Thursday, June 28, 2012

World's Most Beautiful Buildings


 Sagrada Família, Barcelona
 Tiger’s Nest Monastery, Bhutan
Wat Rong Khun, Chiang Rai, Thailand
 Institute for Sound and Vision, Hilversum, The Netherlands
The Golden Temple, Amritsar, India
New Norwegian Opera and Ballet, Oslo, Norway
 The Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain
 Great Mosque, Djenne, Mali
 Mont St. Michel, Normandy, France
 Catherine Palace, Outside St. Petersburg, Russia
Nelson-Atkins Museum’s Bloch Building, Kansas City, MO
 Gresham Palace, Budapest, Hungary
 The Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany
 Christian Dior Store, Omotesando, Tokyo

Google's New Offices In London

PENSON’s giddy design looks like a film place, but beneath the glamour, it’s a place of work. Google’s newest office looks like a space station with foosball tables designed by PENSON. Google Engineering’s new London offices are a frivolous exercise in science creative writing set beautification, sated with flat white surfaces and daring rock-solid colors.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Modern House for Architectural Inspiration

This modern house designed by architects Ong & Ong Pte in Singapore that meant to devote you a spatial experience which excites the senses by promoting light.

The architects tried to establish a relationship between subtle tones and the metallic elements inside the house by enfolding aluminum protecting in the air well.
The air well is divided into two sections of house and turned the best place for indoor/outdoor swimming pond.

The World's Most Beautiful Train Stations


St. Pancras International, London
This neo-Gothic red brick façade won raves when it was unveiled in 1868. And it’s in the news again. After a 20th-century decline, St. Pancras got a recent £800 million makeover. Workers cleaned 300,000 pounds of dirt from the bricks and restored 8,000 panes of glass in the roof of the immense train shed. As a result, the station looks its part as one of the finest Victorian landmarks in London.
The world’s most beautiful train stations were designed to make a big impression. Many were constructed during the late 19th century, a golden era when train travel was new, intriguing, and glamorous. Today, stations from every era continue to impress, attracting travelers who aren’t even catching a train.
CFM Railway Station, Maputo, Mozambique

Monday, June 18, 2012

Sustainable Shipping Container Home


As technology becomes an increasingly inescapable part of daily life, more people express a desire to get away from it. Campgrounds can be hard to locate, however, and there’s no guarantee of available spaces. Worst of all, you can’t even use your electric salad spinner at many of them.
Luckily, there is the Ecopod. Described as “a small and energy-efficient way for a homeowner to get off the grid” by the manufacturer’s official website , the Ecopod is a container home made in part out of rubber that’s been recycled from discarded tires. It can be easily relocated from place to place, and it derives its power from an 80-watt solar panel.

The Elmo Swart Architects 'Wright Conversion' House


Durban, South Africa, is the site of many thatched-roof dwellings, but only one has the curved extension that Elmo Swart Architects added and dubbed the Wright Conversion. The extension has allowed space for a new bedroom, two offices and an entertainment center, but it’s notable mainly for its warped exterior design.

The Klein Bottle House


Those who excelled in the lonely pursuit of advanced mathematics may remember references to non-orientable surfaces, or two-dimensional areas designed to obscure left from right, or inside from outside. This phenomenon is found in the Mobius strip and the Klein bottle, the latter of which was described by German mathematician Felix Klein.
Ever on the lookout for untried designs, architect Rob McBride found one in this arcane mathematical occurrence, and built a house inspired by it on Australia’s Mornington Peninsula. Built around a courtyard at the center, the interior also features an unorthodox layout that at times recalls the work of Dutch artist M.C. Escher. Remember to bring a map of the house when you visit, as well as a compass and a GPS.

Edge House by Mobius Architects


Mobius Architects is a firm based in Poland that began construction on the Edge House in Krakow in 2008. It was finished in 2010, and the visually striking final product is defined by a steep roof that doesn’t make it appear to lean so much as almost fully recline.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Karuizawa, Japan, Shell House


If one were flying over Karuizawa, Japan, and saw the roof of the Shell House, it’s possible that one could entirely miss the fact that it’s a house. The dwelling was created by the Japanese architecture firm ARTechnic, and its unusual exterior design resembles nothing so much as a cannoli transforming into a spaceship.
Described as “out of this world” on the website Trendir , the structure’s curves and ellipses give it a look like nothing before or since. It has sound design principles behind it, however, and takes advantage of natural light and interior textures, so you can feel at home once you’re actually inside of it.

Karim Rashid's Amazing Komb House in Cairo


Karim Rashid is the architect behind the striking-looking Komb House. Rashid was born in Egypt and studied in Canada and Italy, and according to his own website , he has more than 3,000 designs currently in production.
Komb House uses state-of-the-art technology to minimize its environmental impact. The water is heated by solar panels, and the structure reuses grey and pluvial water. It’s composed entirely of reusable materials, such as wood and glass, and it can be taken apart and put back together again…should the need to do so ever arise.

Dupli.Casa – Luxury Contemporary German House


Many dwellings have been built with what its creators call a “futuristic design.” However, Dupli Casa, from Germany’s J. Mayer H. Architects, truly lives up to the description. In fact, the website Digsdigs.com covered it in a 2009 article titled, “The Most Futuristic House Design in the World.”
Dupli Casa is a three-story dwelling near Ludwigsburg, Germany. On the top floor, bedrooms jut out dramatically from the structure’s core, each with a window strategically angled to provide optimum views of the surrounding area. One such view is of David Chipperfield’s Museum of Modern Literature, which sits across the valley in the town of Marbach am Neckar.

Monday, June 11, 2012

The Birds Island


Birds Island is a dwelling designed by Graft architects that addresses an age-old quandary—how do you enjoy the great outdoors and sit in your house at the same time? Located in Kuala Lumpur, the home has a silicone glass exterior “skin” that makes this very thing possible. It changes the transparency of the walls, allowing residents to drink in the views in all their splendor, get a canopy of shade, or shut everything out entirely.
Birds Island is also a sustainable dwelling, and its outer skin collects rain water, and harnesses solar energy and wind power . The structure’s placement on a pier is another nod to energy efficiency. It allows the natural cooling of the water underneath and permits energy collection and distribution from nearby lotuses.

Homes of the Future: The Airdrop House


The Airdrop House is so futuristic and forward-thinking that it has yet to get past the artistic rendering stage, so anyone who wants one will have to wait until some distant tomorrow. However, they are being designed to provide emergency shelter to disaster survivors , so hopefully the need for them won’t come up too often.
The home is designed by Andrew Maynard Architects in response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The home is intended to be air-dropped into disaster areas and used as a temporary shelter. Its design also permits the growing of plants on its surface, to provide both food and shade.



The MercuryHouseOne


MercuryHouseOne is a home designed by Arturo Vittori of the Italian architecture firm Architecture and Vision. Vittori is a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and his interest in technology is obvious to anyone who sees the home’s unique raindrop shape.
MercuryHouseOne is a mobile home, but any similarity to an RV ends there. It runs entirely on solar power and has a thin marble exterior, and according to Architecture and Vision’s website , “the interior is equipped with [the] latest lighting, audio and video technologies in order to maximize the user experience.”
Here are ten amazing futuristic home designs. Some of the designs are bold, some are bizarre, and some seem unlikely to get past the drafting table. However, they all address current challenges and create new rules.

Monday, June 4, 2012

“Amphibious 1000″ First Semi-Submerged Resort in Qatar


The Amphibious 1000 is a semi-submerged resort planned for Qatar. Costing $US500m ($465m) and designed by the Italian firm Giancarlo Zema Design Group, it features both land and see developments. It will be built in the middle of a marine reserve and will feature four giant hotels with underwater rooms, resembling super-yachts. The resort’s main lobby has an interactive sea life museum featuring water

Jade Mountain St Lucia - most breathtaking hotel

Architect by Nick Troubetzkoy, Hade Mountain hotel on the Island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean can be condsidered most luxurious nature hotel of the world.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

World's most amazing prison hotels


1. Jailhotel, Lucerne, Switzerland
Built in 1862 and operating as a prison until 1998, Jailhotel in Lucerne, Switzerland kept prisoners from attempting to escape for more than 135 years.
Now a full-fledged hotel, it offers guests “unplugged rooms” that mimic the sparseness of imprisonment (cold, technology-barren digs) to those who want a taste of the criminal life.
Make sure to visit the library suite, complete with the former prison’s books, and the Barabas suite, the prison’s old rec room. If that’s too isolating, imbibe with fellow inmates at the Alcatraz-Bar.
Everyone’s been on a vacation they wish could last forever, but there’s little doubt any traveler would wish to stay anywhere indefinitely or without choice. While they may now be renovated, luxurious escapes, these hotels put properties to use that otherwise would have been raised, demolished, or deserted – namely, jails and mental institutions. Some of these hotels honor the building’s former identity by naming rooms or dishes after it, some simply rebuild where an institution once stood, a few chillingly remind of the inmates (not guests) that came before, and still others try to forget it all together.

Amazing Elephant Building

A National Historic Landmark in New Jersey, Lucy the Margate Elephant is an elephant-shaped building located on the beach at Margate. The elephantine structure stands 65-feet high and weighs 90 tons. Since its construction in 1881, Lucy the Elephant has enjoyed several different “careers.” Originally intended to encourage real-estate investment on the Jersey Shore.