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Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

Street Smart: Theft-Proof Bike Comes With Recovery Service Guarantee

01 Jun

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Even the strongest bike locks aren’t totally foolproof, but when locks fail or risky storage options don’t pay off, the makers of this smart bike will send a recovery team after your ride. The ‘SmartBike’ by Amsterdam-based bike specialists VanMoof comes with a lot of cool features, but this anti-theft guarantee is definitely the most valuable of them all, and they’ll even buy you a new one if they can’t find it once it’s stolen.

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Available in 3 speed in grey or 8 speed in black, the VanMoof SmartBike features GSM anti-theft tracking with ‘Peace of Mind Service’ free of charge for the first two years of ownership. If a thief manages to make it past all the built-in anti-theft parts, like tamper-proof nuts and screws, the GSM cellular info will activate, allowing the recovery team to find it even if it’s inside a building. They promise to get it back within two weeks, with the last mile of tracking powered by a “top-secret” locating technology.

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But theft isn’t the only special feature on this bike. Designed to be the ultimate city ride, this one comes with a smartphone app, and can be unlocked with a tap of your finger on your phone or the bike’s dashboard. The software will automatically check via your smartphone’s Bluetooth that it’s really you before it unlocks your bike, so freeing it takes seconds. The app also offers personalized direction and weather for your commute and ride stats, and the bike has head and tail lights that automatically turn on and off. All electric components are pedal-powered, so there’s no charging required.

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The bike is now available for pre-order starting at $ 1098.00, with free shipping.


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Rainbow Connection: Huge Mural Spans 200 Houses on Hillside in Mexico

01 Jun

painted town after

Representing an enormous collective effort, this remarkable mural manages to look complete from a distance while, upon closer inspection, brightening 209 houses occupied by 452 families, impacting the lives of 1808 residents of this hillside community.

painted town before

painted town hillside

Even more remarkably, the color selections for different sections (totalling over 200,000 square feet of paint) were worked out in conjunction with those occupying the houses of Palmitas, who were asked about their favorite colors and included in the design scheme. The project has been credited with reducing youth violence and local crime rates while creating jobs for the area.

painted town tour

painted wall house closeup

The group orchestrating this massive undertaking is called Germen Crew, self-named after germs, the seeds of ideas and art. Led by Mibe, a street artist from nearby Mexico City, the group sees itself as much as collection of community organizers and facilitators as artists or creators.

painted town mexico

For them, residents provide multiplier effects strengthening project, process and outcome and making for a much different endeavor than murals made under the radar by individuals. In turn, the artists used a simple pallet of conventional and replicable paint colors, making it both easy to maintain but also enabling those in the neighborhood to turn doing so into a collaborative activity.

painted town steps

Like the Favela Project in Rio or Blue Town of Morocco, there are secondary benefits for the locals as well, including projected increases in tourism. In the case of the latter, the strange site of a single-colored town brought in close to 100,000 visitors in the six months following its completion. This project was completed with support from regional governments as well as the national government of Mexico


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Terrapattern: Satellite Image Search Engine Matches Similar Places

31 May

terrapattern shipyard

A powerful tool for artists, designers and researchers, Terrapattern lets users seek out similar-looking locations from an aerial perspective, finding connections and patterns between disparate landscapes and built environments.

terrapattern culs de sac

The premise is simple: start with a single place, be it a park or street, stadium or shipyard, then let the tool work its magic. The results are uncanny: colors, textures and shapes tied together by computer vision and clever algorithms. The broader use cases are infinite, but specific ones are possible too, like: a user could look for abandoned ships floating around the island of Manhattan.

terrapattern abandoned ships

The system works by looking at its subjects in layers, looking for identifying features like curves, edges and shadows that indicate height. In a way, its task is similar than some pattern recognition software since it is not called upon to identify the subject, just match it.

terrapattern street grids

“For our purposes,” explain the creators, “‘interesting’ features are anthropogenic or natural phenomena that are not only socially or scientifically meaningful, but also visually distinctive—thus lending themselves ideally to machine recognition. Examples could include things like animal herds, methane blowholes, factories, destroyed homes, or logging roads. Many other patterns await discovery.”

terrapattern buses

The system draws on data from OpenStreetMap, combing through hundreds of thousands of images looking for something like whatever you submitted. Researchers can use tools like this to monitor natural habitats or make archaeological finds, but ordinary people can employ this tool to create art or make inquiries about the cities they live in. Even a quick tour around the engine reveals emergent macro-patterns from individual tiles, some worthy of wall art treatment.

terrapattern golf courses

Terrapattern’s creators are indeed excited for more non-standard and unexpected uses: “Terrapattern is ideal for discovering, locating and labeling typologies that aren’t customarily indicated on maps. These might include ephemeral or temporally-contingent features (such as vehicles or construction sites), or the sorts of banal infrastructure (like fracking wells or smokestacks) that only appear on specialist blueprints, if they appear at all.”


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Fresh & Modern Showcase: 15 Unusually Beautiful Home Designs

30 May

modern houses aviators villa

These real-life residences go beyond the cool-looking-concept phase to prove how diverse, innovative and unexpected houses can be when architects tailor each one to specific needs and surroundings.

Blooming Origami House by IROJE KHM

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Set on the edge of Seoul’s Bukhansun National Park, this polyhedral structure by IROJE KHM Architects features an angular facade designed to protect two interior courtyards from the eyes of neighbors and passersby so the inhabitants can feel like they live in nature. The roof points mimic the surrounding mountains and transitional spaces planted with grasses and trees make it hard to tell where the outdoor areas end and the interiors begin.

Sky Bridge House by ONG&ONG

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Two separate halves of this dramatic concrete home in Singapore by ONG&ONG are connected by a glass sky bridge, dividing the social areas of the home from the bedrooms. On the ground floor, a courtyard with stone steps dotting a shimmering reflecting pool offer another way from one volume to the next, stretching all the way up to the sky to draw in sunlight.

Transparent Zig-Zag House by Yuusuke Karasawa

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You probably don’t want to live in ’S-House’ by Yuusuke Karasawa unless you don’t mind trucking up and down stairs all day, and don’t really value privacy. This visually stunning and highly unusual modern home design encases a series of zigzagging platforms and stairways in glass, segmenting what would normally be a two-story space into five levels. These mezzanine levels contain all the normal living spaces you’d expect in a fully functional residence. These photos were taken right after its completion, so it would be interesting to see it furnished and in use.

Blobular S-House by SDeG

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s house

It looks like a bunch of space-age modules that got lost on their way to the next Star Trek set got lost and then stacked on top of each other in urban India. SDeG Architects wanted the home to feel as if the inside is cushioned from the harsh elements and noise of the outside, giving it a thickened concrete envelope in a bulbous texture to create a temperature-regulating air gap. The facade also disguises an upper-level swimming pool.

Spiked Sundial House by Daniel Libeskind

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libeskind sundial

Daniel Libeskind’s 18.36.54 house is named for all of the planes, points and lines of its mirror-finish bronzed stainless steel exterior, which was conceived as a spiraling ribbon. Two jutting pointed extensions create the loook of a sundial when viewed from certain angles, and the reflective surface seems to shift and change every hour and every day of the year as the sun hits it.


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We Are Not Amused: 15 Creepy Abandoned Theme Parks

30 May

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Once delightful domains of sight and sound, these creepy abandoned theme parks now moulder away in silence attended only by shadows and memories.

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What a dump… er, no, not this charmingly manicured abominable snowman in particular but the entire abandoned Miracle Strip Amusement Park in Panama City Beach, Florida.

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The park closed in 2004 and “enjoyed” a whole half-decade of unhindered deterioration until the site was finally demolished in 2009, as disturbingly documented by Flickr user Steve Sobczuk. You’ve gotta admit, the Dante’s Inferno ride never looked spookier than it did in its dying days.

No Hue

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Ho Thuy Tien is an abandoned water park and aquarium located in Huong Thuy, a district of Hue, Vietnam. Urbex explorers like Courtney Lambert of A Great Perhaps had best navigate those slimy water slides with care – the park’s aquarium once housed a trio of very hungry crocodiles who were abandoned along with the rest of the park in 2013. Fear not, animal lovers: thanks to Lambert alerting PETA and the WWF, the crocs were moved to a wildlife park in northern Vietnam.

Petrified

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Prehistoric Forest Amusement Park in Michigan’s otherwise pleasant Irish Hills opened in 1963 but by the 1980’s, changing trends in recreation and tourism saw visitors and revenues enter an irreversible slide. We’d like to say an asteroid gave the struggling tourist trap its death blow but the truth is far less dramatic – the park was sold by its original owners in 1997 and closed for good in 1999.

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In Prehistoric Forest Amusement Park’s heyday, as many as 70 fiberglass statues of dinosaurs, mammoths and the odd Neanderthal Man (kidnapped by students in 1985 and deposited in front of Saline High School) dotted the park’s forested grounds. A few still stand today; most have been damaged or destroyed by vandals. Kudos to KE Photography & Video (whose video of the abandoned park in winter can be viewed here) and Flickr user Wolly Shambler for capturing and posting the images above.

Darkest & Disturbingest Africa

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The former Umoja Children’s Park is located in Chake-Chake, a town on the Tanzanian island of Pemba, just north of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean. If the eerie, rusty caterpillar ride looks familiar, it’s the same kind of “Happy Worm” kiddy ride as one reputed to be in the infamous Pripyat amusement park near Chernobyl, Ukraine. You know the one… THIS one:

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Joyless

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One of six Joylands in the USA, the former Joyland Amusement Park in Wichita, Kansas, operated from June 12th, 1949 through 2004, and then again for a short time under new ownership in 2006. The park suffered extensive vandalism during almost a decade of neglected abandonment, a sad fact reflected in the images above.

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By the summer of 2015, the park’s last remnants (the roller coaster, to be exact) had been dismantled and the site bulldozed flat as the Kansas prairie. Flickr user Krisi Metzen snapped these scenes of a joyless Joyland in October of 2013.


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Pier Park: Undulating Landscape to Hover Over Hudson River in NYC

30 May

nyc floating park

Following the success of the hovering High Line, an elevated park set on re-purposed rail tracks, New York City aims to pull off another park space in an unused space, this time at Pier 55 floating along the waterfront near the Chelsea endpoint of the High Line.

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pier gardens

Designed by British architect Thomas Heatherwick, also behind a garden bridge project for London, the park will be supported on pier-like columns that branch out to hold up the green space above. This new park is as spread out and open as the High Line is linear and streamline, also offering experiences at different elevations compared to its relatively flat cousin.

pier wandering

pier pressure

“The pier will be a place of discovery, where visitors can wander and wonder, finding something new around every corner: places to lounge, eat lunch, or just lie in the grass,” said Heatherwick Studio. With its open spaces and various levels, the park is well-suited to hosting events and performances in the open air.

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pier space

pier side

The project is being funded by Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg, who have pledged personal money and set up a non-profit to fund it. After a series of lawsuits and delays, the architects have now been given the go-ahead by the US Army Corps of Engineers and Hudson River Park Trust.


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Lane-Spanning Airbus to Drive Right Over Car Traffic in China

29 May

land airbus solution china

A Chinese transportation company behind a lane-straddling bus design (which passes over lanes rather than occupying them) is moving from scale to full-sized test models this summer. The plan is to introduced fully-functional models of these “land airbuses” to (or: above) the streets of Beijing over the next few years.

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retro landliner design

The inspiration for this seemingly-novel design dates back to a 1960s “Landliner” proposed for New York City that would likewise ride on side rails adjacent to roadways. Cars would simply pass beneath the buses uninterrupted, moving faster than the bus in high traffic and allowing the bus to move over traffic jams. Such a system would be a fraction of the cost and effort compared to subway systems or even raised railways.

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In China, these new buses would hold up to 1,400 passengers each and cruise at up to 40 miles per hour, which sounds slow until you consider they do not have to stop for traffic. Running on electricity, these designs would reduce the need for conventional buses and cut polluting emissions. As a cyberpunk bonus: cars passing beneath these vehicles will see digital simulations of the sky above.

landair transit stations

For now, Transit Explore Bus is constructing a life-size model in Changzhou. This will allow real-time testing with actual cars, intersections and infrastructure, facilitating further refinements and eventual street deployments. For a country with serious pollution and traffic problems, this kind of solution could be just what is needed – for each new super-bus, 40 ordinary buses can be taken off the roads.


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Missing Pyramid: Louvre Installation Makes Iconic Monument Disappear

27 May

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In a work of large-scale urban camouflage, French street artist JR has made the iconic glass pyramid standing outside the Musée du Louvre disappear. At least, it seems to disappear, when viewed from one very particular angle, thanks to a massive wrapping printed with a photograph of the museum’s facade. Known for paste-ups on a monumental scale as well as digital projections on architecture, JR transforms the 11,000-square-foot pyramid by I.M. Pei, which became a Paris landmark after its installation in 1989.

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The illusion convincingly stands in for the entrance to the Louvre palace, despite being rendered in black and white, and matches up perfectly with the facade. Before the Pyramid became publicly accepted as an integral part of the Louvre, it was controversial, with some critics arguing that the clash of architectural styles was an affront to what the museum itself represents. In camouflaging it, JR takes us back to the days before it was built, leaving us with the distinct feeling that something is missing. The display will be in place through June 27th, 2016.

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“Making the Pyramid disappear is a way for me to distance myself from my subject,” says JR. “The feud between traditional and modern tastes in art and architecture is nothing new. The Pyramid, Buren’s columns at the Palais-Royal, and the Pompidou Center – all of these caused controversy. My work is about transmitting history to better understand the present, and find echoes with our own times. What happened in the past is part of a broader context that can still have relevance for today.”

“By erasing the Louvre Pyramid, I am highlighting the way Pei made the Louvre relevant for his time, while bringing the Louvre back to its original state. The Pyramid is one of the most photographed French monuments. I am redirecting its energy, because people are going to have to move around it. They are going to look for the best angle to get the full impact of the anamorphic image, and really make the Pyramid disappear.”


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World’s First 3D-Printed Office Building Unveiled in Dubai

27 May

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Printed layer by layer from the ground up using a special cement mixture, this rapidly-produced curvilinear structure is a functional example as well as proof of concept, illustrating the architectural potential of 3D printing.

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The entire 2,700-square-foot structure was built for a relatively modest $ 140,000, requiring just one operator to oversee the printer plus an array of electricians, plumbers and detailers to outfit the completed shell for power, water, lighting and telecommunications. The modular machine assembled to do the printing measured approximately 120 by 40 feet and stood 20 feet high, able to build while sitting in one place.

3d interior curves

3d interior

The new building will (aptly enough) be home to the Dubai Future Foundation, providing space for offices, workshops and events. Global architecture firm Gensler designed the building in partnership with structural experts from Thornton Tomasetti and Syska Hennessy.

3d lounge meeting area

3d future foundation

Complex curves on the interior and exterior were both considered part of the visual design but also a way to showcase the possibilities of 3D printing technology.

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3d bakc yard

“We announce today the opening of the first 3D-printed office in the world, after less than one month of launching Dubai 3D printing strategy which showcases a modern model of construction. This is an experience we present to the world on utilizing future technology in people lives. It also represents a new milestone for the UAE as a global leader in strategic achievements,” Sheikh Mohammed said.


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Minimalist Tattoos: Elegant Body Art Drawn With Just One Line

27 May

single line art

Tattoos are generally lauded for their intricacy and complexity, but these bold, beautiful and simple alternatives become artfully different thanks to a simple trick: the use of a single continuous line.

one line lips

single line tattoo

Made by Mo Ganji, a Berlin tattoo artist, each of these works (if you look closely) starts and ends at a single pair of points, no matter how they appear at first glance.

one line koi fish

one line hands together

The zigs and zags required to make this approach work are what signal the viewer to make such a closer inspection in the first place.

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one line bike

Despite the simplicity and consistency of the method, the results are surprisingly varied, from very geometric shapes of human-made objects to organic curves of human and other natural forms.

one line tree

one line conifer

In some cases, pointillist patterns are added to add texture, creating leaves, shadows or other details, but kept intentionally non-linear so as not to detract from the primary lone-line drawing. (via Colossal)


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