Tag: architecture

Future of cities

Sedlec Ossuary

The Sedlec Ossuary also known as the Church of Bones is one of the most unusual chapels you will ever see. If you think that you saw everything in your life, think again! The Sedlec Ossuary is nothing spectacular in the outside. It is a small chapel located in Sedlec, in the suburbs of Kutna Hora, in the Czech Republic. You would think that it is just an average old medieval gothic church.

TinyURL everywhere

nice urls should be more prevalent

The geoURI scheme

The ‘geo’ Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme is another step into that direction and aims to facilitate, support and standardize part of the interaction with geospatial services and applications. Accessing information about or trigger further services based on a particular place on earth shouldn’t be any harder than writing an email by clicking on a ‘mailto:’ link.

The knot driver

“In the spring issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer, Michael Kleber, a topologist at MIT, waxed enthusiastic about [the interchange’s] ‘non-trivial braiding‘: while it is possible to just lift I-95 up and away from I-695, the northbound lane of I-95 braids both over, and then under, the southbound lane, making it impossible to pull them apart without cutting one of the lanes.” This leads me to wonder, of course, if you could take-over the US Department of Transportation, and rebuild the nation’s highway infrastructure as a massive textbook in driveable knot theory.

Wikitecture

I’d love to see an object that many people could modify in some way, which could be rolled back to earlier versions or have individual modifications ratified somehow by the group. Turns out I’m not the only one. I recently noticed an interesting discussion on The ARCH, an excellent blog on virtual architecture, about the possibilities for collaborative design mechanisms in Second Life (complete with transcript). “Is true Wikitecture and collaborative asynchronous design possible in Second Life? If so, what kinds of tools, scripts and rules might be necessary? Some exciting ideas are already beginning to surface.”

collaborative architecture?

Europe Geological Attics

Though I want so badly to learn that a man made labyrinth of tunnels and passageways has been blasted through the highest mountains of the Alps – perhaps even possible to ski through – it seems that this “famous rock tunnel” doesn’t go very deep, and that it houses nothing but enginery for the ski lift, bobbing noisily in the wind outside. But there’s just something so incredibly evocative about an abandoned network of Alpine ski lifts.

i just love all that architectural speculation

Churches of remathematization

Flickr user Seb Przd has been re-mathematizing his photographs of French cathedrals, using a program called MathMap. The results are delirious whorls of rock and decoration, space folded onto itself and circled round again to match up with itself at the beginning. All very M.C. Escher-esque – but nonetheless exhilarating.

mc escher like images from real photographs, with mathmap

Micro Houses

Seldom measuring much more than 50m2, these micro-houses offer sharp contrasts to the rambling houses that are commonplace as second homes.

this is the kind of property i can get behind.

Challenging Elder Architecture

The Reversible Destiny Lofts in Tokyo resemble a psychedelic jumble of kids’ blocks. These “challenging” condos are intended to delay senescence in their elderly residents by forcing them to stay alert and defend themselves from architectural peccadillos.

creating challenging environments for retirees. with all the safety fetish, we need this for all age groups. people are becoming too weak 🙂