When Thaddeus Jusczyk enters a busy train station, he doesn’t just see teeming masses of people. He sees missed opportunities.
“It’s really astounding how much [energy] moves through the crowd,” says the architecture graduate student. “I think it’s an untapped resource.”
He’s not the only one. To demonstrate how public spaces can tap pedestrian power, Jusczyk and architecture classmate James Graham have reimagined a train station in Turin, Italy, as what they call a “crowd farm”: its floors convert the force of footfalls into electricity that powers, among other things, the station’s lights. Initially created for a Venice Biennale exhibit in 2006, their design recently earned first place in a competition organized by the Swiss Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction. It features a mesh floor with small bricks that depress slightly under pedestrians’ weight and move magnets past metal coils, generating electricity on the same principle that governs the wheel-powered light of a bicycle dynamo.
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