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During the short six-to-seven-week life of a factory-raised broiler chicken, the bird is crammed into close quarters with thousands of other chickens selectively bred to mature at an unhealthily fast rate. More »
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Most roller coasters try to keep regurgitating riders to a minimum. But with this coaster by BRC Imagination Arts, queasy patrons may be inevitable. The design firm has taken a cue from NASA's KC-135A "Vomit Comet" aircraft and drafted plans for a coaster that mimics microgravity for up to nine seconds. The only downside? Such a ride costs a pretty penny. More »
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The Taichung City skyline could have been a lot more alien. The city government recently held an architecture competition to design the Taiwan Tower, and Soma Architecture proposed this alien beauty. More »
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At the beginning of the 20th Century, the US decides to turn the tables on Mother England and turn its former motherland into a conquered territory. The American conquerors quickly get to work, importing architects and sculptors who make the city of London look just like New York. More »
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This was awesome.Tony Alleyne's infamous Star Trek apartment inspired us all to up our geeky interiors to the next level. Sadly, the Trek fanatic's majestic apartment is no more — another victim of divorce. More »
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When you're living a nomadic lifestyle, you need to travel light. But that doesn't mean you can't have a deluxe roof above your head. Here, videographer Dan Grossman filmed Shagdarsuren Herelchuluun's family punching out a multiperson ger (or yurt) outside of northern Mongolia's Lake Hovsgol. The whole process took give or take 67 minutes, but here's the instant house's construction in two. More »
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Take a video tour of Michael Garnier's amazing replica of the Ewok Village from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. This former Green Beret built a forrest full of interconnected treehouses — in Oregon! And for a reasonable fee, you can stay in this treetop wonderland and recreate the ending of RoTJ. Yub Nub, y'all! More »
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And by The Prisoner we mean the 1967 "Patrick McGoohan tooling around in a Lotus 7 Prisoner," not the 2009 TV miniseries nobody particularly enjoyed. In the Welsh county of Gwynedd, you can visit the faux-Mediterranean Portmeirion resort, which served as the shooting location for the cult classic television series. More »
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You don't need to be an eccentric billionaire or rugged survivalist to take up residence in a cave. All around the globe, living in an rocky recess is just a fact of life and can be way more homey than any manmade structure. Here are some real estate destinations to investigate should you attempt to cultivate that post-modern caveman chic.

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Here's a new candidate for the world's most precarious school commute. Sorry, two-day Chinese mountaineering expedition. More »
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Architect Tiago Barras has seen the future of public roadways, and said future resembles a moonshine-fueled car chase. As part of his whimsical High-Speed Car Ramp design, the designer suggests adding a jump ramp to Lisbon's Segunda Circular highway. More »
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Is the future of housing round? The Elkinoid Project envisions a future where housing shortages are solved with sustainable, off-the-grid towns made up of thousands of orb-shaped houses. And each structure would take less than a week to build. More »
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Reality inched closer to Sim City (or Starcraft, pump out those barracks!) last month when China's Broad Corporation built a 30-story hotel prototype using prefabricated materials in 360 hours. Watch a time-lapse video of the construction site above. More »
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And Doctor Octopus wants to play voyeur too! Crafter Riley Replicas built this groovy Spider-Man wall panel for a friend's home. Hilariously enough, the panel ended up in "the pondering room." Explains the builder of this project: More »
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How does one build a single turret that a grown man can scale up, aided only by a hair rope, without the whole thing toppling over? Kate Bernheimer and Andrew Bernheimer have created a fascinating series over at Design Observer, where a batch of slick architects and designers have plotted out the blueprints for various fairy tale abodes. Let's start with Rapunzel by Guy Nordenson and Associates. More »
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In the novel Foucault's Pendulum, two characters discuss a house that is not what it appears to be. People "walk by" this certain house in Paris, we read, "and they don't know the truth. That the house is a fake. It's a facade, an enclosure with no room, no interior. It is really a chimney, a ventilation flue that serves to release the vapors of the regional Métro. And once you know this you feel you are standing at the mouth of the underworld..." More »
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This is the Kiev, currently anchored in the Chinese port of Tianjin. Once she was the flagship of the mighty Soviet navy's Pacific fleet. Now she's available for business retreats, intimate getaways or simple relaxation. More »
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Remember that autonomous swarm of drones that built a 20-foot-tall indoor tower in Orléans, France? The FRAC Centre has now released a start-to-finish reel of the quadrotors completing the tower. You can watch the entire process above, fast-fowarded quite a bit. More »
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Ben Masterton-Smith, recipient of the inaugural RIBA Norman Foster Traveling Scholarship in 2007, visited North Korea for a period of architectural and spatial research. More »
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Remember Ordos City, that ritzy urban planning project in the Gobi Desert where most people can't afford to live? Design firm MAD Architects recently completed the blob-like local museum. I repeat — the Chinese government commissioned a museum that looks sort of like a bashful Shai-Hulud in a chichi desert ghost town. If you build it, will they come? More »
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Otherwise, we could pretend we were living in a Judge Dredd storyline. This 1969 design by Alan Boutwell and Mike Mitchell — the aptly titled Continuous city for 1.000.000 human beings — never took off, but this design and other fanciful megastructures offer a glimpse into an arcology-filled future the past never delivered. More »
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Forget Hershel's farm. When the first signs of the apocalypse hit, you'll want to hightail it to upstate New York, where this serene cottage sits atop a Cold War-era missile silo. And several of its underground rooms are already prepped for luxury bunker living. More »
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On December 2 in Orléans, France, a crew of four quadrocopters assembled a six-meter-tall tower using 1,500 foam blocks as part of the FRAC Centre's "Flight Assembled Architecture" exhibit. The project was a collaboration was helmed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, whose researchers had previously taught these flying machines to juggle ping-pong balls. More »
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The ziggurat you're looking at is John Russell Pope's 1912 design for the Lincoln Memorial. This design and plans for other kooky alternate history monuments are currently on display at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Check out parallel universe versions of the Capitol, the White House, and other never-was monuments, like the Washington Dolphin Hotel. More »
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We humans are builders. One of the ways we leave a mark on the universe is by creating massive structures that show that some opposable digits have been here. So when things get tough, like due to an economic meltdown or a cascading environmental crisis, what can we do but build? More »
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Remember last year's Zombie Safe House Competition? For 2011, the contest's popularity absolutely exploded, and competition holders Architects Southwest received dozens of zany anti-undead fortresses, ranging from silos to stilted houses to the Eiffel Tower to the Acropolis. More »
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Since March, Punchdrunk theater company's immersive Shakespeare adaptation Sleep No More has converted an entire Manhattan loft building into a 100-room abandoned hotel from the 1940s. More »
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We've seen how gorgeous the dilapidated Wonderland amusement park in China can be when spruced up with good photography, but what does it look like when you're actually trekking out there? Turns out it's overrun with cornfields, children scampering in the shadows, and stray dogs. The folks over at Stuck In Customs made a video log of their journey out there. Definitely not the happiest place on Earth. More »
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We've seen such luxury end-of-the-world residences as the Vivos doomsday shelters, but Vivos aren't the only folks pioneering fallout chic. Meet Edward Peden and Larry Hall. The former deals in selling bunkers to prospective homeowners and survivalists, whereas the latter is helming a residential development known as the Survival Condo Project... More »
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We've seen concept art for space-saving vertical necropoles and inverted Mexico City skyscrapers before — here's a design that combines the two. More »
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We do enjoy some ridiculously small houses here at io9, so we find Derek Diedricksen's passion for building miniature houses in his backyard rather endearing. More »
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Feast your eyes on "The 1001 Nights House," the latest work by A-cero architect Joaquin Torres. The 2100-square-meter military stronghold single-family home is tucked away in a development somewhere along the outskirts of Madrid, in what Dave over at Contemporist describes as "the suburbs" of Spain. More »
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This may look like your average German suburb on a quiet day, but it's actually a planned community 30 kilometers outside of Shanghai. This is Anting German Town, a one-square-kilometer residential development founded in 2001 and built specifically to resemble a little slice of Deutschland. There's only one problem for this quirky Teutonic oasis —nobody wants to live there. More »
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This is Zwischenräume, a mechanical art installation that features a bunch of autonomous robots hiding behind a living room and beating it down at random intervals, stopping only to peer at the gawkers outside. More »
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The damp, dingy tunnels below Waterloo station in London are hardly your typical concert hall. But last weekend, as part of the Mindful exhibition, artist Oliver Beer brought a choir down to create ethereal music by turning the space into a giant musical instrument. To make the space resound, the singers needed to tap into the natural resonant frequencies of the building. "You sing a high to low range of notes and you listen acutely," explained Beer, as he prepared for the inaugural performance. "At one point, if you sing really quietly under your breath, so that it's just a whisper of a note, suddenly it gets amplified and the whole room zings with something you don't believe you've created." More »
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This here's concept art for BNKR Arquitectura's Earthscraper, an inverted skyscraper shoved deep under the surface of Mexico City. Click on the above image to see a massive cross-section. More »
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A lot of the wonder of science fiction comes from imagining future structures, and the strange worlds they inhabit. So it's no surprise that several of science fiction's most influential creators have either studied architecture formally, or thought about it a lot. More »
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This apocalypse-ready house is sunk deep beneath the Earth, located in a remote area of Saskatchewan, Canada, and it comes equipped with a stove made from an old barrel and an indoor rabbit hutch. And it could be yours if you want to trade some land or a nice vehicle for it. No, this isn't Thunderdome of the Great White North. It's a home of the future. More »
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Last month's earthquake in Virginia rattled the 555-foot-tall Washington Monument such that it's been closed indefinitely so engineers can assess damage. Buildings all across the Eastern Seaboard were rocked on August 23, but the Monument's security camera footage shows that people visiting the famous obelisk had a particularly harrowing experience. More »
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When James Cameron was directing The Abyss in 1987, he opted to film the underwater at the unfinished Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant near Gaffney, South Carolina. After filming wrapped, the set stood basically unattended for 20 years, allowing urban explorers to sneak in. More »
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