AttractiveCity – an interactive City generator from steffiX_stefanieSixt on Vimeo.

(via Bruce Sterling)

Dark Roasted Blend has a big round-up of trippy architectural visions of future cities. Here are some highlights:

Luc Schuiten’s Vegetal City

The Walking City by Archigram, an old favorite of mine.

‘Shroom City, by Frederic St. Arnaud

There are many more at Dark Roasted Blend: Hallucinatory Architecture of the Future

(Thanks Trevor!)

Open Sailing is… well, just look at a list of their projects and check out their site:

- Instinctive_Architecture : an architecture that behaves like a super-organism, reacting to the weather conditions and other variables, reconfiguring itself.
- Energy_Animal : an independent module that generates energy from the waves, wind and sun, providing continuously off-grid energy and being a node for environment and data mesh networking.
- Nomadic_Ecosystem : engineering a mobile aquaculture to sustain human long term life at sea.
- Openet.org : forum to formulate a global standard for a purely civilian internet, an internet moderated by its users, not by the governments nor the industries nor the militaries.
- Life_Cable : a simpler unified standard for energy, water, waste, information in a complex built structure.
- Swarm_Operating_System : a customizable decision assisting software, using real-time data about global threats or personal interests.
- Ocean_Cookbook : making the experience at sea not of a survival quality but a truly yummy experience.
- Open_Politics : think tank about a possible internal organization for a new oceanic urban structure.

Open Sailing

(Thanks Nova)

A 3D model city has been generated using the open source, easy to learn programming language Processing.

(via Digital Urban via Bruce Sterling)

See also: Slime mould could design Tokyo’s railway

5. Prypiat, Ukraine
4. Humberstone and Santa Laura, Chile
3. (Parts of) Detroit, Mich.
2. Hashima Island, Japan
1. Centralia, Penn.

HowStuffWorks: 5 Modern Abandoned Cities

(via William Gibson via Mister X)

For an ambitious landscape design project, Magnus Larsson, a student at the Architectural Association in London, has proposed a 6,000km-long wall of artificially solidified sandstone architecture that would span the Sahara Desert, east to west, offering a combination of refugee housing and a “green wall” against the future spread of the desert.

bldgblog: Sand/Stone

Emergent Architecture is, as Grinding puts it, finding “the sweet spot between public art and alternative energy.”

Ecofriend: Solar-powered Photobioreactor generates biofuel using algae

(via Grinding)

My first encounter with their work happened 3 years ago through blogs and magazines that were raving about Maximilian’s Schell, a temporary outdoor installation that the Californian duo had installed in the courtyard of Materials & Applications in Los Angeles. I finally got to experience one of their works last Autumn at the Venice Architecture Biennial. Titled Echoes Converge and made of thousands of coloured string catenaries, the installation attempted to create a visual sensation reminiscent of the audio phenomenon of an echo while it kinetically registered the gentle currents of air as visitors experienced its cloud like volume. [...]

But let’s get back to 2005: their Maximilian’s Schell warped the flow of space with a golden rendition of a celestial black hole. Constructed in tinted Mylar resembling stained glass, the vortex functioned as a shade structure, swirling overhead for the entire summer of 2005. The interior of the immersive installation created a space for social interaction and contemplation by changing the volume, color, and sound of the courtyard gallery. During the day, the canopy cast colored fractal light patterns onto the ground while a sound installation by composer James Lumb lightly rumbled below the feet of visitors. When standing in the center or “singularity” of the piece and gazing upward, the visitor could see only infinite sky. In the evening when viewed from the exterior, the vortex glowed warmly. The piece paid homage to a character played by actor Maximilian Schell in 1979 sci-fi movie The Black Hole.

We Make Money Not Art: Postopolis, Ball-Nogues Studio

(Many more images at link)

(via BLDGblog)

Archinode checked in on this old post to cite some (pre-Laffoley) influences on the Fab Tree Hab.

The Primitive Hut concept of Marc-Antoine Laugier, from 1753.

Arthur Wiechula’s “Living Trees Grow into Homes” (1923) Arthur Wiechula article on Design Boom

More info: Archinode’s Fab Tree Hab page which includes a full list of references.

Although it is small consolation in the face of overwhelming economic strife in Detroit and elsewhere as the foreclosure crisis continues, this story gave me a real feeling of hope and renewal. To me, this example and other corresponding cases – like the artist-driven re-imaginings of shopping malls and big box stores seems symbolic of an even larger cultural shift. The arts community isn’t just moving into one downtrodden urban neighborhood; rather, they’re taking on the ruins of the unsustainable. They’re taking on big box stores, shopping malls, and grid-connected homes in the car capitol of North America. And they’re not just creating new art. They’re seizing the opportunity to turn old shells of buildings into independent, renewable energy-powered, 21st century-ready spaces.

What I’m most eager to hear next is that creative pioneers are conquering McMansions in the suburban hintersprawl. As Bryan Walsh wrote recently for Time Magazine, “The Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech predicts that by 2025 there will be a surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (on one-sixth of an acre [675 sq m] or more) in the U.S.”

Will subdivisions be turned into workshops and performance spaces? Or possibly into small-scale agricultural communities, or enclaves for artisan food-production? At the very least, will they become denser, transit-connected and less car-dependent … and what will drive that?

Full Story: WorldChanging

See also:

The Sudden Stardom of the 3rd World

This project explores the idea of using creative infrastructure projects to “route around” geopolitical agreements in Israel/Palestine.

More Images: BLDBLG

“Restored and remodeled by the Spanish modernist architect Antoni Gaudi in the years 1905–1907, Casa Batllo is now one the most overlooked buildings by the tourists who visit Barcelona. Although Casa Batllo is a museum now, Gaudi designed it for for a wealthy Barcelona Aristocrat. The local name for the building is Casa dels ossos (House of Bones), and indeed it does have a visceral, skeletal organic quality.”

(via Unusual Things)

“As the holiday season winds to close we’re counting down the days to the new year with a look at some of Inhabitat’s most exciting stories of 2008! It’s been an outstanding year in green building and today we’re looking back at ten of the most impressive green architecture projects of 2008. From LEED platinum superstructures to innovative recycled and reclaimed buildings to ground-breaking monuments that integrate incredible new technologies, read on the year’s best and brightest developments!”

(via Inhabitat)