A building is to an architect what an album is to a musician or band. Now, excuse us for extending the analogy when we say that the façade of a building is like the sleeve cover of an album — it is (kinda). A sleek façade is integral to the experience of moving through a building just as an album’s artwork — yes, even now in the digital age — changes how you hear a record, at least for the first few times.

South by Southwest kicks off today in Austin, Texas, and to console ourselves for being stuck in wintry New York, we’ve combined our two loves of music and architecture. (No, not this.) Here are 20 album covers whose jewel-cases prominently feature architecture. From world-famous landmarks to surreal, fantasy structures, these cardboard buildings are candy for your eyes (and ears!). Click through! 

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Though better known for its music scene (and its hip boutiques, cool bars, and university-town feel), Austin actually has some pretty great architecture. The Texas town boasts, of course, plenty of modern homes with spectacular views surrounded by nature. But we’ve noticed some pretty rockin’ performing arts centers, chapels, and even public restrooms, too. So, in honor of SXSW, which starts tomorrow, we’ve rounded up our favorite examples of Austin architecture. Click through to see all our picks!

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There is always that moment, mid–traffic jam, when your eyes dart around in search of an escape route and land, longingly, on the sky. Urban air travel may sound like a utopian fantasy (and “skywalker” everyone’s favorite whining Jedi), but Frog Design‘s mass-transit proposal for Austin makes airborne gondolas look like the most obvious and economical solution we’ve never thought of. Conceived as an enclosed ski lift large enough for bikes, the “Wire,” as it’s known, would create shortcuts for pedestrians and cyclists by floating them above motorists. Read more!

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With the bursting of the real estate bubble and the recent American foreclosure crisis, the house, particularly the suburban home, has become a potent cultural emblem ripe for artistic seizure. One dilapidated house in Austin, Texas was recently rechristened as an immersive art project by Austin-based art collective Ink Tank. The project, called Last New Year, revolves not around the foreclosure crisis, but around a crisis of a grander and more mythical scale: the end of the world as predicted on the Mayan calendar. The artists described the large-scale installation as a celebration of the end, a study of crisis management, a search for meaning, a chance for closure, and “an unwavering column of truth in a desert of confusion.”

Perhaps the most resonant piece in the installation, as noted in Colossal, is a sculpture called The Purge. While many of the pieces in the house envision glorified and artfully tamed doomsday scenarios, artist Chris Whiteburch’s site-specific sculpture imagines how the physical house would react to the impending doom of 2012. Whiteburch shows the house purging its content, violently spewing structural materials and debris with a powerfully human sense of desperation.

[All photos courtesy Chris Whiteburch, photographers Julie and Nicole Blair, via Colossal]

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“You and a team of strangers, on a bus traveling at 60 miles per hour, have 72 hours to conceive, build, and launch a startup.” Sorry Keanu fans, this is not the premise to the new Speed movie, but a concept that began as a joke amongst friends and went viral one month before Elias Bizannes and his tech cohorts were planning on taking a regular ol’ roadtrip to Austin for the 2010 South by Southwest technology conference. A few phone calls, e-mails, and many tweets later, the experiment began: 25 people loaded onto a bus heading from San Francisco to Austin with the goal of producing a web prototype ready to present to high profile investors in Austin within three days.

Not one but SIX functional prototypes were built and presented, and the team behind the winning design was met with funding in Austin. A year later, the concept grew six-fold, and six different roadtrips ensued, departing from San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Miami. StartupBus has been evolving ever since, expanding to Europe just last December. The concept is thrilling: what ideas can come out of extreme constraints of time and space? What connections and bonds can be made when your ‘office’ shares basic characteristics with a ticking time bomb? To find out, sign up for the next bus. StartupBus is currently taking applications on a rolling basis for SxSW 2012!

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