Japan has a tendency to take existing innovations and bring them to the next level. For instance, Japanese cars have consistently excelled in Western markets. Some say Japanese macarons have surpassed those of traditional French patisseries. Fine dining service in Japan is indisputably supreme. And now it seems that some cartographers in Tokyo came across London’s darling Animals on the Underground project—a project that traces line drawings of different wildlife within the famed London Underground map—and thought, “We can do this. Better.”

The resulting Tokyo Zoo Project reveals complex cycling routes throughout the city traced into the elaborate shapes of wild animals, from a tediously striped zebra to a mother koala with a child mounted on her back. Working with a host of requests from Twitter, the team of cartographers picked out 15 startlingly realistic geo-glyphs and programmed the routes into a personal bicycle navigation system. Each animal announces the total distance traveled and calories burned while giving a brief summary and a few poetic words of advice about the route. Be warned, “You need guts to draw the stripes of a zebra.” Especially if the zebra is 43 miles long.

[via Spoon & Tamago]

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A neighborhood-watch sign stands near the gated community in Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by neighborhood-watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Photo via The Christian Science Moniker.

A recent article in The Boston Globe made an interesting observation about the shooting of Trayvon Martin this past February, speculating that part of the tragedy was rooted in poor urban planning: “Less than 1.2 percent of the population in Sanford walks to work, and the subdivision where the killing took place is designed for driving, so something as human as walking is odd behavior,” wrote Zach Youngerman for the Globe.

On February 26, 2012, 17-year-old Martin was walking home from the nearest convenience store to the house of his father’s girlfriend, located inside a gated community. Martin was reportedly shot by community watch coordinator George Zimmerman in front of the community clubhouse, where the seeming act of trespassing was likely a desperate and resourceful search for a sidewalk.

According to the Globe, the Retreat at Twin Lakes gated community is largely lacking in conventional sidewalks and other forms of pedestrian thoroughfare. Where Martin entered the subdivision where he was fatally shot, he would have encountered a rare stretch of sidewalk, a safer, and less disruptive means of arriving at his destination than the option of crossing the 30-foot street from the corner where he was. As Youngerman wrote, “On [Martin’s] mile walk to the nearest convenience store, the sidewalk ends twice and becomes a no-man’s-land of grassy highway shoulder. IF Martin were trespassing, he had no choice but to do so.”

Numerous design scenarios may have prevented the incident. Aside from more pedestrian-friendly planning, the neighborhood in Sanford, Florida could afford denser residential areas: houses sitting closer to the property line and residences with front porches instead of long driveways may make the Retreat feel a lot less ‘private,’ perhaps deterring Zimmerman from feeling alone, threatened, and fearfully accountable for Martin’s actions. A more local convenience store or café within the neighborhood may have prevented the encounter altogether. Unfortunately, Martin and Zimmerman met in an environment designed explicitly to be sheltered, a place built to project such an image of security that even the most unassuming actions spur insecurity.

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from the Txirbil joinery to the Axalko wood bicycle from Maite Felices on Vimeo.

Though Portlanders have long espoused the wood bike frame, the rest of the world generally sticks to the standard carbon, aluminum, or steel (… or whatever this is). But woodworkers in the north of Spain, faced with an economic slowdown that’s affected their business, have taken up frame building as an alternative to construction. Click through.

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What remains of the Nazi Europe? Mostly reinforced concrete towers and bunkers, whose immense size and incredibly thick walls proved difficult, even impractical, of destroying. In the 70 years or so since their construction, the structures, usually scattered along the beach or stranded in fields, have cultivated an aesthetic aura that continues to intensify as the generational gap and cultural gulf between the war and contemporary life widens. In France, for example, families in coastal towns near the Atlantic Wall have integrated some of the local bunkers into opulent single family homes. Similarly, in Belgium, architects Bham Design Studio have rehabilitated another Nazi infrastructural relic for domestic life, in what we think is  a much more successful, if spurious, effort.

Built between 1938 and 1941 near the village of Steenokkerzeel , the 30-meter tall structure functioned as a water tower–briefly used by the Nazis–up until the 90s, when it was decommissioned and preserved as a war monument. The exterior was completely restored to its original condition, while the interior was completely guttered, save for the concrete ceilings, stairs, and other elements which were left intact, repainted, and repaired where needed. The windows on the top floor were widened to accommodate a “sculptural” kitchen, library, cat house, and general living space. A steel bridge connects this floor to a rooftop panoramic terrace that offers expansive views of the region. The house was designed for two permanent residents, while a guest room on the second level may be rented throughout the month. Click through for more images!

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Every year, warm weather heralds a steady flow of calendar-cramming events, as a flurry of art, architecture and design shows seem eager to coax us all out of social and intellectual hibernation with hours of performances and aisles of one-off objects and installations. But designers and Salone exhibitioners Ryosuke Fukusada and Rui Pereira know that this annual buffet of innovation can be a bit much to take in, and all you need sometimes is a real snack. Their latest project, called Sapore Dei Mobili—or ‘furniture tasting’—was created in response to “the velocity of the contemporary furniture industry and how the consumers are unable to digest the huge amount of new products launched every year.” Thus, the duo designed an iron pan to mold furniture cakes—baked treats based on both Japanese and Portuguese pastries cast in the shape of furniture—served up with sprinkles, spreads and other sweet toppings. The bite-sized furniture is perfect for any sized appetite, and perhaps you’ll actually get that second wind and make your way to that after party.

[All images courtesy the designers]

[Via MOCOLOCO]

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This week at Coverings 2012, three up-and-coming young architects will take the stage to discuss their work, their profession, and the future of both.

Coverings is the annual stone and tile trade show that brings together designers of all stripes in Orlando, Florida. As such, it’s the perfect chance for architects from all over the country to come together in a kind of national summit. The Coverings keynote, State of the Union: Architectural Trends & Influences, will bring together architects Jason Adams and Jason Welty in a conversation led by Architizer founder Marc Kushner.

Where will architecture go in the next year? Join the cast of this year’s State of the Union this thursday to debate the future of the profession. Click through for more information.

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Machine Drawing Drawing Machines from Pablo Garcia on Vimeo.

Picasso may have considered the computer useless, but he never saw how one could draw. “Machine Drawing Drawing Machines” explores a CNC machine’s illustrative capabilities through a series of facsimile drawings depicting twelve historical drawing machines. Each of the images represents a canonical device that introduced a technological shift in the way we observe the world and its contents. From Albrecht Dürer’s “Dürer’s Door” (1525) and Sir Robert Hooke’s Portable “Picture Box” Camera Obscura (1694) to the Drum Plotter “560″ (1959), the new prints cover the gamut of amazing, manmade machines that function(ed) both as an extension of ourselves and also as an autonomous being seemingly capable of its own intuitions and insights.

Devised by Pittsburgh-based artist Pablo Garcia, the project ironically highlights the possibility and obsolescence inherent in all machinery, with the CNC router effortlessly scrawling the painstaking detail hard-won by its precedents. The prints are available in a limited 4-edition set, which can be purchased through the artist here.

“Dürer’s Door”, Albrecht Dürer, 1525

Profile Machine, Carl Augustus Schmalcalder, 1806

[via Geek]

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Hearst Building (left), Gareth Pugh Spring/Summer 2009 (right), image via T Magazine..

Architecture and fashion. It’s a convergence we’ve seen time and time again, whether in Adolf Loos’s polemical essays about proper dress or in the twisted rubber of a pair of Lacoste sneakers designed by Zaha Hadid. We recently got a chance to speak with Karen Moon, co-founder of the newly launched StyleMusée, about the overlap between these two areas of design. StyleMusée is described as “a customizable style inspiration board keeping you at the pulse of fashion. It lets users visually explore the fashion industry’s social media posts on Facebook to discover designers and muses they love… and never knew they loved.” Their hope is to eventually take the style inspiration that people find in social media and offer tailored shopping recommendations. Their first editorial, Architectural Interpretations, immediately caught our attention, and Moon gave us the lowdown on building, dwelling, thinking…and dressing. Check out the interview after the jump.

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Images (c) Dan Holdsworth.

At first glance, British artist Dan Holdsworth’s work might depict any number of things: crumpled up paper napkins, a washed-out image from the surface of Mars, or even microscopic fractal patterns.

In fact, the images are 3D renderings of America’s most famous natural wonders. There’s the Grand Canyon, Mount Saint Helens, and the Great Salt Lake: by cloaking the models in a featureless white, Holdsworth shows us America’s “backyard” as a scaleless study in texture and detail.

Holdsworth worked from digital terrain models created by the United States Geological Survey Data to create the series, called Transmission: New Remote Earth Views. He chose landscapes fraught with political and environmental meaning. The crucial thing about terrain models, says Holdsworth, is that they don’t just depict the land. They “measure man’s effect on the earth.” By removing visual signifiers like color, line, and labels, he shows us our most well-known natural wonders as alien landscapes.

“With neither the schema of the romantic nor the everyday to guide us,” writes the London gallerist showing the work, “Holdsworth absorbs us into a vision of the unknown; a space that is unequivocally, transcendentally, Other.”

Holdsworth’s Transmissions is on view at the Brancolini Grimaldi Gallery in London until 5/09.

Images (c) Dan Holdsworth.

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More and more architects are talking about “super-furnitures” and “micro-structures”–hip nomenclature for large, oversized spatial objects whose compact dimensions and surprising depth constitute portable rooms that can be inserted into any context. Given their inherent mutability, these rooms can be shifted at will with little regard to the spatial dissonance (or opportunity) they may provoke (or inspire). The same cannot be said about the Aquadom, a colossal 25-meter aquarium situated in the atrium of the Radisson Blu Hotel in Berlin.

The concept (if you can call it that) behind the aquarium appears similar to that of super-furnitures, in that it was designed to accommodate, if not galvanize perceptive shifts in the observant’s spatial memory. In the case of the Aquadom, the structure inhabits two opposing premises, that of scaling up a domestic glass tank populated with goldfish and tiny reef-like mounds and, conversely, of harnessing the ocean and perversely introducing it into a man-made environment. Of course, the aquarium–the world’s largest–cannot be moved or adjusted so as to drastically vary experiences over time, but that is not to say that it cannot beget variation. Light passes through the water in different intensities throughout the day; schools of fish dart past to avoid a scuba diver; and the glass elevator at the tank’s core continuously ferries guests to and from the viewing platform overlooking the oceanic spectacle. That, or it’s just an easy way to lure tourists and boost revenues. Happy Friday!

[via zeutch]

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