MapAttack Turns The City Into A Real-Life Pac-Man Board
MapAttack is a (free) real-time location-based smartphone game that turns the city into one big Pac-Man-like gameboard. The idea behind the game is smart yet extremely simple, which makes it very easy to play. Two teams battle for supremacy over a physical territory by capturing digital points on the gameboard. The gameboard, in this case, is […]
Buy Yourself A Piece Of Architecture At The Cityscapes Gallery
How much would you pay for an original model by Rem Koolhaas or a signed sketch of a building designed by MVRDV? The Cityscapes Gallery is a platform that sells original architectural models and sketches as artworks. So it's possible to buy yourself a little piece of architecture here!
A Temporary Lego Church
The architects of LOOS have built a church from giant Lego-like blocks in the city of Enschede, the Netherlands. Their so-called Abondantus Gigantus is a temporary pavilion in public space that was meant to be a meeting point and stage for performances and exhibitions during the Grenswerk Festival. The Lego blocks that form the central construction elements […]
The Urban Apartment As A Pinhole Camera
Stenop.es is an experimental and dreamy visual project by the Paris-based photographers and camera men Romain Alary and Antoine Levi. The project uses a primitive technique: the Camera Obscura. Applied to an original scale, the project is based on projection from the outside to the inside. Two layers are merging while the landscapes become the […]
The Speed Book By Aram Bartholl
Some time ago I wrote about the question "How to democratize art?". Aram Bartholl's work is maybe one of the best examples of how to engage a large group of people with contemporary art. Bartholl meticulously tore down those boundaries built around the image of the 'artwork' as something far from our everyday lives, converting people into active participants of his projects. Gestalten dedicated one of its latest publications to him. The Speed Book is the first comprehensive monograph of Bartholl's projects, with essays on his work, an interview and AB News #1 and #2, two supplements conceived in the shape of a magazine.
Small Deposit Donations In Urban Space With Pfandring
Our German colleagues of Urban Shit featured this great urban intervention that will help the city to get cleaner. Paul Ketz’s Pfandring is a ring-shaped installation that’s attached to street bins. His urban hacking initiative offers people who drink a beer with their friends on the street the opportunity to leave the deposit bottle in the ring, instead […]
Blue Whale Warns Against Floods
With water peaking in November last year, Thailand was affected by floods in a severe way. The floods were accompanied by an overwhelming stream of information that was impossible to narrow down. ‘Roo Su! FLOOD’, a collaboration of friends, juniors and seniors at the Faculty of Communications at Chulalonkorn University, decided to do something about […]
Here It Is: The World’s Longest Park
Marseille-based artist Gaëlle Villedary is the woman behind Tapis Rouge!, a grass carpet installation that runs through the entire French town of Jaujac. According to Designboom, this awesome piece of landscape architecture is comprised of 168 rollers of greenery spanning approximately 1,400 feet with a weight of 3.5 tons. It trances pedestrian avenues into the city […]
Little Factory On The Dutch Prairie
In the Netherlands new business parks pop up everywhere. At the same time 16% of the office buildings stand empty. The Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman came up with this pretty remarkable project that criticizes this phenomenon, as well as the architectural styles at business parks. In the Dutch city of Drachten he built a Little […]
Temporary Architecture Now!
Cologne-based publisher Taschen is known for its picture-rich books that focus on art, design and architecture. In 2011 it launched Temporary Architecture Now!, a publication that sets itself apart from the other architecture books in Taschen's collection.
How The City Became A Planter
Over the last years we stumbled upon many initiatives that focus on turning small urban objects into pretty micro gardens. It has even become pretty hard to think about an urban object that has not yet been transformed into a planter. Not only bigger objects like houses, office buildings, trucks, trains and even buses need […]
The World’s First Vertical Forest
Last Autumn, websites like Inhabitat and TreeHugger reported about Stefano Boeri’s plans for a stunning vertical urban forest in Milan. A great and definitely inspiring idea! But don’t we often see these kinds of urban fantasies that never leave the drawing board? Not this time — construction has already started. This Big City has posted pictures […]
Fuck Yeah OSB
Last year London-based Carl Turner Architects transformed an old barn in Cambridgeshire into an inspiring guest house, studio and meeting place.
Are New York, London And Tokyo The Real Unhappy Cities?
How's big city life? On its Meaningful Innovation website, Philips has published some useful data visualizations about how people feel in different cities in different parts of the world.
Bus Top Gardening
Are there any urban objects left that do not have an urban garden on their roof? I thought about the city buses before I stumbled upon this 2010 project. New York-based designer Marco Antonio Castro Cosio came up with a graduation project at the NYU, that claims to increase the amount of green spaces in […]
