There's a reason why ancient Egyptian pharaohs and Mesoamerican royalty wanted to be memorialized with gigantic pyramids. They look awesome. These ultra-modern buildings translate the pyramids' classical grandeur into today's soaring architecture.
Lush, High-Tech Ecotopias of Today and Tomorrow
When Ernest Callenback published his novel Ecotopia back in the 1970s, he crystallized an idea beloved by science fiction writers and urban planners alike. He imagined modern cities that were both high tech and carbon neutral. Here are some ways that people have tried to make his dream real.
The incredible bridge design that could take Portland into the future
What would happen if we designed new urban megastructures using the latest scientific information about green design? Portland architect Bill Badrick has the answer. The new Columbia River Crossing bridge, in Portland, Oregon, should be a double-decker, carbon-neutral engineering marvel — complete with a huge park on…
This is what farms will look like in the future
As the world's human population grows, we're reducing the amount of agricultural areas and forests. That's why some architects are working on concepts for sustainable skyscrapers and vertical agricultural buildings. Here are some of the most interesting plans for the merging of the city and the farm.
Is this the city of the future?
A century ago, we imagined futuristic cities full of hulking, steel buildings, their towers surrounded by a lace of elevated roads. But today, the future of architecture is biology. Synthetic biology architects and designers imagine cities that are made from bioengineered materials, fed by energy from sunlight. These…
Could you live in this futuristic, ultra-tiny apartment?
Instead of creating taller buildings to cope with skyrocketing urban populations, city planners are proposing tiny "micro-apartments" of just a few hundred square feet. A measure in San Francisco proposes to create hundreds of these apartments, which could increase the population in some neighborhoods by 35 percent. A…
Here are the most futuristic European cities that never existed
There is nothing more fascinating than yesterday's vision of tomorrow — especially when it comes to city design. Here are some of the most incredible futuristic cities imagined by great European designers of the twentieth century and before. We hope that they came to fruition in some alternate timeline.
The Weirdest Monuments Of The Communist Era That Are Still Standing
After the fall of the Soviet Union, many Communist statues and sculptures were destroyed, while others were moved to statue parks or museums. But many of them remained in the same place for the last 20 years, while the former Soviet areas were transformed into modern countries. Here are thirteen of the most incredible …
Could you build a city in an underground cave?
Fantasy and sci-fi are replete with underground cities: Ember, Zion, Menzoberranzan, Khazad-dûm and more. But are there any caves on Earth that are large enough to actually contain a real, functional city?
