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]

According to Strange Maps:

Leighton suggested that the old borough boundaries should be altered to conform to a honeycomb pattern. Within a 5-mile radius of the General Post Office all the sprawling, differently sized boroughs were to become hexagonal-shaped areas, 2 miles across. There were 19 altogether with the City in the centre of the honeycomb. Each hexagonal borough would be identified by a letter, and the letter as well as a number would be painted or cut out of tin-plate to be visible by day and night on lampposts at every street corner.

Very efficient!

More weirdness via Strange Maps

New York

Los Angeles

Chicago

Washington, DC

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Tokyo

London

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Additional Reporting by Caitlin Petrakovitz.

My biggest beef with these shirts (aside from the giant crane in lieu of one of Tokyo's already gigantic movie monsters), is that more cities need to be represented. Where is the San Juan Chupacabra? The Vancouver Sasquatch? I'd even settle for a Montauk Monster.

T-shirts are available for $17 from Stussy.

[via Hide Your Arms]

This one is called Sun Light. Georgiosi says he looked for everyday trinkets that would optimize light transmission, then put them together to make these cool lamps. Images by Georgiosi

OWL main page via

The tower, which at this point remains simply a novel idea, would take up little actual ground space and run like a proper democracy. It is literally broken up into municipal areas—the "neighborhood" is a singe floor of 600; the village is 20 floors and houses 6,000. There are also three super-districts that house 33,000 people each.

Elected reps serve in a local government and have regular meetings to decide what to do with common areas, which would include an ice skating rink, a botanical garden, an open-air theater, and tennis courts.
Circular openings in sections of the tower will provide nature-y parks and gardens for citizens. Five circulation cores with massive elevators—think the Tube, except it goes up and down instead of weaving underground—transport residents from neighborhood to neighborhood. Water and waste will be recycled, and fresh water harvested from the clouds, which pretty much start right around where the tower's peak ends.

Since your workplace, your local movie theater, and all your friends will be in the same building, you'll ever have to leave.

How convenient/scary! Images by Popularchitecture

Supertower main page

Other than those restrictions, the sky's the limit. Well, there is one other thing. According to the rules:

Use of a time machine or other similar instrument to stop the normal passage of time, giving you say 3 weeks to make a film in what seems like just a weekend to the rest of us - well, that is cheating and we won't stand for it - unless of course you use some kind of mind control and erase any knowledge of this rule or your cheating or the fact that the time machine was invented...

Winners get a video camera. What? No Dalek-shaped chocolate cake?

Sci-Fi London [official site]

While we love Robert Carlyle, especially in Trainspotting and 28 Weeks Later, this movie unfortunately looks like an artifact from the days of Volcano, Twister, and Earthquake. Carlyle plays an engineer who worked on the Thames Barrier, which can't withstand the double whammy of high tide and a series of perfect storms that brew up enough water to bury Big Ben underwater.

Of course, Carlyle fights back against the water with some hokey science and cheesy melodrama, and the movie gets mired in relationshippy chatter as people prepare for the end, instead of buying a boat and getting the hell out of dodge. Still, we in the States are hankering to see it. Flood washed into the UK several months ago, but hasn't made it to our shores yet — except, apparently, on the "family friendly" ION network where it aired in December, got its advert ripped to YouTube, then ripped to our own Flash player. Still, you can really catch the fear on Carlyle's face through the pixelation, can't you?

Flood [Channel 4]