"Children's City" Creates Cheerful and Relaxed Atmosphere for Sick Children

Kinderstad (which means "children's city" in Dutch) is an addition to the old VU Medical Centre in Amsterdam, designed by Sponge Architects & Rupali Gupta in cooperation with IOU Architecture.

This was the winning entry of the Young Architects Competition of the Dutch National Board of Architects (BNA) and the penthouse now serves as a visiting area and offers a great space for the parents and their sick children to spend their visiting hours in. Roland Pouw of IOU Architecture says


"I hoped to create a space where young patients can forget for one moment their sickness and where they are in their own dreamland...".

New Standards for LEDs

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in cooperation with national standards organizations, have developed the first two standards for solid-state lighting in the United States.
Also known as light-emitting diodes, (LEDs), the new generation of lighting uses light-emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of incandescent filaments or fluorescent tubes to produce illumination that cuts energy consumption significantly.
Solid-state lighting is expected to significantly reduce the amount of energy needed for general lighting, including residential, commercial and street lighting. “Lighting uses 22 percent of the electricity and 8 percent of the total energy spent in the country, so the energy savings in lighting will have a huge impact," says NIST scientist Yoshi Ohno.
Solid-state lighting is expected to be twice as energy efficient as fluorescent lamps and 10 times more efficient than incandescent lamps, although the current products are still at their early stages. Ohno chaired the task groups that developed these new standards.
In addition to saving energy, the new lighting, if designed appropriately, can produce better color rendering—how colors of objects look under the illumination—than fluorescent lamps or even incandescent lamps, Ohno says.
NIST is working with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to support its goal of developing and introducing solid-state lighting to reduce energy consumption for lighting by 50 percent by the year 2025. The department predicts that phasing in solid-state lighting over the next 20 years could save more than $280 billion in 2007 dollars.