After writing the previous post—about Hong Kong's impending infrastructural self-burial in the form of artificial caves beneath the island city—I remembered an image by Hugh Ferriss, preeminent architectural illustrator of the early 20th century, exploring huge air-raid shelters for New York City carved out of the rock cliffs of New Jersey. "These shelters were to be 30 meters high and 60 meters wide and cut into the cliffs of the Hudson Palisades along the New Jersey side, and were to house planes, factories and hundreds of thousands of people," Jean-Louis Cohen recounts in the recent book Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War.

The mega scale free-form printer of buildings.

Seen from the outside, D-Shape appears like a big aluminium structure inside of which the building will be constructed. CAD-CAM software drives the machinery during the building process. This structure holds the printer head, which of course is the real core of the new technology.

Effectively, the new process returns any type of sand, dust or gravel back to its original Compact Stone state. The Stone is very similar to Marble.
The binder transforms any kind of sand into a marble-like material (i.e. a mineral with microcrystalline characteristics) and with a resistance and traction much superior to Portland Cement, so much so that there is no need to use iron to reinforce the structure. This artificial marble is indistinguishable from real marble and chemically it is one hundred percent environmentally friendly.

D-Shape can print any feature that can be enveloped into a cube 6x6 meters side.

Ferdinand Cheval (born 1836 in Charmes-sur-l'Herbasse, Drôme, France; died 19 August 1924) was a French postman who spent thirty-three years of his life building Le Palais idéal (the "Ideal Palace") in Hauterives.[1][2][3] The Palace is regarded as an extraordinary example of naïve art architecture.

We told our architect at our very first meeting that one of the most important elements was to integrate our books into the heart and soul of our home. He came up with a brilliant solution which we had never seen before, to build the shelves right into staircases (set into the wall) from top to bottom of house. So essentially "book spines" line the spine of our home. Amy Krouse Rosenthal Architectural Interventions

While many need light-filled rooms for inspiration, he wanted to avoid large windows opening onto a residential neighborhood and sought a cave-like atmosphere to disappear into his work. Subtle light was brought in by other means when the architect built a dome above his client’s desk (which Price describes as similar to the rotunda of the oracle’s temple at Delphi) and filled it with the books he uses the most. Davis whimsically calls the space his “Navajo kiva of knowledge.”

The Brain is a 14,280 cubic-foot cinematic workshop where the client, a filmmaker, can work through ideas. Located in Seattle, Washington, the inspiration for the design comes from the neighborhood birthplace of invention, the garage.

The building, by Olson Kundig Architects, is essentially a cast-in-place concrete box, meant to be a strong yet neutral background allowing for the space to be completely flexible. A steel mezzanine was constructed inside the concrete wall on the north side of the box. All internal structures were made with raw, hot-rolled steel sheets.

[Has a fireman's pole, a mezzanine level, and some nice stairs.]

The Kosmograd Newsfeed is an exploration on the themes of disurbanism,architecture, utopian visions and the identity of the city, viewed primarily through the lens of Constructivism and the Soviet space program. To me, it all makes a strange kind of sense.

In the same week (04/11/11) that the "astronauts" in the pretend space mission to Mars emerged from their 500 day solitary confinement, the Phobos-Grunt probe, which was supposed to go to the actual Mars, developed a fault which kept it in orbit around Earth. As metaphors go this is pretty compelling: the Soviet Union/ Russia may be drawn towards Mars, but seem ever to be bound by the gravity of Earth. Twas ever thus. Soviet visions of Mars have always been far more powerful than the sporadic attempts at exploration of the Red Planet.

But why was the Soviet Union so obsessed with Mars? Was the Red Planet the perfect symbol of the dream-myth of Communism? Or was it just the coincidence of the colour red? In this post I will explore the influence of Mars on Soviet art and culture as the canvas for a projected fantasy, a planet wide 'field of dreams'.

Inspiration for your quiet place somewhere.

Shelf-Pod is a private residence and study building, located in Osaka prefecture, Japan. The client owns an extensive collection of books on the subject of Islamic history, so he requested that we create this building with the maximum capacity for its storage and exhibition.

In order to satisfy this demand effectively, we designed a lattice structure made from 25mm thick laminated pine-board which serve as book-shelves. The dimensions of each shelf are as follows: 360mm height, 300mm width and 300mm depth. All of the architectural elements in this space (stairs, windows, desks, chairs, etc) have been designed on the basis of this shelf scale, with the aim of achieving geometrical harmony which is comparable to Islamic Architecture. This innovative structural system affords not only large amount of book storage, but the possibility of flexible floor level which can be delivered from every height of bookshelf. Each space for different activity rise up helically, giving the impression of exploring a wooden jungle gym.

The original image of this structure is derived from the Japanese woodcraft of Kumiko. The structural integrity against an earthquake is provided by a panel of plywood board nailed on the shelf. Initially, the horizontal resistant force guaranteed by the panels was examined in a real-scale model. Further to this, an analysis of the whole structure was performed in order to determine the placement of the windows and panels. The inter-locking laminated pine-board was manufactured precisely in advance and assembled on-site. Similarly, the pyramid-shaped roof was assembled on-site, from 12 pieces of prefabricated wooden roof panel. The completed roof has a thickness of only 230mm and sensitively covers the whole space like the dome of a Mosque.

In addition to its unique structure, the outer wall employs the construction techniques of a traditional Japanese storehouse Dozou. The bamboo net wall foundation layer was attached to the lattice structure and the clay and straw mixture was applied to the foundation by the trowel. Then the red cedar panels forms exterior wall. The interior clay wall was finished with white plaster. These techniques are in accordance with urban fireproofing specifications, as well as maintaining a suitably humid environment for the storage of books.

This page is designed to celebrate an American phenomenon which reflects an important part of US history and culture: the motel. The word showed up in dictionaries as postwar optimism and cold war pessimism led to the creation of an highway system. Before long, families began to discover bright neon arrows pointing the way to temporary homes dotting those long stretches of tar. Motels offered an inexpensive way to travel the country and expand our horizons.

With this website, we wish to share our enthusiasm for this special and poignant part of Americana - one which is slipping into obscurity. In the race to build interstates which cut through the land without connecting us to its people, it is important to find a place to rest - even in cyberspace. Like the best journeys, this page has no particular direction. We have no roadmap for this trip. Nonetheless, we hope you enjoy the ride.

Up to the 19th Century mentally ill people were sometimes chained naked in squalid conditions in places like London’s Bethlehem hospital which became synonymous with chaos (its name being contracted to bedlam) and where tourists would pay to see the freak show. Then came the extreme rationalism of the Kirkbride plan which created a very unusual form of architecture for asylums throughout the Anglosphere that was used until the 20th Century. As a result of their demise, most are abandoned ruins today, giant, rotting testimonies to a bygone era of clinical Victorian discipline combined with neo-Gothic extravagance.

The Kirkbride plan consists of sets of enormous, symmetrical, staggered wings, like a bat made out of lego. Men are on the left and women on the right in sections that radiate from the main entrance for increasingly violent or incurable patients. Early mental institutions where patients had to pay for their own incarceration would also vary in class (rich to poor) on the y axis. The staggering of the wings ensured the flow of air through each, purging them of diseased vapors perhaps, such was the Victorian obsession with fresh air, from outdoor Tuberculosis wards to seaside promenades and piers.

SKELETAL ARCHIPORN

The hexayurt shelter can cost less than a relief tent, is designed to be manufactured anywhere in the world at any scale, from local materials, as Free hardware, to house humans in need. The Hexayurt Project maintains the designs and makes them freely available to you.

This project is for two structures to be placed on the bank of Kielder Water, Northumberland. The structures will provide a stopping place for visitors walking or cycling along the lakeside path. They will also provide visible markers or destination points from which to begin or end a walk or bike-ride.

Cathedral Scan translates the architectural plans of Gothic cathedrals into open-ended musical scores via custom software. Treating the plans as a kind of map, in the live performance Carrington navigates through them to create diverse rhythms, drones and textures. The album is edited from a live concert in a large church space, and combines the direct signal created in software with the immense natural reverberation of the performance space.

dasparkhotel is conceived and implemented primarily as a hospitality tool.

It is constructed from repurposed, incredibly robust drain pipes.

The external simplicity surrounds an unexpectedly comfortable interior - full headroom, double bed, storage, light, power, woolly blanket and light cotton sleeping bag. All other hotelery devices (Toilets, showers, minibar, cafe, etc) are supplied by the surrounding public space.

The fundamental way in which we experience light in the arena of - work - led me to examine this writing hut designed by writer George Bernard Shaw. The first time I read about the GBS writing hut was in a book entitled " A Little House of My Own : 47 Grand Designs for 47 Tiny Houses". Now let me just say that looks can be deceiving. At first glance this is just a simple box with a door and three windows; two of which are fixed. It has a sloping roof to shed rain and snow build up but there is a little secret hidden below. Literally. The hut is built atop a large Lazy Susan.

Every now and then in New York City, you will come across a thing so perfectly useless it reminds you of an old idea you managed to forget: Superfluous things are often beautiful, and beautiful things are generally superfluous in the end.

Examples: the beach at Dead Horse Bay in southern Brooklyn, cruise ships steaming past the end of 48th Street, certain nights when the neon sign at the old McHale’s on Eighth Avenue used to get all smeary in the rain.

It’s a fairly exclusive list, and one you’re pretty sure will never grow — that is, until it does. A good example being the discovery of the century-old bowling alley in the basement of the Frick Collection, the mansion/museum on Fifth Avenue that houses an amazing array of European art.

Duncan Jackson, the founder-director of Billings Jackson Design, bought Martello Tower Y in Suffolk with the intention of creating his family home. Duncan appointed Piercy Conner Architects to undertake planning and, when this was successfully achieved, to work with Billings Jackson Design to realise the project.

The tower was built in 1808 to defend the east coast against potential invasion. The only entrance is on the first floor of the building, which houses what was an ammunition store. The building is vaulted internally, at the roof and the floor, with a central column supporting the structure. It was last inhabited in the late 19th century and was derelict at the outset of the project.

The design of this oak folly is based on a traditional granary store, which is raised on staddle stones to prevent vermin infestation. It is finished with a thatched roof and rendered panels.

It’s a design by the architects at Peter Gluck and Partners. The building is a cube, measuring 20-feet on each side. The interior space mesures 720 square feet. It’s not a house, but serves as a library for a private collection of 10,000 books on Japanese history.

The lower level is reported to be the primary storage space for the books. The upper level is a light-filled open space with fully opening windows.

The first thing that came to mind when I saw this design is that it could also serve as a secure cabin, albeit with some modifications to the open upper level. For example if one were to add sliding steel window covers and reduce the number of windows this little building could be sealed up like a fortress when the owner was away.

ModVic's mission is to authentically restore historic Victorian homes (1850 – 1910) to their original beauty and richness while completely modernizing the home’s systems, functional layout and conveniences for the family of today (sound familiar?). Bruce and Melanie also love the steampunk design aesthetic of combining the best of Victorian high design and craftsmanship with modern functionality and usefulness.

Bruce's home is a Craftsman style Victorian built in 1901. It has a great deal of history associated with it and Bruce has filled it with unusual Craftsman era antiques. But we're interested in steampunk here rather than the merely historical so I'm going to gloss over almost all of that and get to the mods and the steampunk art!

Camp Century—aka "Project Iceworm"—was a "city under ice," according to the U.S. Army, a "nuclear-powered research center built by the Army Corps of Engineers under the icy surface of Greenland," as Frank J. Leskovitz more specifically explains.

A fully-functioning "underground city," Camp Century even had its own mobile nuclear reactor—an "Alco PM-2A"—that kept the whole thing lit up and running during the Cold War.

City Hall, also known as City Hall Loop,[4] was the original southern terminal of the first line of the New York City Subway, built by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), named the "Manhattan Main Line", and now part of the IRT Lexington Avenue Line.Passenger service was discontinued on December 31, 1945,[2] making it a ghost station, although the station is still used as a turning loop for 6 and <6> trains.

Architect and builder Ken Meffan lives in Rough and Ready, California, a tiny town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. … Officially, it's 3,400 square feet, but half of that is a greenhouse. … I consider this house a prototype. Some of its features I wouldn't dare build for customers, in case they don't work out. Like the garage-door "sun-roof" in our bedroom, or the sliding glass walls. … The flip side of experimenting is that the inspection process can be a real drag. I had to get a rural occupancy permit for us to live out here. And I had to block off the spot where the fireman's pole was supposed to go.

An Earthship is a type of passive solar home made of natural and recycled materials. Designed and marketed by Earthship Biotecture of Taos, New Mexico, the homes are primarily constructed to work autonomously and are generally made of earth-filled tires, using thermal mass construction to naturally regulate indoor temperature. They also usually have their own special natural ventilation system. Earthships are generally Off-the-grid homes, minimizing their reliance on public utilities and fossil fuels.

A couple of space colony summer studies were conducted at NASA Ames in the 1970s. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made. These have been converted to jpegs and are available as thumbnails, quarter page, full screen and publication quality images. There are 16 images presented below.

The Harmony Club was originally built in 1909 and was operated as a social club by the Jewish community of Selma, Alabama. It is situated on a high bank that overlooks the Alabama River.…The club functioned for several years non-stop till in the late 1930’s it turned into the Elks Club, where it eventually disbanded in the 1960’s and the building boarded up. …For nearly forty years the building sat quiescent till one day David Hurlbut bought it in 1999.…It took him nearly two years to make Harmony Club a “remotely habitable by most people’s standards”.…Hurlbut has spent a lot personal time in preserving the architectural details, as well as leaving the walls unfinished as if the time stopped in 1960’s.

Gingerbread House Dough
400 gr (a little over 350 ml) granulated sugar
400 gr (a little less than 300 ml) golden syrup
200 gr butter
1 kilo (ca. 1.7 litres) plain flour
25 gr (1½ tbsp) bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp ground cinnamon
150 ml water

WELCOME to the First Annual Zombie Apocalypse Safe House Competition!

In a zombie apocalypse, a widespread (usually global) rise of zombies hostile to human life engages in a general assault on civilization. Victims of zombies may become zombies themselves. This causes the outbreak to become an exponentially growing crisis: the spreading “zombie plague/virus” swamps normal military and law enforcement organizations, leading to the panicked collapse of civilian society until only isolated pockets of survivors remain, scavenging for food and supplies in a world reduced to a pre-industrial hostile wilderness.

Judging: The judge is TBD, however each project will be judged on how well they address the program issues which will be up to the discretion of the judge. Extra credit will be considered for thinking outside of the “box” and addressing issues not brought up in the program.

Earth is probably still the world's commonest building material. The word cob comes from an old English root meaning a lump or rounded mass. Cob building uses hands and feet to form lumps of earth mixed with sand and straw, a sensory and aesthetic experience similar to sculpting with clay. Cob is easy to learn and inexpensive to build. Because there are no forms, ramming, cement or rectilinear bricks, cob lends itself to organic shapes: curved walls, arches and niches. Earth homes are cool in summer, warm in winter. Cob's resistance to rain and cold makes it ideally suited to cold climates like the Pacific Northwest, and to desert conditions.

This website commemorates all abandoned communities. But we will focus on a number of specific places that have been deserted at various times, for various reasons. In each case we will consider what type of community it was, the events leading up to its abandonment, and what happened to the inhabitants after they moved away. We will also be interested in what you are likely to find if you visit the place today, and in this respect you will notice that the observations and experiences of the author will often be recorded.

Being an illustrated run through the basics.

What happened was, for our recent South American tour I wanted an Android architecture overview graphic. I ran across, among the Android SDK documentation, a page entitled What is Android?, and it’s perfectly OK. Except for, I really disliked the picture — on purely aesthetic grounds, just not my kind of lettering and gradients and layouts — so I decided to make another one.

I thought I’d run it here and, since I’ve been spending a lot of time recently explaining What Android Is to people, I thought I’d provide my version of that as well, in narrative rather than point form.

The Theatrum Anatomicum developed in 2007 next to the Kunsthaus di Bregenz, by Paul Renner and the group of Squid. Architects. The big wooden structure reminds to anatomy theaters born inside the ancient universities all around Europe. I remember, in particular, the beautiful one in the Bologna’s Aetheneum, built in 1637…

Fully open source (not open core), thoroughly tested, customizable, extensible and with unique features and excellent performance and scalability to manage hundreds of thousands of VMs:

*
Private cloud with Xen, KVM and VMware,
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Hybrid cloud (cloudbursting) with Amazon EC2, and other providers through Deltacloud (from ecosystem),
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Public cloud supporting EC2 Query, OGF OCCI and vCloud (from ecosystem) APIs,… and much more.

In a way, Shape Grammars provide a nice tool for understanding Sullivan's designs. As with the overall form of his buildings, he saw the ornament he developed as the depiction of man's power and ability, in the marriage of the organic and inorganic, of the Arts and Sciences. His writings elaborate on the Philosophical commonalities of these two domains. As do his designs, through the complex marriage of orthagonal and curved geometry. This marriage of form involves specific, sequential operations for addition, subtraction, and transformation, for which I've developed a set of grammar rules. The grammar presented here was developed through the analysis of a specific design: the tile which line the main entrances on the Guaranty Building. The rules were substantiated and refined through research of his writings, and also his work, A System of Architectural Ornament, which is presented at right with transcriptions.

This project investigates a new Internet architecture called Named Data Networking (NDN). NDN capitalizes on strengths -- and addresses weaknesses -- of the Internet's current host-based, point-to-point communication architecture in order to naturally accommodate emerging patterns of communication. By naming data instead of their location, NDN transforms data into a first-class entity.

In a nutshell, we're building tools to automate the configuration of network systems, in order to make networks more reliable and scalable. We're going to make these tools available in a way that's accessible and affordable for even the smallest organization, while still providing a nice living for ourselves. And we're going to build a community around these tools, to support their growth and ongoing development.

36-foot in diameter American grain dryer with 2000 SF single family starter home inside. Instantly assembled off-the-shelf 14 GA galvanized corrugated steel exterior a 2000 SF developer house inside. Optional greenhouse. Buy 5 get one free!!!

The Palettenpavillon by Matthias Loebermann is a structure made entirely from shipping pallets, ground anchors, and tie rods. Designed to be easily assembled and dismantled, and then entirely recycled at a later date, the resulting building is intended as a temporary meeting place.

As the architect writes, the shipping pallets are "characterized by a complex geometry of open and closed surface portions," with the effect that a staggered stacking of each unit produces "interesting netlike structures." They add that the deceptively curvilinear form becomes a "cave."

Playing the Building is a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

It’s the book store and the library on the second floor, so we wanted to connect those two parts of the museum with a book tower so that you could read the continuity from the stored books to the books that are sold and become eventually a part of every people’s life out there.…this freestanding wooden tower re-evaluates the concept of the ‘archive’. Its walls are made up of hundreds of shelves, holding thousands of second-hand books. Accessed via a spiral staircase, each floor includes a secluded reading chamber. Positioned to face inwards, the book spines form an exterior façade of monotonous white, whereas the interior view consists of a rich collage of colours and typographic textures.

The tower is a bookcase in itself, the first thing you meet is the white backside of the books and they don’t reveal themselves until you get to the inside where you get the spine of the book.

Back in 2006, early on a Saturday morning, artists Julien Berthier and Simon Boudvin installed a new door in the city of Paris—but it was a fake door, leading nowhere, on an otherwise empty wall in the 3rd arrondissement. In a way, I'm reminded of an article published last month in New York magazine called "There’s a Brownstone in Brooklyn With a Secret Passage to the Subway." There, the magazine wrote that "among the lovely three-story brownstones in Brooklyn is one extra-special home, one that really isn't a home at all. It's merely a façade that serves to disguise a passage into the dark subway tunnel" below. An emergency evacuation-and-access system for the subway, the doorway and its Potemkin house remain unmarked and undisclosed; it is the NYPD as Julien Berthier.

Welcome to the Artificial Owl, a site dedicated to provide a selection of the most fascinating abandoned man-made creations.

Have you ever seen ... say, a telephone pole which no longer carries a line, but still stands on the sidewalk? Or maybe you've seen a second story doorway in the outside wall of a building that didn't lead to a landing -- or to much of anything -- anymore. Ever seen a "stairway to heaven," a staircase that goes nowhere, or a walkway that ends abruptly in midair? These are Thomassons. To celebrate the release of the first English translation (by Matt Fargo) of HYPERART: THOMASSON, Kaya Press is setting up a website for a new generation of collaborators (i.e. YOU) to submit their Thomassons.

Livraria de Vila is a bookshop in São Paulo with a store-front made of revolving bookcases, designed by Brazilian studio Isay Weinfeld Arquitecto.

Industrial ruins continue to litter the cities of the United Kingdom, in the bypassed and neglected urban areas, the parts of town which are now disconnected from the flows of money, energy, people and things. Although they are often regarded as a waste of space, dangerous places that should be demolished as soon a s possible, ruins provide an alternative realm for all sorts of social practices, from unofficial art, graffiti, children’s play, sex, drug-taking, parties, living and other kinds of adventure. They are also home to a range of birds, insects, mammals and plants. Through the process of decay, ruins offer an aesthetic experience that bypasses the normal designs of the city, often over-regulated, boring and too smooth. In ruins, we can come across unexpected sights, weird vestiges of the past, unfathomable artefacts, cryptic signs, unfamiliar textures and large, impressive objects. This website is dedicated to the celebration of industrial ruins. These are not the romantic ruin

"On Roosevelt Island —- located in the East River between Manhattan and Queens —- there are no garbage bags on the sidewalks and no garbage trucks. Instead, garbage is collected from its 14,000 inhabitants via a retro-futuristic system of underground tubes. A computer empties the trash chutes several times a day, whisking away the waste of the Island’s residential towers, and zooming it through underground pipes to a transfer station at one end of the island. There it is compacted, sealed into containers, and loaded on a truck to join the rest of New York City’s waste."

"The Mistake By The Lake", a collection of improvised bus shelters around Buffalo, NY.

a.k.a. The Book of Lamentations:
a bitterly nostalgic look at a city in the process of going extinct

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

This underground home, located in the Swiss village of Vals, is set amidst a cluster of mountain houses and if you don’t look carefully you might miss it! The most striking thing about this stone house is the majestic Alpine view through a wide, elliptical opening in the hillside, revealing spacious outdoor entertaining areas that lead to the home’s main entrance. Another entrance from a nearby barn leads residents and guests through an underground pathway, providing an alternate entryway into the home. The circular opening in the mountainside allows for lots of windows, which flood interiors with natural light while framing the stunning mountain views.

Yakov G. Chernikov (1889–1951), was a Russian artist, designer, and architect learned in classical and modern styles. As a draftsman he was on par with Piranesi and Rembrandt; his most forward-thinking drawings resemble the style of Yoshitaka Amano. This combination of knowledge and skill made him one of the most accomplished Russian Constructivist writers and architects; Chernikov designed sixty buildings—although most were not built—and wrote numerous books about architecture and graphic design.
In the late 1920s the state-controlled world of Soviet architecture began to turn against the Constructivists. In 1932 Stalin… barred architects from political speech and limited Soviet architecture to classical revival. Unable to practice in his Constructivist style, Chernikov began drawing architectural fantasies that were usually not intended to be built…in the 1940s he began to study and draw typefaces, an activity unlikely to draw attention.

Alexander's Gates, Asma writes, were the ultimate wall between the literally Caucasian West and its monstrous opponents, dating back to Alexander the Great:

Alexander supposedly chased his foreign enemies through a mountain pass in the Caucasus region and then enclosed them behind unbreachable iron gates. The details and the symbolic significance of the story changed slightly in every medieval retelling, and it was retold often, especially in the age of exploration.

(...) The maps of the time, the mappaemundi, almost always include the gates, though their placement is not consistent. Most maps and narratives of the later medieval period agree that this prison territory, created proximately by Alexander but ultimately by God, houses the savage tribes of Gog and Magog, who are referred to with great ambiguity throughout the Bible, and sometimes as individual monsters, sometimes as nations, sometimes as places.

Beyond this wall was a "monster zone."

The 69 original bridges of the Merritt Parkway were designed by George L. Dunkelberger. Each bridge had a unique design that represented various 1930s architectural styles, such as Art Deco, Art Moderne, French Renaissance, Gothic, Neoclassicism, and Rustic

Until recently, Kiel Johnson’s workshop, appropriately named Hyperbole
Studios, was located in an outland part of south Los Angeles County near
the harbor. Equal parts city, suburb, industrial complex, and junkyard, this
area hardly seems even remotely connected to Tinseltown or OC, but it is
a feast for the eyes of those willing to venture off of the freeways that
cordon off this swath of strangeness from the rest of the world. For those
not so bold, a visit to one of Johnson’s exhibitions offers a glimpse of this
bizarre territory by way of the artist’s unique vision and biting humor.
Johnson’s work defies specificity. He draws, he paints, he prints and he
sculpts but he does none of these in the traditional sense. Still, there is a
unifying theme that underpins all of his work that seeks to transform the
lamentably abject into the wonderfully chaotic.

Journal of converting a 1935 Safeway store into a residence, home office, music studio and performance space using a mix of modern aesthetics and prairie structures (barn, grain elevator, grain silo) to create a creative living environment. The project started September 15, 2007 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

"The Thames Estuary Army Forts were constructed in 1942 to a design by Guy Maunsell."

Constituting their own architectural typology, and falling perhaps somewhere between Lew Welch and Tom Kundig … are the fire lookout towers of the Pacific Northwest.

This is a database of 32,337 historic bridges in the United States of America, past and present.

Based in Santa Cruz, California, Reversica Design makes unique motion hardware that lets builders, woodworkers, and craftsmen produce tv-hiding media centers, hidden passage bookcase systems, and room-doubling hide-a-beds.

Nearly three years ago, in an email I have subsequently misplaced, a reader sent in some scans he had made of a book about Jan Soucek, a Czech artist whose work consists, it seems, almost entirely of elaborate architectural fantasies.

An accessible sunken garden and pond, surrounded by a raised pre-cast concrete boardwalk, has been inserted within the conserved ruin of the western chamber of the former reservoir. The edges of the ruin are contained by concrete up-stands in such a way as to amplify the distinctive curved characteristics of the original brick vaults. The Victorian tree-fern garden hints at the era in which the Reservoir was originally built.

On July 3, 2002, fire destroyed a facility that served as both office and computer server room for
a College of Business located in the United States. The fire also caused significant smoke
damage to the office building where the computer facility was located. The monetary costs of
the disaster were over $4 million. This case, written from the point of view of the chairperson of
the College Technology Committee, discusses the issues faced by the college as they resumed
operations and planned for rebuilding their information technology operations. The almost-
total destruction of the college’s server assets offered a unique opportunity to rethink the IT
architecture for the college. The reader is challenged to learn from the experiences discussed
in the case to develop an IT architecture for the college that will meet operational requirements
and take into account the potential threats to the system.

Working on Lowlife, with its Mega-City One setting freed from the presence of Judge Dredd, I found myself thinking about the city and its place in the Dredd/2000AD franchise. And it occurred to me that, really, the city is the actual star of Judge Dredd. I mean, Dredd himself is a man of limited attributes and predictable reactions. His value is giving us a fixed point, a window through which to explore the endless fountain of new phenomena that is the Mega-City. It's the Mega-City that powers Judge Dredd, and Judge Dredd that has powered 2000AD for the last 30 years.

Doug Carlston's Aspen, Colorado house is 4,500 square feet (418 square meters) and includes not just a maze of hidden passageways but also a fully functioning observatory, a moat and a swimming pool with artificial rain effects. Treasure chests of costume jewelry may be discovered in the home's grottos, and other cool features include caverns complete with fake stalactites and bats, as well as a "room of doom" that must be exited by swimming through a chute or jumping through a waterfall. Carlton, best known as the designer of the legendary Myst computer games, once compared his house to a piece of interactive software, and a trip through the home does seem to involve the same skills as a computer game. To access one hidden passageway, the user must pass a magnetized piece of pottery in a certain pattern over the sensors hidden in a shelf to unlock a secret passageway.