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Abandoned McBarge: Floating Fast Food Restaurant in Ruins

14 Jul

[ By Steph in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

abandoned mcdonalds 1

Built in 1986 in the hopes of enticing diners who were gravitating toward more high-end fare, this now-abandoned floating McDonalds might just be the saddest-looking fast food ruin around. Known as the ‘McBarge,’ it’s been anchored in Burrad Inlet near Vancouver, Canada since its debut and served its last Big Mac in 1991.

abandoned mcdonalds 4

The idea was to show off the future of technology and architecture while also attempting to regain some of the market share it lost during an ‘80s trend toward bistros and boutiques.

Abandoned Mcdonalds 3

How, exactly, McDonald’s aimed to do that with a clunky-looking barge serving the same old menu is unclear. The chain dropped $ 12 million on the floating fast food joint and four other locations built just for Expo ’86 in Vancouver, thinking they could simply move the barge elsewhere if it didn’t catch on.

Abandoned Mcdonalds 2

For whatever reason, it was never reopened, and hasn’t budged from its apparently permanent spot in the inlet. Owner Howard Meaking proposed renovating it into the showpiece of a new waterfront development along the Fraser River in 2009, but the city council still hasn’t approved the idea.

A group called ‘Vancouver’s Worst Ghost Hunters’ took a tour of the abandoned barge, using a legal loophole to get aboard and filming the experience. Check out the (surprisingly vermin-free) interior in the video (Images via Wikimedia Commons, Ashley Fisher/Flickr Creative Commons).

[ By Steph in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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Floating Island: Self-Sufficient Home Produces Food & Power

17 May

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

floating island home vancouver

Powered by solar panels and sustained by a half-acre plot of farmland, these 12 connected buoyant platforms together form an autonomous off-the-grid dwelling for the couple that built the complex over the course of more than 20 years.

freedom cove architecture buildings

Located off the coast of Vancouver Island in Canada, Freedom Cove, as it is called, has everything one could wish from a dream home including pools, beaches, gardens, greenhouses, galleries, towers, workshops and guest rooms

floating island pools plants

Its creators, artists Wayne Adams and Catherine King, spend their time painting, writing, carving and making music as well as entertaining guests – visitors are welcome in the summer, but can only reach this remote location by chartering special boat taxis.

floating island complex platforms

Like the science-fictional floating city of Armada in China Mieville’s novel The Scar, each piece is tied together and seems to have been accrued almost organically over time.

floating island fruits vegetables

Living off the land (and water), the couple fishes for food off the sides of the platforms and grow their own vegetables and fruits in a half-acre farm area above. An array of solar panels provides energy with generators used for backup.

freedom cove cloating home

“A retired ballerina, Catherine maintains these floating gardens while Wayne’s incredible sculptural talents support them. The gardens host frequent visits from whale and bear watching groups in the area. Guests leave with a candle casted from the moulds of various sculptures. They live on a very meagre annual income. “

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

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2,300 Floating Flowers: Interactive Garden Makes Way as You Walk

01 Apr

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

floating plants experienced together

Responding to the movements of visitors passing through the space, this immersive work of installation art puts you in a private bubble in the midst of dense hanging garden – except this remarkable bubble that moves with you.

teamlab floating flower installation

The Floating Flower Garden by TeamLab, a Japanese art collective, is on display in Tokyo, having been extended due to popular demand. Suspended from above, the plants are pulled up or dropped down to both envelop visitors but also given them hemispheres of personal space amid the floating foliage.

floating flower art installation

The idea is to make each guest part of the installation, allowing them to separate from friends and experience it alone or to move in groups and see how the computer system responds in realtime.

floating solo alone forest

Meanwhile, the digital setup is not the only piece that changes things over time: “these flowers are alive and growing with each passing day. Each flower has a partner insect and the scent of the flowers becomes stronger at the time that the insect is most active, as a result the scent of the air in the garden space changes according to the time of day, morning, noon, and evening.”

floating walking bubble interactive

TeamLab believes technology elevates art, but their work also places into pre-modern knowledge and ancient ideas of spatial awareness originating in Japanese philosophy and religion, including Zen gardens. More from the artists: “When a viewer gets close to this flower-filled space, the flowers close to the viewer rise upwards all at once, creating a hemispherical space with the viewer at its center.”

floating garden immersive space

“In other words, although the whole space is filled with flowers, a hemispherical space is constantly being created with the viewer at its center and the viewer is free to move around wherever they want. If many viewers get close to one another, the dome spaces link up to form one single space. In this interactive floating flower garden viewers are immersed in flowers, and become completely one with the garden itself.”

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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Insane Yacht’s Floating Garage Doubles as an Indoor Pool

02 Oct

[ By Steph in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]

Floating Garage Mega Yacht 1

File this one under ‘billionaire toys that will simultaneously make you envious and give you a rage headache:’ the J’ade by CRN is the world’s first mega-yacht featuring a floating garage, which doubles as an ‘indoor’ swimming pool when not in use.

Floating Garage Mega Yacht 2

The hydraulic-operated bay of this ‘flooded garage’ makes it easy to store and access smaller watercraft (in this case, an 8-meter Riva ISEO speedboat) without the need for a tender lift, drying out in just three minutes. The doors can also be closed with water in the bay to create a protected ocean pool, potentially making open-sea night swims feel a lot less scary.

FLoating Garage Mega Yacht 3

FLoating Garage Mega Yacht 4

The 60-meter J’ade has room for 13 crew members and 10 guests, with an appropriately luxurious marble and rosewood interior, four decks, an outdoor diving table for up to 14 people, an audio/video entertainment system and a marble bar in the main salon with an aquarium backdrop. There’s also a hot tub on the spacious upper deck.

FLoating Garage Mega Yacht 6

Floating Garage Mega Yacht 7

Floating Garage Mega Yacht 8

“Ready for delivery to the billionaire owner,” this insane super yacht doesn’t have a public price tag, but it’s safe to say that only the wealth hoarders of the world can even afford to get a close-up look.

[ By Steph in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]

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Floating Neighborhood for NYC, or: How to Hover a Whole Megablock

09 Sep

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

NYC Floating Skyscraper 1

How do you fit an entire new neighborhood for 65,000 people, complete with offices, schools and streets, into the already congested and overdeveloped island of Manhattan without knocking anything down? Hover it. That’s the plan for Hudson Yards, the largest private development project in U.S. history, which will be erected on a super-strong platform over an existing active rail yard between Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen.

NYC Floating Skyscraper 3

The whole massive, incredibly heavy thing will barely touch the ground, resting on 300 concrete-sleeved steel caissons inserted 40-80 feet into the bedrock. Borrowed from bridge-building techniques, these supports will hold up a slab that will serve as the foundation of six skyscrapers, 100 shops, 20 restaurants, a school and 14 acres of parks.

NYC Floating Skyscraper 2

The 26-acre West Side Yard over which this development will be built is a critical part of New York City’s transit system, serving overflow Long Island Railroad trains during rush hour with 30 tracks and space for storage and maintenance. Luckily, its original developers in the 1980s realized that one day the space would be prime for redevelopment, and left a gap around the edges of the yard just big enough for structural members to be installed without interrupting traffic.

NYC Floating Skyscraper 4

Since the trains will still be active while Hudson Yards is under construction, actually getting everything into the ground will be a bit of a challenge. The builders plan to sink the caissons in sections and then attach them to 100-foot trusses whenever there’s a window of opportunity in between moving trains.

NYC Floating Skyscraper 5

Gizmodo got an early look at the plans and has a series of mesmerizing gif images of exactly how everything will come together. It’s an interesting example of developers finding space for something new in a bustling metropolis without disturbing existing functionality, and even arguably improving a lot that many find an eyesore. The final phase of the city’s High Line park, set to open later in 2014, will connect directly to Hudson Yards, which should be complete by 2024.

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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Over Board: Sink or Skate on This Amazing Floating Ramp

02 Sep

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Floating Skate Ramp 1

It’s hard to imagine a more idyllic place to practice skate tricks than a sculptural wooden ramp floating on the crystalline waters of Lake Tahoe. In some of the photos, it almost doesn’t look real, the skaters captured in mid-air seeming jarringly out of place agains the surface of the water.

Floating Skateboard Ramp 4

Skateboarding pro Bob Burnquist got the opportunity to build the ramp in 2013 when Visit California asked him to think big, coming up with an idea that might seem a little nuts at first but was actually achievable. Working with Miami art director Jerry Blohm, Burnquist created a wooden structure on a floating base, featuring a half pipe, a quarter pipe and a 45-degree ramp.

Floating Skate Ramp 2

Floating Skate Ramp 4

The fact that it sits entirely upon the surface of the water is part of what makes it seem so unreal. It’s built on a steel frame with weighted riggers that keep it from moving around too much in the water. It took 30 man hours and 1,250 screws to finish the 7,300-pound structure.

Floating Skate Ramp 3

FLoating Skateboard Ramp 5

You might be thinking, “Isn’t there a danger of skating right off the edge?” Yes, there definitely is, even for professionals – and that’s why Bob had a wet-suited snorkeler waiting to retrieve his skateboard anytime it went into the water during this shoot.

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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Floating on Dry Land: 17 Derelict Houseboats Find New Home

05 Aug

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

ceuvel project lifting place

Located in the north of Amsterdam, the recently-opened De Ceuval (conceptualized by Space&Matter) is a radical redevelopment project featuring homes, offices, restaurants and gardens, all accessed via elevated winding platforms that connect renovated houseboats.

houseboat space matter diagram

houseboats on dry land

A former shipping wharf, this brownfield site is being transformed from a polluted wasteland into a temporary ten-year creative haven, all designed to revitalize and rehabilitate the land it occupies and leave it cleaner at the end of its lease.

houseboat winding wood pathways

houseboat brick wall exterior

The complex is made up of an array of formerly-floating homes that are no longer seaworthy but can still be fixed up and find a second life on land. As PopUpCity reports, “The imaginatively retro-fitted houseboats that make up the creative quarter are all placed around a winding bamboo walkway and the surrounding landscape consists of plants that clean the soil.”

houseboat brownfield site renovation

houseboat axon diagram

An incredible array of sustainable strategies are being employed in the development, both for the benefit of the site and to educate the public, showing off “new technologies that can transform how we produce and consume resources and public services in cities. Throughout the site, solar technologies will convert energy from the sun into heat and electricity. Green roofs and water collection systems are designed to collect, purify, and store rainwater for when it’s needed. Sanitation systems will extract energy, nutrients, and water from the waste produced for on-site food production. A network of sensors provide information on performance and user behavior.”

houseboat renovated interior design

houseboat gathering people party

One of the central features of the program is the Ceuvel Café, designed as a gathering and eating space for tenants and visitors alike, featuring “lectures, workshops and tastings. In the future, it will also be possible to buy locally produced vegetables [and attend] guided tours and events. Ceuvel Café will also act as a stage for artists, musicians, theat[rical performers] and filmmakers.”

houseboat finished pedestrian diagram

aerial view micro town

The entire complex is meant to serve not only the designer and architects who occupy it, but the environment around it, using green tactics of all kinds including “high-tech systems like sensors, monitoring devices, solar panels, and high-efficiency electric boilers. Low-tech systems also play an important role, including biological waste processing, water filtration, smart insulation methods, vegetation, and solar tubes that provide more natural light to indoor spaces.”

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

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Floating Beach: Recreational River Barge Campaign for NYC

05 Jul

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Manhattan City Beach 1

Manhattan is packed full of world-class restaurants, a vast array of shops, a beautiful nature preserve and virtually everything else required to satisfy the modern urbanite – except for a beach. That might seem obvious; it’s an island built up from swampland, cut off from the sea. But that doesn’t mean beach-craving creative thinkers can’t come up with a way to incorporate one into America’s most densely populated city. City Beach NYC is a project seeking to build a floating beach park on a barge in the Hudson River.

Manhattan City Beach 2

Starting with a reclaimed barge, the project would create a two-level destination with shops and restaurants tucked beneath a curving, sand-covered platform overlooking the water. You can’t exactly swim in the Hudson, but the park would have misters for cooling off, as well as a large water feature that mimics the sound of the sea, drowning out the city cacophony.

Manhattan City Beach 3

Changing rooms, a surf shop and a marine science lab would also be incorporated into the 260-foot park. The plan is to permanently moor it on the west side of Manhattan, with the possibility of renting small personal watercraft like kayaks and paddle boards.

Manhattan City Beach 4

The creators of City Beach NYC are currently raising the first round of funding on Indiegogo to hire a team to develop the operational plan; additional milestones will build scaled 3D models, fund the services of architects and engineers, and gain permits. They’re hoping that the people of Manhattan want a beach badly enough to come together and donate. Sure, you could just cross a bridge and go to Coney Island or Brighton or Rockaway, with access to the actual ocean, but a floating beach with views of the city would certainly be a novelty.

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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Floating Architecture: 16 Dramatic Cantilevered Structures

13 May

[ By Steph in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

Cantilevered Structures Main
Jutting out over cliffs or hovering over impossibly small foundations, these 16 dramatically cantilevered structures seem like they’re about to take off into the sky. With designs that appear to defy the laws of physics, these balancing homes, museums and mountain overlooks extend beyond the usual boundaries to take in majestic views.

Balancing Barn by MVRDV

Cantilevered Balancing Barn 2
Cantilevered Balancing Barn 1

Dutch architecture firm MVRDV has made a name for itself with wholly unexpected, often gravity-defying structures, and Balancing Barn is a prime example. The glittering metal-clad building looks like someone started to push it off a cliff and gave up, seeming to balance precariously on the edge of the hillside. The structure is 98 feet long (30 meters) and is actually no barn at all, but a home designed to take in the views of the surrounding forest.

Hemeroscopium House by Ensamble Studio & Anton Garcia-Abril

Cantilevered Hemeroscopium House 2

A swimming pool juts out over the grass at the highly unusual Hemeroscopium House by Ensamble Studios. Made of prefabricated concrete built from three massive I-beams, two segments of an irrigation canal and two steel girders, the house took just a week to assemble.

Top of Tyrol Viewing Platform, Austria

Cantilevered Top of Tyrol Overlook

The sculptural Top of Tyrol overlook by Aste Architecture is a platform that juts 27 feet over a ridge at the pinnacle of Austria’s Mount Isidor. The oxidized metal structure was designed to blend into the environment as much as possible, seeming to disappear into the rocks during warm weather and meld with the snow in winter.

View Hill House by Denton Corker Marshall

Cantilevered View HIll House

Rather than placing the second story parallel to the first, as is most common, Australian architects Denton Corker Marshall chose a perpendicular approach for the aptly named View Hill House. The architects envision the isolated building as ‘land art,’ a shape that can be reduced to two sticks placed on top of each other and ‘dropped’ onto the landscape.

Five Fingers Viewing Platform, Austria

Cantilevered Five Fingers Viewing Platform

Five individual platforms stick out of this overlook in the Salzkammergut area of the Austrian Alps, each with a different way to experience the view. One has a picture frame at the end, another has a glass floor, the third has a trampoline, the fourth features a round hole in the floor and the fifth offers a telescope.

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Floating Architecture 16 Dramatic Cantilevered Structures

[ By Steph in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

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Floating Finnish Sea Sauna: Relaxing Multistory Steam Boat

02 May

[ By WebUrbanist in Technology & Vehicles & Mods. ]

floating sea sauna finnland

Northern Europe is known for its sauna culture, evolved to combat the cold and gather people in the dark of winter, but this seaworthy version adds a mobile twist to a longstanding tradition.

floating sauna rooftop deck

floating sauna at night

Built from recycled wood, floating on salvaged plastic barrels and powered by an outboard motor, the Saunalautta was created by friends who have since decide to rent out the structure.

floating sauna interior space

floating sauna to go

More than just a nautical sauna, onboard amenities include a barbecue as well as tents and hammocks for overnight adventures and relaxation outside of the super-heated central space.

floating sauna recycled barrels

floating sauna trampoline test

The crow’s nest at the top provides a lookout point and diving platform as well as shelter for the cooking space located directly below. They have even tested putting a trampoline on the second story, but safety concerns won out in the end.

floating sauna upper levels

floating sauna docked port

More from Architizer on the long cultural history of saunas in the region: “The chilly Nordic country of Finland is known for its deeply-rooted sauna culture. Dating back to as early as the 16th century, saunas became a popular way to beat the dangerously frigid winter temperatures. In a country with around 5.5 million inhabitants, there are more than 2 million saunas scattered about the land — that’s an average of one sauna per household. In Finland, these heated refuges are not thought of as a luxury, but rather, a necessity to protect people against the cold. Before modern healthcare, most Finnish mothers even gave birth in saunas, as the warm rooms were thought to have hygienic, purifying qualities.”

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Posts Tagged ‘floating’

Abandoned McBarge: Floating Fast Food Restaurant in Ruins

Floating Island: Self-Sufficient Home Produces Food & Power

2,300 Floating Flowers: Interactive Garden Makes Way as You Walk

Insane Yacht’s Floating Garage Doubles as an Indoor Pool

Floating Neighborhood for NYC, or: How to Hover a Whole Megablock

Over Board: Sink or Skate on This Amazing Floating Ramp

Floating on Dry Land: 17 Derelict Houseboats Find New Home

Floating Beach: Recreational River Barge Campaign for NYC