Teams from all around the world competed in the competition, and the first place winners are based in Tokyo, Japan. Christopher Sjoberg and Ryo Saito designed the Regatta H2O, ethereal sailboat-like installations that capture energy through “aerostatic flutter wind harvesting” and capture water through fog harvesting. Operating via the energy it collects, the regatta would generate 112 million liters, or nearly 30 million gallons, of drinking water yearly.
Related: Solar-powered Pipe desalinizes 1.5 billion gallons of drinking water for California
The second place winner is Cetacea, created by a team from Eugene, Oregon. Keegan Oneal, Sean Link, Caitlin Vanhauer, and Colin Poranski from the University of Oregon designed the installation inspired by blue whales’ ability to power themselves by tiny krill. Cetacea draws on three types of energy – wind, solar, and wave – and collects 650 million liters of drinking water yearly via “high efficiency reverse osmosis” (HERO by Aquatech). 80 percent of the 4,300 megawatt hours of energy generated by Cetacea would be used to “offset the energy demand” of the HERO system and Santa Monica’s SMURRF facility.
Third place goes to Christopher Makrinos, Stephen Makrinos, and Alexander Bishop of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They designed Paper Boats, boat-shaped installations whose sails function as “concentrated photovoltaic collectors.” Paper Boats would utilize Holographic Planar Concentrator technology from Prism Solar Technologies to generate 2,400 megawatt hours of power each year.
LAGI founding directors Elizabeth Monoian and Robert Ferry said in a statement, “The winners of LAGI 2016 all responded to the design brief with elegant site-specific gestures for the cherished coastal landscape of the Santa Monica Bay. These innovative and artistic solutions that employ the latest wave, tidal, wind, solar, and water-harvesting technologies have resonance for coastal cities around the world.”
There are 21 other finalists, from a desalinizing pipe to a solar-powered rotating farm and desalination plant to a freshwater-creating orb comprised of transparent solar concentrators.
+ Land Art Generator Initiative
Images courtesy of the Land Art Generator Initiative
