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Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

Twin Tree-Covered Towers: The World’s First Vertical Forests

26 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Offices & Commercial. ]

vertical towers construction progress

Concept designs from far-fetched futurists have toyed with the idea for years, but one firm has finally made the vision a reality: towers extensively populated with intensive (meaning: large and heavy) plant life. In short: trees!

vertical forest sky trees

Situated in Milan, Italy, many skeptics were sure these two towers were just another pie-in-the-sky plan for an impossible building. After all, the load-bearing requirements alone for over 10,000 trees and 5,000 shrubs are extreme. Stefano Boeri Architetti (photos by Marco Garofalo) is showing them otherwise.

vertical green skyscraper lighting

The added weight is not wasted, nor ornamental – the vegetation layers will reduce the need for temperature regulation within the building. They will also filter the congested air of the city and serve to help reduce the temperature (always higher in urban areas).

vertical forest tree diagrams

vertical forest buildings

The pre-grown plant life was carefully selected for the structure based on the regional climate, light and wind exposure, and is even now being hoisted into final positions. When complete, this will be, on some metrics, quite literally the greenest pair of buildings in the world.

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Not Photoshopped: New Optical Illusions by Felice Varini

26 Mar

[ By Steph in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

Varini Optical Illusions 1

As you approach a curve in a parking garage, suddenly a large abstract object seems to float in space just ahead, as if overlaid on top of a static image rather than a three-dimensional setting. You’re not hallucinating: it’s a painted geometric illusion by artist Felice Varini, who has a vast portfolio of similar works spanning decades.

Varini Optical Illusions 2

The Paris-based Swiss artist has painted dozens of settings, public and private, indoors and out, that come together into an optical illusion only when viewed from a certain vantage point. From every other perspective, the markings seem random and chaotic, splashed across railings, walls, ceilings and streets.

Varini Optical Illusions 3

Varini Optical Illusions 4

The effect is so disconcerting at times, that people coming across images of the large-scale paintings often assume they have been Photoshopped. But once you see photos of the scene from different angles, the magic of Varini’s work (and others like it) becomes clear.

Varini Optical Illusions 5

In order to be appreciated and understood, these anamorphic illusions require action – movement – on the part of the viewer. But if you never bother to explore the scene in order to make the image come together, Varini doesn’t mind.

Varini Optical Illusions 6

“The viewer can be present in the work, but as far as I am concerned he may go through it without noticing the painting at all. If he is aware of the work, he might observe it from the vantage point and see the complete shape. But he might look from other points of views where he will not be able to understand the painting because the shapes will be fragmented and the work too abstract. Whichever way, that is ok with me.”

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Domestic Daredevils: 12 Insanely Cool Home Climbing Walls

25 Mar

[ By Steph in Design & Fixtures & Interiors. ]

Climbing Walls main

When the mountains are too far away and you don’t feel like going to the gym, you can always scale the walls of your living room or bedroom – if you’ve got one of these 12 amazing indoor climbing walls installed in your home. Ranging from the modest and colorfully modern to 36-foot rugged rock walls mimicking natural boulders, these residential climbing walls will give you something to do when you’re tired of watching television.

3 Way House by Naf Architect

Climbing Walls 3 Way House

A climbing wall offers alternative access to the roof terrace from the first floor, for athletic people who are tired of taking the stairs. Designed by Japanese studio Naf Architect & Design, the 3 Way House in Tokyo turns the climbing wall into a main visual component of the home by placing it in a glassed interior courtyard visible from many rooms.

Modern Indoor Climbing Wall in Tokyo

Climbing Walls Moon Design

The ‘Outdoors Indoors’ house by Be-Fun design + EANA in Tokyo features a large indoor climbing wall that hovers over the communal area of the home, ascending into a wood-lined ‘cavern.’

Spiral Slide from Pirate Ship to Climbing Cave

Climbing Walls Pirate Ship 1

Climbing Walls Pirate Ship 2

Climb down from an elevated pirate ship replica via drawbridge and head to the mudroom to plunge yourself down a secret spiral slide that will take you all the way down to the ‘climbing cave’ adjacent to a golf simulator room. This house looks insanely fun for kids of all ages.

Yellowstone Club Residence by Krannitz Gehl

Climbing Walls Krannitz Yellowstone 1

Climbing Walls Krannitz Yellowstone 2

Paying tribute both to the rustic traditional cabins of Montana and the state’s rugged beauty, the Yellowstone Club Residence by Krannitz Gehl features a large glass window to maximize views and sun exposure, right next to a large climbing wall. The arrangement almost gives climbers a sense of being outside.

Indoor Treehouse Playroom by Gabriel Builders

Climbing Walls Gabriel Builders

Some lucky little kids got an indoor treehouse with their own private miniature climbing wall in this residential project by Gabriel Builders.

House in Izumi-Ohmiya by Tato Architects

Climbing Walls Izumi

A converted warehouse in Osaka by Tato Architects features a double-height living and dining rom with a ladder providing a shortcut to and from the master bedroom. Designed for an active young couple who like ‘bouldering’, a kind of free climbing, the home also features a small climbing wall.

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Cool Colors: Rainbow Igloo Built of 500 Translucent Blocks

25 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

colorful rainbow ice igloo

When your prospective future mother-in-law takes the time to fill hundreds of cartons with colored water before your visit, it would behoove you to do something with them. And thus this unexpected collaboration was born.

colorful iglooe interior blocks

Braving temperatures down to negative 25 degrees (both Fahrenheit and Celcius), engineering student Daniel Gray and his girlfriend Kathleen Starrie took these frozen ice bricked (formed by Brigid Burton) and constructed an incredible structure.

colored snowcrete construction process

Instead of carving each block, Gray developed a kind of ‘snowcrete’, using flexible layers of snow as mortar to create the hemispherical shape required (after extensive calculations to make sure it was of a size that would not run them out of building materials).

colorful igloo night entrance

150 combined work-hours and 5 days later, the result is nothing short of stunning – the semi-spontaneous igloo is colorful by day, but even more dazzling by night when lit from the inside. If this was a pre-marital tes, one can only hope he passed with flying (or frozen) colors.

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Bread Balks: 13 Old & Moldy Abandoned Bakeries

24 Mar

[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

abandoned bakeries
What becomes of bakeries when they’re no longer kneaded? Do the well-bread upper crust take their dough elsewhere, cooking up some other pie-in-the-sky scheme? This baker’s dozen of abandoned bakeries have closed their oven doors for good; victims of flour play, management missed cakes and muffin’d opportunities.

Wonders Will Never Cease

Wonder Bread bakery sign Columbus Ohio(image via: Ruth E Hendricks Photography)

Well, yes and no… the original Wonder Bread bakery at 697 N. Fourth St. in Columbus, Ohio’s residential Italian Village neighborhood churned out an assortment of baked goods from 1916 through to May 1999. One can’t say the factory had a good run: Wonder Bread was invented in 1921 and the landmark sign dates from the late 1940s.

Wonder Bread bakery abandoned Columbus Ohio(images via: Columbus Underground, jvonr and the_mel)

After being shuttered for a decade, the dark red brick bakery is about to be reborn as the somewhat humorously named Wonder Bread Lofts. A total of 56 apartments comprise the complex which should be complete and ready for occupancy in early 2013. “It can’t be soon enough,” said site developer Kevin Lykens. “Demand for residential right now is through the roof.” Demand for Wonder Bread, not so much.

Tokyo Whiffed

abandoned Tokyo bakery(image via: Guwashi999)

Not even the Iron Chef can resurrect this rusting neighborhood bakery in metropolitan Tokyo and in doing so, save it from the eventual assault of the wrecking ball. Having served the generations who powered Japan’s post-war recovery with the sweet smell of perfumed pastry, this long abandoned bread-monger now serves as a backstop for vending machines and a silent scentless place-holder for future urban renewal.

On Location At The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games Mellark Bakery(images via: CBC and Down With The Capitol)

The abandoned Henry River Mill Village in Burke County, North Carolina became District 12 for a few days in the summer of 2011 as crews filming The Hunger Games recorded their location footage. The planned village was built in the early 1900s around a textile mill that closed in the 1960s and burned down in 1977. The former General Store building needed very little modification to become the Mellark Bakery where Peeta Mellark worked.

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Geometric Projections: Light Art Radically Reshapes Nature

23 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

light art in nature

Everyone knows there are mathematical patterns to be found everywhere in nature – though few such geometries are as explicit and dazzling as those imposed by this projection artist.

light geometric pattern painting

Javier Riera plays with simple regular forms in part because such elementary shapes precede language processing.

light art project scenes

In short: like nature, geometric concepts are immediate and fundamental, short-cutting the part of our brain that demands articulation and explanation.

light art 3d geometries

Sometimes the shapes seem to carve or parcel the existing landscape, turning trees into pie charts of forestry. In other cases, mazes and boxes add or remove dimensionality from complex objects or flat planes.

light artwork shapes forms

Like hedge mazes and botanical sculpture, there is something classically curious (and perhaps contradictory) about these attempts to impose order on the apparent chaos of the natural world.

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Treehouse Taster: 3 Wildly Different Types of Tree Houses

22 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

tree houses

Regular readers will know that this site love tree houses of all types, but in researching articles a few have slipped through the cracks, their stories and histories unknown, yet the images of them are too amazing to go un-shown.

tree house steampunk style

organic huge tree house

These more mysterious examples come from a combination of Pinterest and Repinly, and range from pragmatic well-constructed residences to wild and overgrown structures that seem to have grown alongside the trees they surround, with a few derelict and deserted ones somewhere in between. Above are two examples that seem organically evolved, pieced together around the growth of their trees.

tree house real frame

Of the sturdily-constructed sort, this one looks like a regular small family home simply lodged in the branches of a big deciduous monster and bolstered by basic framing.

tree house multi story

tree house of fairy tales

Finally, the tree homes of fairy tales – these two magical examples show that plans are one thing, but fantasy is another – sometimes the tree is just a foil for boisterous expressions of amazing and spontaneous architecture.

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Body Paint Illusions Transform Human Models into Animals

22 Mar

[ By Steph in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

Body Paint Illusion Marwedel 1
Intricately painted and carefully posed, the human bodies serving as canvases for artist Gesine Marwedel are virtually unrecognizable as they morph into swans, flamingos and iguanas. The 25-year-old German painter employs performance artists to bring her colorful illusions to life, leaving their faces and other body parts visible as part of each composition.

Body Paint Illusion Marwedel 2

The ability to contort into unusual positions is a crucial element of making each of these incredible three-dimensional paintings work. Each photograph depicts not only the painted animal, but also its grace and movement.

Body Paint Illusion Marwedel 3

Body Paint Illusion Marwedel 4

“Body painting is not just paint on a living canvas, it is picking up the body shapes in a subject and the painting on the body,” Marwedel told PSFK. “It is the transformation of a human being into a breathing, moving, living work of art.”

Body Paint Illusion Marwedel 5

Body Paint Illusion Marwedel 6

Marwedel began to explore body art after providing therapy for disabled and autistic children through speech and music. See more of her work at her website, or in person at the World Body Painting Festival, to be held in Austria in July 2013.

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A+ Architecture: The World’s Most Dazzling Designs

21 Mar

[ By Steph in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

Architizer Architecture Awards 1

Can modern architecture be accessible – and even alluring – to everyone in the world? Architizer believes that it already is, and the 87 winners of its first annual A+ Awards prove that assertion with a dazzling array of designs ranging from dramatic mountain overlooks to bright, graphic pop-up stores. Chosen by a jury and 150,000 public voters, the A+ Award winners accomplish the blog’s goal of “breaking architecture out of the echo chamber.”

Architizer Architecture Awards 2

The point of the contest is not only to honor the world’s most incredible modern structures, but destroy the idea that architecture is only for a small group of elites. “The mission of the Architizer A+ Awards is to remind everyone in the world that they are fans of architecture, even if they don’t realize it,” says Architizer CEO Marc Kushner. “This year’s winners make our job easy. They are projects where noble ambitions match their formal sophistication – they represent the best architecture from across the globe – and more than one project I had never seen before!”

Architizer Architecture Awards 3

Winners include the Isbjerget apartment complex by JDS Architects, a tapered set of white buildings designed to resemble icebergs in the harbor of Denmark, and the National Tourist Route Trollstigen by Reiulf Ramstad Architects, a plateau between deep fjords in Norway that holds the title of most awards won by a single project.

Architizer Architecture Awards 4

Architizer Architecture Awards 5

Architizer Architecture Awards 6

Among other notable winners are Yayoi Kusama’s pop up store for Louis Vuitton, Dolomitenblick by Plasma Studio, and the Wuxi Grand Theatre by PES-Architects. See them all at Architizer.

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Doing it Wrong: Funny Photo-Edited Urban Improbabilities

21 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

improbable crosswalk

It would be entirely right and wrong at the same time to call this body of work realistic. On the one hand, the results look like pictures (which form the basis of these manipulations) – on the other hand, while not impossible, the reality they present is dramatically improbable.

improbable urban landscape photos

This series by Robert Rickhoff is titled Out of Place and features all kinds of ordinary spaces and situations, from swing sets, crosswalks and roundabouts to railroad tracks, swimming pools and public bathrooms.

improbable swing sets pool

Yet in (almost) each case, there is something not quite right … or drastically wrong. It takes a little while to notice in each case, though, until you get the hang of it and start looking for the odd-man-out element right away.

improbable urban speed bumps

Still, it is fun to imagine what would happen to people taking a speed-bump ramp, or encountering a raised crosswalk – certainly a surreal experience in reality, and at least something to trigger the urban imagination in photographic form.

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