The Tokyo Institute of Technology, largely considered Japan’s most prestigious university, has unveiled on its campus an impressive new building that is almost self-sustaining in its power use. The Environment and Energy Innovation Building in Meguro Ward features solar panels all along its exterior facade and on its roo — 4500 panels in all, with a total capacity of 650 kilowatts, plus another 100 kilowatts of fuel cells!
Hong Kong can now claim a Frank Gehry of its own, joining the ranks of Los Angeles and New York, Prague and Bilbao — cosmopolitan cities privileged with a billowing bauble with which to launch a minor tourism or luxury apartment campaign.
Early on Sunday morning, Orlando Amway Arena was demolished in under 20 seconds by 236kg of dynamite. The arena was originally built in 1989 and served as the home for Orlando sports teams for more than 20 years.
This year don’t waste your annual leave lying on a sunny beach or in the ski fields. Instead, spend your time off trapped inside a volcano-shaped hotel that could erupt in a deluge at any minute.
I used to think San Francisco’s 297m Sutro Tower was impossibly tall. But it’s just a stub compared to the Sky Tree, Japan’s 634m tall communications centrepiece and the second tallest building on the planet, dwarfed only by the Burj Khalifa.
Forget about the 1km high Kingdom Tower. There will be a building higher than that. This is it, the Azerbaijan Tower. It will be 50m higher, have 189 floors and looks like a beautifully shiny glass, steel and concrete monolith of crap.
Certainly you’ve assembled a piece of IKEA furniture and experienced that special kind of frustration that comes with realising the screw holes don’t line up and you have to take everything apart and put it together it again. Now imagine this problem at 230m in the air with massive steel girders instead of particle board. When those holes don’t line up, it’s a whole different kind of frustration.
It turns out Apple’s questionable rebuild of its 5th Avenue store wasn’t in vain — the company now has the ability to make some pretty daring glass structures. Case in point: this French shop will be almost totally transparent.
These luxury residential towers, set to be completed in Seoul in 2015, are supposed to be evocative of a pixelated cloud floating overhead. But to be honest, the only thing they remind me of is September 11. How did no one cry foul?
