In South America the slums are attached to the outskirts of mega-cities such as Caracas and Mexico City like wasps’ nests on a cliff face. In a hilly island city like Hong Kong, however, living space is limited. Here you only see the laboriously constructed huts made of corrugated iron and planks of wood in which the poorest of the poor live if you look upwards – they occupy, to put it in cynical terms, a penthouse location.
Some of these rooftop shacks, which in the year 2006 after the government’s first slum clearance programme still housed 3962 people in 1554 households, are up to three storeys high. Improvised structures made of ladders and bits of furniture create connections between the individual parts of the buildings and join these impoverished dwellings into complete rooftop settlements – sociologists even talk of a “self-organising niche architecture” and point to the utopian aspects of this urban way of life.
From suspiciousminds’ flickr stream, who went through three plans to get the shot:
Meet Château des Anges. A post-mediaeval castle that was once surrounded by an immense park. It belonged to a very noble family of counts. It just had everything: a grapevine, vast orchards, fountains, stables, arable lands for crops and livestock, woods, a lake. Ownership changed quite often and the castle wasn’t maintained as it should be. The last owner left the place in 1970. It is untouched ever since.
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Plan C
Waiting. For a harsh winter. And ice. I waited 8 months to explore this baby. On one of the coldest winter mornings NeQo and me set off. It was -10°C. There wasn’t a single soul for miles. Just us, this decayed castle, and Mister Winter.
The lake was frozen solid and we didn’t have any difficulties wading through the thorned bush. We arrived at the castle. The backdoor of the terrace was open. Of course it was open. What was the owner thinking? Some schmuck would cross the water – or even better – cross the ice in the event of winter?
And there we were. Setting foot in an untouched place that’s been decaying since the seventies. Forsaken. Since long. But captured in our minds. For ever more.
In a mashup between some of my favourite sexy technologies, Qosmo and architects teradadesign have transformed Tachikawa’s N Building into a QR-branded, augmented, fishtank of an building.
The building’s facade is imprinted with QRCodes that when scanned with a AR program allows viewers to peek inside the building and see animated versions of the movements and activities of those inside. People inside the building are tracked via GPS and their tweets are transformed into thought balloons hovering over their heads.
This unknown power plant had been visited in the past by some of the old explorers, dating back to 2005 and 2006. At that time it was rather easy to access the plant, but very few actually risked it. The decayed part situated just next to the active part made it a very though one…
The year 2007. Chances are you’ve never heard of Electro Magnetic Pulse, but the boys in blue had. A 24/7 security patrol was put on site, with the aid of a handful of live camera’s. There’s even a camera on top of the building, just in case some lunatic parachutes his way up there. The complete area was fenced with razor wire top to bottom and the occasional landmine was put in place. Ok, kiddin’ about that landmine.
Summer of 2008. Everyone who tried that place over the past two years got caught by security. I don’t know what we were on to, but in some crazy mood we decided to give this one a go.
Click through the photo link for the rest of the story….
A giant “digital cloud” that would “float” above London’s skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers.
The construction would include 120m- (400ft-) tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data.
The Cloud, as it is known, would also be used an observation deck and park.
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Its designers plan to raise the funds to build it by asking for micro-donations from millions of people.
“It’s really about people coming together to raise the Cloud,” Carlo Ratti, one of the architects behind the design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told BBC News.
“We can build our Cloud with £5m or £50m. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached.”
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The different spheres would act as structural elements, habitable spaces, decoration and LCD screens on which data could be projected.
“We could provide a custom feed of… searches made by Londoners during the Olympics to give a real time ‘barometer’ of the city’s interests and mood,” said Google, one of the supporters of the project, which has also offered to provide the information feeds.
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The structure would also be used to harvest all the energy it produces according to Professor Ratti.
“It would be a zero power cloud,” he said.
As well as solar cells on the ground and inside some of the spheres, the lifts would use regenerative braking, similar to that in some hybrid cars.
That way, the designers say, potential energy from visitors to the top of the tower can be harnessed into useful electricity.
“Cloudland’s interior design almost defies description. [It's] like a film set for a futuristic Garden of Eden, operating as an architecturally brave bar, restaurant and function space. Patrons are visually stunned by: 5,000 plants climbing and sprawling over a 14-metre interior wall; a 10-metre waterfall; a solid hand-carved ‘China white’ marble bar; and a glass bar made from 19,000 glass balls threaded by hand.”
The Ryugyong Hotel was named after the historic name for Pyongyang, “capital of willows”.. more like a pyramid that would be every skater’s dream, it towers over the city of Sojang-dong; the whole country in fact.
Construction of the ambitious project began in 1987.. went on for five years but ceased due to lack of funds, electricity and building materials. It was abandoned for 16 years, but construction resumed in 2008 and the hotel is now being readied to open its doors in 2012 for the 100th anniversary of Kim II Sung’s birth. With 360,000 sq m (3,900,000 sq ft) of floor space and 105 stories, it would be the world’s tallest hotel. It is currently the world’s 28th tallest building.
The 72-storey building in the London Bridge Quarter will contain premium office space, a world-class hotel, luxury residences, a spa, restaurants & cafes, retail space and a 15-storey public viewing gallery. On the ground level, public piazza, restaurants and cafes will be open to the public with places to rest and changing art installations. Access to public transportation via bus line, train and underground will be directly on site.
How very pretty and science-fictional is that cityscape? And for once this isn’t design-pr0n, they’ve actually started construction on it. Of course, whether they finish it is another thing entirely. Worst case, future-London gets a 72-storey squelette.
Far from a Apocalypse Bunker, a Smithsonian employee builds a tunnel structure beneath his house in the 1930s as a way to relax his eyes from hours staring through the microscope. Via oobject.com
