China has been the subject of much architectural news in these past few years. Its no-looking-back race to technological supremacy has left a trail of new constructions, sending glass and steel shooting into the sky and leaving the nation’s history very much in the dust. It is easy to forget that an older China exists, a China that bears the traces of colonialism, and a China fossilized around an older way of life, one that existed prior to that wave of hyper capitalism that came veiled under the guise of communism. Shanghai-based photographer Sue Anne Tay recently visited a century-old villa, tucked away behind one of Shanghai’s busy shopping arteries. Through Tay’s photographic lens, the ancient four-story villa reveals chapters of Chinese history that are frequently overlooked today. Click through for more.

Photos © Sue Ann Tay

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It’s always great to see practicing architects inspired by student work. Case in point: the team at Studio Gang Architects took some cues from the internetz this week, staging their very own in-office competition to design—you guessed it—LOLCATs. With a 10-minute time limit, the contestants used only images of Studio Gang architecture and Studio Gang cats to churn out a series of ‘Archi-cats’ that riff on the firm’s very own designs and renderings. They even found a much simpler and more adorable solution to rid Chicago’s waterways of invasive Asian carp. Check out the rest of these kitty collages here. Happy Friday!

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Photo: Terrence Sanchez, New York, NY

Friendly, or downright creepy? Designer Joseph King has unleashed a fleet of vinyl sticker hands for willing dissenters to paste throughout their cities, framing everything ranging from subway gates, doors, and street signs to swing sets, graffiti, and even Johnny Cash’s star on Hollywood Boulevard. King explains the project as “commentary on a popular style of poster presentation in contemporary design and the implicit credibility it seems to suggest.” More after the jump.

Photo: Javas Lehn, New York, NY

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What do architecture students do over spring break? If your answer contained the words ‘wet t-shirt’ or ‘mezcal worm,’ you are way off the mark. To give you some idea of how off, a few thesis students at UC Berkeley spent their down time creating architecture-themed cat memes and posting them on tumblr. So without further ado, here are your architecture LOLCATS…

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A professor once told me that trees can do awful things to good architecture. A hulking, untrimmed hardwood or a poorly kept shrub can be the unforgiving bad hair day to even the greatest of architectural schemes. But what about people? Does the built environment shine its brightest absent of the flows of foot traffic? This is the landscape of Lucie and Simon’s ‘Silent World,’ a photographic portrayal of the world’s busiest metropolises, abandoned but for a few lone stragglers wandering amidst the deserted buildings left behind.

Familiar and iconic places—normally bustling with moving bodies—are shown emptied and reticent, cast in an undeniably eerie, post-apocalyptic gloom. The images force us to examine the habitat we have collectively built for ourselves, to contemplate what humans have made of their natural environment. Click through for more images.

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In 1903, Georg Simmel wrote ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’ postulating the emergence of a new urban lifestyle and a sharp discontinuity from life as man had known it. Overwhelmed by the onslaught of stimuli, the modern man must uphold a reserved—and what Simmel calls blasé—attitude as a means of self-preservation. To live in the metropolis was to maintain a safe distance from the churning of its gears, a spiritual separation and freedom from its calculating forces.

So what does it take to get noticed in the city, to awaken the intrinsically unsympathetic dwellers of Simmel’s metropolis? For Chinese artist Liu Bolin, the answer is complete invisibility. The artist, informally known as Invisible Man, paints himself head-to-toe to blend into various urban milieus. One of his latest works took him to Ground Zero, where he camouflaged himself in front of the rising Freedom Tower as a tribute to the victims of 9/11. You can see more of his work at his exhibition Hiding In New York, which just opened at the Eli Klein Gallery in New York.

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BLDGBLOG returned today from a brief hiatus to dish out some ghostly composite photographs of demolition sites in Philadelphia. In Andrew Evans’ layered compositions, razed buildings appear like phantoms, eerily seeping back into the now vacant sites of Philadelphia’s contemporary landscape. Click through for more.

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Burj Dubai, Dubai

By now, the novelty of the aerial view has long warn off (remember when Google Earth blew all of our minds?). Detailed images of our surroundings, captured by satellites orbiting out of sight, are all but commonplace these days. And though few of us have had the privilege of contemplating a place from such a lofty position, we have come to accept these abstract digital images as among the most accurate depictions of our environment.

But with this privileged distance, this ability to think we see all the pieces of the terrestrial puzzle, comes an equally great psychological distance from any real sense of place. Irish photographer David Thomas Smith ponders what has been lost since we have begun conflating satellite imagery with reality. In his Anthropocene series, Smith takes aerial landscapes of industrial sites and sites of voracious development and rearranges them into kaleidoscopic patterns. Though we’ve seen this trick before, Smith’s images are individual in their deliberate evocation of Persian rugs. As Alison Zavos wrote on Featureshoot, “Thousands of seemingly insignificant coded pieces of information are sewn together like knots in a rug to reveal a grander spectacle.” More after the jump.

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Squatter architecture has been somewhat glamorized lately, with the Occupy movement spawning a series of highly publicized DIY settlements and the increased adoration of pop-up pavilions as emblems of an alternative built environment. But for the squatters at Slab City, mobile architecture is not a statement of revolution but a way of life. Taking its name from the concrete slabs left over from what was once a Marine base, Slab City has become a permanent Hooverville in Southern California, a haven for the homeless, a site for general off-the-grid living, and a place steeped in myth.

Here, refugees of the recession and assailers of the system find food, shelter and company, along with the occasional acrylic paint art installation, living modestly in unforgiving climates with the assistance of government checks, electricity generators, and a scant stash of goods from the nearest town three miles away. Photographer Eric Thayer recently made a trip to Slab City, and his photos reveal a city of authentically ad hoc architectures assembled into a provocative portrait of fringe living. More images after the jump.

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Qatar is one of many Arab states that have been literally swept up by the vogue of skyscrapers. Its serrated skyline is all but commonplace these days, and though Qatar’s buildings are far from record-breaking in terms of height, their appearance, as if digitally rendered into reality, is reflective of a fast advancing Middle East. For a personal project, photographer Chris Johnson has photographed some of these buildings, isolating each individual skyscraper from its surrounding context and thereby creating a series of architectural headshots. Click through for more.

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