Tag: architecture

NYC Built on Dredge

fascinating piece about how the army corps of engineers continues to do massive scale landscaping around ny harbor.

On the periphery of the city, at the littoral edge between water and land, a type of landscape architecture is reshaping New York at a monumental scale. It is difficult to see. It happens away from most people, far from the eyes of architects. Most of it happens underwater. It’s the landscaping that occurs when we mechanically lift and remove sand and sediment from one place and dump it somewhere else, an act best known as dredging.

30 stories in 15 days

Zhang Yue, founder and chairman of Broad Sustainable Building, is not a particularly humble man. A humble man would not have erected, on his firm’s corporate campus in the Chinese province of Hunan, a classical palace and a 40m replica of an Egyptian pyramid. A humble man, for that matter, would not have redirected Broad from its core business—manufacturing industrial air-conditioning units—to invent a new method of building skyscrapers. And a humble man certainly wouldn’t be putting up those skyscrapers at a pace never achieved in history.

Zombie Architecture

When the dead start to walk you’d better start building. the zombie safe house architecture competition looks awesome.

A zombie-proof house needs to be secure—not only structurally strong but also with limited openings on its perimeter that are all closable, lockable and impenetrable”. It needs to be simple and sustainable, capable of generating its own energy, food and water, and of managing its waste. And it needs to be “sacrificial—able to destroy itself and as many of the attacking zombies as possible while its inhabitants escape.