Tag: architecture

Casa Sacerdotal

a retirement home for priests. kick ass architecture

Against City Highways

“Highways don’t belong in cities. Period. Europe didn’t do it. America did. And our cities have paid the price.”

Pedestrian Wall

The Virtual Wall provides a barrier made up of plasma laser beams depicting pedestrians doing what they do best

Augmented reality solutions are starting to come online. Yay
2017-12-14: This 3D Zebra Crosswalk is amazing. Messing with people’s visual cortex for safety.

Project Or

OR is a vortex-shaped surface which reacts to sunlight. When in the shade, the segments of OR are translucent white. However, when hit by sunlight they become colored, flooding the space below with different hues of light.

NYC Panorama

Built by Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair, in part as a celebration of the City’s municipal infrastructure

Zurich Office

can’t wait to visit

Ice Hotel

These photos of the ICEHOTEL in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, just popped up everywhere. I think this might literally be one of the most beautiful hotels in the world. It makes me wonder if architects might someday CNC-mill buildings out of glaciers. “You sleep in a thermal sleeping bag on a special bed of snow and ice, on reindeer skins. You are awakened in the morning with a cup of hot lingonberry juice at your bedside.”

this looks about as alien as anything i have seen. very cool though

Stream Processing

The 2nd new market to consider is stream processing. On Wall Street everyone is doing electronic trading. A feed comes out of the wall and you run it through a workflow to normalize the symbols, clean up the data, discard the outliers, and then compute some sort of secret sauce. An example of the secret sauce would be to compute the momentum of Oracle over the last 5 ticks and compare it with the momentum of IBM over the same time period. Depending on the size of the difference, you want to arbitrage in one direction or the other. This is a fire hose of data. Volumes are going through the roof. It’s business analytics of the same sort we see in databases. You need to compute them over time windows, however, in small numbers of milliseconds. So, again, a specialized architecture can just clobber the relational elephants in this market. I also believe the same statement can be made, believe it or not, about OLTP (online transaction processing). I’m working on a specialized engine for business data process- ing that I think will be about 30x than the elephants on the TPC-C benchmark.

Church Recycling

A bookshop constructed inside a converted Dominican church in Maastricht has won an architectural interiors prize.

good use of all those empty churches. we could use that in nyc where space is tight

2011-09-09: “Clients are turning pulpits into kitchen islands” and “There is an enormous glut of vintage pieces on the market and prices are falling” due to lots of churches closing.