The Olympics is fast approaching and the world is waiting to see if China is ready. While we toil away here in the swampy heat of New York City, the nation of China scurries to prepare for the world’s eyes to fall upon it. The fantastic photoblog over at Boston.com has released a series of images of the final push with just 3 weeks to go. The futuristic nature of the architecture balanced with the traditional imagery and eerily quiet street scenes is spectacular. But I have to wonder, if this is…
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We think New York is past the point of gentrification; you’re hard-pressed to go outside and NOT find these things.
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Interesting situation on the B train from Brooklyn this morning:
I was standing in the doorway listening to my iPod very loud. I do this so I hear ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT WHAT I WANT TO HEAR.
The train was moving along at a nice clip when I felt a tug on the back of my jeans, about calf-high. I turned around and saw a man looking up at me, pointing to a torn magazine page on the floor by my feet. He says something I can’t hear, pointing at the…
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Gorgeous looking prison in Austria. Actual rooms, sunlight.
What if people came out of prison rehabilitated? There’s a thought.
via Andrea Harner
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The World, “water-based island masterplan” off the coast of Dubai, is ready for developers to start building custom $10 million island communities and resorts.
Massive sand-tankers built The World one archipelago at a time by spraying earth into the sea. How God is that?
Transportation around the aqueous city-state will be almost entirely by boat, ensuring that it’s only a matter of time before these azure waters are the setting for some imaginative outburst of zombie plague. This entire setup seems like an ad from the Umbrella Corporation.
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We know the end is always drawing rapidly and extremely nigh: visions of nuclear holocausts win Pulitzer Prizes.
If you want to be comfortable during mankind’s final days you should buy a missile base, the 20th Century’s Castle. Used during the the 1960s to house various ICBM missiles–Atlas E “coffin launchers,” Atlas F and Titan–these underground bunker-silos were capable of sustaining dozens of people for weeks at a time.
The founders of 20th Century Castles, Edward and Dianna Peden, live in a refurbished Atlas E site near Topeka, Kansas. Since they…
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Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, designer of the yet-t0-be-finished (but almost!) Centre Pompidoul-Metz cultural center, will be speaking next Tuesday at Cooper Union on architecture and the environment.
Mr. Ban was the man behind using cardboard tubes to house refugees from the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Through the UN he shipped tube houses to Turkey and Rwanda as well: “Refugee shelter has to be beautiful,” he says. “Psychologically, refugees are damaged. They have to stay in nice places.”
FCTS: Shigeru Ban: Cooper Union, 7 E. 7th St: TSDY 2008.01.22: 7pm: $10.…
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Saul Bass’ 1980 docu-animation, The Solar Film, charts the regression of man from dawn-of-time sun-worshiper to oil monger, ending with the hope that we will return to the sun for our primary energy source. Robert Redford produced.
Thirty years later his dream is unrealized, but the animation still kicks ass. Here’s a new, extended cut courtesy of DAS Film Fest.
While we didn’t have The Solar Film in mind when we came up with the scenario for ARCH DL IV, they do bear striking similarities: both reach towards a post-oil world and…
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If man-made opolises moved as transmutably as the natural landscapes we might not be so quick to disavow their development.
Paul Hollingworth imagines a more natural collusion of the organic and synthetic in his We Love to Build series: floating file cabinet buildings with unmoored drawers; vanishing point bridges that seem to follow the sky.
All of the structures bear the mantra “We Love to Build,” an unapologetic declaration of mankind’s right to create harmonious additions to the planet we populate.
Hollingworth makes the images by splicing together shards and sticks of…
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For professionals, students and savant architects: the AMD Open Architecture Challenge wants to help connect 50% of the world to the internet by 2015.
“Participants are charged with designing digital inclusion centers for up to three community organizations: the Kallari Association in Ecuador, SIDAREC in Kenya and Nyaya Health in Nepal.”
Sign up at the Open Architecture Challenge.
“The overall winning solution will be built and one years’ operating costs will be given to the community partner with funds of up to $250,000 provided by AMD.”
Each of the three regions–South…
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All over NYC today parking spaces will be transformed into mini parks as part of a nationwide effort by The Trust for Public Land to give our cities back to the people who live in them.
Our sidewalks are packed: a 250 square foot parking space can hold about 45 standing people, 20 bikes, one tree and bench, or an SUV.
Host of BIFOLD: GRN, Colin Beaven (The No Impact Man), is camping out in front of the Whole Foods on 7th and 24th.
Check out videos of last year’s Park(ing) Day…
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Regine on We Make Money Not Art went to the Global Cities show at the Tate Modern in London: “In 2007 for the first time in history 50% of people on earth are living in cities.”
Her report on the show got us thinking about the conflict between man’s desire to consume and his desire to keep on living; also the enormous wealth conflict in mega cities like Sao Paulo and Mexico City.
To survive mankind’s shift from rural to urban we have become masters of walls, either building walls around our…
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