It’s a sunny Friday in New York, the city is full of life, and we’ve decided to send a little Pinterest love your way. A few weeks ago we featured our most-pinned swimming pools, but after that superstorm known as Sandy, let’s just say we’re a little over water! We’ve moved on to bigger and better things, more extreme things! Whether a futuristic high-speed rail in Hong Kong, China’s Yanqing Ice Festival, fictional fantasies, or realized projects, the pictures locales on our extreme architecture Pinterest board are worthy of any adventurer!

Click through to see more extreme architecture, if you dare!

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This might be the closest that we’ll ever get to teleportation. In what sounds like the hyper-accelerated modes of travel as theorized (and popularized) by sci-fi, the Evacuated Tube Transport could send commuters halfway across the world in as little at 2 hours! The irrevocable social and cultural changes this would effect on all global systems, not to mention the toll it would take on the formation and growth of cities–you could live in Sioux Falls and commute to the office in Chicago–would be innumerable. “Destination dining” could very well become a viable option for bored couples and eccentric retirees

These claims, of course, seem preposterous, if not downright polemic. The thinkers behind the project, et3.com, have devised a schematic system comprised of cross-continental airless vacuum tubes lined with frictionless maglev (magnetic levitation) tracks, on which are mounted 16-foot capsules capable of achieving speeds ranging from 350 mph to a staggering 4000 mph. There would be different models of capsules, each one suited to a specific type of cargo; those ferrying commuters could carry up to six passengers, who would not feel any “discomfort” that would accompany travel at mach speeds. The company says that the construction of the tube transport would be a tenth of the cost of a high-speed rail system and a quarter of that of a freeway. Without wind turbulence or storms to worry about, you’d literally be able to fly faster than Superman.

[via io9]

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Future Sacramento-based environmental office park? A winning entry from Annie Kurtin & Laura Stedman proposes the creation of wetlands around the base of a raised railway, provoking phyto-remediation.

The Van Alen Institute, anticipator of public design challenges to come, recently held a competition called Life at the Speed of Rail that asked entrants to imagine how the nascent infrastructure would look and function. The winners were announced last week at the National Museum of Buildings, and as you’d expect from a jury that included Keller Easterling and Gary Hustwit, there isn’t a frivolous entry among them.

Click through for some of the (many) notable entries.

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Aaron Betsky slams the powers that be in Taiwan today, criticizing the decision of the government to abandon what he calls a “visionary” Antoine Predock design for the National Palace Museum, for a categorically “bad” Artech scheme. [via Beyond Buildings]

“The Limits of Cyber-Revolutions” examines the pitfalls of the “digital uprising” through the lens of urbanism and mobile technologies. [via NY Mag]

The New York Times takes a look at China’s new National Museum – and what’s left out of the official histories on display. [via The NYT]

The federal funding for high speed rail that Florida is “rejecting” on principle? It will probably get funneled to fund the rail projects in California. [via Infrastructurist, Fresno Bee]

An interesting comment from the A/N Blog on whether the auction houses selling objects from Chandigarh are morally obligated not to profit from the “plundering.” [via A/N Blog]

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Slated for opening in 2012 is a new affordable housing scheme in Sugar Hill, Harlem, by emerging starchitect David Adjaye. The plan includes an 18,000-square-foot museum targeted towards children. The main structure, pictured below, resembles a “group of stacked gray-purple cubes, with scattered windows of different sizes and a glass-enclosed floor just above street level to house the museum.” [via Building Design Online]

The Architect’s Newspaper reports a simultaneously exhilarating and frustrating scene at last week’s California High Speed Rail TOD Marketplace. “Mind-blowing” presentations by engineers from France and China were counteracted by a steady slog through bureaucratic red tape to envision similar systems for the US. The state of California does have $10 billion in bonds set aside for the venture, however, so here’s hoping. (For more on light speed rails in California, see our previous report here.) [via A/N Blog]

Non-profit Architecture for Humanity unveiled its very own iPad app this week (which handily coincided with group exhibition Small Scale/Big Change at MoMA). Other tech treats are coming our way courtesy of AutoDesk, who just released new mobile apps for AutoCAD on the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. [via Open Architecture]

Also married last weekend was the daughter of Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Meier. The affair was documented by Vogue as an online feature; if you’ve ever wondered what starchitects wear to prep for their only daughter’s nuptials, we’ve got proof after the jump. (Spoiler: short shorts.) [via Vogue]

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