Archive Category: Architecture
Real-Life Simpsons House
Photo: Design Fetish
In 1997, home developer Kaufman & Broad built a house in Henderson, Nevada that looks exactly like the house that the Simpson family lives in, both inside and outside, including furniture and pictures on the walls. From an article in The Las Vegas Sun, written at the time of construction:
“The Simpsons”, the satirical, animated clan who put the phrases “Doh!” and “Eat my shorts” into the national vernacular, are celebrating their 10th year on television. And in true Simpson fashion, the producers of the show are doing the unexpected – recreating the family’s two-story domicile right down to the throw rugs. Builder Kaufman & Broad has taken the 724 Evergreen Terrace address out of two dimensions and cast it in three, placing it smack dab in the middle of Henderson, Nev., in a housing development appropriately called “Springfield.”
News Story and Gallery via GearFuse
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Custom Backyard Deck Will Make You Dizzy
Photo: Digited Image Company
Apple executive Jeff Dauber has a backyard deck that will not, despite initial impressions, suck you into a wormhole and then throw you back in time. He had architect Thom Flauders design the piece to create an optical illusion of curves where there are only flat surfaces:
“I wanted someone to barf when they look at it,” says Dauber, a senior executive at Apple. “The deck looks like it is sloping away from you.” Dauber is not your standard-issue Silicon Valley techie; he’s covered in tattoos and owns an impressive, challenging collection of contemporary art (including a mosque made out of gun parts, by the sculptor Al Farrow). Five years ago, he hired Faulders to transform his Potrero Hill residence into a bachelor-pad-cum-art-gallery (see “Puzzle Master,” June 2006). The architect gave the space visual interest while still preserving it as a backdrop for Dauber’s art. Notably, the ceiling and walls, which appear to undulate, are made of a smooth pattern of interlocking CNC-milled MDF panels.
Link via Fast Company
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The Manhattan Bridge Turns 100
Often overlooked and certainly overshadowed by its more famous neighbor, the Manhattan Bridge will, this December, become a centenarian. Quite a feat, all told, as the bridge’s history has been full of issues to say the least.
Gustov Lindenthal’s first design was thrown out purely for reasons of aesthetics. He came back with another idea – incorporating two thin-profile steel towers. This idea was retained but his main plan – four cables made of immense chains of eye bars (lengths of steel at least ten foot long joined at each end by steel pins) was again rejected. Perhaps the thought of what was essentially a gargantuan bicycle chain put the chills up the spine of the city fathers.
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10 Amazing Abandoned Bank Vaults
When you think of a bank vault you probably tend to think about thick steel doors, massive locks, armed guards, deposit boxes and lots of cash, which is why it is so strange to see what they look like when they’ve been abandoned! These vaults were built to withstand robbery attempts, so they survive even when the building is destroyed around them. Many have found a new life with a different purpose. The vault pictured is in Bodie, California.
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Luxury Capsule Hotel
Photo: Design Boom
In 1979, Japan built its first capsule hotel — an inn with rooms consisting of little more than a bed, and certainly not enough room to stand up. Now developers in Kyoto are contrasting that minimalist approach with luxury furnishings at the 9h Hotel, which will open in December. It’s called 9h because users are expected to shower, sleep for seven hours, and then rest in a nine-hour period — although you can rent your room for up to seventeen hours at a time. Each pod comes with customizable lighting to help lull you to sleep and then gently wake you.
Link via Fast Company (where there are pictures of a similar endeavor in Manhattan)
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The Dubai Fountain
Reminiscent of the amazing musically coordinated fountains of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas the Burj Dubai fountains named “Dubai Fountains” certainly are impressive. This $217 million project was built by the same California based company WET Design (whose website I highly suggest checking out as it is beautiful!) that created the Bellagio Hotel’s fountains. This record setting fountain uses 6,600 lights with 50 coloured projectors and is able to fire the water into the air at as astonishing 150m or 490ft! The music played in this video is Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman’s “Time to Say Goodbye”.
The first video I found through Dark Roasted Blend (check out the rest of the site!)
This second video is by far my favourite and allows you to see a much closer view of the fountains at work. The song used in the performance is called “Baba Yetu”, created by Christopher Tin which I’m sure some of you Civ 4 fans will most certainly recognize as the opening track to the game! 
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Turning Rainwater Into a Playground
Image: De Urbanisten and Studio Marco Vermeulen
Two Dutch architects want to alter the storm drainage system of the city of Rotterdam to redirect water into playgrounds. The water will be used to fill fanciful ponds and moats for children to play in/around:
In Florian Boer and Marco Vermeulen’s proposal, rainwater runoff isn’t funneled into a complex system of underground pipes, a system that is rather expensive to build and maintain, but is managed instead through a network of surface reservoirs, the Waterpleinen, or Watersquares. These storage spaces will be dry for most of the year, but during storm events, they will collect water from the surrounding neighborhood. If one reaches capacity, excess water will overflow into another basin. After the rain, the collected water will slowly recede into nearby bodies of water or seep into the soil.
So instead of being buried in concrete, excised from the daily life of the city and only experienced by municipal workers, urban hydrology is visibly, even prominently, incorporated into the surface fabric of the city. Programmed with recreational opportunities when its dry and even while inundated, its infrastructure provides active public spaces for the local area, not dark playgrounds for a handful of urban explorers. It even becomes an event, its frolicking rivulets and interior lakes staged for the young and old.
Link via Fast Company
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13 Other Leaning Towers
Hey, it’s hard to keep a tower on the straight and narrow! The Leaning Tower of Pisa may be the most famous, but there are towers that lean all over the world. Web Urbanist looks at thirteen of them, including the Round Tower of the Kilmacduagh Monastery in Ireland pictured. It leans 1.5 feet, but is in no danger of falling over. And its door is 26 feet off the ground! Link -via Unique Daily
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A Gallery of Repurposed Train Cars
Photo: English Russia
WebUrbanist has a great roundup of pictures of train cars that have been converted to other uses, such as hotels, houses, and bridges. The image above is of a train car that has been turned into a Russian Orthodox church — an emerging trend in Russia.
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The Greatest Treehouse in the World
Photo: ZuZu Top
Horrace Burgess of Crossville, Tennessee built a treehouse 97 feet tall. Its 8,000 square feet of floor space is spread over 11 stories. The house is built around a tree 80 feet high and 12 feet wide at the base, so much of the structure extends well beyond the tree itself.
A building of over 11 floors would be expected to have some extra amenities – and the treehouse Horrace has established is no exception. This particular one comes complete with a mini basketball court – if you thought playing you would never live to see guys playing basketball on top of a tree!
The owner of the edifice is a 56 years old landscape architect by the way, and he say an upwards of $12,000 has gone into building thetreehouse . Asked about where he got the inspiration to build the edifice, he cites a prayer vision he got in the early 90s – going further to say that he built it ‘for God.’ Nobody is arguing with him – and nobody is contesting the assertion that it is the world’s greatesttreehouse either. Meanwhile, building work has not stopped at the 11th floor…the building is still a ‘work in progress!’
There are many pictures of the treehouse at the link.
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Can You Identify This Building?
A reader sent this picture to Curious Expeditions, asking if they knew where it was taken. The biggest clue is the building in the background with its distinctive architecture. Can you identify the building or the setting? Link
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The Future of Architecture
Photo: Tom Bonaventure/Getty Images
There’s also speculation about recreating processes like limestone formation -which usually takes nature thousands of years- that eats carbon from the air.
Nanoarchitects are aiming to speed the process up to a matter of days. They believe it could be done simply by coating the walls of buildings with tiny droplets of engine grease. The grease would be laced with a common salt such as magnesium chloride. When the magnesium reacts with carbon dioxide in the air, a solid magnesium carbonate pearl begins to form.
This serves as the seed for the growth of white, wheatsheaf-shaped carbonate crystals. The large surface area of a droplet of grease maximises the interface between the magnesium and the atmospheric carbon, speeding up the rate of the reaction. Within days, the grease would be transformed into a sparkly crystalline coating similar in appearance to heavy frost or snowfall… A green city…would look like Narnia under the White Witch, crystal white and beautiful. The carbon choking our planet could become a harmless decorative feature.
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The Greatest Spiral Stairs in the World
There is something mysterious and intriguing about spiral staircases. Atlas Obscura looks at some of the most magnificent spiral staircases in the world, with lovely pictures and facts you might not know. For example, the staircase at the Vatican Museum, pictured here, is actually a double helix, with one staircase going up and the other coming down. Link -via Curious Expeditions
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Gasometers Reimagined as Apartment Community
Photo by Peter Korrak
For a hundred years or so, Vienna invested in coal/gas energy, but when the plant was decommissioned there were four large gasometers remaining. The imposing structures sat idly, appearing in the James Bond movie, The Living Daylights and hosting rave parties.
Rather than tear them down, architects designed them to be converted into apartment style housing. First, they gutted the structures.
Each gasometer was divided into several zones for living (apartments in the top), working (offices in the middle floors) and entertainment and shopping (shopping malls in the ground floors). The shopping mall levels in each gasometer are connected to the others by skybridges.
Additional features:
Over 70 restaurants/bars/cafes
A multiplex cinema with 12 screens
4200 person capacity events hall
Daycare center
The Vienna National Archive
11,000 square meters (118,403 sq ft) of office space
615 apartments
230-bed student dorm
Link with many cool photos.
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Nero's Rotating Dining Hall Discovered
Back in 1st century A.D. (or C.E., if it pleases you), the Romans were really starting to crank things up. Things like debauchery, poisoning of rivals, fratricide…basically setting the stage for their own eventual downfall.
Of the many Emperors who ruled over this lifestyle, Nero stands out as one of the nastiest. But you gotta give the guy points for trying to throw a serious bash. At the time of his rule, a Roman historian named Suetonius chronicled everything, including the construction of a dining room that rotated.
Now, archeologists think they may have finally discovered this room, which was filled in and built-over in 80A.D.
Quite how the rotating dining room worked is still a bit of a mystery; some think it was by the motion of canals under the room and others think it more likely that it was manually cranked by slaves but hopefully the new funding will enable the archaeologists to confirm one way or the other.
In addition to the rotating floor, the opulent room featured fretted ivory ceilings which would pour flower petals and perfume down on Nero’s guests. Jackie118 has more fascinating history of Nero’s Rome at the link!
Link | Image: Daily Mail
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Solar Footbridge Produces Excess Power
The Kurilpa Bridge crossing the river into Brisbane, Australia is expected to carry around 36,000 pedestrians every week. The world’s longest solar foot bridge is 1,500 feet long and sports 84 solar panels. The panels produce all the energy the bridge needs for its LED lighting and sends 25% of the power generated back to the city’s electrical grid. Link -via Digg
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Drive-In Auto Museum
Last year, the Jiangsu Head Investment Group and the government of Nanjing, China held a competition for designing a museum for the automobile’s history and achievements. Italian architect Francesco Gatti and his team won with this entry featuring an interactive element: you drive into the museum.
The architect describes the museum as a “movie sequence in which the principal actor is the car”, a building where two car-related panorama go hand in hand: on the one hand the architect’s conscious attention to motorway aestheticism and urban scale – the structures and materials remind one of a viaduct – and on the other, his transportation into the museum of the ergonomics of the interior of a car. The furbishing and details within the edifice are related to and on a scale with its specific functions and it is not difficult for the visitor to imagine that he is in a car on a highway, rather than in a museum.
Link (rendering courtesy of 3GATTI.)
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Creative Lifeguard Stations Around the World
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Bedsearcher has a collection of pictures of colorful and creative lifeguard stations that can be found around the world. Pictured above is one by engineer Ulrich Müther and architect Dietrich Otto at Binz, Germany. Müther was a prolific designer in the 1960s and was noted for his buildings composed of concrete shells.
Link via The Presurfer
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Growing Chairs
Amazing 1900’s green creativity from John Krubsack who decided to grow chairs! It took him eleven years to bend and graft stems and brances of elder trees into the shape of a
chair before it was ready for ‘harvesting’. Krubsack is said to have said the chair was ‘cemented by nature’.
Link – via cakeheadlovesevil
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Mobile Tree House
It’s a house carved out of a solid tree trunk! This astonishing mobile tree house started off life as a mobile information centre for Forestry Tasmania. It has recently sold on e-bay for AU$12,000 where it grabbed the attention of the online world. Given the inside is a bit grotty, but with TLC imagine what a perfect spare room, library or playroom this structure would make. The possibilities are endless.
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Appetizing Architecture
Nothing draws attention like oversized objects, and when you’re traveling along the highway, hungry people notice big food. During the 1930s, buildings that look like something else popped up all over to draw in travelers, and many still exist. See 24 examples of appetizing architecture in this collection. Shown is the Big Duck in Flanders, New York. Link -via the Presurfer
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The World's Longest Bridge Will Be 25 Miles Long
Image: Artist’s Rendering, MENA Infrustructure
The Qatar-Bahrain Friendship Causeway will connect the Persian Gulf states of Qatar and Bahrain over a 40 km causeway. Construction is scheduled to begin next year at a cost of $2.3 billion. The structure will include both a roadway and a railway, and will reduce travel time between the nations to a mere 30 minutes. Once completed it will become the longest bridge in the world, surpassing the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in the U.S., which is 38 km long. At the link, you can view a comparative graphic.
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Burj Dubai in New York
To get a little perspective, this is what the Burj Dubai (previously at Neatorama) would look like if it were built in downtown Manhattan. Gizmodo has a chart comparing some of the world’s tallest buildings if you’d like to envision others. Link -via YesButNoButYes
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Vulcano Buono
It looks like a new volcano is growing in Nola, Italy, near Mt. Vesuvius! The Vulcano Buono (good volcano) is a commercial center designed by Renzo Piano. The interior space is bigger than it looks due to the sloping grass roof, which insulates the building. Inside you’ll find a forest and an amphitheater, plus shops, a hotel, a supermarket, and a movie theater. See more pictures at Inhabitat. Link -via Metafilter
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Man Builds Submarine Home Theatre
(YouTube Link)
Tina Law writes in New Zealand’s Stuff magazine about one man who wanted to own a den that looked the interior of a submarine. Wayne Eyre of Spencerville, NZ hired special effects artist Dean Johnstone to design it. These were the results:
Customwood has been sprayed with concrete and painted to resemble rusting steel beams, while plastic sheets have been melted to give the impression of bent steel ripped apart when the submarine hit an island. Speakers emit sonar and ocean sounds throughout the 12-metre by 5.5m room.
At one end of the room, a bar has been created from materials likely to be found on a deserted island. Shelves have been made out of halved tree trunks, while there is a washed-up surfboard.
The bar top is engraved with the random writings of a shipwrecked soul, while vines work their way through the submarine and smoke seeps out of interior walls.
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8 Iconic TV Show Buildings
Some of the buildings you know from your favorite TV shows are real brick-and-mortar places, although the signs are sometimes different. Super Tremendous has video of eight of them and addresses for those who want to go see for themselves.
Located at the Corner of Bedford and Grove in Manhattan, the Friends apartment building houses many New Yorkers who pay way too much money to brag about living in the Friends apartment building.
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84 Strange Buildings From Around the World
The blog Instant Shift has compiled pictures of 84 bizarre and unique buildings scattered across the world. A few have already been featured on Neatorama, but most have not yet been posted here. Pictured above is the Crooked House of Sopot, Poland. It was designed by architect Szotynscy Zaleski and built in 2004. Zaleski was inspired by the fanciful work of Polish artist Jan Marcin Szancer, a fantasy and children’s literature illustrator.
Link via The Presurfer
Image by flickr user lostajy used under creative commons license.
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Fire Lookout Tower House
(L) Fire Tower home in western Montana,
photo: Heidi Long and Gravity Shots; More at Timber Home Living
(R) Fire lookout tower in western Poland. Image: Mohylek [Wikipedia]
Imagine a house in the forest – you’re surrounded by trees and wildlife with no neighbors for miles. The view is simply stunning. The downside: bringing all those bags of groceries up the neverending flights of stairs!
Well, this may be the perfect house for some (very fit) people: old fire lookout towers converted into modern homes!
If location, location and location are what drive your visions of a dream tree house design or luxury hillside wood home then look no further: fire towers that once served vital protective services to natural forests are becoming increasingly used for new purposes including mountaintop homes with incredible views.
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Habitable Polyhedron
Photo by Manuel Villa
SpaceInvading is bringing the Neat back with four architechtural wonders today. This one is the “Habitable Polyhedron” and it has a unique function.
The project, meant for a family house back yard in the suburbs, aimed at designing a small park or opened area where the young parents and their newborn child would enjoy a independent space from day to day house activities, a space for reading, playing, etc. Having in mind this objective, and considering the usages of the space in the long term, it was proposed the project incorporated a small building to complement and support outside activities. That way he building would serve as a shelter for the child to share with his parents and, later on, as his own personal activities and hobbies setting.
It gives the appearance of one of those cartooney buildings where the space inside is bigger than it looks from outside: Link
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Reconstructing Cities from Thousands of Flickr Images
(YouTube Link)
The above video is a reconstruction of the Croatian city of Dubrovnik. Rebecca Boyle writes in Popular Science that computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory have been using Microsoft’s program Photosynth to compile Flickr images of major landmarks in order to create 3-D digital models:
“The key difference is that Photosynth was aimed at doing a single monument or landmark, which meant that it was scaled to a couple hundred or a thousand photographs, after which it became too slow,” said Sameer Agarwal, an assistant professor at UW who worked on the project. “We can now process truly huge data sets — the big breakthrough here was being able to match the images fast.”
A series of videos on the project Web site lets visitors fly through landmarks like St. Peter’s Basilica, the Colosseum and Venice’s San Marco Square. For much smaller Dubrovnik, you can see the whole city, including mountains in the distance.
Each video includes clusters of small diamond shapes, which represent each photographer and his or her vantage point.
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