The winners of Architizer’s A+ Awards have been announced, and some of the picks are awesome. Here’s a round-up of the best, the most surreal, or simply the most inspiring, from private homes to international airports. Notice any trends? Let us know in the comments.
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How’s this for a freaking view? The Pole House in Fairhaven, Australia towers 131 feet over a wooded hill. From this vantage point on solid ground it looks like some kind of crazy domestic hovercraft, but once you’re inside it’s all horizon all the time through the unobstructed floor-to-ceiling windows.
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London’s plan to grow up might go down, Elon Musk’s quest to make electric cars cool, and funny anti-Rob Ford ads appear in Toronto. Plus: Learning from streets in Vietnam, Paris, and Manhattan. All this and more in this week’s Urban Reads.
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This is a really silly building. When I first saw it I thought it was probably some kind of Photoshop fake. It isn’t. It’s cool establishment in South Korea called Dreamy Café. It looks like an awesome red Rolleiflex and inside it’s full of of awesome vintage cameras too.
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Growing outrage against the Guggenheim’s new museum in the United Arab Emirates kicked into high gear this week: Protesters stormed the Guggenheim’s New York location for a second time, and a fake website launched claiming to solicit new, "ethical" ideas for the museum’s design.
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Arsenic-contaminated water is a massive problem in the developing world. But, even when you filter it out, the toxic sludge that the process produces often gets dumped right back into the water supply. It’s tough to dream up a use for arsenic soup, but one research team finally has: They’re making bricks out of it.
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The oldest beer factory in Guangzhou, China, dates back to the 1960s—a hulking concrete building on the edge of the Pearl River, with 12 silos rising 114 feet into the sky. Two years ago, O-Office Architects decided to do something with the 60-year-old behemoth: Turn it into their own studio.
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From churches-turned-libraries, to new uses for old CDs, we have plenty of lovely and awe-inspiring things for you to peep this time around. Check them out in this edition of the most beautiful items of the week.
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The exterior of this brick home in Amsterdam was transformed by Studio Wessels Boer into a large-scale curio case to commemorate its role as one of the original Dutch "dime buildings," an early, 1870s-era attempt at cooperative housing. Each of the custom-made cut-outs tells a story about either the history of the place or a personal narrative from a current resident. [Lustik]
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An exoskeleton punched through to form internal skybridges as the triangular trusswork wrapped around the building’s exterior gets tangled up in spiderwebs deep within the resulting, cave-like hollows. No, it’s not a prop in a children’s horror story or a postmodern Charlotte’s Web, but a new hotel and casino proposed by architect Zaha Hadid for the city of Macau. [designboom]
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