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Posts Tagged ‘Rooms’

Homeless Hotel: Radical Urban Retreat has No Rooms, Ever

08 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Boutique & Art Hotels & Global. ]

homeless hotel

You may have seen some strange and unique accommodations on AirBNB, but few hosts can boast something as unusual as Faktum Hotels, an unreal room-free resort in Sweden.

homeless shelter hostel rooms

Their offerings are entirely out in the open air, doubling as an awareness-raising campaign for the city’s homeless and and actual alternative sleeping space for those same citizens.

homeless urban living awareness

So if not rooms, then what are you actually booking? A sleeping bag, or simply a secluded space … everywhere an actual vagabond or vagrant might occupy, including park benches, public restrooms, abandoned buildings, bridge underpasses and below bleachers.

homeless street parking spaces

And how much to reserve one of these temporary hobo hostels? The rate for each of these 10 surreal pseudo-spaces is just 10 Euros per night … proceeds of which go to charity work supported by Faktum Magazine.

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[ By WebUrbanist in Boutique & Art Hotels & Global. ]

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Trap Streets & Rooms: Cartographic Errors Catch Copycats

19 Feb

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

trap street map fake

Phantom settlements and trap streets are faked or falsified, intentionally introduced (or materially altered) by map makers to catch those who would copy them. And the practice is not limited to towns or roads – there are trap ponds, trap parks, trap buildings and trap sidewalks, too.

trap street real example

Now imagine the same thing applied to indoor spaces being mapped by new mobile device apps: trap rooms, halls, closets and stairwells – entirely fake spaces that could at worst confuse, but at best might become targets of offbeat geo-locational games.

trap room interior navigation

BldgBlog (image above by Laura Pedrick for The New York Times) speculates about introducing false information to interior maps of places like shopping malls:

“Nothing sinister—you don’t want people fleeing toward an emergency stairway that doesn’t exist in the event of a real-life fire—but why not an innocent janitorial closet somewhere or a freight elevator that no one could ever access in the first place? Why not a mysterious door to nowhere, or a small room that somehow appears to be within the very room you’re standing in?”

trap paper street

Unlike some paper streets (example shown above), which are planned but never become a reality, trap streets and phantom settlements (like Argleton, a faux town depicted below) are fictitious creations from the start, designed to mislead copyists into revealing their own copyright infringement. Normally innocuous (like: renaming or bending a road), you think of them as equivalent to programmer’s Easter Egg or a hidden watermark  on a photograph – a buried surprise in everyday maps.

trap phantom settlement

But what are the implications of doing this on a smaller scale of pedestrian circulation, deceiving people not by square mile, but by cubic feet? Could you frustrate the janitorial staff at a school, scare someone into imagining a secret room in their apartment complex? Would it trick urban explorers into actually physically trapping themselves? We will set these open questions aside and leave you with a little fun fact: while designed to catch copiers, trap streets cannot themselves be copyright.

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Trap Streets & Rooms: Cartographic Errors Catch Copycats

11 Feb

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

trap street map fake

Phantom settlements and trap streets are faked or falsified, intentionally introduced (or materially altered) by map makers to catch those who would copy them. And the practice is not limited to towns or roads – there are trap ponds, trap parks, trap buildings and trap sidewalks, too.

trap street real example

Now imagine the same thing applied to indoor spaces being mapped by new mobile device apps: trap rooms, halls, closets and stairwells – entirely fake spaces that could at worst confuse, but at best might become targets of offbeat geo-locational games.

trap room interior navigation

BldgBlog (image above by Laura Pedrick for The New York Times) speculates about introducing false information to interior maps of places like shopping malls:

“Nothing sinister—you don’t want people fleeing toward an emergency stairway that doesn’t exist in the event of a real-life fire—but why not an innocent janitorial closet somewhere or a freight elevator that no one could ever access in the first place? Why not a mysterious door to nowhere, or a small room that somehow appears to be within the very room you’re standing in?”

trap paper street

Unlike some paper streets (example shown above), which are planned but never become a reality, trap streets and phantom settlements (like Argleton, a faux town depicted below) are fictitious creations from the start, designed to mislead copyists into revealing their own copyright infringement. Normally innocuous (like: renaming or bending a road), you think of them as equivalent to programmer’s Easter Egg or a hidden watermark  on a photograph – a buried surprise in everyday maps.

trap phantom settlement

But what are the implications of doing this on a smaller scale of pedestrian circulation, deceiving people not by square mile, but by cubic feet? Could you frustrate the janitorial staff at a school, scare someone into imagining a secret room in their apartment complex? Would it trick urban explorers into actually physically trapping themselves? We will set these open questions aside and leave you with a little fun fact: while designed to catch copiers, trap streets cannot themselves be copyright.

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Don’t Trip: 4 Dizzying Rooms by 1 Surrealist Spatial Artist

22 Dec

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

Like some kind of strange spatial magician, Kyung Woo Han turns conventional furniture, fixtures, doors and windows into otherworldly scenes that call into question just how familiar we really are with such everyday objects.

Consider White Window, a deformed frame that pulls in from the edges, but when viewed through a fish-eye surveillance camera (also part of the installation) is corrected to look like the only straight-lined design in the space.

In Green House, a room is half-filled with faux water while suspended shapes of partial furniture float at eye level, appearing to be reflected at the point where surface meets air.

Other projects like Found House and Checkered Floor take normal objects, textures and materials out of context and distort them, making simple black-and-white patterns and portals between inside and outside seem strange aand surreal.


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