One of humanity’s worst decisions has to be the pairing of darts with bars full of drunk patrons making terrible decisions. Throwing tiny pointed spears when you can barely stand once seemed like a dangerous way to have fun, until the lads at How Ridiculous decided to play darts off a 150-foot-tall observation tower.
We finally have our first look at the World Trade Center’s skyscraper, thanks to a Wired exclusive today. But wasn’t this building already unveiled years ago? And wasn’t it designed by someone else? Wasn’t it under construction?
The World Trade Center’s 107th floor observation deck opened last week with some pretty stunning views of New York City. But does it really provide the best viewing experience among the clouds? The Skyscraper Museum took a global survey of the best observatories and ranked the best views from the top.
It's only been a few years since humans could climb more than half a mile above the surface of the Earth without the help of jet fuel. It's easy to forget that buildings that reach this high into the atmosphere are a new phenomenon in our world—at these heights, it's more like aerospace engineering than architecture.
432 Park Avenue, the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere, is many things: A billionaire magnet; a vessel for the world's fanciest bathroom; a dormitory for "maids." Oh, and a serious hazard for anyone walking near it.
Once upon a time, One World Trade was a trumpeted as the future greenest skyscraper in the world. It turned out to be anything but, and today, Mother Jones has obtained documents explaining what the hell happened. The short answer is money, bureaucracy, bad design. Oh, and Hurricane Sandy.
When you're building supertalls, there are other problems to worry about than just making sure they don't fall or blow over. One of the biggest is how to get people up to the top in a reasonable amount of time. If you've got a slow elevator the 125th floor might as well not exist.
In a remote stretch of the Amazon rainforest, a skinny steel tower will soon rise over 1,000 feet into the sky—higher than the Eiffel Tower, way higher than the trees. The Amazon Tall Tower Observatory is a joint effort by Brazil and Germany to figure out exactly how carbon dioxide fluctuates inside the South American…
The Department of Agriculture doesn't usually meddle in architecture, but this week at an event at the White House, it announced an unusual project: A $1 million competition for high-rise buildings built out of wood—and another million that will go to educating architects about it.
The 43-story De Rotterdam is Europe's largest building. Inside, however, it's a study in how to live inside a small space: The behemoth's tiniest unit is only 645 square feet, yet because it's kitted out with incredible transforming furniture, it functions like a five room apartment.
Rent at the 163-story Burj Khalifa doesn't come cheap. While a one-bedroom "only" costs $55,000 a year (according to CNN), it's the $25,000 service fee that really gets you. Now, a fight over these fees may force tenants to make the climb home on foot.
The seam where a city meets the country is an uncanny place. It's not rural, yet not exactly urban, either, a non-place often full of half-finished streets and isolated developments. Most of us only see these environments through the windows of our cars, but photographer Alexander Gronsky has spent the last four years…
Richard Meier and Partners just unveiled plans for a 40-story mixed-use tower that will become one of Mexico City's tallest buildings. The luxury development will be a rare tower project for the architect—now 80—whom The New York Times reported was turning his focus back home, to New Jersey, just last week. [Archinect]
At first glance, this winning design for a mixed-used complex in Zhejiang Province design by Liu Xisang seems like just another glassy tower project. But take a closer look at the facades, which are laced with a network of outdoor spaces spiraling upwards to connect the ground floor to the roof with…
"I like watching these buildings burn," says Jing Jing Naihan Li, a young Beijing architect. That would normally come off as ominous, but in this case, it's awesome: Naihan makes candles that are modeled after the tallest buildings in the world. Because, after all, aren't skyscrapers just the candles on the…
Proving that all press is good press when it comes to real estate, Rafael Viñoly—the architect behind two recent death-ray skyscrapers—revealed plans for a new skyscraper in Lower Manhattan today. It'll be his second tall building in NYC, and like the first, this one is conspicuously free of curved surfaces.
Here in New York, shady brokers have long been known to sell the same apartment to multiple gullible buyers. In China, however, real estate scammers have gone to the next level: Buyers are being “taken hostage” by developers who fail to mention that the apartments they’re selling are totally illegal.
