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Will That Fly? 17 Imaginary Vehicle & Aircraft Concepts

18 Sep

[ By Steph in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

Imaginary Vehicles Ships Main

Never mind the mechanics of these fantastical digital art renderings of alien spaceships, advanced military vehicles and futuristic aircraft. Whether or not they’re compatible with the laws of physics, these sci-fi visions are a thrill to take in, inspiring a sense of wonder about the possibilities of the future and the technology that might already be present in the far-off reaches of outer space.

NASA Garbage Ship by Vaughan Ling

Imaginary Vehicles NASA Garbage Ship

Concept artist Vaughan Ling envisions a ship for NASA that would collect and recycle garbage in space. He wrote to io9, “My fantasy concept is a system composed of the collector, a net dispenser and a recycling station in low earth orbit. Considering the launch cost can range from $ 4-5k per pound, not including the precious metals often used for satellite constrution, I thought that recycling could be a viable business one day. The collector would use nuclear power + highly efficient VASIMR rockets for propulsion and a detachable holding bay for dropping off at the station plus an arm similar to Canadarm on the space shuttle and ISS.”

Journey Awaits Steampunk Aircraft by Darkki1

Imaginary Vehicles Journey Awaits

A complex steampunk airship hovers over a grassy field in this digital concept by artist Darkki1 on deviantART.

Black Phoenix Ambulance Mech by Bulgarov

Imaginary Vehicles Ambulance Mech

This ambulance mech by Vitaly Bulgarov is part of the Black Phoenix Project, a series of designs showcasing the product line of a fictional military corporation. The series is produced in collaboration with photographer Maria Skotnikova, who creates the high-res HDR-environment maps Bulgarov uses for lighting. The artists plan to release the series in the form of an art book.

G103 Aircraft by Alex Ichim

Imaginary Aircraft G103

The G103 is a concept gunship by artist Alex Ichim.

Cosa Nostra Delivery Vehicle by Igor Sobolevsky

Imaginary Vehicles Cosa Nostra 1

Imaginary Vehicles Cosa Nostra 2

Artist Igor Sobolevsky brings a ‘deliverator vehicle’ from the book ‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson to life.

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Will That Fly 17 Imaginary Vehicle Aircraft Concepts

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50 Years, 1 Imagination: Man Draws 2000 Sq Ft Map by Hand

18 Sep

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

hand drawn world map

Long before Sim City, Minecraft or the MMPORG, there was Jerry Gretzinger, man using cards and spending decades to spawn his own self-contained imaginary game world.

Over 2600 sheets of 8.5-by-11-inch paper make up this strange and amazing fantasy world, largely unknown until this video began to spread slowly (then quickly) around the internet, gaining him almost overnight fame. Each frame is created when Jerry chooses from a deck that dictates his next move, be it destructive, creative over both.

handmade fantasy world map

It started with a single city, then sprawled into ever-vaster territories and entire countries connected by highways and high-speed rail, or or divided by defensive barriers and walls, all expanding panel by panel across standard-sized sheets.

handmade map custom paints

Attention to detail and daily ritual pervades the project, from a carefully-controlled color palette and archaic digital organization system to deployment based on semi-randomized cards, shuffled to reveal what direction he should take next.

handmade map creative process

At the same time, chaos is routinely added back into the system, through elements like ‘void cards’ that dictate the complete rebuilding of a section of the map, and can mean the entire destruction of cities that stand in the way.

handmade map shelf stacked

These pages are stacked by necessity on shelves rather than splayed out to form a contiguous map too big for any interior wall. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the entire project is the fact that the entire work-as-such has never actually been on display until the documentary was being made about it. Even Jerry did not know its exact overall shape or form for the past decades, and, thanks to elements of chance and his own creativity, still does not know what future shapes it may yet take.

handmade map wall panels

As UpperCase reports: ”Jerry’s willingness to bend, adapt and break his own rules extends freedom to the map itself,” says filmmaker, Greg Whitmore, the creator of Jerry’s documentary trailer. “I should add that though Jerry is permissive and liberal when it comes to the process, he is dogmatic in one regard: that this ‘thing’ is, in fact, a map and he is responsible for it.”

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Reconstructed Destruction: Flyover of Bombed WWII Warsaw

17 Sep

[ By WebUrbanist in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

poland 3d model city

It took 1 year, over 1000 photographs and extensive archival research to construct The City of Ruins, a digital stereoscopic reconstruction of Warsaw, Poland in its most devastated state. With over 60,000 3D-modeled structures (detailing what remained), this incredible undertaking brings home the scale of destruction with stunning visual details and remarkable historical accuracy.

As illustrated in the trailer above and images below, over 85% of the buildings in the city were ultimately destroyed between urban combat and systematic leveling. Its creators note that this is the first rigorous large-scale attempt to rebuild a war-ravaged city in digital form.

poland aerial reconstruction images

The Polish Resistance staged the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, which, lacking promised Soviet support, fell hard to German forces over brutal two month period. Thus Warsaw, previously a of nearly 1,000,000 people, was reduced to a habitat for less than 1,00o.

poland 3d reconstruction examples

The extent of its demolition is hard to picture, hence the creation of this model and flyover video for the Warsaw Rising museum. Without anti-aircraft capabilities or the ability to receive sufficient aid and support from the West, defenders in the city fought but ultimately fell or retreated through the sewer system.

warsaw detailed reconstruction photo

Hundreds of thousands of fighters and civilians alike perished in the conflict. The destruction of structures and infrastructure was documented piecemeal, the scraps of which were assembled formed the basis for this disturbingly realistic model and film. More on the remaking of the ruins below.

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Reconstructed Destruction Flyover Of Bombed Wwii Warsaw

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Crazy Cakes: 30-Foot Tentacle Leads to Edible Kraken

17 Sep

[ By Steph in Design & Guerilla Ads & Marketing. ]

Kraken Tentacle Cake 1
The thirty-foot tentacle that appeared to have washed up on the beach in Portmeirion, Wales was what drew the onlookers in, but it was the edible kraken that kept them. Beach goers who gathered around the dark purple-black appendage to stare at it in wonder were led to a tent where they found similar tentacles on a smaller scale – made of cake.

Kraken Tentacle Cake 2

A ‘Kraken Hunter’ in an intricate steampunkish costume performed an ‘edible autopsy’ on the questionable remains within the tent, serving up large chunks of what turned out to be spiced rum cake, including a football-sized eyeball.

Kraken Tentacle Cake 3

Kraken Tentacle Cake 5

The beach installation was part of a viral marketing campaign by Kraken Rum at Festival No. 6, an annual music event that draws thousands to an Italianate village on the Dwyryd Estuary.

Kraken Tentacle Cake 6

The cake calls to mind another incredibly realistic culinary creation: a snake cake that looks so much like a real viper, you’d hesitate to go near it with a knife.

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Sky Bridges: 14 Aerial Structures that Span Skyscrapers

16 Sep

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Skybridges Main

Soaring above the city streets, spanning towering skyscrapers or simply providing links between buildings at lower heights, skybridges often host gardens, observation decks and even swimming pools. More than just indoor bridges, they’re spaces from which to take in views of cities around the world, from Singapore to Copenhagen.

Marina Bay Sands Skypark, Singapore

Skybridges Marina Bay Sands 1

Over 650 feet above the streets, a sky park stretches between the towers of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore, offering one of the world’s most spectacular infinity pools, which seems to pour over into the cityscape. The two-acre skylark also includes a garden, jogging paths, spas and ‘floating’ crystal pavilions. It’s cantilevered 230 feet at one end, twice the length of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

Copenhagen Harbor LM Project

Skybridges Copenhagen LM 1

Skybridges Copenhagen LM 2

Designed as a gateway to the city of Copenhagen, Steven Holl’s Harbor LM project features a skybridge between two skyscrapers hovering over the water. The skybridge features prow-like public deck looking out onto the harbor, painted in bright orange and yellow to reflect off the surface of the water at night.

Bahrain World Trade Center

Skybridges Bahrain WTC

Three skybridges studded with wind turbines connect the two towers of the Bahrain World Trade Center, a 50-floor complex soaring 787 feet into the air. The turbines provide 11%-15% of the towers’ total power consumption, and operate 50% of the time on an average day.

Linked Hybrid, Beijing

Skybridges Linked Hybrid

Designed as an ‘open city within a city’ oriented around pedestrians, the Linked Hybrid complex in Beijing by Steven Holl architects is a complex of shops, offices, pubic roof gardens, residential towers, restaurants, schools and more, all connected to green spaces. A multi-functional series of skybridges connects the various structures from the 12th to the 18th floors, offering access to the pools, a fitness room, a cafe, a gallery and an auditorium as well as views of the city. Say the architects, “We hope the public sky-loop and the base-loop will constantly generate random relationships. They will function as social condensers resulting in a special experience of city life to both residents and visitors.”

Velo Towers YIBD

Skybridges Velo Towers 1

Skybridges Velo 2

Two skyscrapers made up of stacked and rotated volumes are connected near the apex by a 30-story-high skybridge in this project in Seoul, Korea by New York-based Asymptote Architecture. The Velo Tower skybridge includes both a protected indoor viewing platform connecting the towers, and an outdoor recreation spot with gardens and fountains.

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House of Glass: Cabin Facade from Antique Window Frames

16 Sep

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

house glass front facade

On an unusual kind of cross-country road trip, this couple visited garage sales, antique dealers and added these to other roadside finds, all toward the quest of assembling an an eccentric collection of windows for a unique dream home.

house of glass

house glass room interior

Creators Lilah Horwitz and Nick Olson are, respectively, a designer and photographer, but with a common architectural vision of a home where one whole facade would be made of windows. The goal: let sunsets illuminate the structure’s entire interior space, creating a multitude of views, wood-framed through artfully arranged window openings.

house glass night view

The result sits on the sunny hills of West Virginia, a rustic-style cabin in which the front-facing fenestration is the dominant design feature. The assemblage reflects their personalities – the hands-on approach Olson takes with his camera and images, and the landscaping and fashion experience of Horwitz.

house glass hill context

house glass exterior view

In turn, Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long interviewed the couple for a short seven-minute film on Half Cut Tea. The result shows the pair of creatives but also the context of their creation via shots of the surrounding landscape and entry path as well as the dwelling itself by daylight and at night.

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Is It Safe? Nine Creepy Abandoned Dentist Offices

15 Sep

[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

abandoned dentist offices
These nine creepy abandoned dentist offices feature chairs even a weary marathon man wouldn’t sit on. Listen to your inner drill sergeant, this will hurt a bit!

Adel Reformatory, England

Adel Reformatory abandoned dentist chair(image via: Mexico75)

The Adel Reformatory in Leeds, England opened in 1857 and parts of the complex were still being used until 2004. One hopes the drab, dreary and debris-cluttered dentist office above was abandoned as early as possible. Kids, stay in school… but not a reform school, and especially not if you have a toothache.

Adel Reformatory Leeds abandoned dentist office(images via: Mexico75)

Kudos and congrats to Flickr user Mexico75 for not only capturing the decrepit Adel Reformatory dentist office but for lighting it in such a way that promises unimaginable doom to anyone brave (or foolish) enough to sit in that chair.

Le Palace d’Anfa Hotel, Morocco

Le Palace d'Anfa Morocco abandoned dentist office chair(image via: TripAdvisor.fr)

There’s nothing worse than having a dental emergency while traveling in a strange foreign land, amiright? There are degrees of “worse”, however, and the de facto dental office just next to the gym at the Le Palace d’Anfa Hotel in Casablanca, Morocco takes that degree right off the dial. As for the Le Palace d’Anfa Hotel itself, TripAdvisor recommends tourists “avoid this hotel” regardless of the status of their teeth.

Maison De Cerf, Belgium

dentist Maison de Cerf Belgium abandoned(images via: Day Of The Dead)

This abandoned dentist’s house in Belgium doesn’t look too bad, though one can be certain it’s never going to look any better than this. Located in the home’s working basement, the office appears to have been left suddenly and in great haste by the owner, who never bothered to return for his equipment or teeth molds.

dentist Maison de Cerf abandoned Belgium(image via: Day Of The Dead)

The reclining dentist’s chair was obviously designed for comfort and support but as we all can attest, true relaxation in this situation requires plenty of novocaine and nitrous oxide. One thing’s for certain, a trip to this or any dentist is never “boring”… unless you’ve got a cavity that needs attention, that is.

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Is It Safe Nine Creepy Abandoned Dentist Offices

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Panoramic Rainbow: Circular Space Spans Color Spectrum

14 Sep

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

rainbow panoramic walkway design

Rainbows on the horizon are impossible to approach, let alone pass through – they flicker and fade like phantoms, except in the case of this iconic space.

rainbow museum roof path

Your Rainbow Panorama by Olafur Eliasson is an enclosed circular walkway that sits atop the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark. Its colored glass spans from floor to ceiling and rotates visitors through five hundred feet of color, looping them through a rainbow of panoramic city views.

rainbow roof red orane

rainbow roof blue teal

rainbow roof green yellow

The experience of walking along this 500-foot path is at once reductive and complex. At each step, the city outside becomes a monochromatic landscape, filtered through the lens of single slices of color that rotate as you move.

rainbow rooftop viewing platform

From outside, the raised structure forms a bright beacon within the city, a recognizable icon thanks to its combination of round shape and vibrant color. As this project illustrates, powerful architecture can be about more than structure, building and void – it is also about shaping experience through color and light.

rainbow spectrum walking experience

According to its Danish-Icelandic designer, it is “a space which virtually erases the boundaries between inside and outside – where people become a little uncertain as to whether they have stepped into a work or into part of the museum. This uncertainty is important to me, as it encourages people to think and sense beyond the limits within which they are accustomed to moving.”  In the end, is it an gallery space, a viewing platform, a permanent art installation … or does it perhaps span a spectrum of spatial definitions as well as colors?

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Chaos Reborn: Kowloon Walled City Rebuilt as Arcade

13 Sep

[ By Steph in Global & Travel & Places. ]

Kowloon Walled City Arcade 1
Kowloon Walled City, the lawless metropolis just outside Hong Kong, was evacuated and destroyed – but there is still one place in the world where it can be experienced almost as it really was, in a safer and more sanitized setting. Visitors to the Kawasaki Warehouse Amusement Game Park located between Tokyo and Yokohama can slip into those dark, virtually airless passages long after their disappearance to get a sense of what it must have been like to live in a packed dystopian city run by the mob.

Kowloon Walled City Arcade 2

David of Randomwire visited Kawasaki to get a glimpse of it himself, revealing a recreation that takes you from a faux-rusted factory exterior into dingy alleyways modeled on those of Kowloon. David describes it as “grimy, devoid of sunlight and complete with a soundtrack to match.”

Kowloon Walled City Arcade 3

Many of the items found within these halls, including the signs, are based on those that can be seen in old photos and videos of the city. Gambling dens and illegal services of all varieties can be seen just beyond hazy panes of glass. See lots more photos in large sizes at Randomwire.

Kowloon Walled City Arcade 4

The real Kowloon Walled City was once packed with at least 50,000 inhabitants in just 6.5 acres, full of refugees, squatters and those looking to evade the law. After its demolition in 1993, it became the site of a vast park full of gardens, ponds and trails.

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Clear Skies Ahead: Quest for a Complete Global Aerial Atlas

13 Sep

[ By WebUrbanist in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ]

altas generation stack algorithm

If you have ever zoomed out in Google Maps (or Mapquest, Yahoo or Bing), you may have been surprised find your field of view relatively unclouded by inclement weather patterns, yet marred by strange and inconsistent seasons. Instead of a continuous satellite view, you see an apparent patchwork quilt of misfit images, incoherently stitched together.

atlas global clouded default

MapBox (which powers FourSquare among other services) is on a mission to make satellite images not only more beautiful but also more consistent and comprehensible. Their task begins with eliminating blurry landscapes, strange seams and the surreal endless summer you see on other aerial images of the globe, but the potential scope of the project goes far beyond that as well.

atlas stacked pixel maps

Talking to Wired, Charlie Loyd describes how the company is sifting through data from Terra and Aqua, two orbiting NASA satellites, to solve this problem pixel by pixel: “For the new release we’re processing two years of imagery, captured from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2012. This amounts to over 339,000 16-megapixel+ satellite images, totaling more than 5,687,476,224,000 pixels. We boil these down to a mere 5 billion or so.”

atlas consistent cloud free

The industry paradigm is to combine parts of images representing the clearest available shots, but the result can create a clash of color from various seasons. Simply overlapping all of the different possibilities creates a mess of indistinct brown, which is not terribly attractive or useful either. Thus a middle road was found: stacking the images, sorting them by cloudiness, selecting pixels from each picture and filtering around peak growth periods. The result is a consistent yet naturally texture-rich whole both synthetic in composition yet ultimately organic in origin at the same time.

atlas mapbox future potential

The goal for now is to create a single seamless atlas that wraps the world, accurately (but with an eye towards aesthetics) reflecting what the planet actually looks like from above while also being useful in real-life mapping. Future potential iterations, however, could evolve beyond just looking and working best in traditional contexts: “If you do a web search for, say, infrared remote sensing, you’ll get an idea of the richness of possibilities, and you can start to imagine the cross-cutting inquiries that these large, open archives of multi-spectral satellite data enable,” writes Loyd. “Glaciers, wildfires, crops, droughts and floods, cities and forests, surface temperature, plankton blooms, seasonal dynamics, even smog –- it’s all there. It just needs a little work to see clearly.” 

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