Tag: Built

Nail House: Holdout Building Had Highway Built Around It

[ By WebUrbanist in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

China is full of strange stories of so-called ‘nail houses’ – homes of people who refuse to move to make way for a large development project. Still, this one was particularly unique: its owners held out while a whole major motorway was constructed on all sides.

Situated in Wenling, its owner Luo Baogen refused the compensation deal offered to him and the owners of over 400 nearby properties. After a full year of waiting with his wife as they were hemmed in by highway, they finally accepted an improved offer from the government and moved.

In another similar situation, owner and occupant Wu Ping refused an offer (one out of nearly 250 in that case) to move, and found herself surrounded by a sunken pit as shopping mall developers began excavating prior to constructing a new shopping center. Structures in this situation are dubbed ‘nail houses’ because, like a nail wedged deep into a board, they can be stubborn and difficult to remove.

[ By WebUrbanist in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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June 21, 2013
Cool Colors: Rainbow Igloo Built of 500 Translucent Blocks

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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.

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.

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).

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.

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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March 25, 2013
Architecturally Literate: 13 Built Alphabets Spell Design

[ By Steph in Design & Furniture & Decor. ]

For those in love with letters, typography is – or should be – virtually everywhere, from furniture to office buildings. These 13 designs indulge typophiles with three-dimensional typefaces in functional objects including hand fails, bookcases, chairs, pavilions and fun concept architecture.

Alphabet Building, Amsterdam by MVRDV

Architecture firm MVRDV has given their Alphabet Building a facade of 24 unusually-shaped windows that spell out most of the alphabet (curiously, I and Z are missing.) The building provides office space for small to mid-size creative agencies in Amsterdam, with a series of spacious loft-like units.

Negative Space Alphabet

Berlin-based photographer and illustrator Lisa Reinermann captured the entire alphabet in the negative space between buildings in Barcelona. “I loved the idea of the sky as words, the negative being the positive. If I could find a ‘Q’, other letters should be somewhere around the corner.”

3D Font by Bank Associates

A single neon tube can be manipulated in three dimensions to look like any letter of the alphabet in this project by Adam Slowik of Bank Associates. Just turning it in various directions to face the camera produces the effect.

Bauhaus Concept by Chris Labrooy

A typeface and its architectural namesake are united in this Bauhaus concept, a digital illustration by designer Chris Labrooy.

Jumble of Letters Shelf by Pieter de Leeuw

Haphazardly jumbled together, the letters of the alphabet form a creative shelf unit that can hold books and other objects in its random niches.

Handrails, Shelves & Tables by Andrew Byrom

Typography enthusiast Andrew Byrom creates his own three-dimensional typefaces with physical objects, including shelves, chairs, tables and metal hand rails.

Alphabet City by Scott Teplin

Letters make for interesting building shapes in designer Scott Teplin’s ‘Alphabet City’ series of illustrations. Each letter provides a residential, commercial or industrial function, and the shapes work better than you might imagine – even W and Q. See them all at X-ing Books.

[ By Steph in Design & Furniture & Decor. ]

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March 11, 2013
Works of Impossible Architecture Built from Found Photos

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

Like dreams while you are having them, these buildings make perfect sense subjectively and yet no sense objectively. They are seamlessly integrated, yet structurally surreal … and, like a dream when waking up: the details are hard to recall when you look away.

Jim Kazanjian searches through tens of thousands of photographs in search of the perfect bits and pieces for each otherworldly creation. Some of the results seem almost plausible, while others stretch the limits of gravity, structural integrity and even the imagination.

Per his artist statement at 23Sandy (where you can also buy prints): “Jim Kazanjian’s surreal landscapes offer phantasmagoric visions of a where-is-this world, defined by impossibly complex architecture and M.C.Escher-esque black-and-white graphics.”

“Inspired by the imaginary realms of cult author H.P. Lovecraft—whose wild, cosmic short stories set the mold for much of the 20th century’s best science fiction—Kazanjian’s aim is to redress the “misunderstanding that photography has a kind of built-in objectivity…to defamiliarize the familiar.”

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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March 4, 2013
Instant Abandonment: Faux Desert City Built to be Bombed

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Normally, urban design is done with death and destruction in mind – but prevention, rather than facilitation, is the focus. This unique mini-city was made to be destroyed, pummeled into the dust by repeated drills by armed forces.

Built by the United States military in the remote Nevada desert, the Urban Target Complex (R-2301-West aka “Yodaville”) is the target of strafing, sniping, rocketing and bombing (above image by Lance Cpl. Zac Scanlon).

The terrain has a realistic layout patterned after settlements in the Middle East, and the structures themselves – mainly constructed from shipping containers – are stacked up to four stories high.

As Ed Darack writes for Air & Space Magazine, from his experience following troops into the faux action, ”The artillery and mortars started firing, troops advanced toward the target complex, and aircraft of all types—carefully controlled by students on the mountain top—mounted one attack run after another. At one point so much smoke and dust filled the air above the “enemy” that nothing could be seen of the target—just one of the real-world problems the students had to learn to cope with that day.”

BldgBlog asks what we should make of mysterious military architecture, often hidden from public view and thus veiled from scrutiny or critique. “So what, for instance, might something like a Yodaville National Park, or Urban Target Complex National Monument, look like? How would it be managed, touristed, explored, mapped, and understood? What sorts of trails and interpretive centers might it host?”

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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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WebUrbanist

February 1, 2013