The skyscraper index tells us that tall buildings and the market are closely correlated—and the unlucky ones being built during a catastrophic economic crisis run the risk of remaining incomplete forever. Such was the case with Sathorn Unique.
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A cemetery in Sweden. A floating school in Nigeria. A cast-iron facade in the UK. The wildly divergent list of nominees for the Design Museum’s annual awards make you wonder: How the hell do you pick a single building to represent such a broad profession?
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Human bones are amazing—seriously, they’re incredibly cool—but up until recently, it’s been hard to engineer a synthetic material that replicates the super-strong structure of the real thing. Now, scientists in Germany are using a 3D printer to do just that—and it could mean a breakthrough for how we build everything from architecture to spacecraft.
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If you could build your own High Line, what would it look like? That’s the question the QueensWay Project, an effort to turn an abandoned stretch of railway in Queens into an elevated pedestrian and bike path, recently asked designers to answer. Some of the winners announced today are truly wild.
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At this point, we’ve all seen the insane Russian dudes who dangle off of tall things
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San Francisco’s skyline has a handful of famous landmarks dotted around the city—the Transamerica Tower, the Painted Ladies, the Golden Gate Bridge—but the most visible might be Sutro Tower, standing 977-feet-tall on Twin Peaks since 1973. As icons go, it’s definitely got the minimal, industrial-chic vibe going on—essentially the complete opposite of this ambitious 1933 plan for an illuminated monument and water feature cascading down the hillside. Whaaaa??
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In Johannesburg, where student housing is sparse, one developer is taking extreme measures—by creating a 370-bed dormitory out of shipping containers perched atop a set of abandoned concrete grain silos.
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Google just snatched up a piece of American history in Silicon Valley. NASA announced on Monday that Google subsidiary Planetary Ventures LLC would take over the Moffett Federal Airfield including the iconic and hulking Hangar One, former home of America’s biggest blimps.
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Some of the most important buildings of our time exist only on paper—and we’re left to reconstruct them, over and over, in our imaginations. But that doesn’t mean we can’t experience these lost structures through other means.
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Moby wants you to join his perpetual pool party in Los Angeles, and a group of scientists wants China to use "spatial economics" to design more walkable cities. Plus: informal transit in Nairobi, a failed utopia in California, radical ideas for the Vegas of 2034, and a significant prehistoric site that’s currently being uncovered in downtown Miami. Check out this week’s Urban Reads.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
