Liberty City vs New York City
posted on May 14, 2008 - View this thread

Dan Dare, pilot of the future, scourge of the Venusian Mekon menace, and modernist architectural inspiration?
posted on Apr 28, 2008 - View this thread

Two visions of the ideal city rise in the Persian Gulf: "Waterfront City will probably be where a lot of Middle Eastern investors will put their money—and where international architectural stars will build their putative landmarks—but if little Masdar develops successfully, it may hold much more important lessons for us all."
posted on Apr 27, 2008 - View this thread

Gravity Defying Homes Image gallery of some pretty funky homes. {via Daily Dose of Architecture}
posted on Apr 26, 2008 - View this thread

Interactive Architecture is for both geeks and design freaks. Lots of interesting and WTF stuff here, like SandScapes, Funky Forests, Swarming Structures, Colour Responsive Chairs, and Jelly Architecture. Not to mention the amazing Touch, a tower with 4200 windows equipped with RGB color LEDs that can be controlled by passersby.
posted on Apr 26, 2008 - View this thread

"As a great architect once said, 'Buildings should look like what they are'." John Jessop became so frustrated with the red tape required for his company to get permission to build a farm shed, he submitted a sarcastic application . Read his full "Planning Application for Erection of Agricultural Implement Shed" here [pdf, 3 pages]. No word yet on whether the shed was approved. Via.
posted on Apr 24, 2008 - View this thread

The Lighthouse Directory. An information portal for over 9000 lighthouses, and sites of former lighthouses, all around the world. Photos, histories, technical specifications, etc. Most of the links are very thorough, with some including excerpts from keepers' logs. The site also includes links to current news stories and general historical articles related to lighthouses.
posted on Apr 22, 2008 - View this thread

Architecture, Restoration, and Imaging of the Maya Cities of Uxmal, Kabah, Sayil, and Labná - a new extensive exhibition site from Reed College (with nice large images available). See: Contents. The site includes "19th and early 20th century drawings, prints, and photographs, showing the appearance of these four cities before the extensive restoration campaigns of the twentieth century [..and..] over 1000 recent photographs."
posted on Apr 9, 2008 - View this thread

Tokyo By Night - Just one of the posts on ArkiBlog, a blog about architecture and design. {via}
posted on Apr 7, 2008 - View this thread

Lust after some stair porn (don't miss the details of the hanging box stairs), visit some glass igloos, and get comfy in some iconic furniture. That and much more is at materialicious, a blog about "architecture + design + materials + products."
posted on Mar 23, 2008 - View this thread

Norway's breath-taking Aurland Lookout. One of many awesome projects by architect Todd Saunders.
posted on Mar 22, 2008 - View this thread

A recent decision by the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board has saved an abandoned Denny's restaurant from the wrecking ball. On closer inspection the restaurant represents Googie-style architecture which was considered futuristic in the 60's. Granted it's not on par with the future of today. But there are some appealing offshoots in North West modernist designs. (Googie previously here).
posted on Mar 15, 2008 - View this thread

Chattel houses were very small houses, built by freed slaves or plantation workers, that could be dismantled quickly and moved in the event they were fired or unable to pay property tax to the plantation owner on whose land the house stood. Examples in Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad l Sunday 25 March 2007 marked 200 years to the day that the British Parliament passed an Act to outlaw the slave trade in British colonies.
posted on Mar 9, 2008 - View this thread

The George W. Bush Presidential Library : visualizations
posted on Mar 4, 2008 - View this thread

Stylish Blight (slideshow of awesome live/work architecture office) The outside says pure urban squalor, while the inside is pure awesomeness. Full story in today's NYT about the project. (via beebo)
posted on Mar 2, 2008 - View this thread

The sub-prime mortgage crisis is giving way in some places to crime ridden McMansion ghettos, perhaps the beginning of a larger long term trend in demographics: "many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay."
posted on Feb 29, 2008 - View this thread

Eikongraphia - Browsable architecture design theory thingy.
posted on Feb 26, 2008 - View this thread

The Nautilus House is pretty awesome.
posted on Feb 22, 2008 - View this thread

Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator. Now you can join in when the rest of the architecture grad students go to the roof to smoke a joint/apply for grant money.
posted on Jan 30, 2008 - View this thread

The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), is the largest church in the world¹. Completed in 1990 for about $300 million by President Félix Houphouët-Boigny - with profits skimmed from the slave labor best cocoa (chocolate) industry - in the small rural town of his birth, it sits today in the bush a vast empty palace of marble and crystal gawked at by the occasional backpacker. Among other trappings it has the only airport big enough in Africa to take the Concorde, a presidential palace with a lake stocked with scores of Sacred Caymans (crocodiles,) and a mansion next to the Basilica reserved exclusively for the Pope on visits from Rome (used once). The President enjoyed his complex for less than 3 years before dieing in 1993.
posted on Jan 27, 2008 - View this thread

Turning a chapel into an apartment. The Dutch architectural firm ZECC has made a beautiful, modern apartment out of an abandoned chapel. There are more stunning photos and cross-sections in this PDF, though the text is in Dutch. Other stunning church renovations.
posted on Jan 23, 2008 - View this thread

18 stunning bridges from around the world. (via Mira y Calla)
posted on Jan 20, 2008 - View this thread

Superuse: Reusing can be beautiful, unusual, functional, and even illustrative of our culture of excess. (all links lead to the same site).
posted on Jan 19, 2008 - View this thread

MATSYS Based on the idea that architecture can be understood as a material body with its own intrinsic and extrinsic forces relating to form, growth, and behavior, the studio investigates methodologies of performative integration through geometric and material differentiation.

B_Complex, N_Table, Endless Ocean, Endless Sky (more), P_Wall. more.
posted on Jan 18, 2008 - View this thread

Two articles on how interaction may shape the buildings, work places and urban spaces of tomorrow: Design Week's Study takes sensory approach to improve office of the future [which mentions Duncan Wilson, who works with and blogs about this stuff]; and City of Sound's The Personal Well-Tempered Environment.
posted on Jan 17, 2008 - View this thread

In the United States, most counties conduct local legal business in a centrally-located courthouse, which tends to be located in the county seat. Here is a flickr photo set of nearly all the county courthouses in the United States. From the [oldest] to the [most densly populated] to the [most populous], from the [ugly] to the [ornate], county courthouses present a remarkable variety of architectural styles. In some ways, these buildings seem to be the equivalent of European cathedrals -- they often represent the local community's largest and most expensive building, and they're designed with that in mind. Given our remarkable capacity for observer list keeping, I wonder why more people aren't courthouse spotters.
posted on Jan 15, 2008 - View this thread

Love thy Neighbor Photographer and author Steven Hirsh has photographed the homes of registered New York State sex offenders. A wonderful writer and photographer, this work is chilling, alarming, beautiful. I get that Quentin Tarantino feeling of beauty and disgust. Look at me, nooooo look away. The series of 24 images are on Hirsch's website.
posted on Jan 7, 2008 - View this thread

Hugh Ferriss: Delineator of Gotham. Through his charcoal renderings of dramatic, imaginary skyscrapers in early 1900s New York City, Ferriss influenced the aesthetics of numerous architects with his bold compositions.
posted on Jan 6, 2008 - View this thread

Tiny Buildings - "a collection of tiny buildings handcrafted from business cards, packaging and other nice papers."
posted on Dec 25, 2007 - View this thread

How to wash your hands and ride the elevators in the new New York Times Building.
posted on Dec 20, 2007 - View this thread

…you are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always well taken care of if you come from Iowa.
posted on Dec 18, 2007 - View this thread

The proposed new home of the National Library of the Czech Republic. The old one looks like this. The new one ... well ... is it an octopus? What the hell is this thing?
posted on Dec 4, 2007 - View this thread

The American Sign Museum is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and documenting historic and vintage signs from the American landscape.
posted on Nov 29, 2007 - View this thread

The Temples of Damanhur. Behold the Eighth Wonder of the World (according to the Italian government). [Via Boing Boing.]
posted on Nov 23, 2007 - View this thread

Ecoble, an environment design and living site includes some interesting stories and info: Man (Re)Builds Mexican Island Paradise on 250,000 Recycled Floating Bottles l Who Has the Oil? Geography of the World’s Most Contentious Resource l BituBlock - The Sustainable Building Block Built from Trash and Sewage
posted on Nov 20, 2007 - View this thread

City of Sound as it describes itself, is a blog about cities, design, architecture, media, music, etc. But calling it a blog really does it a disservice. City of Sound is a category-killer; amazingly dense, thoughtful, erudite, and compelling, it begins to catalog our urban identity. A bit of reminiscent of Metropolis magazine, if it was edited by Robert Rauschenberg. If you've not visited, do yourself a favor. It is a treasure trove.
posted on Nov 17, 2007 - View this thread

Owen Hatherley, has three blogs where he expounds on culture and architecture from an English Leftist perspective, sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, The Measures Taken (which has longer essays than the previous blog) and the group film blog kino fist. To give you an idea of the range of subjects he covers, here's a sampling of his blogposts: Towards a Communist Couture? Sartorial Socialism from Huey P Newton to Honecker, Zuckendes Fleischer (on pre-WWII American cartoons), Industrial Island Machine - Vorticism and the absence of an English Avant-Garde, Hurrah for the Black Box Recorder (on songwriter Luke Haines and The Daily Mail), The Children’s Book as a Revolutionary Object (with a bunch of pictures from Soviet avant-garde children's books), Architectural Drawings of the 1960s, Art is a branch of Mathematics (Taylorism and Russian SF classic We), Brechtian Productivism in an age of Mechanical Stagnation and Notes towards an attempted refutation of the 'Associational Fallacy' (on architecture). All of the blogs are heavily adorned with pretty pictures, some not safe for work.
posted on Nov 13, 2007 - View this thread

Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Paris, 1900. Approximately 200 antique photographs of Paris at the turn of the 19th century, mostly from the 1900 Paris World's Fair. French CG artist Laurent Antoine is reconstructing the Exposition in Maya 3D. Bienvenue!
posted on Nov 11, 2007 - View this thread

One Wall Away: Hidden Spaces. Jan Theun van Rees photographs secret spaces in Chicago landmarks to allow us to access to what we normally never get to see. My favorites: the old heating ducts for Unity Temple, and inside the Bean. He other series explore Amsterdam's disused theaters, galleries and museums and various personal looks at public spaces.
posted on Nov 6, 2007 - View this thread

American Ruins: a gallery of photgraphs by Chuck Hutchinson. "a gallery of houses, barns, automobiles and businesses that have become the ruins on the landscape of America."
posted on Nov 6, 2007 - View this thread

100 architecture blogs
posted on Nov 6, 2007 - View this thread

Gillespie, Kidd & Coia: Architecture 1956-1987
posted on Nov 2, 2007 - View this thread

The Buffalo State Hospital is a vast complex of moldering Victorian buildings, sitting right in the middle of a residential neighborhood of Buffalo. It is also an architectural gem, not only by Buffalo standards, but for the nation as a whole. It is one of the largest and most complex commissions of New England architect H. H. Richardson, who is known for promulgating his unique, heavy looking stone Romanesque variant of the then dominant Queen Anne style. The Buffalo asylum’s grounds were planned by landscape architect (and designer of Central Park) Fredrick Law Olmsted.
posted on Oct 26, 2007 - View this thread

A miniature of Scrooge McDuck's money bin. (in the words of the model maker) This is a set of images documenting a model of the world's richest duck's money bin, built by me, using blueprints created by the great Don Rosa and Dan Shane.And remember Carl Barks - the mind behind the idea of a man storing all his money in a giant concrete bin.
posted on Oct 25, 2007 - View this thread

The Solar Decathlon is a just-completed competition in which 20 teams of college and university students competed to design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered house. View a photo gallery or take video tours of the homes. Inhabitat has been blogging the event - here's their view of Germany's winning entry.
posted on Oct 21, 2007 - View this thread

Delirious Moscow: a survey on stellar and interstellar Soviet constructivist architecture, or, buildings in the time before Stalin (with pictures).
posted on Oct 11, 2007 - View this thread

Unusual Life Dot Com: Unusual Homes. Amazing Architecture. Strange Places. Fascinating People.
posted on Oct 9, 2007 - View this thread

modulation is visiting warsaw. not a city which has ever appeared in my top ten tourist destinations, but i am much more inclined to visit it after reading his thoughtful reflections on its architecture and history not to mention obscure (and in classic polish style, rarely open to the public or about to be shut down/demolished because they are too popular, attractions.)
posted on Oct 8, 2007 - View this thread

An interview with Lebbeus Woods -- designer and illustrator of speculative futuristic landscapes and buildings. Woods just set up his own website, which has an amazing quantity of drawings, photographs, and text focusing on his lesser known projects [for those willing to deal with a frustrating flash interface and sound. It's better in IE than Firefox.]
posted on Oct 6, 2007 - View this thread

The Guardian is running a neat little feature on Great Modern Buildings of the world, starting with this interactive guide thing on the Empire State building.
posted on Oct 6, 2007 - View this thread