Welcome to the Panopticon

The real Big Brother house; where you will never, ever be alone. And that's the way the architect wants it.

At least the little gauleiter is honest.

Igloo Satellite Cabin

Presenting the Igloo Satellite Cabin; a revolution in compact, transportable accomodation that could only be the result of 21st century go-ahead thinking.

Cicra 1961.

Reversible Destiny

A pair so-called "architect-poets" are behind a block of flats that are intended to keep their tenats young and healthy by providing them with "perpetual challenges".

The fact that these "challenging" Tokyo flats are indistinguishable from poorly executed examples of self-indulgent posturing, bad taste, and incompetence masquerading as a gross delusion that anyone would actuially want to live inside such a monstrosity is purely coincidental.

Ziggurat City

Dubai showcases a design for a ziggurat capable of housing a million people.

Amateurs.

Battersea Saved–If You Can Call It That

The good news is that a group of Irish developers have come up with a way to save Battersea power station from the wrecking ball.

The bad news is that it involves hooking it up to some happy-clappy "carbon neutral" architectural monstrosity that looks like it escaped from a 1980's lighting fixtures department.

Screwed

A city's architecture sends a message about the place.

The Chicago Spire's is obvious.

Faulty Towers

Esquire looks at "The worst building in the history of mankind".

I think North Korea has this sewn up.

Beware the Dark Side

The GE building: Product of a more enlightened age.

Myron Magnet looks at the dark and light sides of New York architecture:

Buildings once expressed some human value or aspiration—and I don’t mean just Greek temples or Gothic cathedrals that proclaimed the immanence of the sacred, but also structures like the old GE building on Lexington Avenue and 51st Street, with its riot of moderne decoration magnificently celebrating man’s mastery of electric power. By contrast, the Hearst Tower is as soulless as any International-Style edifice, and to make up for that defect, it has appropriated an artificial soul. Like a growing number of twenty-first-century buildings in the same plight, it declares itself a temple of ecology that treads lightly and reverently upon the earth, despite its oppressive—indeed, elephantine—footprint, despite the wholly manufactured appearance of its shiny stainless-steel exoskeleton and four-story-high glass scales, despite housing a corporation that gobbles up forests, and despite standing in a metropolis that is triumphantly a work of art, not nature. Nevertheless, though neither civilization nor capitalism has anything to apologize for in the use it makes of the earth, the building’s entrance proudly sports the seal of the U.S. Green Building Council, and the Hearst Corporation’s website coos about the building’s “environmental sustainability,” including its recycled steel (like most steel nowadays), its energy efficiency, and its “harvesting” of rainwater, which, among other wonders, bubbles down the atrium waterfall, “believed to be the nation’s largest sustainable water feature.”

Mile-High Update

As a follow up to the other day's post on skyscraper atrocities in London, a visitor has requested a posting of the Architect Sketch.

Yes, Cinders, you shall go to the ball.

Mile-High Madness

Popular Architecture proposes that the answer to Britain's housing problems is a block of flats a mile high. According to the authors,

The tower allows a massive intensification of the city without the need for dramatic alteration of London's existing fabric.

That's no "dramatic alteration" as in, "Driving a stake through the man's heart was not a dramatic alteration of his existing fabric."

Compact Living

Wired has a slideshow look at ultra-compact modular homes.

It's all very interesting in a Swiss Army knife sort of way, but what strikes me is how the architects tend to plant them in rural settings when one of the reasons I moved to the country was to get out of having to live in a biscuit tin!

Jor El, Call Your Service

The above is what architect Ken Shuttleworth's plans to build next to Christopher Wren's monument to the Great Fire of London.

Thrift, Horatio. Now you can visit both the Monument and the Kryptonian embassy at one go.

By Any Other Name, It Would Still Leak

In 1933, Lawrence Kocher, "noted architect" came up with this revolutionary design for a house made of canvas stretched over a wooden frame.

When a casual observer pointed out that he'd invented the tent, Mr. Kocher wouldn't touch his porridge for days.