An imaginary city that changed the twentieth century Yes, it does. It's very weird that a captain of industry like Gillette would come up with such socialist-sounding ideals. You'll note he was a member of this little socialist nutjob group before he caught a clue and successfully marketed the safety razor. It surprises me how people use things like game theory and mathematical theorems to "prove" that the private ownership of the means of production is a bad thing. 1. 2. 3. Nash totally ignores this, like most socialists do, because if they showed any understanding of how people really act then they'd realize how stupid a one size fits all solution is to any problem.
A closer look at communities thriving in unexpected places In Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, nearly 70 percent of the population lives in slums that appear to drape like silk over every hill of the city. Iwan Baan: Ingenious homes in unexpected placesIwan Baan is not as interested in what architects build as he is in the beautiful ways that people appropriate the spaces once the planners are gone. In today’s talk, Baan — whose breathtaking image of lower Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy hangs on at least one of our walls — shows incredible images from communities thriving in ways that seem quite opposite to the uniformity of suburbs. Baan’s talk will have you marveling at human ingenuity. In the center of Caracas is the Torre David, a 45-story unfinished office tower that was in the midst of construction until the developer died in 1993, followed by the crash of the Venezuelan economy the following year. With no lifts or escalators, the tower is essentially a forty-five-story walk up. In Makoko, forced evictions are a daily reality.
Futurology: The tricky art of knowing what will happen next 23 December 2010Last updated at 02:38 By Finlo Rohrer BBC News Magazine Cheap air travel was among the predictions (illustration from Geoffrey Hoyle's book) A 1972 book which predicts what life would be like in 2010 has been reprinted after attracting a cult following, but how hard is it to tell the future? Geoffrey Hoyle is often asked why he predicted everybody would be wearing jumpsuits by 2010. These colourful ideas from his 1972 children's book, 2010: Living in the Future, helped prompt a Facebook campaign to track him down. "I've been criticised because I said people [would] wear jumpsuits," explains Hoyle, the son of noted astronomer and science fiction author Fred Hoyle. Hoyle's book is a product of its time. Fortunately, jumpsuit proliferation has not occurred as Hoyle predicted "Most of it is based on the evolution of a political system," Hoyle notes. The author also predicted widespread use of "vision phones" and doing your grocery shopping online. Continue reading the main story
Futuristic Vertical City Holds Plug-In Hexagonal Housing Units Share on Tumblr Email Malaysian architect Tay Yee Wei recently unveiled a towering vertical city populated with hexagonal housing units that offer a solution to urban population growth problems in Asian cities. The tower itself serves as a scaffolding — as the population of urban areas fluctuates, modular units can be “plugged in” to the structure to accommodate an expanding population. Wei’s Plug-in Dwelling Development was inspired by Le Corbusier’s theory — “a house is a machine for living.” The project essentially rotates a sprawling community into a vertical orientation. The Plug-in Dwelling project assumes that the development will have a longer lifespan than the city that surrounds it. Via eVolo
Junktown | Fallout Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia "Industrial Junk" Junktown is one of the smaller towns in southern California. It was founded shortly after the War by a soldier named Darkwater.[1] Instead of building on the ruins of an old town, he thought it would be better to begin from the ground up. As the name suggests, it was built after the Great War out of random pieces of junk, mostly from wrecked cars. Background Edit In 2161, the mayor of Junktown was Killian Darkwater, grandson of the town's founder, who also ran Darkwaters General Store. After 2186, Junktown became part of the New California Republic as part of the state of Shady and it was one of the first provisional states, considering it was one of the first (and most trustworthy) of the Shady Sands trading partners during its early formation. Location Junktown can be found one square east and nine squares south of Vault 13. Layout Junktown is divided into three districts. Entrance Edit The only entrance to Junktown. Laboratory Crash House Gizmo's Casino Inhabitants Quotes Notes
Dos and don'ts on designing for accessibility - Accessibility in government Karwai Pun is an interaction designer currently working on Service Optimisation to make existing and new services better for our users. Karwai is part of an accessibility group at Home Office Digital, leading on autism. Together with the team, she’s created these dos and don’ts posters as a way of approaching accessibility from a design perspective. The posters The dos and don’ts of designing for accessibility are general guidelines, best design practices for making services accessible in government. Currently, there are six different posters in the series that cater to users from these areas: low vision, D/deaf and hard of hearing, dyslexia, motor disabilities, users on the autistic spectrum and users of screen readers. The dos, that run across various posters, include using things like good colour contrasts, legible font sizes and linear layouts. While this is true, the aim of the posters is to raise awareness of various conditions through good design practice. The team Next steps Do Don't
Human Architecture Needs A Dissident Instinct - Architectuul. “In every civilized community, Architecture has always been the most powerful sociological, cultural and historical cohesive factor; Architecture is the indispensable amalgam of the common life of diverse human beings.” Ljiljana Bakić Pionir Sports Hall in Belgrade. | Courtesy of Dragoljub Bakić Ljubica Slavković and Iva Čukić planned this interview questioning the meaning of the exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 in MoMA. Dragoljub Bakić, Ljubica Slavković and Iva Čukić in a garden in the Višnjička Banja neighborhood in Belgrade. Before meeting Dragoljub we have passed through the settlement that the couple designed. DB: It is interesting how there is now a curiosity in what we did in the era of socialism. Our architecture developed through cooperation with each other and also under the Balkan Association of Architects. Plan for the residential area Višnjička Banja. | Courtesy of Dragoljub Bakić The neighborhood spirit has been developed. DB: Yes.
Looking Around: Horizontal Space | McMansion Hell If there is one truth about the second half of the 20th Century it is that, by all accounts, we started moving out rather than up; horizontal rather than vertical. Not only through the process of suburbanization, the building of massive highways, and the rapid capital flight from cities, but also in how we designed everything from our homes to our workplaces. It could be said that, since the development of major highways, America has flattened – much in the same way that the invention of both the elevator and air conditioning brought skyscrapers to every major city in the first half of the 20th century. I-55 Under Construction, 1972. In his 1984 book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, John Brinckerhoff Jackson observes this transition: “Who has not noticed…that in almost every American town the upper stories of the buildings flanking Main Street are being deserted? Jackson attributes this decline in vertical spaces to technological changes. Residential Horizontalization 1.)
venue design Part 3. The Origins of Dinotopia: Lost Empires In 1983, soon after I had begun as a published illustrator, National Geographic magazine took a chance and hired me to paint a picture of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt on the Orinoco River. The assignment was followed by many others, including reconstructions of the legendary voyages of Jason and Ulysses, the kingdom of Kush in Nubia, and the civilization of the Etruscans in Italy. West Bank, 1987 During those years, National Geographic occasionally sent its artists to meet with the archaeologists on location. My first glimpse of an actual lost city came at the end of that trip, when I arrived at Petra, the capital of an ancient Arab kingdom hidden in a red sandstone canyon in southern Jordan. I climbed up to the top of a cliff and sketched the dwellings carved from solid rock. As I got to know the research archaeologists, they told me of their dreams of making a discovery as significant as Machu Picchu or Ninevah.
Worldbuilding with Maps Concept artist Lorin Wood has launched a new group blog called "Nuthin' but Worlds," about concept art and worldbuilding, an offshoot of his successful "Nuthin' but Mech" blog and books. I'm a contributor, and here is what I contributed for my first post: For me, making a map is the best stimulant for building worlds and telling stories. But there are many kinds of maps. Here are a few types I've developed for Dinotopia. Physical geography map, with emphasis on landform relief. Seafloor relief, shown in perspective, with the island lifted up to show the caves. Expedition route map. Another route map showing a close-up section of the eastern coastline. Antique maps are more convincing if they're made with antique tools. Here's a close-up of the map above to show the graded hatching of the mountain reliefs, typical of engraved maps of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. City map of Chandara, showing organic street grid and canals. Here's a close-up of the same city in Dinotopia.
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