Earthquakes
by Matthew Power
From the August 2004 issue of Discover Magazine
Last December’s earthquake in the Iranian city of Bam took a huge death toll—roughly 40,000 people—largely because of the collapse of thousands of mud-brick buildings. If a group of researchers in India are successful, the next earthquake might not be as devastating. British and Indian engineers are developing earthquake-proof housing using a cheap, ubiquitous material: bamboo.
They designed a prototype house built around waterproofed bamboo sheet roofing and bamboo-reinforced concrete walls. To test the structure, the engineers, sponsored by the U.K. Department of International Development, took it to the Earthquake Engineering and Vibration Research Centre in Bangalore (below), which has a state-of-the-art earthquake simulator. The researchers shook the house with five consecutive 30-second pulses, equivalent to 7.8 on the Richter scale. The simulation was more than 10 times as violent as the Bam earthquake, yet the house emerged unscathed. “We didn’t even crack the paint,” says engineer Paul Follett, of Britain’s Timber Research and Development Association.
By some estimates, more than a billion people already live in bamboo structures. The innovation lies in developing ways to exploit bamboo’s resilience. Easily prefabricated, fire resistant, and far lighter than steel, bamboo-based structures could be assembled in three weeks and last 50 years. At five dollars a square foot, they would cost roughly half as much as brick-and-block construction. Follett says the project will follow an “open source” model: “Whatever is developed is freely available for the common good.”
