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The 8 Most Unusual Hotel Rooms in the World

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We've covered some pretty over-the-top hotels in our time, and we've learned that space pod suites in the middle of a vineyard and floating hotel rooms in Dubai can be just as luxurious and beautiful as a traditional hotel. When you want an experience beyond cable TV and a warm shower, head to one of these one-of-a-kind rooms.

The 15 Best Airports in the World to Get Stuck in

You finally made it to the airport, checked your bags, rushed through security and got to your gate at last, but only to find your flight was delayed. Lucky for you, if you’re stuck in one of these airports, you will never have to wonder what to do.

Never dread your layover or delayed flight again and enjoy a stress-free experience at these airports. Pamper yourself in their spas, destress in whirlpools, and workout in their fitness centers.

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15 stunning homes made out of shipping containers

Living in a box


Repurposed shipping container homes are all the rage right now. Low cost, eco-friendly and fast to build, the extra-tough boxes can be stacked like Lego blocks and customized with every luxe mod con imaginable. Take a look at 15 of the world's most upscale examples.

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Underwater hotel design gets U.S. patent approval

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Planet Ocean Underwater Hotel won a U.S. patent for its Undersea design. Patrick Jones (@Patrick_E_Jones) elaborates.

World's Coolest Underwater Lodgings

From Zanzibar to Sweden, beautiful underwater properties with one-of-a-kind views have been popping up around the globe, featuring some of the most unique rooms that travelers can book.

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Masjid Al-Haram

This largest mosque in the world surrounds the Kaaba, the holiest place of Islam in the city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Covering 88.2 acres (356,800 square meters) and able to accommodate 820,000 worshipers, the mosque is undergoing a $10.6 billion expansion project that will help it house a total of 2.5 million worshipers at a time.

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World’s highest bridge opens in China (gulp, don’t look down)

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The world’s highest bridge officially opened Thursday in China, spanning a gorge that’s almost 2,000 feet deep.


The Beipanjiang Bridge in southwest China took three years to build, and cost $146.7 million. The four-lane structure stands 1,854 feet above the Beipan River below. For comparison’s sake, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is 220 feet high, and New York’s One World Trade Center — the tallest building in the U.S. — is 1,776 feet high.

Construction was actually completed in September, but the bridge was not opened to traffic until Thursday.

Tall-bridge aficionados should be drawn to China — it also has the second- and third-highest bridges in the world, the Sidu River Bridge (1,627 feet high) and Puli Bridge (1,591 feet).

Inside the world's most luxurious survival bunker

The ultimate hideout

What better way to survive a nuclear blast or a tsunami than in a luxury survival bunker? We take a look inside Vivos Europa One, the world's most prestigious underground hideout. Click ahead to see more.

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9 of the Best Gothic Cathedrals in Europe

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When you take a trip to Europe, you'll inevitably encounter one of the hundreds of Gothic cathedrals that dot the landscape. Built during the 12th through 16th centuries, these medieval masterpieces were born out of the Romanesque movement, which saw churches designed with thick walls, round arches, and large towers. Gothic architecture, on the other hand, focused on height and light—despite being constructed from heavy stone, Gothic cathedrals seem to defy the laws of gravity. Common traits include pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses, all of which enable the structures to be built taller and stronger. Here, we've rounded up eight of the best examples of Gothic cathedrals from across Europe.

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This Glass Igloo in the Arctic Circle Incredibly Houses a Family of Six

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The 19 cities that will rule the world in 2025

Cities of the future

More and more so-called megacities are emerging across the world, becoming centers of population and wealth in the way that whole countries used to be. Using data from McKinsey & Company we reveal the cities likely to dominate the world in the future.

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Inside the most expensive house in America

Another world

The most expensive house in America recently went on sale with a price tag of $250 million (£200m). From the outside, it could easily look like every other Bel Air mansion, but the inside tells a different story, with one huge perk worth $30 million (£24m) alone. We take a look inside.

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Could your next home come out of a printer?

Buildings of the future

Supersized 3D printers are now producing low-cost buildings in record time with minimal human labor required. Take a look at these completed structures, from homes to hotels, that are revolutionizing architecture and construction.

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'U' skyscraper will blow your mind

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12 eerie photos of enormous Chinese cities completely empty of people

Throughout China, there are hundreds of cities that have almost everything one needs for a modern, urban lifestyle: high-rise apartment complexes, developed waterfronts, skyscrapers, and even public art. Everything, that is, except one major factor: people.

These mysterious - and almost completely empty - cities are a part of China's larger plan to move up to 300 million citizens currently living in rural areas into urban locations. Places like the Kangbashi District of Ordos are already prepped and ready to be occupied.

Photographer Kai Caemmerer became fascinated with these urban plans, and in 2015 he travelled to China to explore and document them. His series, "Unborn Cities," depicts a completely new type of urban development. "Unlike in the US, where cities often begin as small developments and grow in accordance to the local industries, these new Chinese cities are built to the point of near completion before introducing people," he told Business Insider.

See 12 eerie images from his series:

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Amazing Cities Hidden Right Beneath Your Feet

Architects in modern times design buildings that reach for the stars. However, back in ancient times people were constructing downwards, creating entire cities under the surface. Sometimes such places get buried after being abandoned and Mother Nature has taken over, only to be discovered centuries later.

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Ten of the world's most incredible rooftops

A new book celebrates amazing urban spaces in the sky. Fiona Macdonald picks out ten projects that have helped transform cities across the globe.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/201701 ... -the-world

Ten of the world's most beautiful floors

Look down – these striking works of art are meant to be walked on. From a Pompeii villa to a Moscow metro station, these pedestrian paths are sublime, writes Jonathan Glancey.

By Jonathan Glancey

20 March 2017

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Sofas and surveillance

Technology firms and the office of the future

Their eccentric buildings offer clues about how people will work

FROM the 62nd floor of Salesforce Tower, 920 feet above the ground, San Francisco’s monuments look piddling. The Bay Bridge, Coit Tower and Palace of Fine Arts are dwarfed by the steel-and-glass headquarters that will house the software company when it is completed later this year. Subtle it is not. Salesforce plans to put on a light show every night; its new building will be visible from up to 30 miles away.

It is not the only technology company erecting a shrine to itself. Apple’s employees have just begun moving into their new headquarters in Cupertino, some 70 kilometres away, which was conceived by the firm’s late founder, Steve Jobs. The four-storey, circular building looks like the dial of an iPod (or a doughnut) and is the same size as the Pentagon. At a price tag of around $5bn, it will be the most expensive corporate headquarters ever constructed. Apple applied all its product perfectionism to it: the guidelines for the wood used inside it reportedly ran to 30 pages.

Throughout San Francisco and Silicon Valley, cash-rich technology firms have built or are erecting bold, futuristic headquarters that convey their brands to employees and customers. Another example is Uber, a ride-hailing company, which is hoping to recast its reputation for secrecy and rugged competitiveness by designing an entirely see-through head office. It is expected to have some interior areas, as well as a park, that will be open to the public.

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BOOK

Welcome to Your World

How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives

by Sarah Williams Goldhagen

About the Book

One of the nation’s chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience.

Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world’s best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people’s experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs.

By 2050 America’s population is projected to increase by nearly seventy million people. This will necessitate a vast amount of new construction—almost all in urban areas—that will dramatically transform our existing landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas. Going forward, we must do everything we can to prevent the construction of exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary; authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important.

Erudite, wise, lucidly written, and beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.

https://www.harpercollins.com/978006195 ... your-world[/b]

The best new superyachts in the world

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THE WORLD'S BEST SUPERYACHTS
The winners of the World Superyacht Awards 2017 have been announced. From ex-Russian tug boats to luxury vessels fit for royalty, we round up the world’s very best superyachts from smallest to biggest.

High-tech construction
3D printing and clever computers could revolutionise construction

http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... na/35302/n

Think spiderweb floors, denser skyscrapers and ultra-thin bridges


Print edition | Science and technology
Jun 3rd 2017 | DONCASTER AND ZURICH

SET in the heart of Cambridge, the chapel at King’s College is rightly famous. Built in the Gothic style, and finished in 1515, its ceiling is particularly remarkable. From below it looks like a living web of stone (see picture below). Few know that the delicate masonry is strong enough that it is possible to walk on top of the ceiling’s shallow vault, in the gap beneath the timber roof.

These days such structures have fallen out of fashion. They are too complicated for the methods employed by most modern builders, and the skilled labour required to produce them is scarce and pricey. Now, though, new technologies are beginning to bring this kind of construction back within reach. Powerful computers allow designers to envisage structures that squeeze more out of the compromise between utility, aesthetics and cost. And 3D printing can help turn those complicated, intricate designs into reality.

In a factory that makes precast concrete, 16km south of Doncaster, in northern England, a robotic arm hangs over a wide platform, a dribble of hard pink wax dangling from a nozzle at its tip. The arm is mounted on a steel gantry which lets it move about in three dimensions, covering a volume 30 metres long, 3.5 metres wide and 1.5 metres deep. Called FreeFAB, the system uses specialised wax to print ultra-precise moulds that, in turn, are used to cast concrete panels. Hundreds of these panels are being installed in passenger tunnels as part of Crossrail, Europe’s biggest construction project, which is digging a new east-west railway line across London.

Run by Laing O’Rourke, a construction firm, FreeFAB is the first 3D-printing technology used in a big commercial building project. Show offices and show homes have been printed in places such as Dubai and China, but are, for now, just concepts. The problem, says Bill Baker, an engineer who worked on the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building, is that printed concrete is currently produced in layers, which are fused together to make a thicker panel. But the boundaries between the layers introduce weaknesses that make the panels unsuitable for real buildings. “These things can peel apart,” he says.

Breaking the moulds

FreeFAB gets around that problem by printing moulds rather than trying to print structural material directly. Invented by James Gardiner, an Australian architect, it has big advantages over traditional mould-making techniques. One is that it creates far less waste. Ordinary moulds are made from wood and polystyrene, and can only be used to produce a single shape. Once they are finished with, they are scrapped and sent to landfill. FreeFAB’s wax can be melted down and poured back into the tank, ready to be re-extruded into a new form. It took Dr Gardiner three years to find a wax which could be printed, milled and recycled.

The system also makes it cheaper to make even complicated moulds. Production of traditional moulds is highly skilled work. Making a mould for a concrete panel that curves along two different axes, like the ones used in Crossrail, takes about eight days, says Alistair O’Reilly, general manager at GRCUK, the firm in whose factory FreeFAB is installed. FreeFAB can print one in three hours. That speed makes it possible to meet the design demands of more complicated buildings. Subtly curved panels can be used inside houses to deaden sound and keep certain rooms quiet, for instance. Doing that with traditional methods would be too expensive. FreeFAB—or something like it—could make such components much cheaper. And because the concrete itself is not being printed, the panels are just as strong as ones made in the traditional way. FreeFAB’s parts do not peel, and have withstood twice the required force in bomb-proofing tests.

It is early days. The factory in Doncaster has had teething problems—it has proved tricky to print moulds without flaws big enough to be visible in panels cast from them. For now the factory supplies concrete cast from a mix of traditional moulds and 3D-printed ones. But if the technology matures enough, Laing O’Rourke plans to spin it out as a startup focused on this new way of creating buildings.

If that happens, Philippe Block, an architectural engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, might be an early customer. Dr Block makes floors that have the flowing, veined look of biological membranes. Just a few centimetres thick, they are modern versions of the chapel ceiling at King’s. Instead of building floors that rely on steel reinforcement to hold them up, Dr Block builds them under compression, so that each bit of the floor holds up the rest in a shallow vault. Each is bespoke, designed by a computer to efficiently deal with the specific loads it must bear. This allows him to build much thinner structures out of materials much weaker than reinforced concrete.

Such floors are useful as well as beautiful. In skyscrapers, for instance, the floors and the structures that support them account for a good deal of the building’s mass. Dr Block calculates that his new, thinner floors would need only about a third as much material as a typical floor slab. At the same time, their thinness allows him to claw back enough vertical space to fit three floors into the space that would be taken by two floors built in the standard way.


Walking on an eggshell
Dr Block has already tested many versions of his ideas, most recently at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016 (pictured, above). There, he and a team constructed a 15-metre vaulted “tent” out of 399 blocks of cunningly shaped limestone, each precisely milled to match the pattern of forces necessary to hold the vault up. Called the Armadillo Vault, its dome was half as thick as an eggshell would be at the equivalent size.

The next test is in a real building, specifically a demonstration house called NEST in the Zurich suburbs. Dr Block’s group will make the floors for a new part of the building called HiLo. The main bottleneck in the production of Dr Block’s structures is the creation of each element. It is expensive and slow to mill all the parts from blocks of stone, or to build traditional moulds for each individual component. So Drs Block and Gardiner are planning to work together on HiLo, using FreeFAB to print moulds that will produce segments of the floors. If all goes according to plan, the work should be done by 2018.

That could be just the beginning. Dr Gardiner talks of using ductal concrete, which is reinforced with steel fibres that make it lighter than concrete reinforced with steel rods but just as strong, to build thin bridges that span rivers in a single bound. For now, that is a project for the future. But all the components are in place.

This article appeared in the Science and technology section of the print edition under the headline "Back to the future"

Building topples in Egypt

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/~/article-4566618/index.html

See the Most Exquisite Mosques Around the World

Ramadan is here, but these architectural and cultural gems deserve a look anytime.

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Photograph by Ron Watts, Getty Images


By Alexandra E. Petri



Roughly one-quarter of the world is Muslim. With facades dressed in mosaics, glowing marble, crowning domes, and spiraling towers, mosques are awe-strikingly stunning from the outside. In off-prayer hours, wander inside these magnificent structures and you'll find exquisite prayer halls accentuated by gorgeous Persian carpets or valleys of chandeliers.


Also known as masjids in Arabic, mosques are places of prayer and worship in Islam, but they also function as much more. Often they serve as community centers with classes or as social places hosting events and holidays, like Ramadan.


Historically speaking, mosques were not always as ornate as some we see today, like the famous Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi. In fact, the first-ever mosque was home of the prophet Muhammed in Medina, Saudi Arabia. Muhammed would stand in front of the wall his courtyard that faced Mecca and would preach to the followers that gathered together to hear him.

China is building a smog-eating 'forest city' filled with tree-covered skyscrapers

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The smog levels in the southern Chinese city of Liuzhou are not yet dire, but if the city fails to deal with its pollution, it will only get worse over time.

Italian design firm Stefano Boeri Architetti believes that building a neighborhood with plant-covered towers could help the city reduce its pollution levels. On June 26, Liuzhou broke ground on what Boeri calls a "forest city."

In April, the company also announced that it will build two skyscrapers, called Nanjing Green Towers, that will hold a total of 1,100 trees and 2,500 cascading shrubs on their rooftops and balconies. The design will be similar to that of a two-tower complex that Boeri designed in Milan. Another tower in Lausanne, Switzerland will follow a similar plan and is expected to open by early 2018.

11 Homes Built to Survive the End of the World

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These penthouse homes will make you want to win the lottery

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http://www.rizzoliusa.com/book.php?isbn=9780847860357#

BOOK

Mosques: Splendors of Islam

Written by Leyla Uluhanli, Foreword by Prince Amyn Aga Khan, Introduction by Renata Holod

Pub Date: October 31, 2017
Format: Hardcover
Category: Architecture - Buildings - Religious
Publisher: Rizzoli
Trim Size: 10 x 12
US Price: $75.00
CAN Price: $100.00
ISBN: 978-0-8478-6035-7
About This Book

One of the most important and authoritative books to celebrate mosque architecture and Islamic design, featuring many exquisite newly commissioned photographs.

This visually striking volume illustrates over sixty of the most venerated mosques from historic monuments such as the Great Mosque of Córdoba and Istanbul’s Süleymaniye Mosque to today’s most dynamic new designs exemplified by the Sancaklar Mosque. Essays by prominent architecture and design authorities include Professor Sussan Babaie, Andrew W. Mellon Reader in the Arts of Iran and Islam, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London; Distinguished Professor Walter B. Denny, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Heather Ecker, Visiting Professor, Art and Archaeology, Columbia University; Professor Mohammed Hamdouni Alami, Archaeological Research Facility at University of California, Berkeley; Professor Renata Holod, Professor of Islamic Art, University of Pennsylvania, and Curator in the Near East Section, Penn Museum; Philip Jodidio, author and independent scholar in art and architecture, Geneva; George Michell, author and independent architectural historian, London; Fatima Quraishi, PhD candidate, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Matthew Saba, Visual Resources Librarian for Islamic Architecture, Aga Khan Documentation Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries; and Angela Wheeler, PhD student in Architectural History, Harvard University.

Mosques from Europe, the Indian subcontinent, North America, North Africa and the sub-Sahara, the Middle East, and Russia and the Caucasus are showcased. This book covers their earliest origins in Mecca and Medina to contemporary masterpieces, illuminating their stylistic transformations and providing examples from Islam’s great dynasties—the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals.

Original and archival photographs offer exterior and interior views along with images of adjacent gardens and fountains that grace these sanctuaries. Stunning mosque calligraphy and tilework, as well as furnishings and illumination, enhance this volume.

About the Author

Author Leyla Uluhanli is a prominent interior designer based in Moscow. She was born and raised in Baku, Azerbaijan, and mosque architecture has played a definitive role in her approach to design. Since 2005, her company Leyla Uluhanli Interiors has worked on numerous projects in Russia and abroad. In 2015, she launched the Leyla Uluhanli Collection of Home Furnishings.

Prince Amyn Aga Khan is a member of the board of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which is active in architectural conservation.

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The incredible homes popping up in overcrowded cities

THESE PROPERTY PARASITES ARE TAKING OVER BIG CITIES

In the same way that a parasite is fed and sheltered by its host, so-called 'parasitic architecture' feeds off a pre-existing structure, providing alternative solutions to overcrowded spaces. In an age of mass migration, impossible rents and a general lack of space, could parasitic architecture be the key to our growing housing needs and lack of space in major cities? Let's take a look at some examples.

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VIDEO: The Louvre Abu Dhabi Lets in Light and, Finally, the Public

After delays, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, created by architect Jean Nouvel is about to open.

https://www.nytimes.com/video/arts/1000 ... d=71987722

How Vincent Scully Changed Architecture

Vincent Scully, America’s most important architecture historian, died on Nov. 30, at age 97. The architect Philip Johnson proclaimed him “the most influential architecture teacher ever.” But Professor Scully was more than a teacher. He was a critic and a passionate public intellectual. He brought his interests, intellect and knowledge to bear on the world around him. Thanks to him, generations of architects, urbanists and scholars learned to see the world around them through the lens of human tradition and experience.

This was no small feat. As much as if not more than any other critic, Professor Scully enabled the recuperation of the grand continuities of architecture and urbanism that had been cast aside by the protagonists of the Modernist revolution of the 1920s and 1930s. Professor Scully helped reconnect contemporary architecture with its past after a generation of self-proclaimed modernists had insisted that theirs was a new unique approach, freed from tradition and rooted exclusively in function and advanced technology.

Without Professor Scully, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and others might never have shown the way past the soulless modernism of their predecessors. Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk might never have developed the ideas of New Urbanism, which have done so much to bring human scale to the suburbs. And generations of scholars — not all of them architects — might never have learned to appreciate the human scope in the world around them.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/opin ... d=71987722

Uncovered secrets from El-Moez Street

CAIRO – 5 December 2017: El-Moez Street is one of Cairo's most remarkable historic places, giving you a glimpse of old Cairo.

Walking along El-Moez Street, you will be fascinated by the historic atmosphere of the old cafés, souvenir shops, and food and sweets sold from kiosks and carts. You will also find Islamic art carved into the historic mosques and houses.

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https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/9/35 ... oez-Street