Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Arkham's Razor: A theory which suggests that the simplest explanation tends to lead to Cthulhu.

It's a tool that works well for me, as it's the only thing I can think of that explains the angular collapsed-hypercube that is The Crystals in Las Vegas' new City Center development. Designed by Daniel Libeskind, it's a convoluted, angular space. Outside artificial lightning and aurorae race across the LED-encrusted surfaces, inside it's a warped space colony fantasy, where stark surfaces are interrupted by laminated wooden extrusions.

It's one of the most unusual pieces of architecture I've seen, where false perspectives steal your sense of scale.

Ia, ia, fhtagn, let's go shopping!







Las Vegas, Nevada
January 2010

St Basil's Cathedral is a highlight of Red Square, its multi-coloured onion domes turning it into a fairy-tale castle, straight out of a Disney cartoon. It's only when you look closer that you see the details, the gilded fretwork, the painted flower scrolls, and the delicate shapes formed by the brickwork.Then there the different shapes of each dome, each with its own colour scheme.

A grey autumnal day burned away into broken blue skies as we circled the building, suddenly turning dull colours into fiery brightness.









A truly amazing building.

Moscow, Russia
September 2008

...in a house made from a 747.

It's a sensible approach to recycling the metal from an old airliner - use the body and wings to build a house. The wings alone make a rather effective roof (as anyone who's sheltered under a plane at an airshow can testify...).

The client, a woman, requested curvilinear/feminine shapes for the building. The progenitor of the building’s form was envisioned as a floating curved roof. It soon became apparent, that in fact, an airplane wing itself could work. In researching airplane wings and superimposing different airplane wing types on the site to scale, The wing of a 747, at over 2,500 sq. ft., became an ideal configuration to maximize the views and provide a self supporting roof with minimal additional structural support needed.

They ended up buying an entire airliner, and then dismembering it, with several components being used in one piece - the nose becoming a meditation temple...
Link found via the BBC

I'm revamping (and relaunching) lav_reviews.

Now going by the name of "Publicly Convenient Architectures", it's intended to be a group blog for sharing the architectural and design quirks of that much maligned feature, the public convenience.

I've given the site a redesign, and will be posting to it regularly - and of course, the more the merrier! I'm also looking at creating a related Flickr community to make it easier to post camera phone shots of interesting public convenience architecture.