Category: BLDGBLOG

The structural engineers over at Hyder Consulting have announced that they are planning what will be, by an overwhelming margin, the world’s tallest skyscraper, coming in at double the height of the Burj Dubai – or very nearly one vertical mile. The firm has “confirmed that the tower would be located in the Middle East region,” we’re told, “but would not give any further details.” So is it just a media stunt?
I decided, nonetheless, to alter an old BBC diagram about the world’s tallest buildings to give myself a sense of what this might mean, size-wise; the results appear above. I have to assume that the building’s actual profile will not resemble what I’ve created… but you never know.
Note the comparative size of the Empire State Building.

(News item spotted on Archinect – where we’re reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile High Illinois project).

[Image: A submission to London’s recent Bat House Project by Andrew Brown, Gareth Jones, and James Falconer; view larger].

The above project, by Andrew Brown, Gareth Jones, and James Falconer, proposes “a home for bats in London.” It was produced for the Bat House Project, the stated aim of which was to highlight “the potential for architects, builders, home-owners and conservationists to work together to produce wildlife-friendly building design. It connects the worlds of art and ecology to encourage public engagement with ecology issues.”
This is pretty old news, of course – but I just saw this particular design yesterday, and I have a thing for architecture delivered from the sky, dropped off by what appear to be military helicopters.
I’d like to see a short, inspirational video in which a dozen U.S. families are standing in a cul-de-sac. Everyone’s hair is whipping to and fro – and there are helicopter gunships flying overhead, dropping off complete Toll Brothers homes. The houses are ready for inhabitation, complete with pots and pans, pillows and sheets. There are five bedrooms, and three and a half baths. Wives are hugging wives; men are cheering.
The slow motion thud of helicopter blades fills all audible space.
The video ends.

[Image: 3d-printing new deltas into existence, courtesy of New Scientist].

If we could divert certain segments of the Lower Mississippi River into subsidiary canals, we’d “create up to 1000 square kilometres of new wetlands between New Orleans, Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico, forming a vital storm surge buffer against hurricanes,” New Scientist reports.
It’s prosthetic deltas as the future of landscape design:

The proposed diversion would cut breaches into a levee some 150 km south of New Orleans, Louisiana, and 30 km above where the river empties into the Gulf of Mexico. With the diversions in place, flooding would cause the river to empty into shallow saltwater bays on either side of the river, releasing sediment-rich water to produce new deltas.

As Robert Twilley of Louisiana State University phrases it: “You keep the sediment within the coastal boundary current that keeps it running along the shoreline, whereas now it gets ejected into the Gulf.” This thus constructs “new delta land” instead of uselessly shooting all that sediment over the continental shelf – and that newly aggregated land, like a literal land bank, will help protect New Orleans and its surrounding parishes from future hurricane damage.

[Image: Courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation].

But I’m left wondering if this might not also imply some new form of 3D printing, using river sediments as ink and machine-controlled deltas as printheads: you open certain valves, gates, and locks according to predetermined schedules, in some massive inhabitable printhead complex run by the local flood control board, and you can print deltaic land into existence, at will, moving peninsulas here and there, forming islands, atolls, archipelagos, all through the directed sediments of the Mississippi River… It’d be a kind of horizontal spray-gun, bringing terra nova into existence.
For what it’s worth, meanwhile, my wife and I have co-authored a chapter in a forthcoming book called What Is A City?, published by the University of Georgia Press, in which we talk at great length about these sorts of post-Katrina hydrological projects – including the use of genetically-modified marshgrasses to anchor artificially dredged fill, in a more or less complete deterrestrialization of the earth’s surface. Or, to use a bad pun, you could say that these projects are literally outlandish.
Finally, don’t miss the show up now at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Birdfoot: Where America’s River Dissolves Into The Sea.

The end of the Mississippi River Delta – the Birdfoot – is a national landscape of disintegration, a fractal labyrinth of dendritic channels, a blend of water and earth, bisected and rerouted by linear, engineered forms of pipeline canals and levees. The people who live and work here, beyond the reach of roads, do so tenuously, in a delicate, disappearing place that is battered by hurricanes, and eroding into the sea.

The closing date for the exhibition is not available.

[Image: Photo by Doug McKinlay, courtesy of The Observer].

“Deep in the Arctic Circle,” we read, there is “a remarkable hotel made up of fishing huts on a frozen lake.” Of course, you don’t check in for the modern amenities: after all, the hotel is more like “a cross between camping and pottering in a garden shed,” Doug McKinlay writes.

Instead, you check in to watch the Northern Lights.

[Images: By Doug McKinlay, courtesy of The Observer].

Called the Abisko Ark Hotel, it’s located 250km north of the Arctic Circle, on Sweden’s Lake Tornetrask. “Guests are expected to bring essentials such as thermal underwear, fleeces and woolly hats, but the hotel provides thick outerwear and heavy snowmobile boots.”

Each hut “is about six meters square and sleeps three comfortably on single beds. The best part is that by each bed is a resealable hole in the wooden floor, allowing guests to fish from the comfort of their down-filled sleeping bags.”

[Image: Photo by Ben Nilsson of Big Ben Productions].

These photos of the ICEHOTEL in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, just popped up everywhere. I think this might literally be one of the most beautiful hotels in the world. It makes me wonder if architects might someday CNC-mill buildings out of glaciers.
“You sleep in a thermal sleeping bag on a special bed of snow and ice, on reindeer skins,” we read. “You are awakened in the morning with a cup of hot lingonberry juice at your bedside.”

[Images: All photos by Ben Nilsson of Big Ben Productions].

“Breakfast buffet, morning sauna and towels [are] included,” of course – and there’s a restaurant on site, made from ice, serving “whitefish roe, venison and reindeer, cloudberries and arctic raspberries. All transformed into tasty delicacies guaranteed to please the most discerning gourmet.”
This year, the hotel was built with collaborative input from students of Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology.

So how is the ICEHOTEL actually built?
“The building process starts in mid-November,” the hotel’s managers explain, “when the snow guns start humming and large clouds of snow start to drift along the Torne River.”

The snow is sprayed on huge steel forms and allowed to freeze. After a couple of days, the forms are removed, leaving a maze of free-standing corridors of snow.

[Image: Photo by Ben Nilsson of Big Ben Productions].

They continue:

In the corridors, dividing walls are built in order to create rooms and suites. Ice blocks, harvested at springtime from Torne River, are now being transported into the hotel where selected artists from all over the world start creating the art and design of the persihable material.

These “corridors of snow,” of course, could be used to form instant cities almost anywhere; with a few “snow guns” and a bunch of “huge steel forms,” you too could build an ICEHOTEL – or an ICECITY, or an ICETOWN, just waiting to be inhabited.
It’s architecture as controlled phase transition: coaxing temporary forms out of what wants to be liquid.
To mis-paraphrase Sanford Kwinter paraphrasing Alfred North Whitehead, we might say that this is an example of Misplaced Concreteness.

[Image: By Ben Nilsson of Big Ben Productions].

In any case, here are some photos of the construction process, documenting how the hotel was made – and here is a price list, in Swedish krona, should you want to book a few nights.
Send me, please!

(Also covered by Dezeen).

[Image: A cargo elevator beautifully shot by po1yester].

Further proof that elevators have been ignored for too long in contemporary building design – after all, they are moving rooms and could be put to use as something other than mere vertical transport through architectural space – even Harrods, the London department store, is (temporarily) updating its lifts.
According to the Guardian, Harrods is about to open Lifted, “the world’s first exhibition to be displayed in elevators” (a wild over-statement that is, in fact, wrong). The elevator-based exhibition will include work by “Oscar-winning composer Michael Nyman and visual artist Chris Levine.”

Levine’s “Sight” lift will feature a light sculpture using Swarovski crystals and lasers to immerse passengers in mesmerising patterns once the doors close. Nyman’s “Sound” composition aims to trigger feelings of confinement. The “Smell” lift, designed by Aroma Co, emits smells such as pomegranate and fresh laundry via wall-mounted buttons, while the tactile “Touch” lift was devised by the Royal National Institute for the Blind.
The “Sixth Sense” lift, however, created by author and “cosmic ordering” expert Bärbel Mohr, encourages customers to send wishes to the universe and “reconnect with their inner self”.

On an only vaguely related note, meanwhile, I’d be curious to see if you could invert the expected volumetric relationship between stationary floors and moving elevators in a high-rise.
In other words, if elevators usually take up, say, one-twentieth of a building’s internal space, could you flip that ratio – and end up with just one stationary floor somewhere hanging out up there inside a labyrinth of elevators?
You have a job interview on that one, lone floor in a half an hour’s time – but you can’t find the place. You’re moving from elevator to elevator, going down again and stopping, then stepping across into another lift that takes you up four floors higher than you’d expected to be – before you’re going down again, confused. You hear other elevators when you’re not moving, and it’s impossible to locate yourself amidst that system of moving rooms. The only floors you ever exit onto are simply other elevators.
Then, through a coincidence of open lift doors, forming a temporary corridor through space, front and back doors open, stretching off through eight cars at a time, you glimpse the meeting room that you’re even right then supposed to be sitting down in for an interview… and you see people there waiting… but the doors all close and you’re back on the ground floor in no time.
You hear machines, cables, whirring gears.

[Image: Elevator Buttons by Vancouver-based photographer Jason Pfeifer].

Stunned, perhaps mesmerized, and already addicted to that well-machined state of vertically nomadic groundlessness, you smile, hit the UP button, and start again.

(Thanks, Nicky!)

I’ve got a new post up on io9 this morning: the Top 5 Ways to Hack the Surface of the Earth. Extremely long-term readers of BLDGBLOG will recognize many of the proposed geo-hacks, but hopefully this look at hacking the earth’s surface will still stimulate… Let me know what you think!

[Image: By Jeffrey Inaba/C-LAB].

Jeffrey Inaba and C-LAB have created this mandala of consumption, refuse, and plastic waste, with one side dedicated to the “hydration compulsion” that helps puts millions of one-use bottles in places bottles aren’t meant to be.

[Image: By Jeffrey Inaba/C-LAB].

There is even a deity of hydration, tempting us with its multi-limbed assortment of tasty beverages.

[Image: By Jeffrey Inaba/C-LAB].

But it’s all part of a new project meant to rethink waste management infrastructure, complete with ironic and colorfully alluring designs for private trash cans.

In this project, the trashcan has been redesigned, and mostly over-designed, to celebrate the taste of suburban culture and to give a form to the can that describes the processes of use, disposal, and management of the things we trash.

The project is thus a look at “our eco-era obsessions that generate trash: the simultaneous rise in environmental awareness and in disposable cleaning goods… the simultaneous rise in global water awareness and the generation of water bottle waste… We made a series of suburban style trash cans to describe these contradictory tendencies.”

The project goes on display today at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

[Images: By Jeffrey Inaba/C-LAB].

Read BLDGBLOG’s interview with Inaba here.