architecture

With 3D printing growing ever more powerful, it's really only a matter of time before a 3D-printed house arrives. So far, we've seen Dutch firm Universe Architecture announce its 3D-printed Landscape House, modeled after a Mobius strip. London firm Softkill pooh-poohed Universe's design, since it will use poured concrete in 3D-printed molds, and presented its own spiderweb-Skeletor ProtoHouse.

Not to mention the European Space Agency's plans to 3D-print a moon base, a sort of extraterrestrial abode for astronauts.

Now another Dutch firm has stepped up to the plate. DUS Architects has announced that it will make … Read more

The Moebius House doesn't look or sound real. It's designed to be built on a Korean island in a forest growing on volcanic rock. It's inspired by the unending brain teaser known as a Mobius strip.

Design firm Planning Korea has tackled some creative projects in the past, including designs for a mega-bridge over the Han River and a cocoon-shaped house that looks like it could hide a giant insect inside. It's no wonder those same architects saw a Mobius strip as a good basis for a house.… Read more

A 220-story Sky City tower in the Chinese city of Changsha could take the crown as the world's tallest skyscraper next March with an astounding height of 2,749 feet, edging out the mega Burj Khalifa that currently stands 2,722 feet over Dubai.

What makes the 11-million-square-foot Sky City so astonishing isn't its height or its appearance but rather the three-month construction plan to create the building that kicks off at the end of the year. Broad Group -- the company responsible for assembling the skyscraper -- plans to achieve these insane building speeds by using 95 percent prefabricated modular pieces that are sort of similar to a giant Lego set to construct the building. … Read more

Some readers experienced a bit of claustrophobia a couple of months back upon reading that construction had started on what may be the world's narrowest house. If you're one of them, you might want to hold your breath. Construction on Keret House is complete, and we're going inside.

The dwelling -- located in a passageway in Warsaw, Poland's Wola district -- measures 4 feet at its widest point and 27 inches at its narrowest. The exterior looks like a 30-foot-tall rectangle lodged between two buildings, but amazingly, inhabitants will find all the amenities inside. … Read more

How would you like to live in a puzzle in the sky? How about right on top of Manhattan?

After a long delay, a rather puzzling 60-story condo building in New York's Tribeca district could soon start becoming a reality. It's made up of a pile of stacked residential units, a design that earned it the nickname "the Jenga Building" after the 1980s game of wooden blocks. … Read more

Is there anything more blissful than escaping gravity's grip by jumping on a trampoline? What if you could do that while going from point A to point B?

Paris architecture firm AZC has come up with a crazy way to cross the Seine River -- huge inflatable trampolines. Just hop from bank to bank. … Read more

"SimCity is a game about endless choices," says lead designer Stone Librande. "Ultimately, you can do whatever you want."

While that isn't entirely true -- you can't play offline -- at least we can get a sense of how the fifth iteration of the city management game works in a nine-minute clip released today by Maxis and EA.

The video shows how the game plays essentially from the beginning as Librande creates a casino-themed city from scratch. Seasoned SimCity 4 players may notice vast differences in the user interface, which seems easier to navigate while simultaneously adding a slew of new options. … Read more

"There's that pesky speed of light." That cautionary remark was offered by Lee Ziliak of Verizon Data Services, speaking on a panel at the 451 Group's Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit last week. The context was that hybrid cloud environments may logically appear as something homogeneous, but application architectures need to take the underlying physical reality into account.

Latency, the time it takes to move data from one location to another, often gets overlooked in performance discussions. There's long been a general bias toward emphasizing the amount of data rather than the time it takes … Read more

Good news for giraffes! Construction has started on a house that's being called the world's narrowest.

The dwelling -- located in a passageway between two buildings in Warsaw, Poland's Wola district -- measures 47 inches at its widest point and 27 inches at its thinnest.

Polish architect Jakub Szczesny of the architecture collective Centrala conceived of the super-slender abode for acclaimed Israeli writer Etgar Keret, who will live and work in the space for part of the year.

When Keret's not using the home, artists and intellectuals from around the world will be invited to stay there for days and weeks at a time. … Read more