The Department of Agriculture doesn’t usually meddle in architecture, but this week at an event at the White House, it announced an unusual project: A $1 million competition for high-rise buildings built out of wood—and another million that will go to educating architects about it.
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The 43-story De Rotterdam is Europe’s largest building. Inside, however, it’s a study in how to live inside a small space: The behemoth’s tiniest unit is only 645 square feet, yet because it’s kitted out with incredible transforming furniture, it functions like a five room apartment.
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Rent at the 163-story Burj Khalifa doesn’t come cheap. While a one-bedroom "only" costs $55,000 a year (according to CNN), it’s the $25,000 service fee that really gets you. Now, a fight over these fees may force tenants to make the climb home on foot.
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The seam where a city meets the country is an uncanny place. It’s not rural, yet not exactly urban, either, a non-place often full of half-finished streets and isolated developments. Most of us only see these environments through the windows of our cars, but photographer Alexander Gronsky has spent the last four years in Moscow’s outskirts, watching and photographing.
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Richard Meier and Partners just unveiled plans for a 40-story mixed-use tower that will become one of Mexico City’s tallest buildings. The luxury development will be a rare tower project for the architect—now 80—whom The New York Times reported was turning his focus back home, to New Jersey, just last week. [Archinect]
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At first glance, this winning design for a mixed-used complex in Zhejiang Province design by Liu Xisang seems like just another glassy tower project. But take a closer look at the facades, which are laced with a network of outdoor spaces spiraling upwards to connect the ground floor to the roof with a—nearly—continuous path of green. [DesignBoom]
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"I like watching these buildings burn," says Jing Jing Naihan Li, a young Beijing architect. That would normally come off as ominous, but in this case, it’s awesome: Naihan makes candles that are modeled after the tallest buildings in the world. Because, after all, aren’t skyscrapers just the candles on the glitter-covered double chocolate ganache birthday cake that is the city?
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Proving that all press is good press when it comes to real estate, Rafael Viñoly—the architect behind two recent death-ray skyscrapers—revealed plans for a new skyscraper in Lower Manhattan today. It’ll be his second tall building in NYC, and like the first
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Here in New York, shady brokers have long been known to sell the same apartment to multiple gullible buyers. In China, however, real estate scammers have gone to the next level: Buyers are being “taken hostage” by developers who fail to mention that the apartments they’re selling are totally illegal.
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