One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous mansions, known as the Ennis House, is up for sale in east Los Angeles. And even if you don’t know the house, you certainly know the movies that the famous building has appeared in, including Blade Runner (1982), The House on Haunted Hill (1959) and The Replacement Killers…
Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's weekly roundup of the neatest toys around. This week, Hot Toys gives us a Deadpool with killer footwear, the incredible Batman Ninja gets an equally worthy action figure, and more Harry Potter Lego than you can shake a whomping willow at. Check it out!
Growing up around Washington, D.C., it’s a relief to now live in a city laid out in a coherent fashion, with numbered streets increasing along a cardinal directional axis and being intersected at sensible right angles. Which is why it pains me to say that physics brings some bad news for my fellow gridded…
The world is rapidly becoming more urban, but as cities grow in size, their impact on Earth’s biodiversity grows in step. As a new mapping effort led by landscape architects at the University of Pennsylvania shows, the conflict is far more dire than most of us appreciate.
On January 19th, 2017, the Plasco building, a 17-story steel high-rise in Tehran, caught fire. The blaze began on one of the building’s upper floors and then spread quickly through the tower’s sprinkler-less garment workshops. As the Tehran fire department battled the nearly unreachable fire, the steel skyscraper …
If you’ve ever caught yourself mindlessly staring out of the window while driving through a big city filled with endless buildings, you’ll understand the appeal of Lauren Pedrosa’s short film, perspective ǝʌᴉʇɔǝdsɹǝԀ. But Pedrosa takes the repetitive monotony one step further by turning footage of random buildings…
Nearly everything about the small block says “wood”: its texture, appearance, sturdiness, and color are like an especially high-quality piece of particle board. But it’s just a bit too dense for wood, which gives it away. The block is made of straw bound together by mycelium, the root-like tendrils of mushrooms.
You may not know the name Gin D. Wong, but you definitely know his work. He’s responsible for some of the most iconic buildings in Los Angeles, including the Theme Building at the Los Angeles Airport (pictured above), and he even inspired the designers of the legendary 1962 animated TV show The Jetsons. Wong died on…
Some Dubai residents woke up to a familiar sight early Friday morning: flames engulfing an enormous skyscraper. In fact, the fire that spanned 50 of the 86 stories of the massive Torch Tower was all too familiar. The same skyscraper burned in 2015, and the causes appear to be related.
Serbian photographer Nikola Olic lives and works in Dallas, Texas, but he also travels the world with a keen eye that’s always looking for unusual angles on buildings and other structures. The result is a collection of architectural photographs that look more like impossible optical illusions.
One of the biggest engineering challenges of building a towering skyscraper isn’t keeping the structure from falling over, it’s moving all the people around inside of it. To improve efficiency, and facilitate the construction of even taller buildings, Germany’s ThyssenKrupp has completely redesigned elevators so that…
The London underground and subway is made up of one of the most complex tunnel systems in the world. As a commuter, it’s hard to see the beauty of that complex maze racing through it every morning on the way to work, but this short film manages to paint those endless tunnels as a work of art.
Inside nearly everything made of concrete, you’ll find reinforced steel rods that compress the material, making buildings, bridges, and other structures even stronger. The rods aren’t designed to break easily, but when they do, the best way to watch the destructive results is through the lens of a slow motion camera.
For those who don’t live under a monarchy, memorizing the ranks of queens, kings, bishops, and other pieces makes learning chess that much harder. But swap out royalty and peasants with buildings from famous cities, and all you really need to know is that taller is better.
According to some, the future of architecture is wood, but in Newark, Ohio, the future has already arrived—in the form of big, dumb picnic basket that’s also an office building no one will buy.
Adam Kalkin is an architect in New Jersey who found the smartest way to expand his home: cover it in a bigger house.
Almost every building in Washington DC is iconic and recognizable in its own way. But no structure in the city, or the country, serves as a more iconic symbol of America than the US Capitol building, with its soaring dome and imposing structure...one that’s now slightly less imposing as Lego’s newest Architecture set.
So how does a company spend the hundreds of billions of dollars of cash it has on hand? It builds itself a fancy new headquarters, and the latest drone-shot flyover of Apple’s new HQ reveals the truly immense scale of not just the central spaceship building, but of the entire new campus.
Trompe l’oeil (literally “to deceive the eye”) is an ancient technique whereby a painter creates a visual illusion via a trick of perspective. French street artist Patrick Commecy is a modern master of this art form, working with his team of artists at A-Fresco to create huge, hyper-realistic murals on otherwise drab…
