Tim Abrahams on Tempelhof in Blueprint. The airport is now mothballed: 'The Mayor seems determined to build on Berlin’s reputation as a playground. It is ironic that he is closing airports given how vital he clearly thinks weekend trips are to Berlin’s future. It is hard not to visit Tempelhof and think what a great airport it would make.' Alternatively, how about The Berg, a frankly silly use for the large amount of empty urban space (via archinect). Shades of MVRDV's Serpentine Mountain, ultimately dismissed as unbuildable. More Berg at ArchDaily. Terraforming technology needs to speed up.

Equally unbelievable, perhaps, the world's second tallest building (and largest building by floorspace), the Abraj Al Bait Tower complex is nearing completion in Saudi Arabia. As it's not a classic spike-like tower (unlike Burj Dubai), the overall effect of height is minimised. Whereas Burj Dubai has topped out at an impressive 818m, the Al Bait Towers are projected to top 595m, making the gap between 1st and 2nd an impressive 223 metres, a shade taller than the Hoover Dam. It's a sprawling complex, built atop the site of the Ajyad Fortress, an 18th century Ottoman Fort (cue understandable outcry from Turkey) . From wikipedia: 'To accommodate worshipers who visit the Kaaba, the Abraj Al-Bait Towers will have a large prayer room capable of holding nearly ten thousand people. The tallest tower in the complex will also contain a seven-star hotel to help provide lodging for the over five million pilgrims who travel to Mecca annually to participate in hajj.

In addition, the Abraj Al-Bait Towers will have a four-story shopping mall and a parking garage capable of holding over a thousand vehicles. Residential towers will house permanent residents while two heliports and a conference center are to accommodate business travelers. In total, up to 100,000 people would be housed inside the towers. The project will use clock faces for each side of the Hotel tower. The clocks will be 80 meters high 80 meters wide. They will be located 530 meters high, which would make it the world's highest and largest clock.'

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Other things. Dugpa, a 'David Lynch electrical resource' / mythologie des lucioles, a photography blog / Hippolyte Bayard, a weblog / Arctic Visions, a journal on photography / The Witch Fire, a weblog / a fine John Portman Retrospective / illustration by Tymek Jezierski / art and sculptural installations by Miquel Navarro / Thomas Hirschhorn builds things and environments out of cardboard.

Enter The Cloud, a scalable monument to technology. This one has Dan Hill all over it, and so it proved. The idea of a floating, hovering thing that looms over the city, providing an injection of technology, information and visible futurism runs all the way from El Lissitzky's Cloud-Irons through to the quasi-inhabited airships of Blade Runner to recent works by Alsop and even contemporary speculative proposals (e.g. The Cloud by Atelier Hapsitus).

Notes on Brian Dillon's Unearthing the Ruin talk at the Barbican. Sad to miss this, particularly the hints at the 'Psychological links between ruin lust and nostalgia' / on the Edge, mass game re-naming / 3D art and games on the Ogre Forums / turning the Farnsworth House into a fetish object / the USA takes Halloween very seriously indeed / house-swaps and short-term rentals at Roomorama, pitched at the transient, youthful, responsibility free demographic (we say huffily), but interesting nonetheless / Voyeur Project / the London Screen Archive.

Mimoa is now on Layar / @issue, a journal of business and design / the Center for the Recycling and Reuse of Buildings / Plan 59, linked here for the nth time in order to help us find its blend of retro art, advertising and illustration / Bell Labs in the 1960s (via Plep). Every workplace should be documented like this. Related, the story of Jan Hendrik Schön, a researcher at Bell Laboratories with an apparent Midas touch.

Labels: architecture, ruins, things

posted by things at 16:00 / 5 comments