Photo: Mathieu César via crfashionbook.com Daft Punk recently released this slick and stylish photo shoot set in a famous LA modernist house, though we here at Architizer think there’s more here than meets the eye. The French DJ duo—whose new album, “Random Access Memories,” drops today—snapped these images of themselves at the Sheats Goldstein Residence, designed by American …Continue Reading
Archivo de la etiqueta: sci-fi
7 Buildings Inspired By A Galaxy Far, Far Away
This house “may not look like much, kid, but she’s got it where it counts.” (No, we love this house.)
Full disclosure: We’ll take about any excuse to talk about Star Wars. But this time we’ve got a legitimate reason: May 4 is international Star Wars Day! This Saturday, let your geek flag fly high, and have no shame in putting that old Boba Fett Halloween costume to use. We thought we’d start the festivities a little early (we don’t work on Saturday!) with this list of buildings that were clearly inspired by (or that influenced) the look and feel of the Bearded One’s timeless space opera.
Who knows want the architecture of Episode VII will look like, but if it’s anything like these structures, we’d approve. Click through to see them all.
P.S. May the fourth be with you!
Daniel Libeskind’s spiky Denver Art Museum takes a nod from Darth Vader’s razor-sharp Super Star Destroyer.
Santiago Calatrava’s troubled City of Arts and Science complex in Valencia, Spain, includes this structure, El Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, whose animistic features evoke the samurai gas mask design of Darth Vader’s helmet.
OMA Casa de Musica in Porto, Portugal, looks exactly like a Jawa Sandcrawler, as seen in Episode IV.
Sandcrawler
Zaha Hadid’s Capital Hill House, which was designed for fashion icon Naomi Campbell, features a periscope-like design that more than a little resembles General Grievous’s flagship the Invisible Hand, from Episode III.
Photo: flickr user enemigo_80
Oscar Niemeyer employed the squat dome in several of his now-canonical projects. The latest can be found at the now-shuttered Niemeyer Center in Avilés, Asturias, Spain, which looks more than a little like the Republic Executive Building on Coruscant, only a lot smaller.
The Republic Executive Building
Those remembering the first (and only) viewing of Episode I may have thought to themselves why Naboo’s stately architecture looked so familiar. That’s because George Lucas and his art direction team were inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the Marin County Civic Center, which sports a dazzling blue-greenish roof and dome that pops from its forested surroundings.
Festivities in Naboo
Photo: Patrick Bingham Hall
The Stamp House by Charles Wright Architects is a surprisingly sprightly concrete home that hovers above a lake. The house’s concrete form and structure looks suspiciously like the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo’s trusty smuggling-turned-Rebellion-saving cruiser.
J. Mayer H’s Rest Stops In Georgia Are Out Of This World!
This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Popular Choice Award in the bus and train station category. See the full list of winners here.
You’re driving on a vast open highway surrounded by nothingness after spending hours in your cramped car, and suddenly, you need a place to eat, use the john, and catch a catnap. You rush into a banal rest stop off the exit ramp, and the sterile interiors, smells of acrid industrial cleaners, and overhead fluorescent lights send you running back to the car. This may be your typical, unpleasant experience at a roadside rest area, unless you pull into this otherworldly Rest Stop in Gori, Georgia. Read more!
Designed by Berlin-based J. Mayer H‘s studio, this roadside respite looks as though it dropped in from outer space—and we mean that in a good way! Known for the incorporation of amorphous shapes, unconventional structures, and fresh materials, J. Mayer H’s designs often appear admirably bizarre and totally unlike anything you’ve seen before. The skeleton of the building is formed by connecting lines of chunky concrete blocks, which feature cantilevers that project outward in random directions from the main form. The concrete frames large, rounded glass curtain walls that fit within the concrete, and flood the interior spaces with natural light. These unusual rest stops are a refreshing break from the mass replicated structures dotting the sides of highways around the world. When viewed from up close, you might think you just drove into a portal to another dimension!
Commissioned by the Head of Roads Department of Georgia, this series of roadside stops sit net to a brand new highway connecting the country to the Republic of Azerbaijan. Our readers chose these sci-fi structures as the popular winner in the A+ Awards Bus & Train Station category, and the photos make us want to take a break there!
LEGO Artist Builds City Out Of 200,000 Individual LEGO Pieces
No one, I repeat, no one can do LEGO like Mike Doyle can. We’ve previously spotlighted his Halloween-themed LEGO sculptures, which used approximately 130,000 of the famed plastic bricks to build large models of crumbling Victorian houses. Now, Doyle is back with a larger and much more ambitious project: Contact 1, the first entry in a series of thematically-linked works that celebrate “terrestrial contact events, spiritual beings and unique worlds.” Wait, whaaaa?
Doyle’s series will shed light on more elevate states of beings through the manically detailed, impressively constructed cities he has and continues to build. With Contact 1, he’s built an imaginary city of near Minas Tirith-like scale, complete with pixelated towers, forests, and waterfalls. It’s called Odan, home to an enlightened species that evolved from us but dropped the lousy inter-species killing thing, and it is dedicated solely to the development of its inhabitants cultural and spiritual needs. It also took Doyle 600 hours to assemble the huge 5 X 6 feet-wide project, which comprises 200,000 LEGO bricks and a whole lot of nonsense. Whether you buy into or are intrigued by Doyle’s conceptual backstory or not, his creation is stunning in many ways. Click through for more photos!
Foster + Partners Designs 3D-Printed Lunar Base
All images: Foster + Partners
Having conquered the world of architecture on earth, Foster + Partners have their sights set on last frontier for their latest project. The firm has released plans for a 3D-printed moon base that will be constructed using lunar soil (nerd speak: “regolith”). Designed in conjunction with the European Space Agency, the lunar homes will have space for up to four and will feature a hard printed shell to shield the inhabitants from the elements, of the galactic variation that is: namely, meteorite showers, gamma radiation, and extreme temperature changes. Continue.
Foster + Partners were responsible for the design of the base’s modular living units. These structures, pressured, inflatable capsules containing various living spaces, would be transported along with the 3D printer aboard a space rocket. Once landed, the tubular modules would be unpacked and inflated; the robot-controlled-printer would then print a regolith shell layer by layer directly over each lodging, effectively burying it in a thick protective crust of lunar soil.
Working with a consortium of engineers, the architects have already constructed a 1.5-ton scale mockup, which they built in a vaccuum chamber to simulate space conditions. The team used a D-Shape printer—the largest 3D printer in the world—to print and test the material strength of the design. They devised a “hollow closed cellular structure” that proved sufficiently strong while reducing the amount of material needed for printing.
“As a practice, we are used to designing for extreme climates on earth and exploiting the environmental benefits of using local, sustainable materials – our lunar habitation follows a similar logic,” says Xavier De Kestelier of Foster + Partners. “It has been a fascinating and unique design process, which has been driven by the possibilities inherent in the material. We look forward to working with ESA and our consortium partners on future research projects.”
Top 10: Sci-Fi Architecture
Photo via Interesting Buildings Architects have a thing for science fiction: museums that look like spaceships, skyscrapers covered in fish-scaley material, and all other sorts of mind-boggling structures. The great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who died last week, was perhaps the most futuristic of them all. Some of his most famous projects, like the Niterói
Race To The Bottom: Will Fiji’s Poseidon Resort Be The World’s First Underwater Hotel?
The planned Water Discus Hotel, designed by Deep Ocean Technology for Dubai, is an initiative of the Dubai construction company Drydocks World and Switzerland’s BIG InvestConsult. Image courtesy of Deep Ocean Technology. Back in 2001, submersible expert Bruce Jones hatched the idea for the Poseidon Undersea Resort, the world’s first underwater hotel. Featuring 24 modular
Editor’s Pick: The Future Of Theater With Magma Architecture
Building: Masrah Al Qasba Theater
Architect: magma architecture
Location: Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
Why We Like This:
A design intended to celebrate both the rich history of the Emirate of Sharjah as well as its cultural future, the Masrah Al Qasba Theatre takes inspiration from the surrounding open air desert landscapes to shape the dramatic interiors. The textile wrap that covers the walls and ceiling of the theater pays respect to the traditional building materials of the region, folded in undulating surfaces that evoke “images of evening sun streaking sand dunes”. The lighting within the space was designed to accentuate the curvature of the shapes while also providing proper illumination of the performance space. Read the complete project description here.
