"Analemma tower... is conceived as a huge construction tethered to an asteroid that would be moved into what the firm describes as ‘an eccentric geosynchronous orbit’ over Earth. The orbit allows the structure to move between the northern and southern hemispheres, tracing out a figure-eight over the surface. With the slowest speed over the ground at the top and bottom of the figure-eight, Clouds Architecture Office suggests that occupants could move back and forth, interacting with ground resources at these points. New York City is suggested as the location for one of the slow parts of the preferred orbit."

"A future timber and plantation industry stretches from the Thames Estuary throughout London, and beyond. The reforestation of the Thames Estuary sees the transformation of a city and its environment, in a future where timber is to become the City’s main building resource."

Japan’s national and local government authorities have urged calm after they revealed at least 60 and possibly up to 100 dwellings and buildings may have been constructed with concrete from radiation-contaminated crushed stone that was quarried near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

a company called Orbital Insight is now tracking "the shadows cast by half-finished Chinese buildings" as a possible indicator for where the country's economy might be headed.

"Ghost stations is the usual English translation for the German word Geisterbahnhöfe. This term was used to describe certain stations on Berlin’s U-Bahn and S-Bahn metro networks that were closed during the period of Berlin’s division during the Cold War. Since then, the term has come to be used to describe any disused station on an underground railway line, especially those actively passed through by passenger trains."

"Laurie Chetwood’s design for an inhabited London Bridge includes solar-powered spires housing a self-sufficient hydroponic organic farm and commercial centre taking advantage of renewable energy generation, harvesting and efficient re-use of water, solar heating and natural ventilation. The vertical farm acts as a cooling tower and powers a wind turbine. Solar heated convection heats water, and EFTE provides a solar PV skin for electricity generation."

Weird throwback: London Bridge was inhabited in the past

"The Earthscraper, designed by BNKR Arquitectura, is the Skyscraper’s antagonist in the historic urban landscape of Mexico City where the latter is condemned and the preservation of the built environment is the paramount ambition."

"I feel that I should use the phrase England My Lionheart somewhere on this page. I’m not quite sure why. Not in a jingoistic little England manner. More I think because it is a song/phrase that conjures a very particular yearning, loss and hope, which is something that architecture such as the above can also at times seems to…"

"Fibrous Assemblages are algorithmic design strategies for encoding agent behaviors within strands."

"Behavioral Formation explores the relationship between emergence and architectural intention, and is a speculation on the architecture of swarm intelligence"

At the heart of Westminster Abbey is an enigmatic artwork that reveals the date of Doomsday

Rachel Armstrong at our Eindhoven thing. She is brilliant.

"The triangular figure that hangs in the night sky in each of these images, a digital cutout of the aurora borealis, is echoed in the equilateral segments of the domed architecture beneath. As a kind of occult ritualistic symbol, the triangle motif here seems to signify the return to a faith in the more primitive geometries of a bygone Euclidean age; one in which truth and beauty appeared one and the same, linear and attainable, yet mystical in their absoluteness."

"...we should all have, as he phrased it, a "difficult New Year." That is, we should all look forward to, even seek out or purposefully engineer, a new year filled with the kinds of challenges Lebbeus felt, rightly or not, that we deserved to face, fight, and, in all cases, overcome—the genuine and endless difficulty of pursuing our own ideas and commitments, absurd goals no one else might share or even be interested in."

"Ultimately, these hard-shelled aircraft shelters holds the two most commonly wanted superpowers: Flight vs. Invisibility. In John Hodgeman’s ‘informal’ survey, the desire for flight was really an ‘inflated mythical, heroic” image that people only aspired superficially. Ultimately, nobody wanted to use the powers to fulfil our traditional sense of ‘good’. As it turned out, being a Superhero was no fun."

A giant shining dome of illuminated QR codes

"A better parking lot might be covered with solar canopies so that it could produce energy while lowering heat. Or perhaps it would be surfaced with a permeable material like porous asphalt and planted with trees in rows like an apple orchard, so that it could sequester carbon and clean contaminated runoff."

"A fogou or fougou (pronounced "foo-goo") is an underground, dry-stone structure found on Iron Age or Romano-British defended settlement sites in Cornwall." (Also ref. Cope's "The Modern Antiquarian" tv docu, available on YouTube) (I'm always forgetting this word.)

"He has fun with architecture—get put on hold calling his Vienna office and “Gimme Shelter” is the muzak—"

"Let us suppose for a moment that the “Parainfrastructures” which Quaderns #262 concerns itself with are a class of things, that object-parodying helium balloons hovering around Heathrow Airport to block its expansion, inflatable “instant cities” powered by air compressors, “geodesic domes, parachutes, spray-foam dwellings, zomes, space frames”, “indoor built and ephemeral complexes” colonizing the open floor plans of abandoned airports, and architectural systems of “air control” can be read as a category of architectural objects called “parainfrastructures”."

"This is Mexican architecture firm BNKR Arquitectura's concept for a 65-story subterranean "earthscaper" right in the middle of Mexico City."

"A recent paper published in the Physical Review has some astonishing suggestions for the geographic future of financial markets. Its authors, Alexander Wissner-Grossl and Cameron Freer, discuss the spatial implications of speed-of-light trading. Trades now occur so rapidly, they explain, and in such fantastic quantity, that the speed of light itself presents limits to the efficiency of global computerized trading networks. These limits are described as "light propagation delays.""

"This is a transcript of a talk delivered at Cognitive Cities, a conference on the future of cities held in Berlin on 26th Feb 2011."

blueprints for nuthouse designs: fascinating

"Camp Century—aka "Project Iceworm"—was a "city under ice," according to the U.S. Army, a "nuclear-powered research center built by the Army Corps of Engineers under the icy surface of Greenland," as Frank J. Leskovitz more specifically explains. A fully-functioning "underground city," Camp Century even had its own mobile nuclear reactor—an "Alco PM-2A"—that kept the whole thing lit up and running during the Cold War..."

Siemens is researching a monitoring technology that detects damage to levees at an early stage. The researchers expect that with the help of sensors it will be possible to monitor the stability of the protective walls, with measurements accurate to within one meter. On the basis of the measurements, self-controlling software can then forecast dangerous situations before they happen, making it possible to implement measures in good time.

"Russian scientists are building Noah’s Ark. Now the mankind has a chance to survive."