It's an architecture that comes with a variety of names: vernacular, transient, tensile, liquid, primitive, nomadic. It doesn't have to mean that a building is transportable, only that it can be moved in meaningful, and preferably reversible, ways.
Continue ReadingCenturies before modern-day fabulists like Jayson Blair and James Frey, there was George Psalmanazar, an ersatz historian who took creative license to a new level. When he arrived in London in 1703, Psalmanazar presented himself as a native of Formosa (now known as Taiwan) who had been kidnapped and taken to Europe by Christian missionaries.
Continue ReadingDutch artist Tinkebell gets lots of hate-mail, so now she's turned the tables on the senders: by using some clever Internet sleuthing, Tinkebell uncovered the identities behind the e-mails, and compiled them in a book with their names, addresses, (naked) photographs, LinkedIn accounts, phone numbers, Facebook pages, and more.
Continue ReadingCollecting the garbage becomes a one-man operation: the truck pulls up, attaches a cable to the container, lifts it up, turns it over, and puts it back into the ground, an eight-minute process that also does away with mistossed bags splattering in the street.
Continue ReadingBusinesses have been clamoring for ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - to open new address possibilities, complaining that existing top-level domains led by ".com" and ".org" are overcrowded.
Continue ReadingInstead of trying to conceal the source of the projected image, Barba transforms it into the centre of attention through a labyrinth of film loops that slink across the space via a network of wheels and pulleys, physically enveloping the viewer and turning the viscous spaghetti of 35mm celluloid into moving sculpture.
Continue ReadingDespite humans' big brains and seemingly infinite storage space, when we think back to an old memory it's usually not hi-res video we conjure up but rather a still image, fuzzy around the edges and hard to keep in place.
Continue ReadingThe Fluid Vehicle bus station in the corporate-campus town of Hoofddorp, Netherlands, is a 130-meter-long blob of foam blocks — and the world’s largest synthetic building.
Continue ReadingThe success of the London Eye has reinvigorated demand for Ferris wheels, with new “observation wheels” recently opening or being built in Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia, with others planned for Berlin, Dubai, and Beijing. And like with skyscrapers, a heated competition is under way for the world’s tallest.
Continue ReadingThough Rotterdam plays host to weighty institutions, many local artists indicate that they nonetheless go abut their work much as artists do in cities that don’t boast such a rich cultural infrastructure.
Continue ReadingIt had all the markings of a television detective show. Posing as patients, three undercover observers got themselves admitted as patients to a locked psychiatric ward to investigate conditions on the inside. And a remote team monitored the project via hidden cameras and microphones from a command center in a nearby hotel.
Continue ReadingVirtual volunteers at an aid network known as Nabuur give people in the developing world advice on projects like how to start a youth computer-training center, improve local water quality, or better integrate the village's disabled people. The assumption is that small communities can carry out many public-works projects by themselves if provided with the right information.
Continue ReadingControlling objects with just your thoughts has been a dream of sci-fi from “Star Trek” to Star Wars, but in the past few years that dream has inched closer to reality.
Continue ReadingThe scam has existed for years in various forms, but in the 1990s it moved online, where it is cheaper to organize and harder to trace.
Continue ReadingThe low-tech graveyards where ships are picked apart by hand could give way to a greener, more high-tech alternative.
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Self-adjustable spectacles, which let untrained wearers set the right focus themselves in less than a minute, greatly reduce the need for trained optometrists, who are rarely available in Africa and many parts of Asia. But the competition is sometimes palpable amongst the companies that want to be the first to distribute adjustable glasses in the millions...
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A Dutch engineer has invented a collapsible plastic shipping container which, he hopes, will replace the steel ones. Because it is made of a fibreglass composite, it weighs only three-quarters as much as a standard container but—more importantly— when it is empty, it can be folded down to a quarter of its size.
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It had all the markings of a television detective show. Posing as patients, three undercover observers got themselves admitted as patients to a locked psychiatric ward to investigate conditions on the inside. And a remote team monitored the project via hidden cameras and microphones from a command center in a nearby hotel.
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Art traded from 1951 to 2007 appreciated just a little more than 4 percent annually, much less than the Standard & Poor’s 500 average of 8.90 percent over the same period. The figure is also significantly less than figures from previous studies that pegged art’s annual returns at 8 percent or even 13 percent.
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