buildings, next level

[een]

/\more info here

\/more info here

[snafu]

[Enaml]

This the place you're staying in milan?

[SHYE_POSER]

STRAF HOTEL

[een]

[trentk]

This entire blog:

BLDGBLOG

Not just buildings, but sci-fi, architecture, archeology, robots, weird shit, etc. His entries seem to start of with something real, then devolve into wild futurist speculation. Take for example an entry on something MIT is developing, "smart sand"

beginning:
"Researchers at MIT's Distributed Robotics Laboratory is working on so-called "smart sand," which would allow for the "spontaneous formation of new tools or duplication of broken mechanical parts." Current prototypes of the substance—essentially, large cubes, seen in the photograph above—operate by way of "rudimentary microprocessors inside and very unusual magnets" on their edges"

getting weirder:
"ScienceDaily suggests you "imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model."

insane:
"You can read more at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory news site; but it's too tantalizing a scenario to pass up mentioning other, much larger-scale possibilities for this technology, especially a scenario where "smart sand" has, as it were, escaped into the wild. Imagine whole deserts of this stuff, magnetically self-assembling into temporary sandstone cities, walls, and hills, a landscape of shifting urban forms you have to travel through, map, or settle. Like a deleted scene from Invisible Cities as rewritten by Magnus Larsson.

Wandering tribes armed with mysterious handheld magnetic technologies reach into the sides of dunes and pull out whole buildings—where they proceed to sleep for the night before moving on the next day, their instant villages dissolving at dawn, "returned to the heap," as ScienceDaily would say.

Or—perhaps in some future game brought to you by BLDGBLOG and Big Robot—you have to battle your way forward through infinite sandstone buildings that rise up, one after the other, like endless violent waves rolling as far as the eye can see, a desert of shapes lurching and unbuilding themselves toward you, forever. You jump through doors, up stairways, over walls, never advancing forward more than a few feet at a time, blinded by clouds of sand crashing on all sides, always another building ready to rise up out of the moving dunes and block you."

[Chinorlz]

we are very far away from what they describe at this point in time. It's going to be a long time before they can miniaturize their large (relatively speaking) prototypes.