The City Museum

A Perennial Favorite of Many, Half-Art, Half-Playground, Half-Museum
(I Realize thats too many halfs

I Like the Way This Looks

I don't know anything about this, but I like the way the architecture looks, I like the urban density, and I like the closeness to the Sea.  It could be terrible, but it looks nice.

Tiny Architecture is Tiny. And Awesome.

If my life goes as planned (Currently filed as Plan#: 427) I'd like to live on a sail boat of the comfortable but not grossly huge size 30-50 ft (used) However, I like the idea of maintaining a small landlubber residence (ideally coastal with nearby dock) This style of home seems perfect, perhaps with an outbuilding with a studio setup. In any case despite my Packrat tendencies, I personally appreciate the benefits of modest sized well designed homes.

P.S. There's also a really cool video of the process of making one of these homes: link

Working in the Woods

Spanish architecture firm SelgasCano has designed their own office in the middle of the forest.

Via Cousin Liz

Separation of Church and State, Was Never So Literal

This is about as surreal as it gets. An incredible video about the moving of a huge church on a huge truck, set to over the top choral music specifically written for the event. I'm honestly flabbergasted.

It's really strange, the truck is so small comparatively it looks like the church is moving on its own.

separation

It's Like an Ark Built to Save Two of Every Style of Architecture From The Great Flood of Cookie Cutter Homes, and McMansions

Wooden Skyscraper - Arkhangelsk, Russia

I've had the pictures on my hardrive for over a year I think not knowing anything about them other than they're of an awesome building, and probably Russian. Today I randomly found this article.

"Nikolai Sutyagin, a former gangster, began building this ‘wooden skyscraper’ in Arkhangelsk, Russia with the intention of it being only a two-story building. But, a trip to see wooden houses in Japan and Norway convinced him that he hadn’t used roof space efficiently enough, so he kept building. “First I added three floors but then the house looked ungainly, like a mushroom,” he said. “So I added another and it still didn’t look right so I kept going. What you see today is a happy accident.” The multimillionaire became a pauper after his possessions were destroyed during a stint in prison, and the house is now decaying around him, but he still lives in the bottom floor with his wife."

Greener Space

Photos of an abandoned church with the surfaces covvered in living grass. I cannot find the original artist, but it reminds me of Misha's B.F.A. piece, although I think this kind of tops that a bit. The photos on the inside are particulary brilliant, a little haunting even.

Supplemental To That.

Supplemental to the last post this is another painting by Brueghel, known as The "Little" Tower of Babel.

Also both might have been painted as a condemnation of the House of Habsburg, the Austrian rulers of an international empire at the time, that continued all they way to the cessation of the first World War, and whose last head of house only abdicated (albeit in exile) in 1961.

Let's All Work Together.

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563)

"And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."

It is interesting to me that this is seen as a bad thing by God. I must admit I've aways found the story of the tower of Babel interesting. plus I really like towers, it seems the ideal construction method really. Brueghel's painting is Beautiful, it seems so much more evocative of the possibilities of people cooperating, rather than the foibles. Instead of a lesson against pride, I wish we could take this as a lesson in the power of working together towards odd tasks.

Perosnally I Think They Were Just Bored And Thought building a tower to heaven sounded fun. Which sort of reminds me of a quote from The Book of The Seven Seas, "At first I thought I might go fishing, but that seeming dull I resolved on a voyage around the world." The quote is by Joshua Slocum about his 3 year journey, the first ever solo-circumnavigation of the globe, begun in the spring of 1895.

FUN FACT: (if it really could be defined as such) while the height of the tower is something of contention, it is listed in a couple of places:

The Book of Jubilees: 5433 cubits and 2 palms (according to ancient measurements, one cubit is twenty-four inches) putting the height of the tower at about 10,866 feet tall, about 8.75x taller than the Empire State Building, or nearly 2.5 kilometers.

A typical mediaeval account is given by: Giovanni Villani (1300): He relates that "it measured eighty miles round, and it was already 4,000 paces high (5,920 m (19,423 ft)) and 1,000 paces thick, and each pace is three of our feet."

The 14th century traveler John Mandeville also included an account of the tower, and reported that its height had been 64 furlongs (= 8 miles), according to the local inhabitants.

The 17th century historian Verstegan provides yet another figure - quoting Isidore, he says that the tower was 5164 paces high, about 7.6 kilometers, and quoting Josephus that the tower was wider than it was high, more like a mountain than a tower. He also quotes unnamed authors who say that the spiral path was so wide that it contained lodgings for workers and animals, and other authors who claim that the path was wide enough to have fields for growing grain for the animals used in the construction.

So the height kind of tends to vary from story to story, but is sort of universally immense by modern standards.

And finally, a contemporary author looking at it from an engineering perspective wrote, in his book, Structures or why things don't fall down (Pelican 1978–1984), Professor J.E. Gordon considers the height of the Tower of Babel. He wrote, 'brick and stone weigh about 120 lb per cubic foot (2000 kg per cubic metre) and the crushing strength of these materials is generally rather better than 6000 lbf per square inch or 40 megapascals. Elementary arithmetic shows that a tower with parallel walls could have been built to a height of 7000 feet or 2 kilometres before the bricks at the bottom were crushed. However by making the walls taper towards the top they ... could well have been built to a height where the men of Shinnar would run short of oxygen and had difficulty in breathing before the brick walls crushed beneath their own dead weight."

Most of this was taken from the Wikipedia Article here.

Not quite a Light House Per Se...

This was out side of the Contemporary Art Museum, the Friday before last, on the 13th, and i have to say I enjoyed it more than the work inside.







“Chorus” by Rainer Kehres and Sebastian Hungerer



The Installation was constructed inside of the old burned down church off of Washington, that has been nothing but foundation and skeletal masonry walls for years, and as long as I can remember. The lights were picked in an attempt to mimic the colours found during sunset in the city.

99 Bottles of Beer in the Wall...

Mr. Heineken wanted to help the world and the enviroment through beer.

"...the idea of turning waste into useful products came to life brilliantly in 1963 with the Heineken WOBO (world bottle). Envisioned by beer brewer Alfred Heineken and designed by Dutch architect John Habraken, the “brick that holds beer” was ahead of its ecodesign time, letting beer lovers and builders alike drink and design all in one sitting.Mr. Heineken’s idea came after a visit to the Caribbean where he saw two problems: beaches littered with bottles and a lack of affordable building materials. The WOBO became his vision to solve both the recycling and housing challenges that he had witnessed on the islands."


I think the last image really sells it for me, I could live in that.

Via Inhabitat

If You Ever Wanted Your Own Hobbit Hole

This is a low-impact enviromentally friendly home hand built by a family in england for roughly £3000. they even posted plans, and sort of how-tos here, in case you wanted build your own.

the interior is just as awesome:

Maybe We Could Make a Tree House Sub-Division?

That last post reminded me of this:

This is another by XKCD.

I have this exact same phenomenon, I just have all these awesome (at least I think they are) ideas. I wonder if there are zoning laws concerning tree houses?

I want to Live in This When I Grow Up

I mean seriously, How awesome is that?

I think for mine i'll use Airstreams, and maybe get some rope bridges, covered connecting awnings, and a small crane with a rope pully elevator, It'll be so cool.

P.S. it looks like they used shipping containers to support the trailers as well as steel posts. Recycling, and extra storage space.

Another Plastic Brick In the Wall.

These are by one of a collective of 21 artists that did site specific work in a little European town. (Italy?)

No name was given for whichever individual did these in particular, and it might have been several. Still it's just amazing simple little pieces that just work so well. I always apreciate thoughtful yet unobtrusive public art, it's the sort of thing that makes the world a better place to live in.

Of course some people have a differen't opinion of what is considered unobtrusive than I.

A Zebra, A Marxists, and The Pope Reading His own Obituary

Normal on the outside. Surreal, amazing, Unique on the inside.

If you like interesting interior design, give this a look.

i think i may try to make my own chalkboard room.

Vanja Pointed me toward this:

"Home & Garden
Far From Conservative
Gavin Jackson/Arcaid for The New York Times
Published: 20080807
It may look buttoned-up on the outside, but the director Roland Emmerich’s London town house is far from frumpy inside."

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/08/07/garden/20080807-EMMERICH_index.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

There are Better Uses for Volcanos than Magma Storage

I started out going to school for architecture, and i still love it, there is something beautiful about a well designed funtional space. Now the realities of the actual practice of architecture and the limit's of comfortable collective imagination brought alot of that crashing down. Well That and the temptation towards that sinister and amorphous siren: Conceptual Art. (parents talk to your kids about conceptual art before someone else does)

in Any case i've continued to doodle in a semi-architectural manner, though almost always of a fantastical nature. Like say a cloud factory that purifies and vaporizes the sludgy river Des Peres into pretty clouds, or The giant Cannon that fires locomotive sized Artillery shells at West County. (yes harmless doodles, pay no attention to the 12 story tarp)

side note: i wish i had been better at documenting my work.

the Point of all this was to say i found something cool:

Mr Jesse van Dijk is a conceptual artist and illustrator from The Netherlands. Project Indigo is this huge project creating a ficticous seaside vertical city, and its pretty amazing stuff.

heres one of my favorites: