Houses in weird places

clipped from www.crystalinks.com

Built with pennies

clipped from www.fincher.org Hi, I'm Mitch Fincher and these pages are from a talk I gave while a Civil Engineering student at Texas Tech University. The following is the basic pattern for building cantilevered structures with Pennies. Although it looks trivial, we can build amazing structures with these pillars. All penny columns are ten high, a "stack". Two side-by-side pennies held in place by a penny above them is called a "triad". Below is a stack with two triads resting on top. clipped from www.fincher.org

The Water Cube

clipped from www.popsci.com The official swimming facility of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China, will span 7.8 acres, house five pools, and seat 17,000 spectators, yet it doesn’t contain a single steel cable, concrete column or structural beam. Instead its walls and ceilings are composed of a network of slender steel pipes linked together by 12,000 load-bearing nodes. These nodes evenly distribute the weight of the building, making it strong enough to withstand Beijing’s most severe earthquakes. A plastic Teflon-like foil—just eight one-thousandths of an inch thick—covers the entire structure like skin. It lets in more light and heat than glass does, helping to keep the pools warm and slashing energy costs by 30 percent. Construction wraps up this year with the official opening scheduled for the Summer Olympics. arup.com clipped from img.timeinc.net clipped from img.timeinc.net clipped from img.timeinc.net clipped from img.timeinc.net clipped from img.timeinc.net clipped from img.timeinc.net

First Underwater Hotel to Open in Dubai

Amazing and interesting.

Hydropolis reproduces the human organism in an architectural design. There is a direct analogy between the physiology of man and the architecture. The geometrical element is a figure eight lying on its side and inscribed in a circle. The spaces created in the basin will contain function areas, such as restaurants, bars, meeting rooms and theme suites. These can be compared to the components of the human organism: the motor functions and the nervous and cardiovascular systems, with the central sinus knot representing the pulse of all life.

clipped from www.arkitectrue.com Currently under construction in Dubai, Hydropolis is the world’s first luxury underwater hotel. It will include three elements: the land station, where guests will be welcomed, the connecting tunnel, which will transport people by train to the main area of the hotel, and the 220 suites within the submarine leisure complex. It is one of the largest contemporary construction projects in the world, covering an area of 260 hectares. It will open at the end of 2007. The original idea for Hydropolis developed out of Hauser’s passion for water and the sea, and goes much deeper than just building a hotel underwater. More than just curiosity, it is a commitment to a more far-reaching philosophy. “Once you start digging deeper and deeper into the subject, you can’t help being fascinated and you start caring about all the associated issues,” he explains. “Humans consist of 80% water, the earth consists of 80% water; without water there is no life.”

The Most Amazing Houses in the World

Most interesting too.

clipped from mostinterestingblog.blogspot.com The most interesting and amazing houses from the world