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Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

Urban Rigger: Floating Student Housing Made of Shipping Containers

22 Sep

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

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This hexagonal floating student housing complex made of stacked reclaimed shipping containers is better than any dorm you could hope to live in. ‘Urban Rigger’ by Bjarke Ingels (BIG) creates a sustainable solution to the pressing need for additional accommodations for students in the city, providing 15 living spaces arranged around an internal courtyard. Completely carbon-neutral, the structures are solar-powered and make use of hydro source heating and low-energy pumps, and the first unit opened to the public on September 21st.

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Each apartment is available to college students at $ 600 per month and includes a private bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. Occupants get access to the courtyard as well as a kayak landing, bathing platform, barbecue area and roof terrace. The pontoon basement features storage zones and fully automated laundry. It’s a pretty sweet deal for students, who get to gaze out of giant windows at the sunset every evening and enjoy a water-centric lifestyle that most adults only dream about.

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Making use of the harbor ensures that students get to live close to the school, instead of far outside the city, where most affordable units are located. Eventually, BIG plans to create entire communities made up of multiple structures.

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“There are few strategies that allow cities to expand,” the architects explain. “Yet, Copenhagen’s harbor remains an underutilized and underdeveloped area at the heart of the city. By introducing a building typology optimized for harbor cities we can introduce a housing solution that will keep students at the heart of the city.”

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“Meanwhile, the standardized container system has been developed to allow goods to be transported by road, water or air, to anywhere in the world in a complex network of operators at a very low cots. By making use of the standard container system we are offered the framework of extremely flexible building typology.”

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“By stacking 9 container units in a circle, we can create 15 studio residences which frame a centralized winter garden; this is used as a common meeting place for students. The housing is also buoyant, like a boat, so that can be replicated in other harbor cities where affordable housing is needed, but space is limited.”

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In Stitches: 45+ Artistic Embroidered & Cross-Stitched Creations

21 Sep

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

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This is definitely not your grandmother’s embroidery. It’s stitched into the helmets of soldiers, onto car doors and fences, producing cats that pop out of shirt pockets and portraits so painterly, it’s hard to believe they’re made of thread. In fact, needlework stands in for everything from spray-painted street art to living moss in these extraordinarily artistic stitch-based creations.

Floral Cross-Stitch Urban Murals by Raquel Rodrigo

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Cross-stitched street art is in bloom all over Madrid this week thanks to floral creations by artist Raquel Rodrigo, who wraps thick string around a wire mesh form and then affixes it to urban surfaces.

Cross-Stitched Microbes by Alicia Watkins

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Rather than flowers and the other pretty things that are typically stitched within an embroidery hoop, artist Alicia Watkins puts the spotlight on nasty germs and microbes ranging from the measles to mad cow disease.

Pets in Pockets by Hiroko Kubota

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Adorable, strikingly realistic cats and puppies pop out of pockets in this fun clothing line by Hiroko Kubota called Go!Go!5. The project started when the Japanese embroidery artist’s son asked for a custom cat-adorned shirt, and took off from there. You can even have a custom pet portrait created just for you.

Embroidery Gone Wild by Danielle Clough

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Virtually anything that can be punctured or woven with embroidery floss is fair game for Danielle Clough, whose wildly unique creations have appeared on tennis rackets, shoes and fences.

Splotchy Embroidered Fashion by Olya Glagoleva and Lisa Smirnov

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What appears, from a distance, to be splotches of paint roughly applied to textured textiles turns out to be hyper-detailed embroidery in abstract forms. Russian artist Lisa Smirnova paired up with fashion designer Olya Glagoleva to collaborate on this fun project for the eco-friendly clothing line GO!

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In Stitches 45 Artistic Embroidered Cross Stitched Creations

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3Doodler Pro: New 3D-Printing Pen Works with Nylon, Wood & Copper

21 Sep

[ By WebUrbanist in Gadgets & Geekery & Technology. ]

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A new model of 3D sculpture-drawing tool from WobbleWorks operates using extrusion like its predecessor, but has expanded to allow users to print with new materials like wood, copper, bronze, nylon and polycarbonate.

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Users can draw shapes in the air which solidify as the extruded materials cool to create complex works of art and design.

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Each of the materials in the new range of offerings is combined with plastic to form a filament that can be heated and shaped as before. Now, however, these works can be modified post-production per the new material line (e.g. wood sanded or bronze polished).

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The new device features dials to control temperature and speed as well as a fan for cooling materials as they are deployed for rapid setting. Housed in a carbon fiber shell, the device can be used to draw scale models, household decor, creative crafts and fun sculptures. The gadget also comes with a portable battery pack.

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“When we started the 3Doodler journey back in 2013, we had world-leading architects telling us ‘I want to do this’,” said WobbleWorks co-founder and CEO Maxwell Bogue, referring to  “a quick wave of the pen in the air, with plastic solidifying in its wake. With new materials like polycarbonate, that dream is a reality.” In the future, technologies like this could be employed in medical and other fields as well.

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Drone Design: 14 Autonomous Gadgets Taking Tech to New Heights

20 Sep

[ By SA Rogers in Gadgets & Geekery & Technology. ]

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Their efficiency in the real world is yet to be established, but if these drone concepts and fully-realized creations are any indication, some of us could be looking at losing our jobs to robots in a range of industries over the net couple decades. From emergency responders to face-recognizing cameras, many of these autonomous flying gadgets take over tasks currently completed by pilots, construction workers, delivery drivers and videographers – but sometimes, they’re just for selfies.

Mercedes-Benz Electric Vision Van with Rooftop Drones

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Designed for last-mile delivery in urban and suburban contexts, the all-electric ‘Vision Van’ by Mercedes-Benz is the first of its kind to feature built-in aerial drones that enable multiple package deliveries in a single neighborhood at the same time. This theoretically reduces the number of vehicles in any given residential area and makes the delivery process totally emissions-free. The van also features blue LED lighting on the lower body and slide-out shelving units. It certainly takes windowless vans to another level.

ROAM-e Mini Selfie Drone

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What would have been seen as undeniably dystopian in previous decades is now packaged as a selfie assistance tool. The ROAM-e drone can be programmed with facial recognition technology so it follows you around like a puppy, snapping your photo or streaming live video all the while. Admittedly, the video function could be helpful, standing in for a camera operator in all sorts of settings and going where they can’t go (unless they’re secretly superheroes). The drone can be collapsed and folded to the side of a water bottle an two hours of swappable charging keeps the drone in the air for up to 20 minutes (for longer videos, switch out the battery.)

PowerEgg Drone

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A small egg-shaped device sprouts propellers and turns into a personal camera drone at the push of a button. The PowerEgg by PowerVision is clean, simple and easy to transport, featuring a 360-degree panoramic 4K HD camera, advanced sensors for indoor navigation and real-time, long-range video transmission. You can snag one yourself for $ 1,288.

Drone Ambulance by Argodesign

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Could this Drone Ambulance concept by Argodesign save lives by enabling more flying responders to hit the ground faster than a single helicopter? It’s about the size of a compact car and can land in much smaller areas, and a single pilot can manage an entire fleet of them remotely.

Trident Underwater Drone

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Explore bodies of water without ever getting wet thanks to the Trident drone by Berkeley robotics company Openrov. No scuba gear and training is required when you send this portable machine down into the water in your place, and it can dive to a depth of 100 meters, sending live HD video to the surface via a thin buoyant tether. It can be controlled from the surface by a laptop or mobile device. The Trident is set to hit the market in November.

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Drone Design 14 Autonomous Gadgets Taking Tech To New Heights

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Brutalist Reality: Tower Blocks Can Be Dystopia For Real-Life Residents

20 Sep

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

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Architecture enthusiasts might love the cold, harsh lines of Brutalist buildings, but for the people who actually live in the iconic London tower blocks and other modernist complexes for low-income residents, they can be – well – brutal. News that the tower blocks of Thamesmead in the city’s southeast quadrant are due for a pricey facelift drew a backlash from many Brutalist admirers, but it’s important to face the fact that these estates are far from the utopias they were promoted to be back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

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For many of us, the stark, institutional qualities of Brutalist architecture are part of the appeal. It’s where it gets its name, after all. But the same endless planes of uninterrupted concrete, stilted proportions and labyrinthine layouts that make for a visually interesting museum, monument or even a luxury residence for a well-to-do enthusiast don’t necessarily translate well to low-income apartments. In these environments – as exploited in the recent film High-Rise starring Tom Hiddleston – the gloom of the architecture itself can become oppressive, especially when it’s not properly cared-for.

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In a recent editorial at The Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslet notes that the dream of modern “concrete utopias” for working-class people broke down quickly once people were actually living in complexes like the Alexandra Road Estate, the Barbican, Trellick Tower and Balfron Tower.

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“The lifts broke down, the stairwells were awash in urine, there was poor lighting and scant green or communal space. A visitor to the Holly Street estate in east London, quoted by Dominic Sandbrook in State of Emergency, wrote of ‘dark passages, blind alleys, gloomy staircases,’ corridors that were a ‘thieve’s highway’ and people who would ‘stick to the lit areas and walk hurriedly.’ No kind of paradise, in other words, and hardly embodying the social progressivism claimed by postwar city planners.”

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But even beyond these issues, which could arguably be ascribed to just about any poorly managed low-income housing, are the sci-fi aesthetics when rendered all too real by daily life within. French photographer Laurent Kronental spent four years capturing the ‘grand ensembles’ housing projects in Paris, which are largely occupied by elderly residents, finding a fascinating juxtaposition of that crumbling modernist utopia and its marginalized occupants (top five images). “There is an unsettling paradox of life and void,” he says.

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Could a middle ground be found with better planning, or converting some of the structures to new uses? It seems possible, but so far developers have been brutal (sorry) in flushing out existing residents to transform structures like Trellick Tower and Balfron Tower to posh residences for higher-income buyers. Both are set to become luxury housing developments, thereby eliminating the egalitarian intentions of their creators, rather than making them more livable for a broader swath of the population.

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Creative Crosswalks: Artist Adds Color to Brighten Crossings for Students

19 Sep

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

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Part art project and part urban safety experiment, this series of Funnycross installations in Madrid have been positioned outside a cross section of city schools.

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Designed by Bulgarian artist Christo Guelov (images by Rafael Perez Martinez, the creative crossings weave diamonds, circles and other shapes into the visual language of existing horizontal wide lines.

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The brightly-colored interventions are designed to enliven the streets beyond conventional sign-posting while their eye-catching patterns are aimed at making the crossing points more visible.

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The artist also aims to raise larger questions about the role of color in cities, where infrastructure is often monochromatic, systematic and ultimately dull.

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“Opening up new horizons for human experience has always been the main source of creative energy, both in science and in art,” says guelov. “To inquire into something apparently non-existent or invisible to others and to provide it with real presence has always been the natural mechanism to generate usefulness for art objects.”

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Park Like a Girl: Women Frustrated with Pink “Ladies” Parking Places

19 Sep

[ By Steve in Culture & History & Travel. ]

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Sexism or security – why not both? Pretty pink women-only parking spaces show once again that best intentions can bring about unintentional consequences.

A curious fact about designated women-only parking is that many of the most obvious examples can be found in developing nations – societies not exactly known for egalitarianism and women’s rights. Travelers from First World countries who notice these “pink paradises” are often bemused by both the concept and the location, as is the case with Canadian blogger Maiya of Hungry Woman Eats who snapped the Ladies Parking section at the Gandaria City Mall in Djakarta, Indonesia.

Shanghai Surprise

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Women-only parking has come under fire, however, from (among others) women’s rights groups who are offended by the pink paint, cutesy signage and (in some cases) the extra width allotted to each space. Some men are peeved as well, including a netizen who posted on xinmin.cn “Isn’t it a kind of discrimination against men drivers? Some men may be less skilled at parking than women.” Hurt feelings aside, who’s taking the fall for the glossy floors of these women-only parking spaces at the Wandu Center in Shanghai, China? You try navigating that slick expanse on a rainy day, loaded down with shopping bags, and wearing stilletto heels.

One Tire Over The Line

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Without the benefit of a distance-shot, we’ll just have to assume this rather stark and (mainly) sexism-free Ladies’ Parking sign at a Brescia, Italy rest area denotes at least two parking spaces reserved for the fairer sex. We’ll refrain from commenting on the above driver’s parking technique, however, and make no allusions to their gender. Kudos to photographer Stefano Bolognini, who visited the location – that may even be HIS poorly parked car – in 2007.

Turkish Delight

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Why did ladies’ parking get the works? That’s nobody’s business but the Turks’… and business must be very good indeed at the MarkAntalya Mall in Antalya, Turkey. Not content with working up a couple of pink parking spots just for show, the mall has designated a whopping 450 parking spots for women, most of them selected for their convenient location to mall entrances. It’s “positive discrimination” in action – their words, not ours.

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Park Like A Girl Women Frustrated With Pink Ladies Parking Places

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Binational Megacity: Master Plan Designed to Span US-Mexico Border

18 Sep

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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Border City is being designed as a bridge between nations, a novel approach to creating international unity at a time when some politicians call for building walls. Proposed by architect Fernando Romero of the firm FR-EE at the London Design Biennale, this visionary project is to be developed along a region of border covering parts of Texas, New Mexico and Chihuahua.

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The plan is centered around an extant border crossing and aligned with other crossings in the area as well. It may sound far-fetched, but Romero is already negotiating with private land owners in the region as well as developers and investors. He hopes to make the city a reality within a decade.

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Romero believes our existing concept of borders is “primitive” and sees and urgent need to move past binary understandings of such divides. Already, many global centers of economic activity are centered not around cities but rather clusters of metropolitan areas, often along national borders.

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“This is a long-term vision, a vision that is not about building walls but about thinking more ambitiously about the mutual relationship [between two countries] and about what borders really mean between countries” said the architect. It is also a reflection of current reality, where there already “exists a very strong mutual dependency of economies and trades.”

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The urban plan consists of interconnected hexagonal-shaped grids, each with their own center and linked to existing transportation corridors and border crossings. If his proposal is fully realized, the city could even become a special economic zone (see also: Hong Kong and Andorra) that would enjoy semi-independent governance.

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Even without that kind of designation and semi-autonomy, however, there would still be big benefits to residents and businesses in terms of easy access between countries due to optimized transit and city planning. Many “twinned” border cities along the Rio Grande have already benefited from close ties despite extant borders, despite the lack of centralized and ground-up plans to optimize connectivity.

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“What you’re seeing here is the first binational city to be designed from zero between the United States and Mexico,” said Romero. “This is one of the most active borders in the world in terms of commerce and traffic of goods but also in terms of human activity and employment.”

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Vessel: Climb This Sculptural NYC Landmark to Look Out Onto Hudson Yards

17 Sep

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

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Unlike most of New York City’s standout architecture, this sculptural, almost alien-looking structure set to rise above the new Hudson Yards development will be open for the public to explore. Architect Thomas Heatherwick envisions this centerpiece as a way to take all of the visitors to the square and “sort of sprinkle them into the air,” encouraging them to interact with each other and with their surroundings in a new way.

Influenced by images of Indian stepwells, which use hundreds of flights of stairs to descend beneath ground level, this observation deck uses flights of stairs almost like building blocks to reach into the sky.

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The ‘Vessel’ design is made up of 154 interconnecting flights of stairs, with nearly 2,500 individual steps and 80 landings, and if you want to walk the whole thing, you’ll travel an entire mile while remaining in the air above Hudson Yards. It’s 50 feet in diameter at the feet, blooming into 150 feet at the top, and gleams appealingly in polished copper.

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The square at Hudson Yards is a collaboration between Heatherwick Studio and landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz, set to feature 5 acres of trees, perennial gardens, pathways, seating and a 200-foot-long fountain mimicking a flowing river.

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The square will be surrounded by a whopping 16 brand new skyscrapers containing nearly 13 millions square feet of office, residential and retail space. The largest development in New York City since Rockefeller center was built in 1939, it’s currently under construction, and estimated to be fully completed by 2023.

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“We put ourselves under this vast pressure because we felt, intuitively, that it should be something that you haven’t experience already before,” says Heatherwick. “It has no commercial job to do. It’s not based on electronics. It’s not based on advertising. it’s extremely interactive but it’s properly using your physicality. There’s something that is timeless about humans and our physicality. The project, in a way, is a big invitation. It’s just there to hopefully mean things to different people, to not tell you how you’re supposed to think. It’s like a platform for life.”

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Art Exhibitionism: Neighbors Threaten Lawsuit Over Museum Voyeurs

15 Sep

[ By WebUrbanist in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

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Visitors to the new panoramic rooftop deck of the Tate Modern are being told not to take pictures … and not just of artwork on display inside the galleries: voyeuristic snapshots inside neighboring apartments are now off-limits as well.

The neighborhood Neo Bankside apartments have threatened to sue the institution over this addition, an extension to the Tate designed by Herzog & de Meuron that opened earlier this summer. The problem: people are shooting zoomed-in photographs from the viewing platform then posting them online, exposing living rooms and bedrooms behind floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall glass facades.

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London politician Adele Morris calls it a “tricky situation” and notes that “residents were very distressed to suddenly discover they had no privacy at all in their homes. Nobody had anticipated that people would literally be hanging over the balcony and taking photographs of their rooms and then posting them on the internet.”

Architectural responsibility aside, solutions have been proposed to the situation. For the Tate, ideas like closing the deck or installing a screen of plants on it have been considered. On the Neo side, a film could be applied to the glass to deflect gawkers.

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One resident described the experience as “terribly intrusive” and said “I bought this apartment because of the view but now I have to keep my blinds down whenever the platform is open, otherwise you get people waving at you.If I had known what it would be like, I would never have bought a flat here. Now I think I would struggle to sell it.”

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Of course, there is arguably a ‘buyer beware’ component to this fiasco – living in an urban condo with extensive glass (particularly in a vertically-growing city like London) means making certain concessions to privacy. Those who live in glass houses may need to be aware of the risks they are taking – having a room with a view means that people can probably view you, too. Meanwhile, the Tate defends the design.

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“The viewing level is an intrinsic part of the free public offer of the new building, providing a 360-degree experience that is virtually unique to London,” said representatives of the museum in a statement. Realistically, if someone can sue over viewers in this case and place, it also opens the door to lawsuits between basically any set of urban buildings.

“Since the very first plans were drawn up in 2006 we have been through an extensive consultation and planning process, and have maintained an ongoing dialogue with local residents. At no point during this process were any concerns raised regarding the viewing platform. There is signage encouraging the public and visitors to use it respectfully and responsibly” (Instagram images by refik, ellarog and karen_1605).

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