Jimmy Stamp, writer behind amazing architecture blog Life Without Buildings, says he saw the installation in Berlin many years ago and has been haunted by it since. He has a great post up today about it, and some of the other installations by Elmgreen and Dragset. Here's another of their oddities, a crumbling administration building. Stamp writes, "Their pieces give the impression that they belong in the Ancient Civilizations Wing of some far-future museum."

Photograph of the crumbling Adminstration office courtesy of Galleri Nicolai Wallner. All other photographs courtesy of Life Without Buildings and Le Territoire des Sens.

A Floating Room and Broken Architecture [Life Without Buildings]

Ferguson writes:

Accounts vary on the origins of this complex, and indeed, as to whether it was meant to be a hotel development or a housing development. Apparently, it was constructed in the 1960s and included/was to include a dam to protect it against sea surges, floors and stairs made of marble and a small amusement park. The site was commissioned by the government and local firms and there is no named architect. Local papers at the time reported that there were numerous accidents during construction which caused the death of some workers. As news of these accidents spread, no one wanted to go there, even to visit, and the project was subsequently abandoned. The ghosts of those who died in vain are said to still linger there, unremembered and unable to pass on. The complex was left in its unfinished state because no amount of redevelopment will bring people to the area due to superstitions about ghosts, and it can’t be demolished because destroying the homes of spirits and lost souls is taboo in Asian culture.

This is just one of several strange housing developments profiled in a recent post by Tomorrow Museum's Joanne McNeil. Check out the whole set of bizarre residential areas — not all of which have been abandoned.

San Zhr Photos [File Magazine via Tomorrow Museum]

According to Inhabitat:

Salinity gradient solar ponds, water purification tanks, and water filtering processes will all be integrated into the designated “water islands” of the chain. The other two island designs will be for tourists and solar energy production, providing self sufficient power as well as creating revenue.

Here is a more detailed schematic:

The design was shortlisted for Architectural Association’s Environmental Tectonics 2007 competition because the design attempts to solve political and cultural issues using design techniques.

Innovative Watertechture in the Dead Sea [via Inhabitat]

The ceiling looks just as bizarre as you might guess. Below, you can see something even stranger. The oddly-shaped shiny cube is actually a kind of appendage to the rest of the museum, which looks like an ordinary nineteenth-century-ish rectangular, red brick building.

You can see the cube just peeking around the left-hand side and a little bit on top.

Telstar Logistics Photostream [via Laughing Squid]

Here the cabinets are all open.

Here you can see the entertainment center.

And here are two longer views.

Here's the layout.

Triptyque via Archinect

Harvard design grad students Kiduck Kim and Christian Stayner explain how this would work:

Housing plats and roads are marked by solar-powered lighting poles. Individual dwellings bob, tethered with RV-type umbilical cords through which potable water, electricity, sew-age, and telephone connections continue uninterrupted. When the water subsides, depositing the city in a new arrangement.

Sure, it's Utopian, but I need Utopianism on Monday. Really, I do.

Floating in a Sinking City [Harvard via Inhabitat]

Business Week has a whole gallery of parking garages, gas stations, and car dealerships that have the ritzy gallery flair. In fifty years, the only place we may see cars is in museums, so these lovely structures (below you can see a Vancouver parkade that looks like the Guggenheim Museum) may be more prescient than their architects realized. Images via Business Week

Traffic Stopping Parking Structures [via Business Week]

How would this work? Otegu explains:

The outer skin of the structure absorbs sunlight through an organic photovoltaic skin and transfers it to the nano-fibers inside the nano-wires which then is sent to storage units at the end of each panel. Each turbine on the panel generates energy by chemical reactions on each end where it makes contact with the structure. Polarized organisms are responsible for this process on every turbine's turn.

The inner skin of each turbine works as a filter absorbing CO2 from the environment as wind passes through it.

The fact of using nano-bioengineering and nano-manufacturing as means of production is to achieve an efficient zero emission material which uses the right kind and amount of material where needed.

These micro organisms have not been genetically altered; they work as a trained colony where each member has a specific task in this symbiotic process. For example, an ant or a bee colony, where the queen knows what has to be done and distributes the tasks between the members.

Nano-Vent Skin [via Dezeen]

The surface of the house has a double-curved space frame for structure, vaporized skin, insular foam, and solar cell paint to top it all off—any energy it doesn't generate on its own is supplemented by wind turbines in the backyard, which also help operate a hydraulic elevator.

Here are some blueprints of the interior.

Victor Vetterlein main page via Dezeen

Below is the Eastern State Penitentiary, where our crazed antihero is sent in 12 Monkeys. Built as a reformist prison by Quakers in the nineteenth century, it was supposed to "cure" people of criminality by isolating them in monk-like cells. Unfortunately, it just made people crazier. The peeling paint looks almost like rotting skin.

And here is the forbidding Alton Estate, used in book-burning dystopia Fahrenheit 451. Though these buildings were originally considered stately and regal, you can see why the filmmakers thought they might also look like the barracks-like housing of a fascist country.

Want to see a dozen more intriguing scifi film settings? Check out Oobject's gallery.

The waste in the building comes from two different nuclear reactors. Under local law, it must be stored for 100 years. William Verstraeten, the artist who designed the facility, views his piece as a commentary on metaphorphosis. Open for tours, the building also contains four symbolic paintings. According to World Nuclear News:

The theme of decay is extended to the inside of the facility, where four large pictures hang. They all feature the same local natural scene, but occur in a sequence in which base colours are removed one by one. The final two-tone image is printed on gold leaf, to introduce the idea that the waste has more value after its radioactivity has decayed.

According to Architectural Record:

Its gently curving span is suspended by 66 cables from a tilted 387-foot mast, anchored in concrete, that resembles a bolt of lightning. The mast is set at an angle to the deck of the bridge and it bends roughly halfway up, so the entire mast forms an angle of roughly 150 degrees. Cables are attached at various heights on its tapered top half, creating cross-hatched visual patterns as they seem to swirl out from the mast. At the sharpest bend of the bridge, the slightly concave, boat-shaped deck and the shape of the bend transfer the load to the ends of the bridge, which is 525 feet long; access ramps, clad in stone, add another 656 feet. A walkway on its southern side has glass decking and a glass railing.

This is a holiday center in the Ukraine.

This government building in Georgia was inspired by a sketch of an imaginary city. Images by Frederic Chaubin

Frederic Chaubin main page via PingMag

The building consists of 32,000 square feet including a reading room, an auditorium, a children's library, offices, and open space for hanging out.

From the outside, it looks like a giant pile of stones or firewood. Images by Nicolas Cabrera

Villanueva Public Library, Colombia [Dezeen]

According to Inhabitat, there's good reason to call this building green:

A solar photovoltaic array on the roof provides shade for top level parking and on-site renewable energy. The materials used in construction were recycled and finished with low-VOC paints and finishes. The building envelope utilizes low-e glazing to decrease heating and cooling loads and the mechanicals are energy efficient. A storm-drain water-treatment system helps reduce tainted runoff from directly entering the hydrosphere and greywater harvesting provides for landscaping and on-site facilities.

First LEED Parking Garage [Inhabitat]

Interesting article, this idea has been written about in many SF stories-of course ;-)  I believe Larry Niven wrote one about a self sustaing arcology.

You might be wondering why the observation deck is so far away from the other building to its left, which is a visitor center. It's because Duggan and Morris see this not just as a building, but as a sort of real life table top in a still life painting. Doesn't it remind you of the fruit basket and vase you drew in middle school art class? The visitor center is actually called "the bowl."

You can see it really looks like a bowl here. The visitor center has a gallery, a cafe, and a shop. The observation tower is called "the lamp." Images by Duggan Morris Duggan Morris Architects main page via Designboom

Aquilialberg is currently working on the first realizations of this design for private clients in Italy. Images by Aquilialberg

Aquilialberg main page via Dezeen

We've superimposed structures from Earth onto real Martian landscapes created by the Martian rovers and satellites orbiting Mars. You can see smaller photos of the original Earth structures next to each.

Black Rock City
Above, you can see what Black Rock City, home to Burning Man, would look like in a Martian crater. Why this city? Erected swiftly every year in the barren playa of Black Rock Desert in Nevada, the city is like a beta test for instant colonies erected in harsh alien climates. People use vehicles and temporary buildings to shield themselves from extreme temperatures and sandstorms. Would it work on Mars? If the buildings could provide atmosphere, yes. A Martian colony will need fast, temporary housing and will also need to be profoundly careful with the ecosystem on the planet. So the Burning Man credo of "leave no trace," meaning leave no trash or non-environmentally appropriate items, will become the credo of Mars too.

Anarctica
Already there is an international program devoted to simulating life on Mars in the arctic region. And Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Red Mars trilogy, spent several seasons in Antarctica to get a feel for what it would be like to live on Mars. Many researchers have speculated that the new high-tech Antarctic science station, pictured here on a Martian landscape, would be perfect for the frigid, windy climate on Mars. It's placed on hydraulic legs that can lift or lower the station so that winds can blow underneath the station, and snow (or on Mars, sand) doesn't get packed around the walls.

Dubai
A vast city that grew out of a harsh desert climate over the past two decades, Dubai could provide a model for the Martian desert too. The problems? Even though the city grew quickly, it's not "instant" enough to provide a good colony blueprint. And the amount of power and raw materials required to build skyscrapers on this scale might not work on a planet whose natural resources are not as plentiful as the Earth.

Las Vegas
Like Dubai, Las Vegas is literally a city in a Martian-esque landscape (although Vegas is hot rather than freezing, the way Mars is). Much of Vegas is already under a dome, in the sense that most action on the strip takes place in vast, climate-controlled casino-malls. Would it provide a good model for a city on Mars? While Caesar's Palace might work as a domed city, the problem here is the same as in Dubai. The resources and water required to keep this city running on full power probably wouldn't exist on Mars.

Nunavut
The far-northern territory of Nunavut in Canada is an excellent analog for Mars. Cold and dry, the region is home to cities and peoples who are used to surviving the cold without the vast resources of a wealthy land like Dubai. Here, you can see the John Arnalukjuak School in a small city in Nunavut, which was built to withstand subzero temperatures while also using modest power. Low to the ground and insulated, the building is precisely the kind of shelter that would keep Martian kids of the future warm while they learn all about those weird old people from Earth.

Pueblos of United States and Mexico
The natives who lived in what later became Mexico and the United States built homes directly into rocky slopes, and later used clay to build vast, interconnected homes that stayed warm in winter and cool in summer. Small windows kept the worst of the desert wind out, and the thick clay walls provided excellent insulation. Obviously a pueblo alone wouldn't work as a Martian colony, but pueblo-style dwellings with atmospheric controls, low to the ground and interconnected, made from thick Martian clay, might be just the ticket for a Martian city.

Image spiffing by Stephanie Fox.

Image of the North American Pueblo at Taos by Bobak Ha'Eri. Image of Las Vegas by MattSims. Image of Nunavut school by eanoee. Image of Black Rock City from Incredimazing. Octal has a great set of photos of Dubai, including the one we used above that captures how much it is literally growing out of a barren desert.

Here is what developers claimed the CityCenter would like like back when the started construction.

Last week, Deutsche Bank AG, the lender on the Cosmopolitan Project (the piece of this structure that's on the far right), started foreclosure proceedings after developer Ian Bruce Eichner was unable to get more financing for the world's biggest mega-mall. Let that be a lesson to everyone who looks at gleaming architecture renderings and imagines they're seeing the future. Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty.

Foreclosure on Las Vegas Casino to Begin [Wall St. Journal]

The centipede legs will house modern art displays.

Wilkinson Eyre main page via Dezeen

The beauty of this addition to the tower is that there will be no modification of the existing tower — the observation deck will simply be bolted in place. This is one of the most ambitious temporary modification projects ever undertaken.
Image by Tristan Nitot

Serero Architects main page via Dwell

Here is a cutaway view of a dome, showing you what it's made of.
And here's a recently-completed expansion to the School of Communication Arts in Raleigh, North Carolina. It's made of three two-story domes, with 120 foot diameters. They call it the "art school of the 25th century."

And here's a huge, 5,600 square foot dome with domettes, in Colorado. It's for sale, and you can check out interior photos here.

Of course, we couldn't forget the Florida luxury dome. Are these the houses of the future? I could actually see them becoming more popular in disaster-prone areas like Florida, where hurricanes tear the crap out of people's houses all the time.

If you need to ogle more domes, there's a whole bunch of them at the Monolithic Dome Institute.

The Chanel Pavilion recently made its Hong Kong debut and moves to Tokyo in April.

Zaha Hadid main page

Here are some of the highlights of this proposed city:
- No cars
- No taxes
- Small streets
- Constant streams of efficiency maximizing data
- Photovoltaic farms
- Transparent laws
- Full intellectual property protection

Sounds awesome, right? Although I'm not sure I'm willing to give up my car just yet. When and if completed, Masdar City will occupy six square kilometers of land near Abu Dhabi's international airport. No word yet on the world's first zero-G city.

The Masdar Initiative main page via Techpin

Like a strange new race of Celtic gods, London's wealthiest residents, "digging dozens of feet underground," the Times reported, were busy constructing a literally subsurface world for themselves in the ancient waterproof clay of southern England.

As the Times explained, London's "super-rich," including oil barons, Indian steel tycoons, and the odd American hedge fund manager, have been "seeking permission to excavate under the garden... making space for a three-story garage with car stacker, a swimming pool, a gym and a private home cinema." At least one example of this bizarre new form of subterranean architectural eccentricity even includes a "walk-in shower with waterproof television screens and glass walls that turn opaque with the press of a button."

While doing this, of course, there's still a house to consider, sitting up there on the earth's surface - so, in an effort to prevent cave-ins, the "original house" has been "propped up on giant steel pillars." Digging machines and men in helmets, like a painting by Fernand Léger, grind away at the planet beneath.

This spelunking upper class of central London - surely something new in human history? - are even now "engaged in a multimillion-pound game of one-upmanship," the Times suggested, "as they vie with each other to dig ever bigger, wider and deeper extensions."

So I'd like to propose a slightly more interesting addiction for investor class Brits, hip-hop moguls, and easy-money Hollywood types who think cocaine is still a thrill and Courvoisier worth pursuing: Give up your alcoholism and your sports cars and your use of bad drugs from the 1980s - and start digging show caves.

Dig vast, artificial caverns that extend for miles beneath the city.

Show your friends.

"I'd like to introduce you to Komatsu earth-moving equipment," I'd say, sitting across the table from Robert Downey Jr. I'd show him a sales brochure. "For the price of one custom Ferrari, you could buy half a dozen of these things - and rip away."

Buy land outside Moab. Buy a thousand mountain acres in Colorado. Buy an estate house somewhere deep in London - and tear the basement up. Go down. Go under. Stay up all night in a haze of klieg lights, dust, and diesel fumes, drilling into the planet.

Rats will flee from you. Water mains will burst.

Now start a few side tunnels and install nice couches.

Because who cares? You're the world's first interesting celebrity. You build tunnels beneath rowhouses and drink liquid Vitamin D.

And forget your neighbors. Slash would have thrown TVs out the window and played his guitar too loud - how exciting! So you're just playing with earth-moving machines at 3am, building artificial show caves beneath the city streets. You've got dredging equipment. Pulverizers.

You could be up, listening to the irritating squeal of a mobile crusher, shredding concrete four floors below ground.

You wake up to hear that Keith Richards has been arrested - and not because he's wrecked a Rolls Royce or bought heroin, but because he's tunneled all the way to France.

Or Colin Farrell gives up sex to construct a network of manmade caverns beneath his house in outer Dublin. That's not an earthquake - it's Colin Farrell.

He's drilling again.

Colin Farrell Addicted to Mining, the newspapers report.

I'm reminded of Seymour Cray, founder of Cray supercomputers, who apparently found "his inspiration" somewhere "deep in a dirt tunnel beneath his Wisconsin home." Having eventually tunneled out toward the nearby woods, his underground adventure wasn't always free from surface incidents: "When a tree fell through the top of the tunnel several years ago," Time magazine reported in 1988, "Cray used the opening to install a periscope-equipped lookout."

For Cray, the excavation project is more than a simple diversion. "I work when I'm at home," he recently told a visiting scientist. "I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s."

Of course, Seymour Cray was no by means the first person to relieve a bit of stress through home tunneling.

Two years ago, the excellent blog Modern Mechanix looked at a man named Dr. H.G. Dyar, who had "one of the oddest hobbies in the world": he had "found health and recreation in digging an amazing series of tunnels beneath his Washington home."

Almost a quarter of a mile of tunnels has been completed, lined with concrete. The deepest passage... extends 32 feet down. Every bit of earth was removed unaided by Dr. Dyar, being carried out in pails. He found the tunnel-digging an appealing form of exercise to relieve the intense strain of his work day, which involved much close work with high-power microscopes.

Almost anti-climactically, we learn that "the idea first came to Dyar when he sought to make an underground entrance to his furnace cellar" - but, as with all things worthwhile, anywhere, he simply kept going. "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise," William Blake once wrote - and Blake wasn't even a tunneler.

Finally, there was William Lyttle, the so-called Mole Man of Hackney. Lyttle was an east London eccentric who lived in a dilapidated house on Mortimer Road. "But this is no ordinary house," the Guardian reported in August 2006.

Quoting at great length, because I love this story:

Since the early 1960s, the man who owns and lives inside the £1m Victorian property has been digging. No one knows how far the the network of burrows underneath 75-year-old William Lyttle's house stretch. But according to the council, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m (26ft) deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house.

Their surveyors estimate that the resident known locally as the Mole Man has scooped 100 cubic metres of earth from beneath the roads and houses that surround his 20-room property.

"I often used to joke that I expect him to come tunnelling up through the kitchen floor," said Marc Beishon, who lives a few yards from Mr Lyttle's house.

His wife, Joy, sees the serious side of the issue, however. "We moved in six years ago and we've been complaining to the council ever since," she said. "Until six weeks ago they had the audacity to tell us the house was structurally sound. The whole of the opposite street lost power one day after he tapped into a 450-volt cable."

Now, after 40 years of complaints, the council has admitted Mr Lyttle's quarrying has put the neighbourhood at risk. Last week it obtained a court order to temporarily evict him in order to enable engineers to fill the holes with cement, at an estimated cost of £100,000 - for which Mr Lyttle will be billed.

"There has been movement in the ground," Phillip Wilman, a council surveyor, told Thames magistrates court.

In any case, how much more interesting would the world be if, say, Eliot Spitzer's recent and mysterious financial transactions had not been directed toward sex - it's easy enough to get that, Mr. Spitzer - but toward weird and illegal machines that caused movement in the ground outside his Albany mansion? Police surveyors armed with ground-penetrating radar swarm the place - and discover several miles' worth of artificial caves in a warren of entrances and exits throughout the city. Eliot Spitzer did this, the gruff, benchpress-ready men quietly say. We've got to stop him.

But I've made my point.

What I'd like to see, at some point before I die, is a series of show caves, free and open to the public, that have been excavated and paid for by the film and music revenues of global superstars.

All the tunnels have been supervised by celebrities, who are addicted to digging. Shia LaBoeuf has a tunnel. Shakira has several. Even Bob Dole has one - but he's forgotten how to use it.

You book a flight to Hollywood, then, and you buy a Star Map - but within three hours you find yourself one hundred and sixty seven feet below ground in the most spectacular cave you've ever seen. Its stalactites have been precision-cut by CNC-milling machines, the walls shaped by computer-programmable routers. There is a vague smell of sawdust in the air, and you notice several wood boards holding up some parts of the walls. There are vaults visible in the distance, and a slight groaning sound.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for the New York Times, was there last week - and he hated the place.

Rumor has it, though, that a vast, echoless complex exists beneath Atlanta, dug by Ludacris. Its dimensions are too shocking to believe. He hangs out down there with Umberto Eco, discussing the Hollow Earth Theory and practicing rhymes.

Whenever another royalty check comes through, he digs deeper.

(Note: The final two images show the Excelsior Tunnel, and were taken by the always impressive Nick Catford of Subterranea Britannica; all rights, copyrights, and otherwise remain with him. The opening thumbnail is a South American ice cave, shot by Flickr user Tom Holub)

Looks good in blue.

And orange, too. Images by Michael Jantzen

Michael Jantzen [official portfolio page]

The secret to making this shiny building work in extreme hot weather is angles. The facade is angled to minimize glare, and the roof is slanted with the winds so that cool air currents can pass through the building.

Construction starts this summer.

Foster + Partners main page via Dezeen

Designed by architecture firm Brisac Gonzalez, this stadium is dotted with glass bricks backed by colored filters and resembles a cross between the UFO in Close Encounters and the castle walls in some kind of Flash Gordon serial.

Aurillac Stadium [Dezeen]

- The top portion is a residential tower.
- The middle is an office tower.
- The bottom section is a huge shopping mall.
- The round spaces in between are communal sky gardens.
- The entire building is mechanically jacked, so each section twists slowly, giving people different views of the oceanfront over time.
- Estimated completion date: 2009

James Law Cybertecture main page

- 2700 square feet of solar panels will produce enough energy to power the building and more.
- A structure coated with titanium dioxide, called the Solar Drop, reacts with UV rays from the sun taht break down smog using photo-catalysm.
- Rainwater is collected from the rooftop for use in the building.
- A helical, 148-foot tall "Wind Tower" captures breezes coming across the canal and turns it into energy. Images by Vincent Callebaut

Anti-Smog main page via G Living

Those tubes are escalators connecting different living areas to each other.

Koolhaas says he's using this 6.5-mile square mini-city to launch a critique of generic cities filled with acres of sameness. He wants this city to look like a cross between the supergeneric urban spaces of New York and the superfantastical, weirdly-shaped buildings for which Koohaas is known. According to the New York Times:

The core of the development would be the island, which would be divided into 25 identical blocks. Neat rows of towers — some tall and slender, others short and squat, depending on the zoning — line the blocks, as if a fragment of Manhattan had been removed with a scalpel and reinserted in the Middle East.

The monotony is broken by mixed-use structures whose immense scale and formal energy draw on mythic examples from architectural history. A spiraling 82-story tower might have been inspired by the minaret of the ninth-century Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq; a gargantuan 44-story sphere brings to mind the symbolic forms of the 18th-century architect Étienne-Louis Boullée.

City on the Gulf [NYT]

Here's the inside, which is still open to the elements and filled with sand. Here's a structure that looks like a chunk of spaceship. Photos by Zhang Wenkui/ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images.

The rocks are super modern inside, and constitute a library, a community center, and a cultural center. Here's how to look cool without being tacky or over-the-top. Images by Sergio Gómez

Giancarlo Mazzanti via Notcot

The mega-complex will contain offices, apartments, stores, restaurants, cafes, poet-inspired ponds, a Rockefeller Center-esque open terrace, and a hotel, and it's designed by Steven Holl Architects, the firm responsible for another similarly-constructed mega complex in the country opening this year.

Steven Holl Architects main page via Designboom

Available commercially in 1968, Maneval's houses came in white, green, and brown—colors that would blend easily into the landscape. Only thirty were ever produced, several of which were used to house visitors to a vacation spot in the Pyrenees. From the outside, the Bubble House looked like nothing so much as a downscale version of Monsanto's House of the Future, which was on display at Disneyland from 1957-1967; indeed, its petite size may have been drawback. Of course, when I imagine a plastic house, all I can think of is the delightful atmosphere inside a porta-potty. Look at more pictures here and here.

Chengdu, in Southern China, is one of the country's most important economic hubs. Images by Sutherland Hussey

Sutherland Hussey Architects main page via World Architecture News