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Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

Streets Illustrated: Colorful Interventions Make the City More Fun

24 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

Filling the city with art by literally painting right onto the streets makes it feel like everyone is immersed in an illustration, acting out some kind of larger-than-life story. Formerly bare patches of asphalt and concrete get splashes of color, patterns and imagery that can be humorous, fun or politically pointed. Roadsworth is among the street artists best known for this style, and recently debuted a new piece referencing the refugee crisis.

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“A new record: as of today, the UN has counted 65 million refugees in the world,” he says. “I painted this in recognition of this tragic fact. Walls and Fences are for painting and climbing not for dividing and obstructing.”

In this particular mural, painted onto a street in Montréal, passersby are confronted with massive hands cling to a chain-link fence, effectively forcing them to recognize and think about the subject matter.

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Other Roadsworth murals are more playful, like a stop-animation squirrel that appears to run down the street when the images are stacked in a GIF, and a crosswalk that has been turned into a rope bridge. A giant pink ice cream cone melts onto the pavement.

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Prints can be purchased at Roadsworth.com, and you can keep up with the artist’s work on Instagram.

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[ By SA Rogers in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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Hovering Homes: 12 Cantilevered & Elevated Residences Maximize Views

24 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

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Supported by nothing but skinny poles, delicately balancing or tethered as if they might float away, these precarious-seeming houses laugh in the face of gravity. Cantilevering architectural volumes off cliffsides or elevating them well above ground level gives modern residences incredible views of their surroundings, whether they’re located on a mountain overlooking the sea or in the middle of a busy Japanese city.

Snohetta Treehotel, Sweden

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Architecture firm Snøhetta has completed their addition to Sweden’s Treehotel, a hovering cabin that appears at first glance to be supported by no more than the staircase leading up to it. The design is based on a traditional Nordic cabin with a wood facade clad in charred boards of pine for a look that contrasts with the snow below, making the structure look heavy and solid to enhance its gravity-defying properties.

Tower House Inspired by Observatories

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Tucked into the woods of upstate New York, GLUCK+’s Tower House takes inspiration from observatories for its mostly-vertical form. A bright yellow staircase is visible from outside through the glass envelope of the supporting tower, and the upper volume is topped with a terrace.

House in Yatsugatake Mountains by Kidosaki Architects, Japan

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Jutting out over a cliff at the foot of Japan’s Yatsugatake Mountains, this home by Kidosaki Architects Studio expands horizontally out into midair to enhance views of the natural landscape through floor-to-ceiling glazing on three sides. The cantilevered portion of the home is supported by two diagonal steel cylinders.

Cargo Container Office Sticks Out Beyond Edge of Hill

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Architect Patrick Bradley repurposed a 45-foot cargo container into an office for himself, allowing a third of it to hang out over the edge of the hilly plot as a sort of floating balcony encased in glass. The project makes very few structural changes in the container itself, staying true to its original form while modernizing its exterior.

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Hovering Homes 12 Cantilevered Elevated Residences Maximize Views

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See Wall: Graffiti Praising & Parodying Donald Trump

22 Jan

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

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Donald Trump is destined to leave his mark on the world stage but the world’s graffiti artists have been leaving Trump-related marks for some time.

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The notorious “wall” Trump has theatrically threatened to build along the US-Mexico border already exists – in parts – and older sections have been renewed, reinforced and in some places made redundant. One example of the latter can be found about a mile west of Tijuana airport: the so-called “old border wall” situated on American territory.

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Graffiti collective Indecline created the above “¡Rape Trump!” mural on a section of the rusty, corrugated sheet metal wall in late 2015, roughly six months before Trump clinched the Republican nomination for the U.S. presidency. Check out this video by Indecline posted at their website. The caption “¡Rape Trump!”, by the way, is a sort of Spanish pun – the word “rape” translates roughly to crop, trim, shave or snuff while the ball gag adds a dash of kinkiness to the mix.

Great Brickin’

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So crowdfunding graffiti is a thing now: graffiti artists The Paintsmiths paid for the above mural through online sales of their photo-book Are We There Yet? The artwork features Trump figuratively and literally walling himself in, and can be found at the corner of Nelson Street and All Saints Street in Bristol, UK.

Where’s Wall-Donald?

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It’s not as if Donald Trump just popped up out of nowhere: the larger-than-life real estate developer took over The Trump Organization way back in 1971 when The Donald was only 25 years old. Indeed Trump was here, was there, and now it seems he’s everywhere.

Punchdrunk Trump

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The island nation of Malta is chock-a-block with ruins of all ages, many of which have been co-opted by graffiti artists under the government’s benign gaze. The unusual and intriguing work above, by Czech artist ChemiS, complements abandoned and deteriorated architecture by featuring a young boxer and Donald Trump. Whatever one’s political bent, you can’t deny this particular work is a knockout.

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See Wall Graffiti Praising Parodying Donald Trump

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Guerrilla Guidance: DIY Street Signs Make Urban Life More Interesting

21 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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You’re hurrying along the sidewalk on the way to work, running late and not in the greatest mood, when you see a sign in the adjacent field that simply reads “PLEASE WAIT HERE, YOUR FUTURE SELF WILL MEET YOU SHORTLY.” How does that affect your day? Little moments like these can bring some much-needed levity to the world around us, especially in dark times.

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Impeccably produced, often enticing you to push a button or take a card, these guerrilla installations look pretty legit until you stop to read what they say. They’re easy to miss, if you’re hustling too quickly and tuning out your surroundings – but if you take a moment to notice them, they might just make you smile.

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Artist Michael Pederson (aka Miguel Marquez Outside) creates these little interventions and puts them up all over his home city. Sometimes they’re site-specific, referring to things that can be found in the local environment, like a hole in the curb or a sidewalk that ends abruptly.

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The personal space cards would actually be pretty handy, and who wouldn’t be tempted by a time travel pay phone? Check out more of Pederson’s work at his tumblr and Instagram.

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Waste Not: The Trash Can that Inspired the World’s Tallest Condo Tower

19 Jan

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

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432 Park Avenue in Manhattan has taken criticism for various reasons since well before it was completed, but its source of inspiration makes it almost too easy: the skyscraper was inspired by a garbage bin.

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Specifically, Rafael Viñoly cited a 1906 trash can designed by Josef Hoffmann of the Vienna Workshops as a pattern basis for the gridded exterior of the supertall tower. The design origins were confirmed by the developer but are also plain to see. The infamous bin itself retails for $ 225, which could be considered cheap for a classic design object … or expensive for something you fill with garbage.

That grid design is intended to mask the fact that the columns of the building need to be wider at the base in order to support its immense height. The thick grid from top to bottom disguises this transition from wider to narrow, covering structural columns toward the top. It is the third-tallest structure in the United States and tallest residential tower on the planet.

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Aside from aesthetic critiques, the skyscraper has come under fire for supply a relatively handful (just over 100) units at immense sizes to support occupancy but the wealthy elite. Of course, it is not that unusual for industrial design to inspire architecture. Still, the fact that its design was inspired by a waste receptacle only adds fuel to those who see it as an eyesore and sign of urban opulence.

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Modern Mazes: 15 Labyrinths Made of Glass, Steel, Light and Salt

19 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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Escaping the convoluted confines of the conventional hedge-in-a-garden, the labyrinth takes on ever more complex forms to better confuse you with, especially when mirrors, glass or mechanical elements are involved. These immersive installations use unusual materials and disorienting configurations to encourage visitors to wander, explore, face uncertainty about their paths and pause to marvel at the beauty of it all.

Maze Made of Light by Brut Deluxe

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This immersive light maze made of acrylic panels with dichroic film applied to one side creates a reflective rainbow you can walk through. Once you’re inside, circles cut into the acrylic transmit colors from other areas of the maze. ‘Yûzhóu’ was craeated by architecture and design studio Brut Deluxe for the Luneng Sanya Bay Light and Art Festival in Hainan, China.

Vertical Maze Tower in Dubai

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This 56-story skyscraper in Dubai is the world’s tallest vertical maze according to Guinness. DAR Consult worked with maze designer Adrian Fisher to design the eye-catching accent, highlighting it in thousands of LED lights to make it stand out after dark.

Big Maze by Bjarke Ingels Group at the National Building Museum

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With high birch panel walls that tower over you along the edges shrinking to waist-height at the very center, this maze by architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group gets easier the navigate the further you go. The life-sized indoor maze was assembled inside the National Building Museum in Washington DC. “The concept is simple: as you travel deeper into a maze, your path typically becomes more convoluted,” say the architects. “What if we invert this scenario and create a maze that brings clarity and visual understanding upon reaching the heart of the labyrinth?”

Steel Labyrinth by Gijs van Vaerenbergh at C-Mine Art Centre, Belgium

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The architect duo known as Gijs Van Vaerenbergh experimented with the classic form of the labyrinth for a sculptural installation at the center of the C-Mine Arts Centre in Genk, Belgium. The design, made of 5mm-thick steel plates weighing a total of 186 tons, is envisioned as a composition of walls and voids that strategically frame various areas with cut-outs. An accompanying tower outside the maze allows visitors to get a bird’s eye view of the entire thing.

Salt Labyrinths by Motoi Yamamoto

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This labyrinth is so minuscule in scale, only insects could ever hope to navigate it, but it’s a wonder to take in from above. Artist Motoi Yamamoto is known for his intricate temporary sculptures made of salt, creating complex arrangements that almost seem organically formed.

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Modern Mazes 15 Labyrinths Made Of Glass Steel Light And Salt

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Architectural Relics: When Demolition Leaves Behind Nonsensical Structures

19 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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Steps that go nowhere, pedestrian walkways that dead-end into elevated bridges, doors that open out into mid-air: these so-called ‘Thomassons’ are what happens when workers demolishing an outdated structure leave part of it behind, whether out of necessity or laziness. Ultimately, they become almost sculptural in their absurdity, visual ties to the past of a particular place. Walking up one of those staircases to nowhere almost seems like it could be the key to time travel.

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Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei named these nonfunctional structures ‘thomassons’ or ‘hyperart thomassons’ in the ’80s in reference to a baseball player with a ‘useless position’ on his team. He noted one such structure in Tokyo in 1972, a staircase that had no entranceway once you reach the top. Discovering more around the city, Akasegawa began giving them names like “the useless window of Ekoda,” building a collection that was published as a book called Chogeijutsu Tomason.

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These days, images of such relics are collected via Instagram tags, on the Hyperart: Thomasson tumblr and on Reddit. There’s even a Thomasson Observation Center on Facebook, accepting public submissions and curating them into new visual references.

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A photo posted by uu_architects (@uu_architects) on

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Like the human appendix, these vestigial structures have long since ceased to be useful, yet somehow they’re still around, even as the world constantly shifts and changes. That in itself is pretty strange and incredible.

(images: Mathieu C, Matthew Fargo, Seng Chen and mindbomb via hyperart thomasson tumblr; reddit; wikimedia commons)

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Public Wattway: France Activates World’s First Solar-Paneled Roadway

18 Jan

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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Developed by Wattway and deployed on the streets of Tourouvre-au-Perche, a 1,000-meter-long solar-paneled roadway in France is the first stretch of a 1,000-kilometer endeavor.

The technology along this initial pathway is designed to generate enough energy to light up the streets of a 3,400-person town, and it is just the first step in a five-year plan.

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France ultimately aims to pave 1,000 kilometers of solar roads over the next half-decade, supplying renewable energy to 5 million people (close to 10% of the population).

The flat and smooth surfaces of existing streets are perfect places to serve a double function and harvest clean energy as long as the issue of durability is taken into account.

The solar brick-like sheets are covered in multiple layers of silicon resign designed to allow light to pass through while protecting the panels from damage. The panels are engineered to withstand the weight of six-axle trucks and to stick directly onto existing road surfaces.

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The goal for this first phase is to produce 280 megwatt hours of power per year and to test the durability of the tech under real-world experimental conditions. Under controlled conditions, the panels survive a “cycle of one million vehicles, or 20 years of normal traffic a road, and the surface does not move.”

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“We are still on an experimental phase,” says the company. “Building a trial site of this scale is a real opportunity for our innovation. This trial site has enabled us to improve our photovoltaic panel installing process as well as their manufacturing, in order to keep on optimizing our innovation.”

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Painting with Light on a Canvas of Night: Alien Blooms by Hannu Huhtamo

17 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Photography & Video. ]

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The strange glowing figures in these images are so complex, you might think they’re screenshots from a digital animation, or created in Photoshop – but there’s no computer-based trickery here. Just the same long exposure techniques light artists have been using for decades to create and capture ethereal compositions, albeit applied in an unusually creative manner.

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Hannu Huhtamo’s bizarre shapes glow against twilight landscapes and abandoned interiors, often looking somewhere between a plant and an alien insect. They sprout up in snowy fields, appear from inside giant teacups at theme parks or take shape in darkened living rooms.

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A musician by training and hobbyist photographer, the Finnish artist first experimented with lighting techniques when taking promotional photos for a death metal band and deciding he wanted a long-exposure pentagram made with the flame of a lighter. Years later, when he met light artist Janne Parviainen and got a look at his work, Huhtamo decided to revisit the technique from a new angle.

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All of his work is created ‘SOOC’ or straight out of the camera, and he uses no special light equipment other than El-Wire (electroluminescent wire) and modified LED flash lights. “Darkness is my canvas and the light is my brush,” he says in this behind-the-scenes video produced by Great Big Story.

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High-Elevation Dining: 12 Sky-Scraping Restaurants Around the World

17 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

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As long as heights don’t make you queasy, you could enjoy one of the best meals of your life from as high as 1,350 feet above street level, gazing out onto bustling cities like Dubai, Tokyo, Toronto, Shanghai and Chicago. Or, take a higher altitude approach at a restaurant that’s not just tucked into a mountain range in France, but also located almost 9,000 feet above sea level. These dining establishments are the closest you’ll ever get to eating meals in the clouds, outside of an airplane (unless, of course, you’re an astronaut, in which case, congratulations.)

Catch: Guangzhou International Finance Center, China

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100 floors above ground level in the Four Seasons Hotel at Guangzhou’s International Finance Center, seafood restaurant ‘Catch’ looks down onto the city from an astonishing 1,312 feet in the sky through floor-to-ceiling glass windows. The 103-story building is the 15th tallest in the world, and opened in 2010.

At.Mosphere: Burj Khalifa, Dubai

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The highest restaurant in the world crowns the top of the tallest tower, the Burj Dubai. Located on the 122nd floor, At.Mosphere is a 200-seat French restaurant set 1,350 feet above the ground. From your dining table, you can watch the frenetic pace of Dubai life or get a bird’s eye view of various ongoing construction projects.

Top of the World: Stratosphere Hotel and Tower, Las Vegas

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800 feet above the Las Vegas Strip, ‘Top of the World’ is tucked into the highest floor of the Stratosphere Casino, Hotel & Tower and revolves 360 degrees every 80 minutes.

Club Jin Mao: Grand Hyatt, Shanghai

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Gaze out at the Shanghai skyline from an unusual angle at Club Jin Mao, a showcase of classic Shanghainese cuisine on the 86th floor of the Jin Mao Tower at Grand Hyatt Shanghai. There’s seating for up to 40 guests, and six private rooms.

The Metropolitan Club: Willis Tower, Chicago

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Chicago is actually packed full of sky-high restaurants, many notable enough to make it onto lists of the world’s highest. That means there are plenty of opportunities to dine with an amazing view of the city, the Chicago River or Lake Michigan. The Metropolitan Club is a classic, located on the 66th and 67th floors of the famous Willis Tower (which has 110 stories in total.) The Club has long been open to members only, but recently invited the public to dine as well.

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High Elevation Dining 12 Sky Scraping Restaurants Around The World

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