Lots of lovely geodesic domes and spheres in gallery on Speigel. I particularly like this oddity right at the end, showing the echoes of Buckminster Fuller’s design elsewhere.
From the photo’s metadata:
Golden Geodesic Dome. One of two major buildings at the U.S Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. 25 U.S women guides pose in polka-dot dresses chosen to represent what the average American woman would wear. 1959.
via Karl Held
This (annoyingly) short video of rapper Ice Cube dissecting the Eames‘ architectural work through the prism of hip-hop and sampling is a delight.
It’s not about the pieces, it’s how the pieces work together. You know, taking something that already exist and making it something special.
It’s part of Pacific Standard Time, a campaign to draw attention to LA’s cultural institutions, and there’s and indication there might be a longer-form video up soon. We can only hope.
via Kottke
This epic BLDGBLOG post put a smile on my face. Go read it, listen to it, marvel at it.
The project asked a group of eight well-known improvisational musicians to “react” to four Dutch bridges (or, more accurately, to field recordings made on, under, and near those bridges). The project is thus as much about musical improv as it is about infrastructural acoustics—a structural ecology of sound vibrantly humming in the spaces around us.
The resulting album is on Bandcamp and it’s quite lovely indeed.
I saw this on Unhappy Hipsters with the caption “The trees weren’t the only ones who wished he’d invested in something (anything) other than glass walls” and while it’s perfect fodder for laughing at the sub-ironic post-poster kidults of aspirational hipsterdom (and breath…) it intrigued me greatly. Mostly because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how it stayed in the air.
It was only when I scrolled past the photos on Arch Daily to the architectural drawings that I realised it’s clamped to a tree. The reflections had confused my eye, which I guess is the point.
There’s more at Arch Daily with some chatter in the comments and another post about the wider Tree Hotel project at Inhabitat.
I’m sure it’s utterly impractical and expensive but as a piece of sculpture it’s a lovely object, especially when lit up inside at night.
When I saw the above photo I assumed it was an architectural model photographed decades ago. Turns out its a photograph taken from an airplane in 2008 of an actual place, the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia Spain. From Wikipedia:
In 1989, the then president of the Valencian Generality, Joan Lerma, took up the idea of José María López Piñero, professor of the history of science at the University of Valencia, to build a scientific museum on the land of the Garden of the Turia River that bordered the road with mulberry trees. Lerma entrusted the creation of a team that articulated the project and that visited spaces with similar characteristics in Munich, Canada and London, to devise a project of evident pedagogical appearance.
The “City of the Sciences” was the name that the autonomous government gave to the initiative, and plans included a 370m high communications tower, which would have been the third highest one in the world at that time; a planetarium; and the museum of science. The total price of the works was estimated to be about 25,000 million pesetas, or about 150 million euro.
I’m no big fan of Grand Projects but I do love that something on this scale exists, and has been built in the 2000s. It’s like the sci-fi future we were promised but never arrived. I bet they even have jet-packs in there.
via finding this photo on a blog, the name of which I forget, and wanting to know more.
Neil Hall’s project to photograph Stanley Kubrick’s Film Locations
The project is one of the most detailed presentations of Stanley Kubrick’s film locations. It was undertaken over a number of months and utilized extensive research from Kubrick’s own archive matching behind the scenes photographs, call sheets and other original material. It shows the interiors, buildings, architectural details and landscapes that Kubrick incorporated into his vision. The choices were not arbitrary. The project shows the painstaking effort Kubrick put into his location choices.
via Husk
Almost too much good stuff is currently being thrown up on Fuck Yeah Brutalism at the moment but this one leapt out. It’s the Geisel Library at UC San Deigo, named after Dr Seuss, as it happens, and it’s quite spectacular.
Living in a city with it’s own awesome brutalist library it takes a fair bit to get me jealous, but can you imagine this in the middle of Birmingham? Wow!
Photo by Marcus Avedis
The Atlantic’s In Focus has a lovely gallery of photos from North Korea by David Guttenfelder who got unprecedented access to the country. Photos from North Korea are always fascinating as it’s the closest thing the Western world has to a truly alien culture where we have no influence.
What particularly struck me about these were the photos of buildings. You’d think basic housing architecture would be standardised in the late 20th century but these look like they come from a parallel universe where about 100 years ago the most influential architect in the world made subtly different decisions about how buildings should be.
Click through to see them at full size (In Focus is one of those Big Screen photoblogs) with descriptions.
I’ve never read any of his work but having read this interview on BLDGBLOG I intend to. Very interesting chap.
Fanastically nerdy anaysis of The Shining, specifically how the layout defies logic – doors to rooms that can’t be there, corridors leading nowhere, and so on – and, given Kubrick must have done this deliberately, why? The two videos cover the basics in 25 minutes and they’re expanded at the link.
via Serial Consign / Waxy.
Update: All bollocks, aparently. But still, highly entertaining bollocks. via DF
