La Caja Mágica

This past week's Madrid Open - did I mention that m'man Roger won the title and moved back up to number two - was held in the Magic Box, something I'd never seen or heard of before a week ago but that looks pretty frickin' cool and kinda makes me want to get myself to Madrid to check out the building and the tourney.

See, those big flaps up topside are roof sections that can retract to let the sunshine in over the three stadium courts.



Apparently not everybody loves the stadium - finding it cold, but I love the idea that tourney owner, Ion Tiriac, is making a major push to be the 'fifth major'...

...and that he took a big leap to dye the clay blue and make a huge news splash - even if he racked off a number of the top players. Give the man credit for trying something different...

...and for having an absolutely rockin' 'stache...

Man, I want to see a major clay court tennis tournament.




I'm thinking that the Madrid-Rome-French Open swing would be phenomenally fun.

Two of my passions

The Lego Architecture line has been out for a while now, presenting sets that are microscale versions of some pretty famous landmarks. I've bought (and gifted) the Sears Tower and would love to have Falling Water and the Robie House, but they're a little pricey to build and stick on a shelf somewhere - especially for a set without a minifig anywhere to be found.

All that's neither here nor there. What is, however, is that they're currently conducting a vote to see which buildings should inspire them for their next sets. They're not promising to actually produce any of the sets but just to see which buildings we want them to be inspired by.

It's interesting to see just how evenly split the vote is with all ten (as I write this post) between 16146 and 16530 votes. There's apparently no consensus among these ten.

Make your voice heard with your three votes.

A little thanksgiving

One image from The Tree of Life that intrigued me was of a spiral of stained glass windows below which the camera twirled. The shot wasn't more than a few seconds, but the gorgeousness of the glass and the oddity of the receding spiral has stuck with me.

So I did a little hunting and found that the windows are actually part of the ceiling at the Chapel of Thanksgiving, the major architectural feature of Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas, Texas. Having been to Dallas, I'm a little disappointed that I didn't find time to see this beautiful building and its apparently pretty bucolic setting, including this Norman Rockwell mosaic which I know I've seen somewhere before...

But it's the chapel's Glory Window that was featured in Tree of Life. Stunning...

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Back on the High Line...again...

 

From what I can tell, the denizens of the Big Apple had some old train tracks that they weren't using any more, and they'd kinda stopped mowing the grass up there.  After a little while - like ten or twenty years - people noticed that some drought-resistant grasses and trees were growing among the old iron rails and thought "Hey, let's make a park."

A park in the sky...with rainbows water fountains and gum drop benches and cotton candy walkways...

Ok, not quite.

But some people did get together and start fund raising to turn the old railways - known as the High Line - into New York City's newest park, known simply as The High Line.  The first part of the park opened this past June, and the rest is going to open in stages as the redesign is completed.

The place looks awesome...check out their blog for some outstanding pics from the first six or so months of the High Line.  (I do warn you that a few of the pics are a little on the (insert chili pepper here) side of things).


This thing looks great, and I love the reclamation project.

Go Big Apple...

 

  

 

Museum Plaza?

I like the Louisville skyline.

It's not New York or Chicago, sure, but it's got a few tall buildings that stand out nicely against the lowerland around them.  And it's got the classic advantage of having water off of which the reflections make for great photos

But the above photo  (it's photoshopped, of course) would throw that whole skyline right out of whack - big, contemporary monstrosity all on the far right messing everything up.

That monstrosity - which I'm guessing Ame and the rest of my family already know - is called Museum Plaza and is a building proposed to be developed in the River City over the next few years.

It's a freaky building that is composed of a number of separate towers that would house a hotel, office space, a museum, private residences, and public park space a third of the way up .  Check out the architecture firm's explanation of the plans.

Thankfully, it looks like there were some problems with the financing, and the newest update suggests everything is solidly on hold.

Generally, I'm okay with contemporary architecture, but this one just looks awful.



It's a contemporary turd, and I'll be happier if it gets flushed.

 

It's really not porn

It's certainly not porn, but it is stair porn, a series of photos of staircases.

I do warn you that it does have an architectural bent, so there are a number of white background photos.

A kilometer tall

I stand by my statement and add Saudi Arabia to the attribution:

The people of Dubai (and Saudi Arabia) have more money than sense.

Seriously, a building more than a kilometer high? Insane...and kinda cool.

Everything old is new again

I the semi-regular perusing of OhIkea.com, I came across a listing for a rockin' cool house up in Middletown ('bout fifteen miles north of The Homestead.

All-steel home from about forty years back. Very open floor plan. Some decently environmentally-friendly aspects here and there. Might be worth a look if they run an open house.

Not that I'm looking to leave The Homestead or anything, but I'm always curious.

Check it...

A simple task

So, what's the tallest building in the world?

No, it's not the Sears Tower. If you answered that, you really haven't been paying attention for a while now...c'mon.

If you said the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, you're getting warmer - and you probably saw that awful film Entrapment.

Nope, the tallest building in the world is - and has been since 2004 - the Taipei 101. To the top of the roof, Taipei 101 is 448 m tall. To the top of its spire, it's 508 m.

The Sears Tower, on the other hand, tops out at 442.3 m to its roof. Of course its spire is actually taller at 527.3 m. So maybe it's the tallest building in the world.

Or maybe it's the the CN Tower in Toronto. After all, its spire tops out at 552.3 m - even though its technical roof is only 457.2 m high.

Or maybe it's the KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota. The transmission tower tops out at 628.8 m, but it's supported by guy wires.

Turns out that answering the question of which is the tallest building in the world is a bit of a tricky subject depending on whether you want to count distance to the roof or the spire, flagpole or antenna, and whether the building has to be self-supported or cable-stayed. Some people even try to include height from top to bottom of oil platforms, but those people aren't right.

Generally, the current winner is accepted to be Taipei 101, but not for long.

Two structures in Dubai (I think I've mentioned the place before, eh?) look to be competing for the title of world's tallest, and neither one will announce a final height for their tower. The Burj Dubai is going to top out somewhere between 808 m and 1011 m, and it's down the road competitor - the Al Burj looks to be somewhere above 700 m tall.

It's interesting to watch the funny humans try to top themselves a few feet at a time as they strive to reach the heavens.

We're funny folks...

Oh, and thanks to the Skyscraper Page for their help with research.

Extreme houses...

As a dweller in the land of suburbia, I get to enjoy seeing the new developments popping up with bigger and bigger houses on smaller and smaller plots of land, complete with three-car garages, two-story foyers with giant chandeliers, and automatic sprinkler systems to grow back the sod that was peeled off in the first place. A term for these sorts of houses has come into being: McMansions, and there is a growing backlash against them.

Which is where the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company comes into the story.

Karlen found their site thanks to an NPR story about the houses being used as homes in the Katrina-devistated areas of the Gulf Coast.

The houses are from a designer who lives in one of his houses, all of which are between 100 and 500 square feet and - according to the company's website - can meet the fulltime living needs of anyone interested in providing a smaller environmental footprint. Or, as suggested, they could be artists studios, weekend retreats in the country or just about anything else that people could want from a smaller residence.

Karlen's talked a number of times about getting a retreat in the country with a little trailer on the land, something simple. In my mind, these would be much better than any trailer.

Honestly, I'm amazingly impressed and kind of tempted by the houses. It's probably an extreme that I won't be pursuing, but the mere presence of people working at these extremems remind the rest of us that we need to keep our footprint as small as we can manage.

It just says Cincinnati...

There are all sorts of things that people comment just say Cincinnati - from three-way chili to Graeter's ice cream, Montgomery Inn ribs to the serpentine wall.

But now there is a new sight to see that truly says Cincinnati. The new Cinergy Center convention center is just freakin' cool to see from the expressway coming into downtown. It's got a bunch of angled panels that if not seen from straight on just look like a bunch of random angled panels. But when the lgiht and the angle are just right, it's an impressive bit of advertising.

Sure, it's been a few years in the making, and I haven't a clue what it's like on the inside or anything, but it just looks cool.

I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for architecture and for cool design

More money than sense...

I am learning so much about the emerate of Dubai.

The first thing that ever brought them to my attention was the Burj al-Arab hotel, the tallest hotel in the world. It's a gorgeous building with some amazing architectural details and prone to stunt athletics to get some press for the hotel.

Then came the plan to build the three largest man-made islands in displays called The Palms. The three islands are each in the shape of a palm tree, but a really big palm tree, complete with homes and roads and shopping and boat docks and everything. All created from rock and sand dumped into the ocean to bring land up where there was previously no land.

Now, though, there is a project that tops them all in terms of sheer ego and disposable income: The World. The World is a project to create a world map made of islands (each around two to four acres in size) which will be sold to allow multi-millionaires to create their own dream island - perhaps a golf resort, a recreated 18th-century Scottish castle, a personal rain forest, an African safari island, a cullinary resort, anything they can dream of. It's just so ridiculous in terms of money and scale that I find it almost hard to understand or believe, but it's so freakin' cool...

I was going to open this entry with some comment about the people of Dubai having oil coming out of their wazoos and more money than God, but in researching this entry, I found that Dubai's oil reserve is dwinlding and that only about 10% of its revenues come from oil nowadays, and that was without even once consulting the CIA factbook on Dubai.

My other love...

Architecture was the field that I was going into before I chose teaching. Until I was a sophomore in high school, architect was my standard answer to the What do you want to be when you grow up? question. Then, somwhere along the way, I found out I was going to be a teacher, that's just who I was and still am...but I digress...

I still love and appreciate architecture, finding myself reading architecture books, watching specials about architecture, and just enjoying the sight of a beautiful building. Which is why - a year or so ago - I dropped $10.99 on a total impulse buy at the Target check out line on the softcover Time: Great Buildings of the World. It's a pretty cool book with two-page spreads on dozens of the greatest buildings in the world. And I thought I'd give a shout out to some of my favorites in flipping through the book...

First up, the Taj Mahal...the Guggenheim in NYC...Salisbury Cathedral...Shirasagijo Castle...all of Brasilia...the Millenium Bridge in London...Angkor Wat...la Sagrada Familia...Monticello...Fallingwater...Target in Montreal...Pompidou Centre...Jewish Museum of Berlin...Guggenheim Biblao...Experience Music Project...Burj al-Arab Tower Hotel (as shown on the right)...Milwaukee Art Museum...Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank Tower...Petronas Towers...Thorncrown Chapel...and the book closes with Tail o' the Pup...