New Scientist reports that geographers Jordan Silberman and Peter Rees, both professors at the University of Delaware, have developed a geographical information system (GIS) that allows resort entrepreneurs to plug in their resort dream — small and exclusive resort or mega slopes — and the app will geolocate the best conditions and spot for the venture.

Says New Scientist:

The software then homes in on the preferred general region and seeks out those locations with the combinations of available land and humidity levels most likely to produce powder snow. Among many other factors, it also analyses accessibility by road, slope steepness — to work out the risk of avalanches — and the likely erosion from tree felling. A key factor is the ready availability of electricity to power the ski lifts.

Will city Olympic committees use this software to argue their way into becoming the winning town for future Winter Olympics? We can already see the genetically engineered slalom skiers lining up on their perfectly situated ski slopes.

Geo software aims to avoid ski resort eco-disasters [New Scientist]

Image via Freaking News

Curbed NY picked ten of their favorite buildings from this decade's deadpool, mourning concept designs that fell prey to practicality, politics, and the credit crunch. Topping the list is the 80 South Street residences, depicted above. The tower would have consisted of a dozen four-story townhouses, each starting at $29 million. The project was ultimately doomed because there were "Not Enough Billionaire Supervillains" ready to shell out for a waterfront lair.

Also on the list is Frank Gehry's design for a Guggenheim Museum, which was to sit on the piers south of the Brooklyn Bridge and perpetually look like it was about to blow away.

And another experiment in innovative housing for the ultra-rich bit the dust with 56 Leonard Street. The great glass condos would have been arranged in the Jenga-like design we've seen in other recent architectural concept designs, with a silver jelly bean sculpture by Anil Kapoor wedged into one corner of its base.

You can see the rest of the the top architectural casualties at Curbed NY.

Top 10 Crazy Things That Didn't Get Built [Curbed NY via About Architecture]

Oxman, a Ph.D. candidate in design computation at MIT, specializes in reactive architecture: surfaces, furnishings, and structures that change their own properties according to different stimuli. Her resin floors grow thicker where they need to support more weight; her composite walls rearrange their windows and stress lines based on local weather conditions. One of her best-known works, a chaise longue called Beast, can adjust its shape, flexibility, and softness to fit each person who sits in it.

The language that Oxman uses to discuss her work is provocative — she talks as much about the "behavior" of a piece as its appearance or function — and nearly everything she's done evokes biology in some way, whether it recalls the composition of human bone, the veinwork of a butterfly wing, or the helical polymer chains that comprise our DNA. She's remarked that "the biological world is displacing the machine as a general model of design."

It's an approach at once oddly specific and not particularly limiting, if the portfolio of Material Ecology, Oxman's design initiative, is anything to go by. Household items like carpal-tunnel therapy gloves — with zones of varying rigidity patterned after the spots of a cheetah — share space with designs for entire skylines.

About those skylines: some of Oxman's most ambitious work has to do with what buildings could look like in the twenty-first century. A proposal for "PeristalCity," an urban design plan based on a re-imagining of Manhattan's elevators, features slumped skyscrapers that look less like buildings than melted candles. "[T]he vast space… which the elevator shaft occupies is, temporally speaking, useless," the proposal reads. "Should the elevator, of all things, persist as the non-negotiable limit of our vertical habits?… What if circulation was to become the actual living and/or working space?"

Rather than having a conventional elevator traverse an inflexible vertical column to deliver people to stationary rooms, Oxman proposes "[a]n inhabitable pocket (living and working unit)… contained within a flexible element." These bubbles of space would travel throughout the larger body of the building by the same principles of expansion and contraction that move muscle tissue around.

A selection of Oxman's work is currently on display at Boston's Museum of Science. The full Material Ecology oeuvre can be found online, though much of the language seems like it would be opaque to anyone who hasn't taken several high-level design courses. Still, the projects are worth a look; it's not clear whether Oxman's materials and designs will become a thing of the mainstream, but it might be wise to get acquainted with them just in case.

Photo: Neri Oxman accepting the 2009 Earth Award for her design work.

The project is just getting underway, and the designers enthuse that it combines luxury with the ideas of eco-friendliness. I just want to know where I can go to activate the lasers and store my robot army.

via Inhabitat

Singapore is currently developing its largest garden project ever, showcasing plants from various climates. Giant fake trees collect rainwater and solar energy to power the conservatory, with vertical gardens climbing up their stems. The garden will feature separate biomes for different kinds of plants — a cool, moist biome for plants from the cloud forest and a cool, dry biome for Mediterranean plants. The first phase of the project will be completed in 2011.

Now, if only they could find biolumiscent plants to light the way in addition to the artificial lights from those solar trees.

Singapore's Largest Garden Project Unveiled [Inhabitat]

Andrey Bondarenko of 2-B-2 Architecture designed the arctic mobile unit to aid researchers exploring the icier parts of the world. The unit, which can house inhabitants for up to 15 days, is powered by a solar battery and melts surrounding snow with a diesel generator. It can be folded up for easy transport and parts of the unit can be expanded to make more space. The minimalist quarters actually don't look too bad, but I'm still hoping for a drivable model that can transport itself across the frozen regions.

Arctic Mobile Unit Keeps North Pole Visitors Warm [Inhabitat]

The house is actually made of concrete, so it mixes the concrete aesthetic of bunker life with some cute hobbity features like a high ceiling criss-crossed with wood. Because the structure is mostly underground, it rarely needs heating or air conditioning. And it has a great hot tub out there on the circular patio. Plus the house is located right near some famous mineral springs. It was esigned by the architects of SeArch and Christian Müller.

via Inhabitat

[Contemporist]

Sadly, this means no Death Star gracing the Dubai waterfront. Sphere-loving Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas will have to turn elsewhere to construct his weapon-shaped buildings. The proposed Anara Tower, with its giant, non-functional turbine, has also fallen to the architectural chopping block.

And though construction was set to begin on these wind-powered, rotating towers, they won't be spinning any time soon.

Perhaps, someday, these projects could be floated by another bubble, but for now they're going back in the drawer. You can see more architectural casualties of Dubai's financial crisis at Inhabitat.

Dubious Dubai: The Towers We Will Never See [Inhabitat]

MAD Architects has just unveiled the Urban Forest, the latest vertical garden to grace the world of concept design. Each floor features garden space and some of the floors are completely open, containing only plant life in lieu of the residential and office space on the enclosed floors. The abstract floors are meant to evoke an organic look, and the transparent outer walls give the impression that each floor hovers above the last.

MAD Architects are the authors of some truly bizarre and ambitious projects, not the least of which is their idea for a star-shaped mobile city, aptly called the Superstar. The Superstar is meant to travel from city to city and be more than self-sustaining energy-wise, feeding power back into its host city.

MAD architects: urban forest [Designboom via Inhabitat]

Portuguese architectural firms Atelier Data and Moov designed Forwarding Dallas for the Re:Vision Dallas competition, which solicited sustainable designs to construct on a city block in downtown Dallas. Forwarding Dallas took the top prize, which means it will actually be built, with construction starting in early 2011.

The design is inspired by natural hills, with different portions of the hills designated for different uses. The valleys are filled with public green spaces; vegetation, including food, will be grown on the step-filled slopes, and the peaks are topped with solar panels and wind turbines. The plan is for the community to be completely self-powered, and it even features a rainwater collection and storage facility.

But the community — which will include apartments, a gymnasium, a cafe, a daycare, and exhibition space — isn't merely sustainable; it's also a practical, cost-effective design. The construction is completely prefabricated and streamlined for rapid construction. The purpose of projects like Re:Vision Dallas is to provide cities with a model for off-the-grid architecture that's quickly realized and doesn't break the bank.

Dallas sprouts green city block downtown [Re:Vision Dallas via Inhabitat]

Paolo Soleri, who coined the term "arcology" to describe a super-dense hyperstructure that houses tons of people in a sustainable manner, is building Arcosanti, a nascent arcology, out in the Arizona desert between Phoenix and Flagstaff. So far, it's still fairly small, and is supporting itself by making Soleri's ceramic and brass bells — a lot of the cool-looking structures are actually foundries for the bell-making, or casting tons of concrete for more structures.

Journalist Simon Bisson visited Arcosanti, and took a ton of photos. (There are more at his Flickr stream):

The idea of a sprawl-free city seems attractive and smarter for our long-term survival. And the two great barrel vaults look amazing in the middle of the desert, as the sun goes down. But after visiting the site, Bisson has a couple of concerns:

However I'm left with some disconcerting thoughts.

The society that's grown up around Arcosanti reminds me of the guilds that built the great cathedrals of Europe. It's not difficult to see the arcology as a secular cathedral, a project that will take generations to complete and that will never be what Soleri dreamt all those years ago. Perhaps that's not a bad thing.

One thing did seem clear: it's in the wrong place. If arcologies are to replace the urban sprawl of a city with a new, intentional community on a human scale, then the desert (as beautiful as it is) is the wrong place for Arcosanti. It should be in a city, in a Detroit, a LA, a New York, a London, a Moscow, a Hong Kong. It shouldn't be isolated, a new Taliesin for Soleri's architectural disciples. It should be a visible sign of a different way to live, of a new city. Make it La Sagrada Familia, big, vibrant and reaching in the heart of Barcelona, not a hermitage in the desert.

[Simon Bisson on LiveJournal]

[The Next Side via Super Punch]

We mentioned a while back that Scott Chambliss, who designed the set for the most recent Star Trek movie, highlighted cited Eero Saarinen as the influence behind the slick, iPod-white designs we see at Starfleet and aboard the Enterprise. But that wasn't Star Trek's first dance with Saarinen's designs. His iconic Tulip Chair became the basis for the seating seen in the original series, and his sweeping, modernist style is clearly an inspiration for that contoured, ultra-clean future.

At once elegantly organic and evoking a sense of progress, Saarinen's work attracted not just the Star Trek team, but other entities looking to harness that sense of looking forward. General Motors, IBM, John Deere, and CBS all contracted Saarinen to design their corporate headquarters, and his designs became a symbol of an America that firmly believed it was marching toward the future.

New York's Museum of the City is currently hosting an exhibition "Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future," which features, among others, the Saarinen designs below.

Making the Face of Modernism Familiar [NY Times]

A global team of architects, engineers, and artists, organized by MIT's Carlo Ratti, has pitched the Cloud to the city of London for the 2012 Games. The Cloud would function as part monument, part park, and part billboard. Visitors would be able to walk inside the high-flying bubbles, which would double as screens, broadcasting weather information, sports scores, and other information, which could be seen from the ground. The Cloud would also be self-sustaining, not hooked into any power grid, and would derive its energy from a combination of solar, wind, and water power.

The Cloud is a finalist in the competition to create a monument for the London Olympics, but even if it is not selected, the team hopes to build it. They've already started a fundraising effort in case they don't win the London contract.

The Cloud [via Inhabitat]

Architect Jakob Tigges developed the plan for the Berg, a 1,000 meter man-made mountain that would sit on the site of Tempelhof. Tigges believes that building the mountain would attract tourist skiers, and add green spaces and wildlife to the city. He doesn't outline what the ecological impact of building such a massive structure would be, but Inhabitat notes that the Berg has captured a lot of people's imaginations. Several German outlets have republished Tigges' mountainous plans.

The Berg [via Inhabitat]

V's mothership is directly inspired by the new wing to the Milwaukee Art Museum, designed by Spanish artist Santiago Calatrava in 2001, executive producer Steve Pearlman told OnMilwaukee.com:

"One of the things we loved about the design is the "V" built into the architecture," Pearlman says.

Ian Thomas, production designer on the show's pilot — he was unable to stay with the show — showed photos of the museum to director Yves Simoneau and executive producers Pearlman and Scott Peters, "as concept art when we were in the design phase of the Mothership and we loved its scope and the simplicity."

Pearlman says the idea was tailored to the Mothership and tied "to other areas of the ship that we were also creating (i.e. The Grand Atrium and Anna's Executive Office)."

The sets are actually computer-generated, and the actors film in front of a greenscreen, as you can see here:

Want to see the museum that inspired the alien mothership? Here are some photos, from Associated Press:

V is back on ABC tonight at 8 PM.

Museum photos by AP/Morry Gash [On Milwaukee]

The Timeship is the dream of architect Steven Valentine, a proposed six-acre structure that would defend the frozen from... well, almost everything:

We see the Timeship as the "Fort Knox" of biological materials. DNA, tissue samples and cryopreserved patients will be housed in Timeship, and their safety and security against all threats, both natural and human-made, will have to be maintained for hundreds of years. Timeship has been designed to provide that security at every level, from defense against terrorist attack, to sea level changes due to global warming, to interruption of energy supplies due to any catastrophe.

Part of those defenses, according to those who have seen presentations from Valentine and associates?

He has specific plans to keep trucks at a distance so a truck full of explosives can't affect the stored patients, and a separate circle of separation for cars, with suitably weak bridges to ensure that the truck that tries to park with the cars winds up in the moat... He thinks that storing frozen endangered species would decrease the risk from Earth First! types and that storing frozen religious leaders would decrease the risk from religious lunatics, but I think these would increase the risk, especially in the case of religions where a frozen religious leader is not properly buried.

Those involved with the project consider Timeship's potential to be the continuation and consolidation of all manner of life-extending research, including "organ banking," nanotechnology and "patient reanimation":

Research on all of the complex steps needed to bring cryopreserved patients back to health and youth. This includes patients now in suspension with older technologies, and those now entering suspension with new vitrification technologies. Among the technologies that will be needed to revive such patients successfully are new treatments for killer diseases, for human aging control, for the regeneration of damaged tissues and for the repair of damaged tissues.

Currently looking for an appropriately large site ("The site will accommodate far more than just the six-acre Timeship Building and its immediate services. The park-like site will also accommodate future development that will take place around the Timeship, including research laboratories, a conference center, a hotel, a hospice for those making the transition to cryopreservation, and a hospital," the official website explains), plans for the futuristic home of undeath can be found in the project's official book, Timeship: The Architecture of Immortality, released last month.

[Timeship]