Just a concept now (although one that can be demonstrated), buildings of the future might be put together by flying robots. Which sounds like a great idea, but I’d still want a real human building inspector! -via Geeks Are Sexy

Josh proposed to Brook and took the idea of a “leap of faith” to a ridiculous level! I don’t think her “No way!” is a rejection; I think she was only shocked and probably trying to lower her blood pressure. -via I Am Bored

Periodic Table Building Blocks - $33.95

Are you worried that your baby does not have a solid foundation in the academic discipline of chemistry?  You need the Periodic Table Building Blocks from the NeatoShop.  Remember, it is never too early to start memorizing elements.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more stimulating Toys & Games.

Link

Photo by Boston Photographer Erik Jacobs

The 24-square-foot house pictured is named the Gypsy Junkard. It’s the largest of Derek Diedricksen’s tiny house designs. Diedricksen has always been fascinated with tiny architecture, and once challenging himself to build a homeless shelter for less than $100. He accomplished that by using scavenged and recycled materials -and imagination. The four tiny structures he built in his backyard cost an average of $200 each in materials. Outside of his building hobby, Diedricksen is a building inspector who lives with his family of four in a 950-foot house. A fixer-upper, of course. Read more, and see his other constructions, at the New York Times. Link

(Image credit: Erik Jacobs/The New York Times)

Graffiti artist Rainbow Warrior in Albuquerque finds drab buildings and "improves" them by spilling paint to pour "illegal rainbows"
off their tops.

City officials are angry and threaten to go after the "knuckleheads" behind the scheme, but Ingrid Fetell of Aesthetics of Joy asks whether the rainbows – while illegal – can still be joyful:

I find this tension – between the forbidden act of graffiti, technically vandalism, and the delight people are discovering as a consequence – acutely compelling. Is an illegal rainbow still joyful? Here’s a letter writer commenting on the rainbow warrior situation:

So, somebody lays down a rainbow on the thing, a piece of art (and yes, it is art, even if it is “free,” and maybe especially so) that pokes fun at the mess, that makes me grin and say, “That’s a little better!” As a life-long citizen of Albuquerque, as someone
who has had his very personal property damaged by genuinely malicious individuals: this isn’t the same thing. Is it graffiti? Yeah. Is it the same as somebody tagging a vulgar word on the car my parents gave me when I went to college? No. The intention of the rainbows is perhaps mischievous, but it is definitely not malicious. The intention, and the execution, is a wink, a laugh, a little unexpected burst. Worth a slap on the wrist and a good talking to, nothing more.

Link – via swissmiss

The idea of rather simple: take most of the planets in the solar system, chew them up, and then turn them into a ring as long as Earth’s orbit, as wide as the planet, with 1000 mile high edges to keep the air in. A Ringworld would certainly give you lots of extra space – something on the order of three million earths – and, like Globus Cassus, it would be spun to make fake gravity. You could even make parts of it higher off the surface if you like your air a bit thinner, and if missed days and nights then you could put a row of black squares in an inner orbit to cast shadows.

This is just one of the megastructures you’ll see at Dark Roasted Blend. Link

(Image credit: Stephan Martiniere)

In Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, Monty Python brought the words "corporate raiders" to its logical conclusion by turning staid office workers into fearsome pirates that perform really hostile takeovers of other companies.

That short film is titled The Crimson Permanent Assurance, which is the name of the building (and pirate ship) housing the company of the same name.

Well, Flickr user gotoAndLego has created The Crimson Permanent Assurance in LEGO form. The work is fantastically detailed – and one can’t help but chant:

It’s fun to charter an accountant
And sail the wide accountancy,
To find, explore the funds offshore
And skirt the shoals of bankruptcy!

It can be manly in insurance.
We’ll up your premium semi-annually.
It’s all tax deductible.
We’re fairly incorruptible,
We’re sailing on the wide accountancy!

Yaaarrr! Link [Flickr Set] – via Laughing Squid

See also: Monty Python and The Holy Grail items from the NeatoShop

Architects from the firm SHSH built a temporary pavilion building in Brussels from recycled material -30,000 beer crates! With lighting, the yellow crates give off a golden glow inside and out. See more pictures of this structure at The Design Blog. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

Materials used to build the structure would include reinforced concrete (for the foundation), composite slab (wood/concrete), and timber wood.  The floor will be made of a hybrid glulam (glued-laminated) beams and reinforced concrete.  The building would include photovoltaic panels on the outer facade to generate electricity along with a “green wall” (aka “vertical garden”).  The building will further protect the environment and public health through use of local resources, reduced routes of transport, use of sustainable materials, and significantly improved CO2 balance.  Highly pre-fabricated construction will further reduce air pollution as well as construction site waste.  In accordance with Passivhaus standards, construction of the LifeCylce Tower will reduce carbon emissions by 90% when compared to conventional construction.

The LifeCycle Tower will have plenty of other environment features, which you can read about at InventorSpot. Link

Faulders Studio has designed a building called GEOtube that, if built in Dubai, would develop its own outer surface from salt! The building plans include a lattice of pipes on the outside, which would grow solid from salt deposits over 15-30 years.

The GEOtube building is covered in a vascular pipe system following a grid of structural lattice and is situated in a salt-water pond, carried to the building from the adjacent Persian Gulf via an underground viaduct. Utilizing floating solar panels for power, the seawater is pumped from basement level to the rooftop and is then gravity-fed through the vascular system.

The lace-like skin forms once the seawater, misted onto its exposed mesh, evaporates and leaves a layer of salt behind. Because the Persian Gulf has the world’s highest salinity for oceanic water, the salt deposits accumulate quickly, making the transparent skin take on a new crystalline appearance.

Once the building is covered, salt could be harvested for other uses. Of course, this project is just a concept for now. Link

Designed by Santiago Calatrava, the building defies description — better just to look at the pictures. Construction started in 2003, but was paused due to the financial crisis. Right now, it’s on track to be fully completed in February 2011. In honor of one of Oviedo’s most famous children, the palace will be inaugurated officially as the Palacio de Congresos Princesa Letizia.

The two side wings of the horseshoe shaped complex will hold ministry offices. A hotel is going into the back building and in the center, under that audacious roof, will be the area for expositions and congresses. Below ground is a shopping mall, with the goofy name of Modoo, already open for business. In all, the size of the palace is over 15,000 square meters. [...]

By the way, we love the Palacio. From afar, it dominates the cityscape a little too much, but seen from close up, it’s awfully impressive.

Link – Thanks Juergen!

The world’s tallest and arguably the most futuristic tent has opened to the public in the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan. The Khan Shatyr Entertainment Centre, located in the capital city of Astana, is 150m (490ft) high. The centre has a huge indoor leisure park, shops, restaurants, movie theaters, and even an artificial beach inside the building! Link to story. Link to website. -via YeinJee’s Asian Blog

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Jee.

Today the architectural world remains divided. Should the cathedral be completed in a less ambitious contemporary style? Or should it be left, unfinished, as an original creation?

One exhibit in the Paris Exhibition of 1910 stole the show. It was a plaster model of a church designed by the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi – a design so daring and outrageous that it was difficult to believe anyone seriously consider building it.

An extraordinary fusion of Gothic and Art Nouveau in style, the model was painted in vibrant colors that further enhanced the exuberant design. The plans called for spotlights to direct shafts of light into parts of the interior. Three sets of bell towers, housing both manually operated and electronically controlled tubular bells, were to be topped by stone statues of cherubim with wings that would move in the wind.

One hundred years later, the project is still unfinished. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Wolfgang Staudt)

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by MrGhaz.

A building demolition in Liuzhou, China went horribly wrong on Wednesday. Experts planned for the building to be split in two, but they expected both halves to fall down. Instead, one half of the 22-story apartment building was left leaning at a dangerous angle. It has since been brought down by crane. Link -via Arbroath

Now that Dubai’s economic bubble has popped and the emirate’s mega-projects are imploding under their own debt crunch, we can weep over all the fantastically outlandish buildings that will never be built. Like the rotating tower by architect David Fisher above, a refrigerated beach, a vertical seawater farm, and so on.

Inhabitat and Treehugger have the post: Link

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

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

A friend of Neatoramanaut Andrew Wirtanen snapped this photo of a construction site with a unique screen hiding the building being worked on in Seoul, South Korea. The screen is made entirely out of doors!

A little Googlin’ brought another view by waynekorea [Flickr]; this wonderful house made entirely out of old doors in Elberton, Georgia; and this amazing "door/portal" group on Flickr.

Thanks Andrew!

For centuries, architectural marvels known as dovecotes were built to house the birds of the nobles. As you can see, you’d have had to be powerful and wealthy to obtain the rights to build these kind of pigeon coops on your property!

Pigeons were an immense passion and hobby for Romans, and typically the most powerful of men had these buildings constructed with marble powder coated roofing. Varro, Columella and Pliny the Elder wrote works on pigeon farms and dovecote construction. In the time of the Republic, the internal design of “pigeonholes was adapted for the purpose of disposing of cremated ashes after death: these columbaria were generally constructed underground.”

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.

“It was just like an earthquake,” witness Zhang Supong told China Daily.

Construction of the building has been halted pending an investigation of the collapse, including reports that cracks had appeared Friday on a flood prevention bank near the apartment building, Xinhua reported.

Link to story. Link to pictures. -via J-Walk Blog

"I captured defined patterns of light above the city when atmospheric conditions were right," he explained in an email. This is part of a larger interest in seeing "the clouds as a surface." For instance, Gordon mentioned that he had also produced "rough images from a plane flight in Minnesota where I saw the reverse: low winter clouds gave light pollution a medium to mark upon, and towns broadcast their cluster signals to those above."
About these "broadcasts," Gordon asks: "Some of them were so precise that it’s hard to conceive that they are just afterthoughts of a lighting design. Would it still be called light pollution?"

BLDGBLOG has the story: Link | Gallery at Blake’s website

If the folks at Carlos Marreiros architecture firm have their ways, the Macau Pavillion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010 will be in the form this glorious giant rabbit:

… the pavilion will be wrapped with a double-layer glass membrane and feature fluorescent screens on its outer walls. Balloons will serve as the head and tail of the ‘rabbit’, which can be moved up and down to attract visitors. The building will be constructed with recyclable materials and consists of solar power panels and rain collection systems.

Link

Those distinctive eyes, nose and lips are the hallmark of a Brazilian street artist Mundano. But instead of graffiti, this particular one graces the whole facade of a building in São Paulo. I can just imagine the lower "lips" rolling up when the store opens for the day.

Found at Wooster Collective, where one would find such things: Link | More of Mundano’s street art on Flickr