The Remarkable Electric Vehicles Of Spijkstaal
What would our vehicle landscape look like without the ongoing inventions of the Dutch company Spijkstaal? Here we would like to shed a light on the collection of remarkable Spijkstaal vehicles produced since 1938. Spijkstaal has a tradition in producing electric vehicles for special use, which makes them a real visual attribution to the collection […]
Auto Check-Ins With Nike+ And Foursquare
If anyone can make wearable computing cool, it’s Nike, MobileBehavior claims. The world-famous sports brand created the famous Nike+, a connected running shoe which enables users to track their running progress and compile a “quantified self”. In order to take Nike+ to the next level, several designers make attempts to turn the service inside out […]
Blind Date Swingers Club
The Blind Date Swingers Club probably has the best name for a club night. In fact the BDSC is a Berlin-based club with an ever-changing location throughout the city. The night is a new clubbing concept based on sharing music. All guests have to bring a self-made mix tape which swings during the night and […]
Supermarket Skate Lane
After having introduced The Fun Theory (with the brilliant piano stairs), Volkswagen now comes up with another interesting action which speeds up life a little: the fast lane in the supermarket. The idea is simple: some shopping carts are pimped with a skateboard, providing some extra shopping fun for those who can’t stand people who […]
The Pop-Up Lunch Bag
Some time ago we already paid attention to the great and inventive Pop-Up Lunch initiative by New York-based Alexandra Pulver. She changes public urban places into temporary lunch spots by adding designed pop-up furniture. All her designs are easy to take and can be removed when you’re done. Here we show just another great example […]
Monaco's Vertical Infrastructure
Monaco breathes luxury. It is not only a tax avoider’s paradise and therefore home of many rich and famous, the city also has the most luxury infrastructure for pedestrians I’ve ever witnessed. Monaco is built on a steep mountain rising from the Mediterranean sea. In order to facilitate an easy way up and down, the […]
Genoa's Augmented Reality Light Signs
Yesterday we discussed the effort of cities to do something about too much commercial expressions in their streets. We concluded that most cities find it very hard to find a balance between prohibiting of private initiatives and earning money with advertisement spaces leased by the authorities themselves. Here is another brilliant example from Genoa. The […]
DIY Guerilla City Advertising
Cities often try to find solutions against the excess of advertising in public space. Shop owners and entrepreneurs are forbidden to have light signs or banners that affect the visual character of the public domain too much. Such happened in São Paulo for instance, where the mayor decided to remove all advertising in public space. […]
The Transcendent City
Richard Hardy, a recent graduate from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, has produced a couple of very interesting movies exploring the future of our cities. This one, featured on BLDGBLOG, is called the Transcendent City, and speculates on the question whether the conception of artificial intelligence has been a necessity in human evolution and if we […]
Addicted To Health
In contrast to what's mostly argued about light signs in public space, I truly believe in their attribution to the urban lay-out. Light signs give valuable information when navigating through the city. They simply tell us where it's nice, busy, and where to drink beer. In fact this is is how we all use them when standing on a crossing in an city you're unfamiliar with. We unconsciously tend to walk in the direction where light informs us about the activities behind the facades. Light signs mostly promise drinks, music, people and entertainment.
Subcultural München: Remake In Stop-Motion
We just want to share some great stop-motion videos with you. The animations are the result of a graduation project by students of the München Design School. The video’s, which we discovered via Urbanshit, represent the urban life in two streets in München. Both are very pretty and deal on an interesting way with different […]
A Dystopian Eco-Commune By Richard Hardy
The video The Eco-Commune by Richard Hardy is a short film exploring a dystopian vision of London in the near future. The economic meltdown of 2009 has left the financial district abandoned, allowing space for nature to reclaim its iconic structures, and a new community of scavengers to settle within its midst.
This Is Not An Architecture Theme Park
Did you ever sleep in a hotel with an architecture bookstore on your floor? In Marseille that’s possible. We stayed at Hotel Le Corbusier, to be found in Le Corbusier’s famous building Unité d’Habitation. The hotel on the third floor of the building is combined with apartments on the other floors. It’s a great design hotel […]
Make Art, Not Trash
In their battle for salary increase, the garbage men of the city of Amsterdam decided to strike in May. Their actions led to an entire city full of stinky trash. We were lucky that it wasn’t that warm, otherwise we should have hired some pied piper. In order to make the city a bit more […]
Revealing The Invisible City
Under the name of Invisible Cities, New York-based designers Christian Marc Schmidt and Liangjie Xia started a fascinating information mapping project that reveals the ever-expanding invisible layer of digital activity that is everywhere around us in the urban environment. The application, which was built using Processing, enables real-time mapping of activities on online social networks such […]
