“You put snow into the buckets and pour water on the snow, and that forms a mortar, that forms a mush. You put some mush on top of the block and it freezes together,” says Dr. Antony Wood, professor of practice and director of the Masters in Tall Buildings and Vertical Urbanism program. “Until it thaws, that is absolutely solid.”
“We have a 12-foot ice tower made out of water balloons, simple as that. The process starts with 250 water balloons, fill them with water and food coloring, so different colors, and then bring them to the build site,” says Dr. Antony Wood, who thought of the ice tower as a teaching tool for his students in the Masters in Tall Buildings and Vertical Urbanism program. “I thought it’d be a great fun exercise for them to design this tower and build this tower, and the objective here is to get as tall as we could.”
“It starts with water balloons. We filled up 275 balloons, and we let them sit out for two to four days until they all froze. They have food dye in them, so that’s where it gets its color from,” said student Kristin Lasorsa. “After they completely froze through, we brought them over here and they started piling them all up, and we used snow and water to form a mortar.
“Our food system is really dependent on these long supply chains,” said Illinois Tech’s Weslynne Ashton, professor of environmental management and sustainability and co-director of the Food Systems Action Lab. “Our food is coming from all over the country and really all over the world, and contamination can happen at any point in that journey. And so there's a real awareness about those contamination possibilities along the supply chain, and it is increasing people’s interest and awareness in more local sourcing.”
While window unit filters do catch particles like dust and dander, they don’t perform the same function as an air purifier, for example. “The filters used don’t remove particles very effectively, so the air isn’t necessarily coming out much cleaner than it went in,” says Brent Stephens, a professor at Illinois Institute of Technology who researches indoor air issues.
“There is at the minimum an appearance of a conflict of interest,” said Chicago-Kent College of Law Professor Harold Krent, “and that’s something that should be avoided by the court. It wasn’t. And so if the justices are going to thumb their nose at this kind of written ethics rule, then maybe Congress has to do something more stringent.”
“We need these particular devices to make things more efficient,” said Maurice Dawson, director of the Center for Cyber Security and Forensics Education (C²SAFE). “The problem is, if you have one bottleneck, everything goes down.”
Clustering of two or more independent microgrids hasn’t yet been accomplished, according to Illinois Institute of Technology Bodine Chair Professor Mohammad Shahidehpour, who leads Illinois Tech's work on the microgrid cluster. “That project, once it’s fully in operation, represents the first cluster microgrid anywhere in the world,” Shahidehpour said at a ceremonial “switching on” of the Bronzeville microgrid in May
The Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) at the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology has announced the shortlist of 53 Outstanding projects. The 5th cycle of awards celebrates built works completed in North, Central, and South America in 2022 and 2023, striving to bring visibility to those projects that best address the demands of our time and work towards building resilient communities.
The editor of “30 Trees: And Why Landscape Architects Love Them,” Illinois Institute of Technology Architecture Professor Ron Henderson, understands diversity as a value. Founder of Lirio Landscape Architecture, he brings together more than 30 contributors from across the field, each offering a meditation on a different tree species.
