It sucks to be a villain. Not just because you’re destined to lose to the hero but because when you do lose, you lose everything, including your stupid awesome villain hideout slash lair slash headquarters. Why couldn’t you just lose a little bit and get to keep rolling around in the Death Star? Why can’t I live in my Dr Evil Volcano with all of its amenities? The secret headquarters of villains are always amazing. Here’s a pretty list showing you which one was biggest and baddest.
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A man died trying to escape a fire in his high-rise apartment building in Manhattan earlier this month. What makes this all the more tragic is that he would have survived—if he had only stayed in his apartment. Skyscrapers are designed to contain fires, so that, even when you’re hearing alarms and smelling smoke, the safest thing to do is to ignore every instinct to flee and stay put.
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If you’re just strolling down the street or driving in your car, you’d never notice anything weird with this house in Raleigh, North Carolina. It looks like a house is supposed to look. You can imagine the family that lives there and the weekday dinners they throw for the neighborhood. You can imagine the kids in the yard. But no. It’s not a real house. This home hides a noisy water pump station for the city. What?
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I’ve seen plenty of Russian kids risking their lives walking on top of buildings or hanging from bridges, cranes and buildings. I get nervous just by looking at the photos, but this video compilation actually raised my blood pressure— I felt physically dizzy half-way through it.
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If you head along to this year’s Sochi Winter Olympics, you could be the face of the games. Quite literally, actually, thanks to the British architect Asif Khan‘s Megaface—a giant pinscreen on the side of a building that will morph to display the scanned faces of visitors.
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The construction of 432 Park, located a block south of West 57th in New York City, on the former site of the 80-year-old Drake Hotel. When the building reaches completion in mid-2014, it will stand as the tallest residential building in the western hemisphere
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Amazon has somehow gained initial approval to build a huge series of greenhouses
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Between 1923 and 1951, a diminutive Floridian single-handedly and without heavy machinery moved 1,000 tons of limestone, creating out of it a castle. This is his story.
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You’re in the homestretch. The weekend, my friends, is at hand. But before you disembark, check out some of our favorite finds from the worlds of art, architecture, and design over the past week. It’s plenty to tide you over before you hit happy hour.
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NeverWet is so 2013. The next big spray-on coating, developed by a federally-funded team working on smart windows, will use electrical currents to actually stop heat—and light—from passing through your windows. Besides being a remarkable feat of engineering, the invention could save us billions of dollars a year in energy costs.
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