Come to Downtown Bryan this Saturday for Doomsday.

Council of Doom is a bicycle collective & crew based out of Costa Mesa, CA. Comprised of close knit friends, they ride to push the boundaries and expectations of fixed-gear bicycles while having as much fun as possible.

find out more info and watch a kool video here. Above image from here.

SAN FRANCISCO — In tough circumstances, sometimes all you need is hope, but other times you need a blow-up survival shelter featuring a bed, a couch, freeze-dried food, a 50-gallon water bladder, a first-aid kit, a radio and a cookstove.

And the latter is exactly what the “Life Cube” from startup Inflatable World is designed to provide. Packaged into a four-foot-tall cube, it inflates into a 12-foot-tall structure built from the same thick plastic as a bouncy house.

Designed to provide shelter and basic amenities for people in the days and weeks after a disaster, the instant housing will come with a $3,900 price tag, so the company’s first market could be wealthy survivalists.

“We need a versatile design that is completely self-contained that gives you instant survival,” said Nick Pedersen, business development head of the fledgling startup, based in Santa Barbara, California. “We’ll get you through the critical first 72 hours and beyond.”

Inflatable World isn’t the first company to focus on short-term housing for disaster-struck areas. In fact, a wide variety of architects and builders, notably TED-grantee Cameron Sinclair and Architecture for Humanity, have designed structures to keep people alive in the aftermath of calamity. But Inflatable World sees a market between the long-term FEMA trailers and the tents used in the immediate recovery efforts.

via wired

Monday, November 10th, 5:00 p.m. Geren Auditorium

Hernan Diaz Alonso is the principal and founder of Xefirotarch, a Los Angeles-based design firm working in architecture, products, and digital motion. For the last several years he has been a thesis coordinator and professor in studio design and visual studies at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. He is also a design studio professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He worked for several years as a senior designer at Eisenman Architects in New York and has lectured around the world.

Hernan Diaz Alonso is hailed as an architect who pushes boundaries and breaks the rules. His recent winning design for the Lexington Courthouse Plaza (though not the design being built)is a close-to-home example of the tension between cutting-edge design and the inertia of the expected.

Alonso, who has also worked with both Enric Miralles and Peter Eisenman, is uniquely primed to contribute to our current cultural discourse. He continues to challenge with each project, such as the Aqua Center in Denmark and the Queens Museum of Art in New York. The PSI competition. etc.

Alonso received his professional degree in architecture in Argentina, his M.Arch at Columbia University.

via coolhunter

It’s a perfect metaphor for the teetering global real-estate market: Capital Gate, the glassy tower at the center of Abu Dhabi’s $2.2 billion Capital Centre development, has just been submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records as the “world’s most inclined building,” according to the press release. (I prefer “leaningest.”)

Capital Gate practically swoons with a queasy 18-degree westward tilt, easily besting Pisa’s paltry 3.9 degrees. (The more famous building’s accidental declivity comes from a shoddy foundation and loose soil, problems that Capital Gate’s architect, RMJM, expects to stave off with a steel diagrid structure and hundred-foot-deep piles.)

The 35-story tower, which includes a five-star Hyatt hotel, should be completed next fall, but given the tanking world economy, I’m not sure the developers have fully realized its symbolic potential. Why not, for example, tie the building’s angle to the stock markets’ sinking fortunes and turn Capitol Gate into a a huge art-installation-cum-roller-coaster?

recap: +4X more tilted than the Leaning Tower at Pisa, 8 story deep piles, 35 stories tall, steel diagrid

via metropolis mag

So I may have been on a surrealist/conceptual/somewhat-gravity-defying architecture kick lately … but it never fails to amaze the mind and question our most rooted notions of what architecture is, what space is, and how time and society are effect each. 

via BLDGBLOG

Seattle-based concept artist Daniel Dociu is Chief Art Director for ArenaNet, the North American wing of NCSoft, an online game developer with headquarters in Seoul. Most notably, Dociu heads up the production of game environments forGuild Wars – to which GameSpot gave 9.2 out of 10, specifically citing the game’s “gorgeous graphics” and its “richly detailed and shockingly gigantic” world. 
Dociu has previously worked with Electronic Arts; he has an M.A. in industrial design; and he won both Gold and Silver medals for Concept Art at this year’sSpectrum awards. 

To date, BLDGBLOG has spoken with novelists, film editors, musicians, architects, photographers, historians, and urban theorists, among others, to see how architecture and the built environment have been used, understood, or completely reimagined from within those disciplines – but coverage of game design is something in which this site has fallen woefully short. (go to bldgblog to read the complete article)

Can a building become an instrument? according to David Byrne … yes … and he has convinced me.

David Byrne shows off his recent project, “Playing The Building”.

About this talk

In this engrossing EG talk, architect Liz Diller shares her firm DS+R’s more unusual work, including the Blur Building, whose walls are made of fog, and the revamped Alice Tully Hall, which is wrapped in glowing wooden skin.

About Liz Diller

Liz Diller and her maverick firm DS+R bring a groundbreaking approach to big and small projects in architecture, urban design and art — playing with new materials, tampering with space and… Full bio and more links  »