Pallets No Longer Good For Just Shipping… Or Making Huge Fires

For this year’s Architecture Triennale, there will be an exhibition that focuses on humanitarian housing solutions. Ten architects have been chosen to design and build full-scale prototypes to be showcased. A few of the participating architects include Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, and I-Beam Design. I-Beam Design has their Pallet House that they will be showing in the exhibition. Pallets are found in most countries nowadays and make for cheap, available building materials. This house took one week to build and furnish. Homes like this show that there are quick, affordable ways to provide housing for poverty stricken areas that allow easy manipulation and customization.

The Pallet House

A Cardboard Landscape

Rice University artists recently constructed an artwork installation that consisted of 20,000 layers of cardboard weighing in at about 8 tons! They die-cut the corrugated sheets into more or less a large topography model. It took 12 days to cut out the curved pieces and 4 days to construct. The structure is even strong enough for a few to stand on it!

…we expanded the potential of constructing landscapes in cardboard to include the viewer’s physical participation. We invited visitor exploration by extending the casual social terrain of the campus into the gallery, transforming it into a traversable rolling playground. On any given day one might discover a group of gallery goers studying, snoozing, climbing, sliding down the rolling terrain, or making-out in one of the darkened recesses below the cardboard surface.

- Rice Artists

Rip Curl Canyon via io9

Steampunk Workshop

Steampunk Workshop focuses their design on taking everyday objects and modifying them to give them a Victorian/Jules Verne/H.G. Wells kind of feel. Their amazing products make today’s products seem somewhat boring. They have modified everything from LCD monitors to RV’s. Check out the pics and head over to their site to get a full list of their projects.

Steampunk Workshop

Sketchup to Maya

Many students and professionals are beginning to work with Autodesk’s modeler called Maya. It provides alot of flexibility when doing animations and creating objects. Many of the same people also like to use Google’s newly aquired modeler, Sketchup. Getting these two modeling programs to work together can be somewhat stressful at times but giantMONSTER has written and illustrated a step-by-step procedure of exporting a model out of Sketchup and importing it into Maya. It’s a very involved process but the end product is definately worth it.

Sketchup to Maya Tutorial

The Not So Ugly Duckling

Got a million power cables running under your desk like us? Check out the “Swan” desk by Louis Beliveau of the design team Les Chics Types which is based in Montreal. The desk offers you enough holes plus, a power strip to plug into, so you will no longer have to run your messy cables all over your floor. Just weave your cords through the holes to make a cool logo or spell out words to describe how your really feel about your boss.

Les Chics Types via MoCo Loco

A Digital Antique

If you’re one of the 10 people that decorates your house with Rococo Revival furniture, this clock is for you. The Digi Clock, made by Thorsten Van Elten, is one such piece of artwork that lets you put your Rococo appetite at bay and still keep it real here in the 21st century. Van Elten also has many other pieces of artwork and furniture available on his site.

Thorsten Van Elten

CAD Block Exchange Network

If you’re looking for AutoCAD blocks, look no further than CAD Block Exchange Network. They have a vast amount of objects and people drawn in plan, elevation, and in 3D. They have just about anything you can think of and I mean ANYTHING! Yeah, you know what I’m talking about… Any who, this site is totally worth the look, especially when that final project deadline is nearing and you realize you need some details in your drawings to really win over the critics.

CAD Block Exchange Network

London Bridge is Falling Where?

For those of you, along with Fergie, who have ever sung that song and just assumed the bridge was actually located in London, you are sadly mistaken. Ever since 1971, the bridge has been enjoying its new home in the most random of places, Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The bridge was built in 1831 and enjoyed a healthy life until 1962 when traffic crossing the Thames River became too much of a load on the aging bridge. The city claimed it unsafe and soon auctioned it off to Robert McCulloch, the founder of Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The bridge was soon dismantled stone by stone and each piece was numbered for easy reassembly. 10,000 miles and three years later, London Bridge was brought back to its prime.

Road Trip America

Parachute Jump Ride To Light Up Coney Island

The once famous “Parachute Jump” ride that was built in 1939 for the World’s Fair in Queens has recently received a face lift thanks to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The structure stands 262 feet tall and has been called the “Eiffel Tower of the Boardwalk”. The ride was in its prime use in the late 1940′s and 50′s but was put out of service as many of the other rides were in 1965. The structure has been covered with lights to illuminate the boardwalk area and now is a beacon for Coney Island. The project ended up costing 5 million dollars and took seven years of negotiating and construction to complete. The following link talks about the steps taken in the negotiation process to make this restoration possible.

Coney Island Parachute Jump

French Puppetry

This puppet show was blown into larger than life proportions to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Jules Verne’s death. Lead by French puppeteer/actor troupe Royal De Luxe, the show begins with a “Jules Vernesque” space craft which has crashed into the streets of Nantes, France. The story continues with a parade that follows a puppet girl and elephant through the city. Check out the Village of Nantes’ website to see more images of the entire puppet show.

Ville de Nantes