wow
10 annoyingly brilliant office interiors
in an ideal world all company directors would invest in their workforce to the point where the office didn’t resemble a huge ice cube filled with back-breaking plastic chairs, mdf tables and computers less powerful than my old commodore plus-4. the sad fact is, for the majority of the world’s office-dwelling workers at least, company offices are some of the most inhospitable places on earth…
the world of bizarre sound recordings
As I imagine is the case for many deputydog readers, I’m fascinated by anything that goes above and beyond the norm. Having hosted experimental radio for nearly a decade, I’ve had opportunities to hear many truly strange sounds. These are a few standouts of the unlikely and just plain odd recordings I’ve come across. All are beautiful in their own ways– I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
the world’s most astounding agricultural engineering project
the rice terraces of the philippine cordilleras, if laid out end to end, would stretch halfway round the globe. if this ingenious feat had been accomplished in recent times the clearly enormous task would have seemed more than impressive, however the fact that it was completed thousands of years ago without the use of modern apparatus and machinery takes the terraces and integrated irrigation systems to a whole new level.
old aged computers, submissions are open & chicago at night
my computer gasped its last breath 4 days ago.
i realised it was coming when the need to re-install windows became a fortnightly affair and the husky sound of the pc itself became louder than the washing machine downstairs. it ended messily: the little bastard wouldn’t even entertain another fresh start, stubbornly throwing lines of delibrately confusing code in my face instead of the oh-so familiar re-install options page, whilst making noises similar to the sound of a ferry’s horn as it approaches port. anyway, punches were thrown (by me) and i ended up terminating its life altogether using human force and screaming.
the most dramatic chapel on earth
if god was real and happened to be a sci-fi fan i reckon the cadet chapel at the air force academy in colorado would be his chapel of choice. it looks like no place of worship you’ve ever seen and from the outside resembles a row of 17 angular spacecraft sitting on their back-ends, ready to shoot off at any minute. the chapel and its surrounding complex was designed by walter netsch of architectural firm skidmore, owings & merrill and construction was completed in 1963. no sooner had the spire-fest been announced than the public outcry began…
2 stunning and surreal gasometer conversions
the reason for this post is to show you 2 incredible converted gasometers and illustrate that demolition shouldn’t always be the answer when industrial structures come to the end of their career. with a bit of imagination even an enormous disused gas container can look incredibly inviting whilst also serving a new purpose.
the frightening grid of nezahualcoyotl
while we’re on the subject of aerial geometry, check out the insane aerial views of nezahualcoyotl, mexico state’s 2nd most populous municipality. this particular area consists of hundreds and hundreds of rows of densely packed housing occasionally sliced by a main road. just looking at these photos makes me claustrophobic but i can’t help admiring the patterns created by the hardcore “pack ‘em in tightly” urban planning.
hands down, the coolest skyscraper ever made
there are so many reasons to love this beauty that it’s hard to know where to start. it’s got 13 floors which, to me at least, makes it a skyscraper. it’s entirely made of wood, thus making it a wooden skyscraper. it was made by the fair hands of a single crazy russian man, thus making it a homemade wooden skyscraper. brilliant.
standing in the leg of a giant
with a total weight of 1.2million tonnes, the troll offshore gas platform was built using 245,000m3 of concrete and 100′000 tonnes of steel (apparently the equivalent of 15 eiffel towers), the walls of its legs measuring over a metre thick. following construction, over a period of 7 days, ‘troll a’ was towed from rogaland in norway to the troll gas field in the north sea - a total of more than 200km.
i hope those pillars are strong
below is the recently (2003) extended runway at funchal airport in portugal. the original 1400m runway was notoriously short and, as a result, sometimes dangerous for landing planes. the runway extension won the iabse’s ‘outstanding structures award’ and rightly so: due to an obvious lack of land, engineers have supported the extension on 180 pillars, each 70m high. on the last photo you can see the presumably noisey car park that now lives under the end of the runway.
deputydog favourites
- adaptive reuse
- art of manliness
- bldgblog
- boing boing
- cineleet
- dark roasted blend
- environmental graffiti
- fogonazos
- freshome
- gcaptain
- grow-a-brain
- look at this
- matt gilluley photography
- metube
- miss cellania
- neatorama
- plastique monkey
- pruned
- startling moniker
- super colossal
- things
- think or thwim
- unique daily
- videosift
- web urbanist
