DxO’s new camera, the ONE, offers an appealing combination of features and some highly impressive technology. Designed to be used in combination with Apple smartphones, the ONE is built around a capable 1 inch type sensor and bright 32mm equivalent lens. DPReview’s technical editor has been digging into the specifications, and talking to DxO’s resident scientists to find out what makes the ONE tick. Click through for his analysis
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Offices & Commercial. ]
Retrofitting an existing roof, this project has turned the top of a commercial loft in Long Island City into a working urban farm with close to 1,000,000 pounds of soil supporting tens of thousands of square feet of growing space (able to produce hundreds of tons of produce annually). Efficiently designed, projects of this kind can produce food in cities with 20 times less land and 10 times less water than conventional fields.
Working with Acumen Capital Partners and the building managers of Brooklyn Grange, designers from Bromley Caldari Architects, this redesigned roof was conceived of as both a space for retreating from the city but also a functioning laboratory for urban agriculture and source of fresh local greens for surrounding neighborhoods.
A series of tightly-packed rows grow a variety of crops, all packed in between existing rooftop features including a water tower, elevator and HVAC system accessories. New York City is home to an increasing number of converted rooftop farms but this is the largest in the area to date and one of the biggest on the planet.
The rest of the 300,000-square-foot building below is a seven-story loft housing businesses in media, architecture, film, fashion, printing, design and other creative industries.
As part of the $ 10,000,000 renovation project, energy-efficient windows, exterior lighting and signage were added to the structure in addition to plumbing, electrical and elevator retrofits.
Opening this year in Newark, this 69,000-square-foot space will grow 2 million pounds of pesticide-free produce each year, turning an old steel factory into …
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The statistics for this incredibly successful indoor farming endeavor in Japan are staggering: 25,000 square feet producing 10,000 heads of lettuce per day …
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Even for difficult-to-surprise native New Yorkers, the hidden NYC that Alex MacLean captured in his new book might be something completely new.
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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Offices & Commercial. ]
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A team of five photographers has created what they describe as the world’s highest resolution panoramic photograph by stitching 70,000 digital images together to create a 365 gigapixel photograph. Recorded using a Canon EOS 70D with the EF 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens on a 2x converter, the picture took 35 hours of shooting over the course of 15 days just to capture. Read more
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]
Designed to provide 1,000 square meters of recreational space across four floors, this multistory structure bends and curves to accommodate bowls and ramps for skaters who can move vertically between differently-shaped levels.
The proposal by British firm Guy Hollaway Architects is to be constructed in Kent as part of a larger project to recreate the area and bring in new and diverse activities. The structure’s semi-transparent skin will allow views in from the surrounding sidewalks and streets.
Climbing walls and boxing rings are interspersed through the floors and aimed at a variety of ages and experience levels and activity types. The ceilings of each floor are informed by activities above, making for a rich series of building sections.
While the design is still in development, it is both impressive but features a series of missed opportunities as well, including the chance to at more vertical integration through multistory tubes, ramps or pipes. In its current iteration, skaters use side ramps to traverse floors but more sectional complexity could add new elements that truly take full advantage of the height of the building.
256 plastic barrels support this multistory marvel, which stands up and out even amid a sea of buoyant and stilted architecture in this fishing village …
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Out of four recent proposals for a radical overhaul of Penn Station in New York City, this concept is far and away the most dramatic.
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We see conceptual modular designs of this kind all of the time, but rarely such exquisite real-world proof of how fast construction can be in the age of …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]
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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]
One of the biggest challenges to building with concrete is the material’s propensity to crack both while it dries and in the years that follow, making this self-fixing solution an incredibly powerful application of bacterial biotechnology.
Developed by Dutch scientists Eric Schlangen and Henk Jonkers, this new biocement has been in development for years but is now first the first time a critical part of a real work of architecture and the results are extremely promising. As reported by CNN, one can already witness the self-healing process in action on the side of this lifeguard station, a test structure subject to highly varied sunlight and weather conditions.
Concrete is generally created with portland cement, aggregate and admixtures – this just adds one more key ingredient to the list: a mixture of bacteria and capsules of calcium lactate. Activated by water when cracks form, the former ingests the latter to produce calcite that in turn fills in gaps. Unlike algae-fueled bio-architecture that needs to remain alive and active, these bacteria can lay dormant for years without water or oxygen, lying in wait until called upon for an unpredictable future repair job.
Architects have long had to work around this critical limitation in concrete, creating separations between spans and avoiding sharp corners that crack and break. This technology could open up new possibilities for infrastructure as well as building designs, impacting everything from parking structures and sidewalks to skyscraper foundations and walls. Similar solutions are also in development, including a variant in development by MIT that uses sunlight as the activation mechanism rather than moisture, but this is the first full-scale application of such a self-healing material. Between these developments, concrete-printing and concrete-deconstructing robots, the future looks bright for this traditionally gray material.
Whether the building is a bare-bones warehouse or five-star hotel, demolition is an equally messy business – but perhaps it does not have to be. What if …
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Future buildings could be made of artificial human bone, hemp, bacterial byproducts or concrete that absorbs greenhouse gas emissions and lasts thousands of …
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Featuring 100,000 square feet of smog-filtering surface area, this structural facade will break down harmful oxides in sunlight to improve air quality all …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]
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[ By Steph in Gaming & Computing & Technology. ]
“Why play a game when you can live it?” ask the creators of The Void, the world’s first virtual reality theme park slated to open in Utah in summer 2016. Gamers will soon be able to immerse themselves in 4D environments, with all sorts of eye-popping effects layered onto real spaces. Imagine: first-person shooters meet paintball or laser tag – this is the future of gaming.
The flagship Pleasant Grove location will feature sixteen 60-by-60-foot rooms with different themes for different experiences, and they even plan to change these virtual stages every three months so repeat players never get bored.
Want to find out what it feels like to wander around in the jungle during the Jurassic age, or explore a truly terrifying haunted house? Zoom around skyscrapers in a flying car? The Void basically enables you to star in your own action movie, alone or with a group of friends, in a VR experience that far surpasses anything you could do with a headset on your couch.
Each stage not only has custom architecture and sculptures to make it feel more real – you’ll also feel blasts of air and shifts in temperature, take in scents and strap yourself into motion simulators for activities like flying. Individual rooms hold up to 10 gamers at a time who can work as a team or play against each other. The Void has created a virtual reality headset of its own design, called Rapture HMD.
You won’t necessarily have to fly to Utah to experience it, either – they’re planning on opening other locations around the world.
In this new video, Technical Illusions, the company behind CastAR, a hybrid augmented and virtual reality headset, shows off a series of amazing everyday …
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Virtual reality, like the hovercar, iis taking longer than expected to progress, but we’ve made some very large leaps in the right direction. Here are examples.
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Feel the wind on your face and smell the pine sap of the forest as you gaze down at the scenery far below – without ever leaving the ground. …
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[ By Steph in Gaming & Computing & Technology. ]
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[ By Steph in Design & Furniture & Decor. ]
What about this chaise lounge makes it worth the equivalent of approximately ten middle-class suburban homes, or 5,000 Ikea couches? The Lockheed Lounge by Marc Newson set a record for the world’s most expensive design object created by a living person after it sold for more than £2 million (over $ 3 million USD at today’s exchange rate.)
One prototype, four artist’s proofs and ten editions of the seat have been created since the Lockheed Lounge’s design in 1990, and it’s perhaps best known to people outside the design community for being prominently featured in Madonna’s 1993 video for the song ‘Rain.’ It’s this particular lounge that got snapped up for millions – over the phone, no less – when it recently went up for auction.
The aircraft-inspired furniture design was an immediate success when an early version of it debuted at a Sydney gallery, and it’s been in demand among the world’s wealthiest design collectors ever since, especially since the shape was refined to become smoother and more free-flowing. It’s made of thin aluminum plates welded together and riveted from the inside. The core is made of fiberglass-reinforced plastic.
The sale cements Newson’s status as one of the world’s highest-grossing designers. His works collectively brought in over £8.5 million in April alone.
Ranging from thousands of dollars to millions of dollars here’s a look at some of the world’s most expensive toilets.
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The World’s most expensive houses include a high-rise residence that takes up an entire skyscraper, to a tree houses larger than your residence.
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While many individuals desire multi-functional and space-saving furniture, many cities want quite the opposite: an object that one can sit on but that foils …
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[ By Steph in Design & Furniture & Decor. ]
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Three photographs taken by Joseph Nicephore Niépce, a Frenchman born in 1765, will soon be exhibited by the National Media Museum. These particular images, which their creator called ‘heliographs’, were taken during the 1820s, and are part of a set of 16 image located throughout the world. All three images are said to be amongst the earliest of photographs ever taken. Read more
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
[ By WebUrbanist in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]
Boasting 5 miles of trails, ramps and obstacles, this cavernous subterranean space sits 100 feet underground and totals 320,000 square feet. The wide-open footprint and copious mounds of dirt, able to be endlessly reformed into new types of terrain, lend themselves to this particularly fitting form of adaptive reuse.
Located in Louisville, Kentucky, and open as of yesterday, the Mega Underground Bike Park gains a number of advantages from being far below the surface, including a relatively consistent temperature and protection from wind, rain and other weather (without the typical costs of constructing a building to house these activities).
Originally a limestone mine, there were plans to create a highs-security business park in the space – while there are a few businesses actually occupying other parts of the underground complex of caves, the big idea fell through, replaced by a plan to create zip lines, challenge courses and now the biggest interior bike park on the planet.
Currently the space offers 45 trails with differing degrees of of difficulty as well as clever additions like cargo containers turned into ramps and overpasses. Most of the materials needed, though, were already in place – it was mainly a matter of lighting, accessing and shaping the space.
From their website: “Are you ready to experience a one of a kind Underground Bike Park? Over 320,000 square feet including over 45 trails, Jump Lines, Pump Tracks, Dual Slalom, BMX, Cross Country and Single Track all in a former limestone cavern 100 feet sub-surface. Enjoy the comfort of our 60 degree temperature year round. Come experience what the buzz is all about. You simply won’t believe what you see.”
Well known for grand gestures and huge installations, Christo has outdone himself once again in this latest work made of air, light and wonder.
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Designed to break records held by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Superconducting Super Collider built (and abandoned) in Texas features fourteen miles …
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Using fiber optics as “remote skylights” to pipe illumination down from the surface, this bold plan aims to transform a century-old trolley station …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]
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[ By Steph in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]
You might wonder why anyone would pay money to gaze at collections of dog collars, toilets, packets of ramen and mammalian penises in jars, but one thing we’ve learned from this list of weird museums is that absolutely anything can be collected and put on display. These unusual exhibitions range from the bizarre and macabre, like a Peruvian museum of brain abnormalities, to the oddly specific, like Massachusetts’ Museum of Burnt Food.
On the busiest street in Reykjavik, you’ll find a museum filled with shelf after shelf of animal penises in jars. Iceland’s Phallological Museum started as a private collection in 1974 when the founder received a bull’s penis as a joke gift, and it took off from there. “Some of my teachers used to work in summer in a nearby whaling station and after the first specimen they started bringing me whale penises, supposedly to tease me. Then the idea came up gradually that it might be interesting collecting specimens from more mammalian species.
Run by a social service organization that works to protect human rights, sanitation, waste management and social reform through education, New Delhi’s toilet museum showcases the 4,500-year history of toilets around the world, including one disguised as a bookcase and King Louis the XIV’s royal throne, upon which he was said to defecate during court sessions. Sulabh International has been credited with bringing sanitation to India’s poor, and founded the museum to send a message about how important proper disposal of human waste is.
The names and addresses of over 16,000 women around the world are taped to delicate little samples of hair hanging from the walls at the Avanos Hair Museum, a bizarre treasure tucked into the caves of Turkey’s surreal Cappadocia beside the owner’s pottery studio. The first lock of hair went up in 1979, supposedly as a memento for founder Chip Galip, starting a bit of a trend in which women voluntarily left their locks behind. Every year Galip chooses ten hair samples at random and invites the women to come back for a pottery workshop and to stay in his traditional guest house for free.
The history of ramen noodles and Cup Noodles is celebrated at the Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum in Osaka, a free exhibit with recreations of the ramen inventor’s workshop and thousands of cups and packets of instant noodles on display. There’s also an instant ramen workshop where visitors can make their own noodles.
Get up close and personal with tapeworms, mites and other parasites at the world’s only parasitological museum. Located in the Meguro neighborhood of Tokyo, this museum has over 45,000 specimens in its collection, including the world’s longest tapeworm at 8.8 meters. You can even get yourself a parasite-themed souvenir.
Travel isn’t required to view some of the world’s weirdest collections, like the Museum of Barf Bags or every airline spoon ever created – these 13 are online.
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The pyramids of the Louvre shine in hard candy, the Guggenheim gleams in solid sugar, and gingerbread makes for convincing concrete on Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi …
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Cappadocia’s cave homes have made it famous, but there is another, less well-known attraction there: a weird museum with 16,000 samples of human hair.
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[ By Steph in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]
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