Tinselman

Underwater Churches

Click on photos to link or enlarge.

 

 

This is Not a Room

Engel, 2002
by Tatzu Nishi

 

I recommend taking a look at more of Nishi's weirdly displaced rooms... they're all equally fascinating.

A City in a Day

More procedurally generated cities. When will it end?

• earlier: City Engine

Thanks, Rangachari

High Tea

Chino City, Nagano Prefecture

A traditional Japanese teahouse by architect Terunobu Fujimori, which he calls, "the ultimate personal architecture." He says it feels like an extension of one's body, or "like a piece of clothing."

Somehow it reminds me of it Howl's Castle.

link (thanks Guy!)

Cabin-Kitsch Headstone

 

Flickr photo by sandrift.

Cactus Dome

Intrigued? Just stare at this photo a bit and try to imagine what it might possibly be. I'm thinking... the secret lair of Jame Bond's nemesis? Better yet... evidence of a crashed spaceship!... (because it looks a lot like the top part of the U.S.S. Enterprise to me).

 

Turns out, we're not so lucky. Brookings reveals the bitter truth...

Beneath this concrete dome on Runit Island, part of Enewetak Atoll, built between 1977 and 1980 at a cost of about $239 million, lie 111,000 cubic yards or radioactive soil and debris from Bikini and Rongelap atolls. The dome covers the 30-foot deep, 350-foot wide crater created by the May 5, 1958, Cactus test.

click to enlarge panoramically

via pruned

City Engine

I'm barely even sure what to say about this stuff. Yes, they are just plain cool... that's obvious. But more than that, I wonder if both products might just represent a sea change in the way we create. 

Not much description is necessary... just watch. First, City Engine, which procedurally constructs complex 3D cities. And then ILoveSketch, which allows artists to draw 3D models with––

Nevermind... just watch. And thanks Kevin, for pointing both products out!

Bubbles on the Beach

Click photos to enlarge

I've never been to Cape Romano Florida and, unless someone forces me, I won't be going there any time soon. From the looks of it, there's pretty much nothing to do or see there except this dome house, which supposedly managed to survive hurricane Wilma without a scratch. Though it looks to me like it's slowly slipping off into the ocean.

Flickr photos by Gunboats and Mila O

• more at flickr

Secret Spy Sublimity

Partial view of snow fort – click to enlarge (it's worth it!)

Around the age of nine, my friends and I spent inordinate amounts of time designing and drawing top secret spy hideouts, an activity undoubtedly inspired by an overdose of our favorite spy: James Bond 007. These hideouts usually, but not always, came in the form of smallish, artfully disguised command centers for top secret spy stuffs, the creation of which required whopping amounts of concentration on the parts of our teensy-weensy nine year old brains. So much work! So much effort! But oh... so little time.

When finished designing and rendering our islands – a task which typically took about 45 minutes – we'd go outside and attempt to play the worlds we'd just made, applying our fanciful creations to the real world around us. So my bike becomes the helicopter. The area of dead grass in the corner of the yard becomes the helipad. The tree house becomes the mountain. Matt's bike becomes the fishing boat... And I think you're getting the general picture. At first this is a raucous delight but, in a matter of minutes, the whole thing disintegrates because, after all, the backyard is never going to measure up to these kick ass cool spy maps we've drawn. How could it?... How could anything in the backyard begin to approximate the elaborate underground control centers of our spy islands?

So that's it. That's what we did. But it all pretty much pales in comparison to the above sublime snow fort. It's probably a good thing we never saw this snow fort as kids; we might have never drawn another spy island in our lives – it so puts everything we did to shame. It's all there: so perfect, so complete. Does it even matter what it's supposed to do and why it's doing it? Of course not! (except maybe for the fact that it has something to do with the cold war and averting atomic bombs).

Click the image... enlarge it. You won't be sorry.

More information about here at Modern Mechanix.

Illustration by Frank Tinsley

Britannica Revealed!

One panel of Britannica. (click photos to enlarge)

It's too good to be true. Artist Chesko (see last post regarding Midtown) succumbed to my infantile beggings and supplications and has recently sent exclusive photographs of his early Britannica work! Chesko's Britannica is staggering; I have no idea how he did it.  It's almost sad to think that that this creation is rolled up in one of Chesko's closets... when it should be hanging on a gallery wall.

Of his fantasy city, Chesko says,

Britannica is the Imagination run amok - my Magnum Opus. 

It begins with a series of maps scaled 1 inch to a mile. Britannica is a city of roughly 400 square miles that contains over 10 million people. It is surrounded by hundreds of suburbs, and the maps when connected portray a metropolitan area over 150 miles wide.

I recently went to Wikipedia to see a map of Gotham City drawn by Eliot R. Brown. My Britannica map is drawn in very similar style, only it makes this rendition of Gotham City look like Hooterville. I also copied maps of the Los Angeles metropolitan area to the same scale, spliced them together, and put them beside Britannica - and Britannica is considerably larger. I have drawn more streets and freeways for Britannica than the whole Los Angeles metropolitan area has in reality. Britannica is easily as intricate and complicated as New York.      

The buildings in Britannica are gigantic. They are ruled by a Titan called Britannica Rex, (the locals call it The Rex), a soaring spectacle reminiscent of the Empire State Building - only it is 2,400 feet tall. In addition to Britannica Rex there is the New World Center, an incredibly massive skyscraper over 2,025 feet tall. Britannica has more than 20 skyscrapers over a thousand feet, and I have modeled them all.  Yes!

Although it is incomplete, I have a model of downtown Britannica that is slightly larger than the Midtown model of New York.  All my models are the same scale, 1:3200.   I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We will be anxious to soon see the Model of Britannica... even if it is incomplete.