It is located Hohenwarthe near the town of Magdeburg, Germany, which was designed by Ingenieurburo Grassel GmbH Beratende Ingenieue Bauwesen and HRA Bochum for responsible engineer. The construction started in 1997 and taking 6 years to complete, aiming to connect Elbe-Havel canal and Mittellandkanal by crossing over the Elbe-Havel. The bridge is known as the longest aqueduct, which now connects Berlin’s island harbor network with ports along the Rhine River.
Previously, the opposite side of the Elbe River was a meeting place where these two rivers join, where it has a lower elevation level. The idea of creating this bridge is to reduce time and distance from crossing the river, instead of 12 kilometers to 918 meters. Also avoiding unreliable passage along the rivers when low water level occurs. With these 918 meters in length, 34 meters wide, and 4.25 deep; the bridge is capable of carrying 1350 metric tons. The bridge was constructed as truss bridge where mainly use 24,000 tons of steel and 68,000 meters cube for the concrete piers. The force and bearing load of the water depends on the speed of the boat and water is distributing the load by its flowing.
The Helix Bridge, Singapore
The Helix Bridge is a pedestrian bridge that links Marina Center with Marina South in Marina Bay area in Singapore. It is located beside the Benjamin Sheares Bridge, which also accompanied by a vehicle Bayfront Bridge, where they connects at its mid-point; also having Singapore’s first art park, the Youth Olympic Park, at its entrance as well. It is expected to link cultural, recreational, entertainment facilities all together. This helix shaped bridge was designed by comprising Australian architects, The Cox Group, and engineer, Arup; also Singapore based architects 61. The Collaboration of Sato Kogyo Pte Ltd and TTJ design and Engineering Pte Ltd took the construction and completed it in 2 years.
The concept of the bridge came from a desire in creating curved plan bridge which having it sweeps down onto promenades either side. Within 280 meters long, steel tubes were used to form both major and minor helixes; crossing over each other in opposite direction. Many canopies, made of fritted-glass and perforated steel mesh, are incorporated along inner spiral parts providing shades to pedestrians. Additionally, arranging all steel tubes that were used would create a 2,25, meters of straighten steel. This pedestrian bridge provides 5 viewing platforms sited at strategic locations providing amazing visions of the Singapore’s skyline and also events in Marina Bay.
At nighttime, the bridge will be lighted up by series of light that highlight the double-helix structure, giving special visual experience to audiences. Also pairs of colored letter C, G and A, T will be lit up in red and green; which each letter represents 4 bases of DNA: Cytosine, Guanine, Adenine, and Thymine. Moreover, the Helix Bridge was mentioned as ‘life-giving’ and ‘sustainability’ because of organic design of multiple connection joints, the use of stainless steel, and an utility of steel which is five time less steel than a conventional box girder bridge. Therefore, these facts give an impression to Singapore as ‘green walking city’. Helix Bridge design won the winner place of the World Architecture Festival 2010
The lipstick head in tuxedo symbolises female and coloured skin people as leaders. The World map falling off the edge represents the condition of our Earth that is not going to become positive. Crowd of hands say about people who seem to be helping to improve the world situations while the two hands that are trying to gap the map represents people who are really helping but it is not enough to make the condition better.Characters and letters of languages forming the map implies about globalisation and also mixed-culture. Cracks in individual letters expresses about local unrest. Heads at the bottom suggests about people to choose to ignore about what is going on in the World and see the world falling off without any feeling and a head up says about the percentage of the world population that seem to care. Grey background at the top expresses about the past that we are full of regret of our actions to the world.
what seem to be a very big problem for us now is a continually growing of human population and in there future, there wouldn't be enough natural resources for all of us. There are 7billion people all around the world who share and use natural resources together. In the year 2010-2011, global production is expected to be not enough for global consumption. Soon enough, people will have to pay more for natural resources and might fight for it in the future. WIthout knowing, while people are reaching for natural resources, they are also creating trash and pollution to the environment. So, they are reaching for both resources and pollution.
In this current time, most people are buying the wrong, outdated idea of the world. They have failed to realise that major problems the world is facing are systemic problems, interconnected and interdependent , and are fragments of one intergrated crisis in which cannot be understood on its own. This will not be solve until a paradigm shift into an ‘ecological paradigm’ has occurs and people undergoes an utter change in thier perception, thinking and value.
Ecological Awareness is an acknowledgement of the earth-centred values rather than just a human-centred values. This can be break down into ‘shalow’ ecology which excludes humans from the narural environment and ‘deep’ ecology which recognises value of all living beings and views everything as one unified whole.
Additionally, social ecology and ecofeminism is also an important philosophical schools of ecology that addresses important aspects of the ecological paradigm. Social ecology is the acknowledgement of cultural characteristics and that patterns of social and economics structures along with their technologies are rooted in the ‘dominator system’ of social organisation, whereas ecofeminism views the men domination over woman as a prototype of all domination and is deliquently adopted in various hierarchical forms.
Thus, the shift of paradigms requires not only our changes in thinking but also values in a healthy and dynamically balanced way, it is less self-beneficial and therefore founded difficult by most people. Hence why its viewed most urgent to introduce an ‘ecoethical ethics’, a new systems of ethics related to the understanding of deep ecology that every lifes are connected, to the world especially to the science field. Unless the understanding of ecoethical ethics and a deep ecology paradigm shift has occurs, humans perception of the world can becomes life-threatening to all living beings on this planet in the end.
Understanding the reality of a new world is what the author wants to imply to our modern society. Understanding the new world is to be able to accept the theory of seeing the world in a whole cannot which cannot be separated. People have studied about problems in this world and start to realize that they cannot look at the world as in isolated parts. The world we are living in is all connected. However, their politic leaders do not care about problems and fear to receive any fundamental changes from the new world because not only their thinking that has to be changed, but also their values. If changes were able to do so, we might be able to achieve a ‘sustainable’ world. So, a new paradigm or paradigm shift has been brought up to urge people to change their way of thinking and be able to accept any radical changes. The new paradigm can be seen as in two views, holistic view and ecological view. Holistic view sees the function as a whole and acknowledges all parts of the function. And for ecological view, author also introduces two more ways, deep ecology as a way to look at the world wholly and see humans as part of nature, and shallow ecology as humans being a center of all living beings. If people start to realize the importance of deep ecology, they would probably accept the radical changes and the equality of humans and nature.
In this new century, there are several global problems, interconnected to each other, such as an overpopulated in world population, poverty, or extinction of animals and plants species. Those problems may be considered as a whole different causes and resolutions, but in fact, caused by mainly a problem which we called, a crisis of perception. Approximately fifty years, physicists and philosophers have been debated about this change in paradigm where, according to Thomas Kuhn, changes in paradigm occur in discontinuous and revolutionary breaks which so-called paradigm shifts
Not only in physics field where paradigm shifts occurred in twenty-five years ago, whereas they can be found in a much larger arena throughout the world; which is now to be concerned as a cultural transformations rather than physics itself. What is happening now is that the revolution of paradigm, for instance the view of human body as a machine or the achievement in technology growth, has shaped up our society for over decades and as well as influenced the rest of the world.
The new paradigm, generally, can be called either holistic or ecological worldview. However, ecological seems to be more applicable to the term since ecological sees things within how it functioned, as same as holistic, and addition to the effect on communities and environment. In deep ecology, according to Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosophers, it prioritizes human as same as other existence. Another characteristic is to question more, which considered as another kind of paradigm shifts as well. Within ecology schools, social ecology and ecofeminism schools seem to be interesting as well since social ecology does much more on cultural characteristic and patterns while ecofeminism concerns more on the context of patriarchy.
Moreover, even though expanding our perception is very important, however, having values is another necessarily aspect as well. In the past patriarchy in society plays a major role that gives power, self-assertive, and prioritizes men as an upper class of women. However, according to new paradigm, it shifts social organization to networks.
When comes to daily life, deep ecological ethics is needed especially in sciences which what scientists do today is not life-preserving but life-destroying. Yesterday we might have separated facts from our values, whereas today’s society has corresponded perception and behavior as a psychological connection.
Deep Ecology is about how our new scientific understanding of life is based on a new perception of reality. The problems in the world today are interrelated. They can't be understood separately. Together, it's a crisis of perception which can be solved by a radical shift in our thinking. But somehow higher authorities seem to have not dealt with these issues with proper solutions. Accordingly, a paradigm shift, not only within science but in a larger social realm, is needed to change how people view and shape their modern reality. The new paradigm can be defined as deep ecology which is comprised of holistic and ecological worldview. Deep ecology sees the world as a network of phenomena that is interconnected and interdependent and is concerned with the perspective of our relationships to others. We need to shift not only our ways of thinking but also of our values which are essential aspects of life. Moreover, the new paradigm longs for a kind of power that is influential to one another. The idea of hierarchies need to be replaced with networks in order to form a stronger foundation of our modern way of living. However, the notion of the old scientific paradigm hasn't been forgotten. It has along the way helped carry out a shift from physics to the life sciences as it is nowadays.
The author of Deep Ecology is trying to convey us with the idea that everything on Earth is related. The global problems that we are facing are interconnected - they are the causes of another problem and the main cause for all these problems is the matter of perception in which our leaders, or people who have the authority to decide what to happen, are not up to date and foresee enough to deal with the issues. Therefore, the shift in paradigm is in need as it will change the way people think and live. The new paradigm can be seen as a deep ecology in which human is seen as a part of the whole natural system and not above it. The idea of the old paradigm is more likely self-centered rather than earth-centered as the new one would be. The shift in paradigm also requires the shift in values to balance with the thinking to bring out the good outcomes as they are interconnected ecologically. The idea of gaining power and domination over the others in the old paradigm should be replaced with thought of sharing and influencing the other to a better position together. Basically, we have to apply the ecological concept of the nature in our living that we are all interconnected and interdependent and that is the values to enable us to shift to the new paradigm.
