[Images: A "living neon sign" made of bioluminescent bacteria; via UC San Diego]. Scientists at UC San Diego have made a bioluminescent bacterial billboard. They call it a "living neon sign composed of millions of bacterial cells that periodically fluoresce in unison like blinking light bulbs." Making...
Ice Island Infrastructure
[Image: "From Seismic Arrays on Drifting Ice Floes: Experiences From Four Deployments in the Arctic Ocean" by C. Läderach and V. Schlindwein, from Seismological Research Letters]. In a paper published back in the July/August 2011 issue of Seismological Research Letters, authors C. Läderach and V. Schlindwein...
We Can Move It For You Wholesale
[Images: Moving Fort Moore High School in Los Angeles, 1886; photos courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust/C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries]. In 1886, Los Angeles moved the Fort Moore High School. "A contractor who claimed he could accomplish the task hoisted the building onto scaffolding...
Return of the Brick Swarm
A short video has been released documenting the brick swarm project mentioned here last month, in which Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler deploy semi-autonomous flying robots to assemble a structure of foam bricks. However, it's as if the architects underestimate the interest of their own work,...
Speleological Superparks
[Image: Downtown Reno on a Saturday night with people queuing up to climb the BaseCamp wall; photo by BLDGBLOG]. As part of an overall strategy to rebrand itself not as a city of gambling and slot machines—not another Las Vegas—but as more of a gateway to outdoor sports and adventure tourism—a kind...
Brooklyn Vent
[Image: Disguised infrastructure; photo by BLDGBLOG]. In the novel Foucault's Pendulum, two characters discuss a house that is not what it appears to be. People "walk by" this certain house in Paris, we read, "and they don't know the truth. That the house is a fake. It's a facade, an enclosure with...
Drone Tax
[Image: An otherwise unrelated image of the unmanned Draganflyer X8 system, courtesy of Draganfly]. A post on sUAS News—a blog tracking the "small unmanned aviation system industry"—we read about the possibility of drone aircraft being used to enforce residential property tax. Citing a recent court...
A 7-Mile Rainbow for Kim Jong-il
[Image: Assembling the 7-mile rainbow one ring at a time, by Ben Masterton-Smith]. Ben Masterton-Smith, recipient of the inaugural RIBA Norman Foster Traveling Scholarship in 2007, visited North Korea for a period of architectural and spatial research. One of the many outcomes of that trip was Ben's...
Portfolio Futures
[Image: From the Morpholio app]. A few of my colleagues at Columbia have just released a free portfolio app called Morpholio, with the aim of creating "a new platform for presentation, critique, and collaboration relevant to all designers, architects, artists, or members of any image driven culture."...
House of the Cave Bear
[Image: The erstwhile basement hibernator, photographed by Brendan Kuty/Patch.com, via Gothamist]. I'm a sucker for tales of the after-market animal reuse of domestic architectural structures—such as wildcats taking over foreclosed California suburbs, bees colonizing the internal walls of a single-family...
Mine Plug
[Image: The museum inserted underground, by Brandon Mosley]. The town of Picher, Oklahoma, offers a range of spatial conditions that support speculative design projects. On the most basic level, the town is "at risk of cave-ins" due to the "abandoned mines beneath the city"; this means that "trucks...
