New York City’s North Brother Island has lived many past lives, as a shipwreck site, a smallpox clinic, a tuberculosis colony, and a drug rehab facility, for starters. The 20-acre island, which sits between the Bronx and Riker’s Island, has been abandoned since the 1970s. But two architecture students are hoping to change that soon, with a proposal to build a school for autistic children on the island.
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Forget bulging muscles or a toned set of abs. If you really want to impress everyone on the beach this summer, a stunning sand castle is the way to go. And if your sculpting skills max out at Play-Doh snakes, these architectural sand castle molds will let you re-build the most stunning structures from past empires, ready to be lost to time once again once the tide rolls in.
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There’s plenty of precedent for echolocation in the natural world: bats can navigate based on the echo of their chirrups; and blind humans, at least anecdotally, sometimes develop remarkable sound-based spatial skills. But using sound to accurately map a space in three dimensions? That’s new.
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It’s the longest day of the year, so I don’t really know what you’re doing not being outside right now. But since you’re here, take a moment to check out some of the best pieces of art, architecture, and design, we found this week.
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The atrium of New York’s Guggenheim Museum is usually a bustling space, filled with crisp light and crowds of visitors. You wouldn’t have known it from the scene yesterday, as the museum opened its long-awaited James Turrell show: saturated in shimmering cobalt light, visitors quietly sprawled around the space, gazing up at Turrell’s “skylight.”
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When you build a monolithic tower that reaches hundreds of feet up into the sky, it’s going to cast a shadow. That can be a big problem for those on the ground, if they’d like to occasionally see the sun. But the designers of a new building being planned in lower Manhattan have figured out a way around the problem: An oddly-shaped building that will not only shed light on occupants, but spread it around for neighbors as well.
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Beijing is one of the earliest still-existant cities planned around a grid: the old city is organized around a chessboard-like matrix of alleys, known as hutong, that date back at least a millenium. But as developers in Beijing scramble to built modern towers in the urban core, hutong are disappearing.
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There’s a great scene in the first season of Mad Men where Don unveils a campaign for Bethlehem Steel. "New York, Chicago, and Detroit—all brought to you by Bethlehem," reads the copy. The client rejects the pitch, but the sentiment itself was hard to argue with: steel from those small rustbelt towns was feeding the growth of a kind of city never imagined before the 20th century.
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Did you know there’s an abandoned swimming pool in the basement of the Woolworth Building? Did you know there’s an abandoned Cold War-era missile silo buried under a log cabin in the Adirondacks? Do you have any idea what happened with the filming location of Ghostbusters or Annie Hall? Nope! But Nick Carr, the location sleuth behind Scouting NY does.
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In Vietnam, it’s common to use bamboo baskets to catch fish and eels. Less common? To find the same type of bamboo structures supporting an entire building. This open-air beauty is the Kontum Indochine Cafe, in central Vietnam, and it looks like it’s supported by 15 giant bamboo fishing baskets.
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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.
