May 1, 2013
Researcher and Photoshop mastermind Nickolay Lamm has done it again. After remarkably re-imagining America’s coastal cities under rising sea levels (see the GIFs here), the Pittsburgh-based digital artist took to his computer-cum-city wrecker once more to imagine the famous sights of New York City, such as the bright lights of its night skyline, as they would appear in everyone’s favorite authoritarian curiosity and headline darling, the North Korean capital city Pyongyang.
Inspired by Pyongyang’s reputation for being a “sight to behold” because ”no artificial lighting competes with the intensity of the stars,” as described by Barbara Demick in her book Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Lamm used Photoshop to rob New York of its glittering lights and modify social behaviors and tourist landmarks of Times Square. Click through to see!
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April 17, 2013
Remember in your sugar-fueled youth how you enjoyed bending over on bent arms and legs to look at the world upside-down? Australian photographer Ben Thomas captures some of that same delirious, mind-curdling fun with his dizzying photo-composites, which render some of the world’s most recognizable cities, well, unrecognizable. Thomas takes skylines and flips them on themselves to create gravity-defying metropoles. Yes, you saw something similar happen in Inception, but there’s something just as spatial at play in Thomas’ work. Using a mix of tilt-shift photography, filters, and Photoshop, Thomas conjures up an imaginary kaleidoscope-urbanism that’s grounded (?) in scale, volume, and density. Now, where’s all that light coming from?
Click through for more!
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March 5, 2013
What is going on here? Curves, lots of curves. The ludicrously bowed walls of this “building” look to be at the breaking point, and their extreme curvature should give you an idea of the project’s architect. But that isn’t the question at hand. What we’re asking you is: real or rendering? Given the angle and selected vantage point, it could go either way. The sky looks authentic, but that could have easily been added in post-production. On the other hand, the mysterious, homogeneous white building stuff looks straight out of rendering engine. Let us know what you think!
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February 19, 2013
The latest in our “Real or Fake” feature is yet another amazing image of Central Park. And no, they never get old. This new photo actually isn’t new at all, but (re-)surfaced online earlier today. Near the center of the image is the the Mandarin Oriental hotel at 80 Columbus Circle, and it’s here that make us question the authenticity of the “photograph.” It doesn’t take too sophisticated eye to pick up on how Columbus Circle’s twin towers look like computer renderings convincingly photoshopped into a spectacular panorama of Manhattan at sundown. We wouldn’t be surprised if there were further touch-ups and edits that we haven’t spotted yet. Still, despite these, the gridded array of skyscrapers and historic housing buildings that hug the western perimeter of the lush, green park make for great web fodder. Click on the photo for high-res!
[via Gizmodo]
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January 31, 2013
Phil the Groundhog at the Garden Shed; All Photoshop work: Peter Levins
The frost of winter is on the thaw, and spring will come early this year! At least, that’s our take on the results from this year’s Groundhog Day. No, the furry little prognosticator—that would be Phil—will not see his shadow this coming Saturday (Feb. 2), and that’s that.
So what better way to welcome the new season than with the best of “spring architecture”? It’s something we just made up, but by which we mean houses that photograph real well in the springtime, when flowers are coming into bloom, the sky is blue, and the sun hasn’t reached its greatest intensity yet. We’ve gone ahead and added Phil in there just to be festive, so see if you can spot him in the following 10 projects. Click through for the slideshow.
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January 16, 2013
Beautiful Steps #2
Stairs—usually spiral stairs, but not always—are a gateway drug to architecture. (That and infinity pools.) They’re easy on the eyes and don’t require the tortured exegesis that many architects resort to when their designs can’t speak for themselves. From a designer’s standpoint, the right staircase packs a lot of punch with little energy or fuss, meaning you can use it in a pinch or in a tight spot (literally).
Swiss artists Lang/Baumann love stairs. The duo has devoted an entire project on the theme, a series of Surrealist scenarios that could easily be nightmares. Stairs of all shapes and styles are, it needs to be said, physically suspended—no Photoshop here—from the sides of towers and coiled around castle turrets, found hovering in art galleries and shooting down palazzo halls. Click through for more stair porn.
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January 4, 2013
D’ville 001 (2012)
Do you often find yourself in buildings that, well, make too much sense? The Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin has long been tantalizing us with his digital composites of fanciful houses with multiplying roofs, illogical cantilevers, castles consisting only of walls, and geometric prisons of stone with no visible way in or out. Often set in romantic landscapes loaded with old-world texture, Dujardin’s impossible architecture is at once pastoral and panic-inducing, like a fairy-tale world designed by a slightly malicious Escher.
On February 7, San Francisco’s Highlight Gallery will kick off its solo exhibition of Dujardin’s photos. Here’s a preview of the works in the show, which will be open through March 29. Check them out!
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December 6, 2012
Reality Cues, the firm that brought you the Le Cor(nudie)r Competition and the !!!!!!!! Competition, is back with its next collage challenge. The Monumental Competition wants you to super-size anything—a sculpture, your lunch—into an instant monument ready to be reblogged, tweeted, and tumbled across the interwebs. If you’re skillful enough, you may even convince teenagers that that 300-ft tall Big Mac actually exists or have honeymooners sincerely plan a spiritual excursion to that fictional Buddhist mountain retreat. As the Librarian writes in the competition brief, “You decide who or what needs to be memorialized in epic proportions and our jury will decide what goes viral, because let’s face it, size matters.” Click through for submission deets!
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June 26, 2012
Top prize: ‘H. Ferriss’s Paris Visit’ by Francisco Villeda
The results are in for Reality Cues‘ !!!!!!!!!!! Competition, which asked the internet to show the Librarian just what the “Architecture of OMG” looks like. Contestants were given eight images to modify and manipulate beyond all logic and decency so as to create new virtual architectures of their own. A flood of entries (nearly 100) came pouring in, each one fantastic, phantasmagoric, nihilistic, and slightly demented in its own way. Ultimately, victory would go to Francisco Villeda, whose entry (pictured above) depicted a clone stamp city of ubiquitous infrastructural Tours St. Jacques stretching out into space. For his efforts, he’ll be taking home a Reality Cues’ hacked version of Hasbro’s ‘Operation’ game (entitled “Keep off the Grass!!!”), while the best in each category will be receiving a Lego Cube!!!! with secrets inside.
So what did the jury have to say? The sheer number and zaniness of the entries drove some to grand pronouncements, with Chris Barley, the Future—Predictor himself, claiming that The !!!!!!!!!!!! competition threw down “the digital gauntlet and reclaims architecture’s position as the mother of all arts.” Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan offered some wise words, calling for a reprieve from an internet design culture “gripped by mediocrity of a single overriding style diktat”. Still, it all proved a bit scary for Juergen Mayer H. (“Spooky”) and more than a little despairing for others. Oh, and consider Archistophanes pwned.
Click through for more.
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