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Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

Vertical Landfill: Monument to Civilization Honors Our Trash

10 Mar

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Monument to Civilization Vertical Landfill 1

Nearly all of our most majestic architecture reflects pinnacles of achievement for our species, and one architect aims to call attention to yet another way in which we are ‘spectacular:’ our unmatched ability to produce incredible amounts of waste. ‘Monument to Civilization‘ is a vertical landfill tower that offers both a serious solution for urban waste management and a commentary on our unsustainable habits.

Monument to Civilization Vertical Landfill 2

Monument to Civilization Vertical Landfill 3

The third place winner in eVolo’s 2012 Skyscraper Competition, ‘Monument to Civilization’ is not just a sobering daily reminder of how wasteful we can be, and the pressing need for new solutions. It’s also a power plant, harvesting methane gas from all that rotting trash and using it to help keep the city running.

Monument to Civilzation Vertical Landfill 4

Lin Yu-Ta envisions a narrow tower reaching high into the sky. Noting that we often “build towers for towers’ sake,” the Taiwanese designer puts some meaning behind the spectacle: the 1,318-meter (4,324-foot) height of this tower proposal represents the space that would be needed to store just a single year worth of trash from New York City alone.

Monument to Civilization Vertical Landfill 5

“The ever-growing Monument may evoke the citizens’ introspection and somewhat leads to the entire city’s waste-decreasing and better recycling. Perhaps all metropolitan cities would inverse the worldwide competition from being the tallest to the shortest.”

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Temporary Urban Coffee Farm Grows & Sells Bean Brew

10 Mar

[ By Steph in Culture & Cuisine & Global. ]

Urban Coffee Farm Melbourne 1

Coffee lovers are getting a special treat at this year’s Melbourne Food and Wine Festival: an urban coffee farm installation made primarily of pallets, which functions as both a temporary coffee shop and a learning experience. Australian design firm HASSELL created the ‘festival hub’ for the two-week annual event, placing it on the red stairs at Queensbridge Square.

urban Coffee Farm 2

While the installation won’t be around long enough for Melbournians to drink coffee grown right there in the middle of the city, it does have more than 120 coffee plants, in pots set into the stacked wood pallets. HASSELL’s Shaun Schroter and Mary Papaioannou told Habitus Living that their aim was to connect coffee consumers to the laborious and resource-heavy processes required to produce the beverage.

Urban Coffee Farm Melbourne 3

Educational signs offer coffee facts, including info on various types of beans and where they’re grown. The temporary cafe was installed in an underutilized area of Melbourne’s South Bank, inviting residents to explore their city in a new way.

Urban Coffee Farm Melbourne 4

“Coffee has become one of those consumables that is linked to a lifestyle experience and very rarely connected to the places of harvest,” says Schroter. “Embedding this narrative into the conceptual story then becomes important because it is a holistic experience.”

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Homeless Hotel: Radical Urban Retreat has No Rooms, Ever

10 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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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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16 of the Most Creative (and/or Sexy) Hotel Rooms in the World: From Upside-Down to Local Urban Art

Even though some may look uncomfortable, unusual or downright freakish at least they aren’t among the 7 tiniest hotel rooms in the world.
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Creative Urban Furniture: Convertible, Inflatable & Portable Homeless Shelters

Regardless of your view of street dwellers or opinion regarding the best solutions to these problems, suspend your judgment for a moment to take in these extremely cool designs!
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Temporary Urban Coffee Farm Grows & Sells Bean Brew

08 Mar

[ By Steph in Culture & Cuisine & Global. ]

Urban Coffee Farm Melbourne 1

Coffee lovers are getting a special treat at this year’s Melbourne Food and Wine Festival: an urban coffee farm installation made primarily of pallets, which functions as both a temporary coffee shop and a learning experience. Australian design firm HASSELL created the ‘festival hub’ for the two-week annual event, placing it on the red stairs at Queensbridge Square.

urban Coffee Farm 2

While the installation won’t be around long enough for Melbournians to drink coffee grown right there in the middle of the city, it does have more than 120 coffee plants, in pots set into the stacked wood pallets. HASSELL’s Shaun Schroter and Mary Papaioannou told Habitus Living that their aim was to connect coffee consumers to the laborious and resource-heavy processes required to produce the beverage.

Urban Coffee Farm Melbourne 3

Educational signs offer coffee facts, including info on various types of beans and where they’re grown. The temporary cafe was installed in an underutilized area of Melbourne’s South Bank, inviting residents to explore their city in a new way.

Urban Coffee Farm Melbourne 4

“Coffee has become one of those consumables that is linked to a lifestyle experience and very rarely connected to the places of harvest,” says Schroter. “Embedding this narrative into the conceptual story then becomes important because it is a holistic experience.”

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Fresh Blends: 12 Cool Multi-Functional Coffee Shops

Multi-purpose ‘combo’ coffee shops combine a beverage bar with other services like washing clothes, printing documents or getting a pedicure from a tank of fish.
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Crafty to Crazy: 13 Contemporary Cafes & Coffee Shops

Stop in to any of these 13 design-oriented cafes around the world and you might just forget about food and beverages altogether, wowed by the interior decor.
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Airborne Architecture: 12 Images of Flying French Houses

08 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

Context – that is the key to taking the ordinary and making it amazing in this series of displaced homes soaring up from forgotten streets of Paris. The results float like an intentionally mundane version of Pixar’s UP, or a modern-day urban Wizard of Oz Tale.

Laurent Chehere picks a range of dwellings, but most are dilapidated and seem perhaps sad in their crowded urban environment. She takes photographs of local buildings, tents and trailers, then photoshops their surroundings into something radically new.

Some are slathered in graffiti – others shown with clotheslines in everyday use. To this, she adds a few whimsical gestures – power lines, strings of lights, earthward ladders and other odds and ends to tie down each piece like a balloon and keep it from floating away.

One consequence of ripping these from the ground and setting them in the sky is simply an enhanced focus on an otherwise-connected building. In these isolating images, townhouses become standalone works, and we start to see them differently.

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Architectural Light Graffiti: Projection Bombing Images on Urban Surfaces

Architectural light graffiti, or projection bombing, falls somewhere curiously in between.
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Urban Street Art Images in Miniature: The Little People of London

Wonderfully creative urban street art. These photographs, taken around town in London and even shown in galleries, are just a small portion of his “little people” collection.
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3D Printed Car is Strong, Light and Close to Production

08 Mar

[ By Steph in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]

Urbee 2 3D Printed Car

The Urbee 2 is strong as steel, half the weight of a conventional vehicle, and can be manufactured in a warehouse full of plastic-spraying 3D printers. The teardrop-shaped 3D-printed car is an ecologically sound hybrid, and it looks cool, too. Aerodynamic and futuristic, this car could be a total game-changer for the automobile industry, leading to a rise of small-batch automakers.

Urbee 2 3D Printed Car 3

The three-wheel, two-passenger prototype vehicle with a generously sized, curved transparent roof (also made of plastic) was constructed by Kor Ecologic at RedEye, an on-demand 3D-printing facility with a Fused Deposition Modeling printer that sprays molten polymer one microscopic layer at a time to create the desired shape. The whole car takes about 2,500 hours to manufacture, but the process is fully automated.

The Urbee 2 3D-printed car’s light weight makes it so fuel-efficient, creator Jim Kor aims to make it from San Francisco to New York City on ten gallons of gas. Kor Ecologic’s design ideals for the project include causing as little pollution as possible during manufacturing, operation and recycling of the car, using local or regional and/or recyclable materials whenever possible, and making it affordable.

Urbee 2 3D Printed Car 2

You might wonder just how safe a plastic car can really be, but Kor is aiming high in that department, too. The bumpers will be just as strong as their sheet-metal equivalents. The final goal for the Urbee is not just to exceed all current automotive safety standards, but be able to pass the tech inspection required for race cars.

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Nest-Like 3D Printed House Will be Assembled in a Day

Another contender for the first 3D printed house, ‘ProtoHouse 2.0’ looks like a spider’s nest and can be assembled without screws or welding in a single day.
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Amazing Aerogel: Strong as Steel, Light as Air

There is an amazing material that is lighter than Styrofoam, stronger than steel and the perfect heat insulator – and most people have never heard of it.
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Preservation Puzzle: Extreme Ideas to Save an Urban Facade

08 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

historic preservation prentice ideas

The Prentice Women’s Hospital building at Northwestern University has some serious fans, including a range of architects such as Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi, Tadao Ando, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, who would like to see it preserved. The open question: is the exterior of sufficient historical value to keep, even if it means building up through, above and/or around it?

historic new tower solution

While a wonder of structural engineering with an iconic shape, the structure simply is not practical or fit-to-purpose anymore. One daring proposal from Studio Gang Architects (illustration by Jay Hoffman) involves adding dozens of upper stories, and nearly a million square feet, while leaving the shell of the original intact.

historic mirrored facade idea

A scheme by Cyril Marsollier and Wallo Villacorta won a competition to suggest alternatives with another approach – one that allows half of the building to be absorbed by a new structure, while reflecting the other half – using a mirror-image effect to preserve the complete appearance via a rather ingenious and nuanced illusion.

historic original humorous proposals

Critics exist on both sides. Some say this proposal strips away so much of the building and its context that what is left is really metaphorically (not just literally) a shell. Others suggest that any solution bends too far toward impracticality to accommodate an arguably unattractive building (many consider it an eyesore). Humorists like LunchBreath have weighed in as well, as seen above.

historic preservation proposal rendering

Meanwhile, the university itself does not seem interested in considering preservation options, so these concepts, while compelling, could well be moot in the end. Still, the High Line in New York is a great example of how enough public pressure and celebrity support can change the minds of an entire city, and perhaps a private institution as well.

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Brick Farmhouse Facade Illusion via Photo-Printed Glass

This project was deadlocked for decades until MVDRV showed up with a radical proposal remixing old and new, printing local historical-building photographs right onto glass.
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Retro-Futurism: 13 Failed Urban Design Ideas

From Hitler’s vision of a post-WWII-victory Berlin to ‘Boozetown’, a drunkard’s dream city, some of these retro urban design concepts were destined to fail.
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Lunar Soil Structures: 3D-Printing Dwellings on the Moon

08 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ]

3d printed space base

One of the biggest challenges of settlements in space is the cost of transporting materials and technologies for construction, a problem addressed beautifully via 3D printing technology in this architectural proposal (currently being prototyped on Earth).

3d robot space printer

The design by Foster + Partners (in conjunction with the European Space Agency) uses a minimum of imported materials – mainly: an inflatable core, pumped up into domes and tunnels on site.

3d base concept prototype

Yet despite its simplicity, the project addresses everything from extreme temperature fluctuations to gamma radiation in this ingenious multi-person dwelling, effectively allowing humans to bypass the need to burrow below the surface while still using it effectively as a shield.

3d space home model

The man-made domes at the center of the concept are augmented by 3D-printed material derived from locally-sourced soil – a concrete-style foam substance providing stability, safety and structural support.

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Printing Prospects: 10 Hi-Tech Printer Prototypes & Concepts

Printers are no longer just the bulky machines that sit on our desks. Current and future printers can create our homes, our toys and even our new body parts.
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Augmented 3D Printing: Architectural Model Overlay App

Augmented reality meets architectural modeling in a remarkable best-of-both-worlds hybridization for architecture designers, builders and clients.
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Vertical Landfill: Monument to Civilization Honors Our Trash

08 Mar

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Monument to Civilization Vertical Landfill 1

Nearly all of our most majestic architecture reflects pinnacles of achievement for our species, and one architect aims to call attention to yet another way in which we are ‘spectacular:’ our unmatched ability to produce incredible amounts of waste. ‘Monument to Civilization‘ is a vertical landfill tower that offers both a serious solution for urban waste management and a commentary on our unsustainable habits.

Monument to Civilization Vertical Landfill 2

Monument to Civilization Vertical Landfill 3

The third place winner in eVolo’s 2012 Skyscraper Competition, ‘Monument to Civilization’ is not just a sobering daily reminder of how wasteful we can be, and the pressing need for new solutions. It’s also a power plant, harvesting methane gas from all that rotting trash and using it to help keep the city running.

Monument to Civilzation Vertical Landfill 4

Lin Yu-Ta envisions a narrow tower reaching high into the sky. Noting that we often “build towers for towers’ sake,” the Taiwanese designer puts some meaning behind the spectacle: the 1,318-meter (4,324-foot) height of this tower proposal represents the space that would be needed to store just a single year worth of trash from New York City alone.

Monument to Civilization Vertical Landfill 5

“The ever-growing Monument may evoke the citizens’ introspection and somewhat leads to the entire city’s waste-decreasing and better recycling. Perhaps all metropolitan cities would inverse the worldwide competition from being the tallest to the shortest.”

Want More? Click for Great Related Content on WebUrbanist:

Towers of Trash: 5000-Foot Junk Skyscrapers to Fuel Cities

Instead of burying our legacy under the Earth’s surface, these structures showcase the impact of the millions of tons of trash major cities produce on an annual basis.
Click Here to Read More »»


Skyscraper Squatters: Lessons from Ad Hoc Vertical Slums

Recipe: an abandoned office tower without occupants while people all around sleeping on the streets. Result: 45 floors now inhabited by over 3000 people.
Click Here to Read More »»


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