NYC BigApps: The Final Results
Last October I wrote about some initiatives that aim to improve the so-called user-generated city. One of those initiatives is the New York BigApps competition, set up by the City of New York asking for innovative applications to make city life more transparent, accessible and accountable. Today the organization announced the winning project — WayFinder NYC. […]
Mobile Bus Bars
Today I stumbled upon a nice article by Rebel Art about a wicked, unusual mobile bar in Berlin that consists of four old vans. According to its inventors, “Wientjes’ mobile bar is a cloak-and-dagger pub that deals with gentrification quite self-ironically”. Four furniture lorries drive around the city, each equipped with one quarter of a […]
Prefab Rooftop Swimming Pool
Just a piece of architectural inspiration which I found via Matarua’s Tumblr blog Obsidian Bureau. It’s a swimming pool on top of the Hemeroscopium House, a residence in Spain designed by Ensamble Studio last year. It must be extremely exciting to swim here. According to Matarua, “the cantilevered lap pool is actually one giant precast […]
Green Connections In A Nursing Home, Amsterdam
On Bill O’Reilly’s conservative TV show, The Netherlands are often ridiculized when talking about the way soft drugs policy is organized here. First of all, O’Reilly doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but that’s obvious. Second, hold on Bill… it’s even worse here in Amsterdam. Not only adolescents are smoking their way through life, even […]
Caravan Hitchhiking Project
Friday’s Dutch late night news show had nothing better to report about, so an item passed about a Dutchman who’s hitchhiking around Europe with a trailer. Tjerk Ridder (the man on the picture) has a caravan, but no car to transport it. On January 3rd he left Utrecht with his caravan hitchhiking to the European […]
Build An Upgradeable Future With Grid Beam
Grid Beam is a building system which enables anyone to construct a variety of objects quickly and easily without expensive wood shop services or equipment. All of the Grid Beam system is based on re-usable standard beams of steel and wood with repeating hole patterns on all four sides. This offers its users an infinite […]
Arrow, Crane
To inform the world about their (free) Ovi Maps mobile navigation software, Nokia built a house-sized, interactive signpost in the form of a dynamically rotating electronic LED screen, and hung it next to London’s Thames river, 50 meters up in the rainy sky. The gigantic structure allows passers-by to send in a location via text or email […]
Anteroom
The idea behind the Anteroom series is so brilliant and simple. Vancouver-based artist James Nizam projects a big size pinhole experience into rooms of abandoned, soon-to-be-demolished houses. He then made photos of the nostalgic sceneries. (By the way, check this nice pinhole photo series on Flickr.)
Soundpiece: A Permanent Audio Experience In Rotterdam
One of these days Soundpiece will be installed in downtown Rotterdam. Soundpiece is a major permanent open air sound installation, meant to transform the Schouwburgplein into a permanent cultural platform for audio-related culture. According to its curator David Dooghe, the idea behind Soundpiece is to create a central place in the city where different cultural […]
Hungry Hungry Eat Head
Hudson-Powell and Joel Gethin Lewis created a new site-specific play experience for a big screen in the center of Edinburgh entitled Hungry Hungry Eat Head. The greatest thing about the project is that there’s no specific goal or reason, apart from the fact that it is fun. Passers-by are given the opportunity to perform in […]
Emily, Will You Marry Me?
Derick Childress spent more than three nights at the Clarion Hotel in Raleigh, North Carolina, to prepare a wedding proposal for his girlfriend Emily. The project he finally came up with must have been a succes, and we therefore hope to congratulate Derick. He made his drawing using light writing technique. A light source is […]
Spacecraft 2 #2
Last Friday I paid attention to Spacecraft 2 by showcasing some of the more than 150 projects covered in the book. Under the slogan 'more fleeting architecture and hideouts', authors Robert Klanten and Lukas Feireiss present a wide range of spatial projects that focus on a flexibilizaton of urban lifestyle. In my previous article I outlined the first three chapters of the book. Today I'll focus on the second part (sections 4-6) by providing a few more inspiring projects.
AR Ink
“I know, you’re probably sick of AR this and AR that by now, and the technology is only in its infancy, but this?” Today I bumped into this article on Grinding about a new development in the world of Augmented Reality. Buenos Aires-based software producer ThinkAnApp managed to develop a form of ink that is […]
Spacecraft 2: More Fleeting Architecture And Hideouts
In 2007 we fell in love with Spacecraft, a fantastic book published by Gestalten which presents inspiring “projects that meet the changing spatial needs of our modern lifestyles and that are simultaneously expanding our current understanding of architecture”. For that reason we were very happy to hear about the launch of Spacecraft 2 last year. […]
Parisian Disco
For the occasion of the Nuit Blanche Festival, Michel de Broin made the largest mirror ball ever to render the starry sky of Paris. His atmospheric structure was suspended from a construction crane 50 meters above Jardin du Luxembourg and transformed public space in the French capital into a dreamy nightclub.
