Tentacled Building

A building in France with inflatable tentacles.

Drainage Pipe Hotel

Hasn't it always been your dream to spend the night inside a giant concrete cylinder? Well now you can! At the Parkhotel, rooms are put together inside a short length of the kind of concrete pipe that large drainage systems are made from. One end cap adds a dash of art to the room, and the other is a hobbit door that opens up the entire height of the space directly to the outdoors.

I imagine spending the night here pretending to be in the intro sequence of a particularly gruesome episode of CSI. There seems to be a tiny circular skylight or two, but I doubt that would dispel the feeling of being entombed. There is an interesting cave-like quality to the room as well. It's a refreshing change from the endless proliferation of generic rectangular spaces.

Book Staircase

This incredible book staircase caught my eye awhile ago, but I just had to share it with you. It's the realization of my library daydream. I'm surrounded by wonderful books that go to the ceiling, and I can climb up the bookcases, actually entering the space of the books, and at the top and deepest penetration into the bookcase, I emerge into a sunlit nest perfect for enjoying whatever books I picked up along the way.
Books are objects that beg to be entered. Their covers and titles lure you inside and tempt you to lose yourself for hours inside the world they offer. This book staircase acts as the physical embodiment of the mental act of entering the world of the books. Most good libraries have a labyrinthine nature in both their physical and conceptual structure, adding to the tendency to lose oneself in them.
The photos of these bookstairs are especially intriguing in that they never show the back of the bookshelves. It visually suggests the possibility that if one climbed the staircase halfway and pulled out a book or two, one might discover another hidden portal to crawl through into even deeper and more hidden realms of the book world.

Wall Decor for the Paintless

I used the old trick of starched fabric on my walls in college. The idea is to get cheap wide fabric, and to use starch to turn it into removable wallpaper. This is great for those of us who don't have painting privileges in our living spaces.

This how-to from How About Orange uses the same technique to make temporary fabric wall decals. I can't believe I never thought of this! It takes mountains of fabric and gallons of starch to completely cover the walls of even the 90 square foot dorm room that was mine in college. With these fabric decals, even a small amount of materials can have a big design punch.

Designers like blik and One Up Designs create some inspiring temporary vinyl wall decals that this fabric project brings to mind. These starched fabric decals are a great combination of the high-design ornamentation of the potentially pricey vinyl wall decals with the possibility to DIY on-the-cheap.

The project calls for supplies I already have on hand, or can get easily through freecycle or thrifting, and when it comes time to remove them, the fabric scraps are still usable once the starch is rinsed out. This would be an incredible way to use up odd scraps of vintage fabrics, thrift store materials, and even deconstructed clothing.

Public Farm 1 by WORK

Each year, P.S. 1, a contemporary art museum in Queens, New York, chooses one promising young architecture firm to turn their sparse concrete courtyard into an innovative summer party space. The only requirements are that the designs include seating, shade, and water, and fit within the $70,000 budget.

This summer, P.S. 1 will become Public Farm 1, a garden of vegetables, fruits, and herbs proposed by New York City-based WORK Architecture Company.

Cardboard tube planters attach to each other forming a sloping plane from the pavement of the courtyard and up over the wall, creating a "flying garden" that reaches 30 feet in the air. The garden itself provides shade for visitors below, with areas of different heights being specified for different purposes. The lowest area is reserved for kids. Some tube spaces are left open so that not only can community gardeners go up through them to care for the plants, but the shadow cast by the elevated farm has a more dappled, organic feel. The sloped angle lets the garden act as both shelter and surface, literally intersecting nature with the built environment.

Previous Young Architects Program designs have focused on the inventive use of materials and technology to create unusual atmospheric spaces. Not only are the living plants in WORK's project absorbing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and controlling heat buildup through water evaporation from the soil, but the design explores the possibilities of public space by providing a sustainable community garden with edible foods.

Translucent Concrete

A mesmerizing new material: LiTraCon transparent concrete. Instead of the normal concrete aggregate material of small rocks, fiber optic cables run the width of the concrete blocks. Not only do they hold the material together, but they allow light to pass uninhibited from one side of a concrete wall to the other.

Standing on the brightly lit side of the wall, it appears to be normal concrete, but once backlit, all sorts of shadows and images from the other side of the wall become clear.

There is a strange coexistence of heavy solidity of the stone-like concrete material with the ethereal lightness of the glowing backlit wall, giving the strange sense that the solid wall could be made insubstantial and penetrable.

I'd love to see a building made completely out of concrete blocks, with these transparent blocks in a pattern on the wall, in such a way that at certain times (when it's dark outside), the walls would appear to be solid and imposing, while during the day, with the lights dim inside, shadows of people walking outside and the placement of the sun would permeate the interior space. The effect reminds me of the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale, with its thin translucent stone walls.

Ice Dreams

I am totally mesmerized by this light installation by artist Kiki Smith and architect Lebbeus Woods for the Snow Show in Finland. The glowing lights emanating from underneath the thick ice are surreal. Strange illuminated patterns from the frozen surface intersect shadowy figures to create an incredible winter vision.

The artists used fiber optic lighting buried deep under the ice in the extreme cold of the Finnish winter to achieve this eerie effect. They take advantage of the ability of the ice to diffuse light. Wish I could have been out there to see it in person.