Working and living in Mars Science City will allow us to gain experience with climate control, safety, quality of construction, and resilience of human-made ecosystems that will be invaluable when we finally go to Mars and to our work on Earth. Part academic, part commercial, part exhibition, it will act as a Martian embassy on Earth &#; the first foothold of our neighbor planet on Terran soil.

From the street, the urban façade encloses the parking. Since the parking is outdoor and naturally ventilated, the façade is perforated to let it “breathe.” By perforating the traditional aluminum plates in six different sizes, the façade creates a rasterized image of Mount Everest. What appears at close to be a pattern of transparency and opacity becomes a crystal clear image at a distance. Façade as artwork.

The equilateral triangular footprint creates a building with no ends, only three faces perceived as free standing two-dimensional surfaces. The conference center and lobby is sunken into the landscape, leaving the hotel building in a small oasis of Swedish forest in an airport city of parking lots and infrastructure. In the center of the building a series of executive meeting rooms hang inside a hexagonal atrium, creating a kaleidoscopic view from the lobby to the sky.

The new multidisciplinary research center, Paris PARC, located between Jean Nouvel’s Institut du Monde Arabe and the open green park of Sorbonne&#;s Jussieu Campus will become a significant addition to the campus, strengthening the international appeal and openness of the leading French University for Science and Medicine. The facility will bring together academic scholars and the business community, while re-connecting the university physically and visually with the city of Paris.

By harnessing the economies of scale associated with greenhouse structures it is possible to provide a % transparent enclosure to provide the future massive silhouette on Uppsala’s skyline with an unprecedented lightness while allowing the citizens to enjoy educational glimpses of what happens within. Rather than the conventional, alienating hermetic envelope of traditional power plants the crystalline volume serves as an invitation for exploration and education. The next generation of creative energy.