What happens when you give Shanghai’s financial district 26 years and a few billion dollars of makeover money? This miraculous transformation, which hit a staggering 2,073-feet-high just this past Saturday when the Shanghai Tower became the world’s second tallest building.
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Even window washers can be scary when you don’t expect to see them outside your office window. But a camera-wielding man dangling from a single rope goes beyond the pale. Caracas-born photographer Carlos Ayesta has freaked out thousands of Parisians over the past few years, rappelling down the side of Paris’s skyscrapers to shoot remarkable images of the city’s towers.
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Even if you’ve never seen them in person, we’ve all gotten glimpses of the Palace of Westminster or the Arc de Triomphe on television, in magazines or wherever. And most likely those brief encounters have even been high res. But Luke Shepard’s Nightvision takes images of famous European architecture to a whole new level.
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Here at Gizmodo, we love us some transforming apartments
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Torre de David is a 45-story, partially-finished office tower that houses a vibrant community of squatters in Caracas. It’s also an internationally-known symbol of Venezuela’s economic troubles, to which the The New Yorker and The New York Times have both devoted long profiles. But there hasn’t been much video documentation of life inside—until now.
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The Bank of America tower boasts all sorts of green details: An automatized system to dim lights in daylight. A grey water collection system. A foundation partially made from waste materials. Must be a pretty energy-efficient building, eh? According to one analyst, nope!
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You’d think that in this day in age of digital software, scientists wouldn’t need to destroy a real building to test the strength of its materials. But that’s exactly what’s happening this summer in Buffalo, where a team of Johns Hopkins engineers are using a hydraulic “shake table” to recreate the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles.
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Spitbank Fort is one of those spots you read about in an Alexander Dumas novel. It’s a gritty, grey, Victorian-era fortress with a dark past and nothing but miles of water on all sides. And it’s the perfect place for a romantic weekend the next time you’re on the coast of England.
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Mass dampers—the gigantic weights designed to counteract swaying in skyscrapers—are usually installed during the construction process. But today, a Japanese real estate company announced plans to install six of the devices atop a 39-year-old building in downtown Tokyo. If all goes well, they could pop up on tall buildings all over the world.
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Windows, our source of life-giving sunlight indoors, are a menace to your electrical bill. In the summer, windows bleed cold and in the winter they ooze heat. To save energy, researchers want to give window panes a circulatory system that could pump in cool, liquid relief when they get too hot.
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