Attention HB&A Architects!!!

Please design this setup into all future buildings, for the purpose of freaking the pants off of people.


http://view.break.com/384045 - Watch more free videos

Tank. Limo.

LINK

The Year 2000

One from a set of 1910 illustrations that imagined the year 2000.

link

via BoingBoing

U.S. Americans Like Such As

This is very important commentary on mapping, and like such as.

The Real Bat Cave

Check this out. Super-rich homeowners in London are building extensions to their houses underground to avoid conservation regulations on their old homes. Huge, underground, 50 ft. deep extensions for pools, living space, and garages.

One home in north London even has a bespoke chute covered in a special slippery paint, which enables the owner, who loves swimming first thing in the morning, but hates the fuss of dressing, to step out of bed and slide straight into the water a couple of storeys below.

Link

BLDGBLOG Roundup

Aerial Conversationalists

Rotating Liverpool

Ant Urbanism

"Beneath the Neon"

An amazing article about a book about the huge underground flood control tunnel system under Las Vegas and the weird, creepy subculture that lives in them.

Link

Tornado Power

"...once the tornado achieves enough energy, there would be very little to stop it from escaping."

Inhabitat » COULD TORNADOES POWER YOUR HOUSE?

Stilt City

This is the same building, before and after the ground was raised up around it.


The link below leads to a fascinating description of how the entire town of Galveston was raised up. In 1900, a hurricane and associated flooding killed 6000 people, prompting city leaders to ambitiously propose that the whole town be elevated. So, they propped all of the buildings in town up as much as 17 feet, and filled in the ground underneath with silt.

Pruned: Galveston on Stilts

Serious Linkage

This is a long list of interesting, military-related links. Some are a little bit conspiracy-minded (like the hubbub about HAARP, pictured above).

Subtopia: Peripheral Milit_Urb 17

Friday Funny

This is from the Onion. It's a joke.

Shitty Neighborhood Rallies Against Asshole Developer

Home Inspection Nightmares

Link

Cool Fence Bench

Link

Roundup

How to tie useful knots. Link

The Architecture of the Pantheon coincidentally (?) echoes the arrangement of our solar system, even though it was constructed much early than that understanding. Link

Some of Manhattan was built on bombed London. Link

A long tradition of gardening in war. Link

Tunnel House. Link

Hyper Kids - A Renewable Resource

Harnessing the power of restless kids to pump water.

Pruned: The Hydrological Playground

Street Level Views on Google

Google released a new feature today: Street level views in some locations. If you go to Google Maps and zoom into Denver, Chicago, New York, or a bunch of other cities, you'll see a button at the top for Street Level Views. Basically, you can walk down any street in downtown Denver, seeing the street trees, storefronts, with street names layed over the top of it. It's definitely worth a test drive.

Incidentally, the company that provided the imagery, which was collected while driving a truck equipped with a 12-sided video camera capturing a spherical, georeferenced viewpoint, licensed the technology to the military before this new partnership with Google. See the press release here.

Good stuff for map nerds.

Transportation Experimentation

It turns out that the collapse of a freeway in San Francisco has been an ideal opportunity for planners to study transportation patterns and develop different conclusions from the same data.

Conclusion A: People haven't had too much trouble, mainly because the interstate system wasn't that congested to begin with, and there are (thankfully) lots of other highways and alternative routes in the Bay Area.

Conclusion B: People haven't had too much trouble, mainly because they've switched to public transit in huge numbers. A reduction in the number of cars by 10% can bring a drastic reduction in congestion. (via Planetizen)

Maps as Art

Map of the Sacramento River, weaved into Airport Carpet

Smart Shrinkage

Youngstown, Ohio (where we've done a bit of work) is dealing with a backwards, bizarro problem: trying to plan out how to best shrink the size of their city, emptying out old neighborhoods and converting them to green space.

Link

via Planetizen

Architecture in Google Earth

Google has added two layers to their Google Earth interface from AIA. Check out the video above or find the layers in Google Earth. If you don't have Google Earth, you have to get it.

Link

Up Next: Planners Liability Insurance

The State of California is suing a county because their General Plan doesn't take Global Warming into account.

Link

Via
Planetizen

ArBITAT

A neat place to browse through the work of your favorite Architect, take a tour through your favorite building, and see what else is going on in the world of Architecture!!!


http://www.arbitat.com/

Test Post

Q: How do architects in the jungle stop monkeys from swinging from trees onto the roofs of their buildings?


A: With very good de-tailing.

Round Up

Thank Brian for the Picture

Wire-frame version of a subaru
Via Make:Blog

Map a trip on Google Earth in real time
Via Lifehacker

Caffeine Database
Thanks Brian

Version Control

This happens to us occasionally in planning: You give a document out for review, but someone forgets to turn on "track changes", and you want to know what changes were made. Here's an article that talks about a couple of strategies that would beat a manual word by word comparison:

Link

Via
Lifehacker

Related
Diff Doc - Another option

People like to drive

Interesting, unsurprising article about how people like to drive because it's generally cheaper, faster, and more convenient.

"If you want to know why so few people use mass transit, meet Sue, a college administrator in Minneapolis. If anyone would use transit, Sue would. She's single, she lives in a condominium, and she can afford any additional out-of-pocket expense. She could use her city's Hiawatha Line, a light rail route newly completed at a cost of $715 million. But she doesn't, although she feels guilty about it. That's because her car gets her where she needs to go. Faster."

Link

Via Planetizen

New Urbanism on Former Barracks in Canada

" At Currie Barracks, “every house is within four minutes’ walk of a bus stop and within two minutes of a park,” Hackman points out. Fourteen buildings and landscapes with “heritage” designations are to be preserved. Six airport hangars, some of which have been used as sound stages and other film-related production facilities, will probably be removed."

Link

Via
Planetizen

Related
"New Urbanism: It's in the Army Now"

Engines

Radial Engine powered motorcycle

Tank engine powered Mustang

Jet engine powered VW

Gasoline engine powered LP turntable

Pulse-jet powered shopping cart

Washing machine engine powered kid's tractor (and others)

Wood-burning turbine engine

Paper V-Twin Engine

Rocket powered car legend

A crazy helical engine design (and other good stuff)

Kalzip

Amy sent along some information about this roofing material. Looks like pretty amazing, versatile stuff, and a good deconstructable, recyclable product too.






Link

Star Wars Inspiration

Dan brought this to my attention:


previous post

San Francisco Federal Building

"The building may one day be remembered as the crowning achievement of the General Services Administration’s Design Excellence program, founded more than a decade ago to remedy the atrocious architecture routinely commissioned for government offices."

Link

10 websites

Planetizen, a great source of news and commentary on every different kind of planning and a site I visit just about every day, recently did an article featuring their favorite 10 websites for architecture, design, and planning. Looks like a good list for lazy friday afternoon surfing.

Link

What You Missed From the Planners Roundtable Last Week

We talked about planning, of course. Lots of very professional, relevant, multimedia-enhanced talking about planning and productivity.

But we also discovered some interesting facts about Scooby Doo.

1. The show was originally called "Who's S-S-Scared?", and featured a rock band called the Mysteries Five and their dog named Too Much.

2. The producer got the name Scooby-doo from Frank Sinatra's "Do-be-do-be-do" at the end of "Strangers in the Night"

3. Casey Kasem is the voice of Shaggy.

4. The movie "Scooby Doo, Pirates Ahoy!" has recieved great critical acclaim from Tasha's kids.

Link

Open Source Architecture

A new network has sprouted up for architects to share, review, remix, and recombine designs with a worldwide community.

"The Open Architecture Network is an online, open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design. Here designers of all persuasions can:

• Share their ideas, designs and plans
• View and review designs posted by others
• Collaborate with each other, people in other professions and community leaders to address specific design challenges
• Manage design projects from concept to implementation
• Communicate easily amongst team members
• Protect their intellectual property rights using the Creative Commons "some rights reserved" licensing system and be shielded from unwarranted liability
• Build a more sustainable future"

The Open Architecture Network

Via
Planetizen

Related
"Wired" Article: "Framing Open-Source Architecture"

Fun Friday - Dynamically Balancing Walking Robot

Check out this robot. He walks like a 1 year old.



Via
Neatorama

Defensive Design

This brief article from the New York Times does a good job of describing how "temporary" security barriers and bollards are morphing into a new design style.

"Four years after the American invasion of Iraq, this state of siege is beginning to look more and more like a permanent reality, exhibited in an architectural style we might refer to as 21st-century medievalism."

Link

Fun with Google Maps

Cruise Missile over Utah

Capsized Cruise Ship

The Matterhorn in Hi-Res

The White Houses

"Googled By the Enemy"

Effective Meetings

Paul, this one's for you.

This article says it all in the first paragraph:

"If you called the meeting, do your %*?@?! job"

Link

Via:
Lifehacker

Related:
How To Run a Meeting Like Google

Great Sites

BLDG BLOG

Planetizen

Design Observer

Lifehacker

Anybody else have any that you keep going back to for great Architecture, Planning, Design, GIS, web-design, productivity or other news? We'll put them all in the sidebar over there.

Transit Walking Sheds

So, we had "watersheds" which led to "viewsheds" and now "transit sheds". What's next? Maybe businesses will start replacing the word "market" with "dollarshed." Citizens will start referring to the local Safeway and King Soopers as their "groceryshed."

Some research has found that people will walk a bit further than the previously assumed 1/4 to 1/3 mile.

Link

Via:
Planetizen

It turns out, we're utopians after all

This guy's kinda a zealot, but he's a smart zealot, and it's good to see that perspective.

"...the arrogance of architects who believe that, because they can design a house for one family, they can design an entire urban area for a million families. That is something like gardeners believing that, because they can grow a rose bush, they can design an entire ecosystem for a million-acre forest..."

Link