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…
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…
The average ticket price for getting into Walt Disney World is just north of $100, making the magic kingdom less than magical for your holiday budget. But instead of packing up the kids, wrangling them onto a plane, and then waiting in line to get into the park, just grab Lego’s new towering Disney Castle and give…
This is the “Kiefer Technic Showroom” in Austria and the changing panels are meant to help the people inside regulate the internal temperature. Given China’s “weird architecture” ban, it’s good to see there are still weird buildings around the world.
The concept behind the short film “Fabricating Performance” by the Interactive Architecture Lab and the study that surrounds it concerns reciprocation in design.
In 2012, Frank Gehry and Mark Zuckerberg posed for a series of photos that sealed their intertwined fates: Gehry, arguably the world’s most famous architect, would design a new campus for Zuckerberg, arguably the world’s most powerful not-lizard person. Surely with all this money and talent coalescing like a hunk of…
Many New Yorkers have schlepped to Penn Station to take a train out. We’ve sat in the waiting room, bored, and said to ourselves, I know what would improve my experience. If only I could go on a 1,200 foot amusement-park ride before my train arrived.
