The Ryugyong hotel actually doesn't look half bad with the glass (photoshopped?) in, although it has more of a retro-futurist look than a 21st century one.
To me this is a very egotistical building. Tall and thin skyscrapers are fine, as are smaller squat buildings. But when they are tall and wide like here they are taking away a lot of light without giving anything back. A lot of buildings will be in its shadow most of the day. And since each wing is relatively narrow, it actually doesn't add a lot of usable hotel, now mixed, space. I am sure there is a lot more usable space in SOHO Galaxy than in Ryugyong, without being one tower to rule them all. Mirror glass cladding is what it took to make the building looking less of a ruined husk.
The building is supposed to be in Simcity for Facebook, as "Fortress of ultimate Woe".
It was almost not built and faced foreclosure, with the economy heading into a downward spiral. It was sued by Cosmopolitan Magazine for the name (It was originally going to be just the Cosmopolitan, but the name had to be changed to the The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas to make the lawyers happy It was going to 2,200 condominium units, but that had to be reduced because of the recession, so it got sued for that, too.
This is the Chandelier Bar inside the Cosmo (now I'll probably get sued :p )
I didn't take that picture, but I've been there. It's not my taste, personally.
I like to give an eye to the future with architecture. Not just how modern does it look now but how out of place will it look 20 years from now and further down the road. You need only to drive thru a housing development or tower complex from the seventies to see what I mean. Superfluous design beyond function meant to be modern, now torn down as the ugly eyesores they are. Boxy, protruding plains and yuck glass incorporated in gaudy amounts. Such will be the way of glass bubbles and odd architectural curves in the future.
I think it best to give a wink to the past classical styles while incorporating the curves and modern glass design. Simple really is better. There are limited prospectives to any building. you can only take in so much. If detail destroys the the overall shape from a distance or the function gets lost in design you're doing it wrong. The most brilliant aesthetics are useless in a building that can't or won't be adapted for future use. When the cost of renovation exceeds the worth of the building in the near future you're, again, doing it wrong.
Buildings are getting cheaper (per size) and easier to make in whatever shape you want. That's only going to get more true. You want buildings that are an icon for the era into the future. Not a fad of design.
The SOHO Galaxy is just the newest, and biggest, of a number of SOHO properties. It's massive, especially up close (I was looking at an apartment in a building next door when it was still under construction, turned my head around a corner and saw this death star right in front of me), but it is also on a really expensive piece of real estate. Most of the SOHOs are quite eye-catching, and they do have well-designed offices. They have by the look of it managed to get a huge amount of office space, but still keeping it light and with good passage ways. Some others:
Sanlitun SOHO (right) Sanlitun, at the edge of the embassy district, and once at the edge of the city, is now the main upscale and foreigner shopping and entertainment district. This one hasn't filled up and is quite dead after hours, but the shopping/rest complex across the street is thriving, with among other things the largest Temple of Apple.
Chaowai SOHO (left) This building, inspired by Hakka circular fortresses, probably is most noteworthy for housing the Opera Software offices in Beijing.
Guanghualu SOHO (right) More shopping (lower floors) than offices (upper floors).
SOHO Shangdu (left) This one is kind of nice to walk by.
Wangjing SOHO Next year's project, another Zaha Hadid, but taller. In Wangjing, an upcoming peripheral district that is a bit of a Korean town.
I quite like the look of that Norse museum, but some of those Chinese things just look gaudy. Still, the Galaxy Soho looks pretty nice. It reminds me of the corncobs in Chicago, although I suppose in this case it's more like two beehives. The Ryugyong hotel actually doesn't look half bad with the glass (photoshopped?) in, although it has more of a retro-futurist look than a 21st century one.
Hamburg's new quarter is one of the largest urban development projects underway in the world today. But will it be successful? City planners are hoping that their application of an academic field known as environmental psychology will do the trick. But how to ensure that success? How can one make certain that this very important piece of real estate actually becomes a living, breathing part of the city -- a place where people want to both work and spend their leisure time? Indeed, how can one guarantee that a brand new neighborhood actually feels neighborly?
Strolling through HafenCity on an overcast, late-summer evening is enough to make anyone feel the weight of such questions. It remains difficult to get here with several roads blocked by construction sites and taxis a rarity. During the day, a never-ending stream of trucks cause noisy, dusty traffic jams. While some in Hamburg are optimistic, calling the development "Hamburg's most beautiful construction site," others are less kind, referring to it as an "architectural zoo." For the moment, both are accurate. Many of the new structures are certainly aesthetically pleasing, but HafenCity does not feel like a city center. In fact, apart from a couple of lit windows and one or two pedestrians out with their dogs, it feels like nothing so much as an oversized ghost town.
Some fear it could remain that way and that high property prices could seal the new quarter's fate as a "rich man's ghetto" full of wealthy pensioners. Such concerns have been fueled by forecasts estimating that up to 10 percent of office space in Hamburg's city center will stand empty by the end of 2010. [...]
A multi-faceted discipline, environmental psychology enjoyed a lot of attention in the 1970s and '80s and launched its own publication, the Journal of Environmental Psychology, in 1980. With its broad definition of environment -- used to include social, physical, architectural and other elements -- it has since been used to get shoppers to buy more in malls, to encourage environmentally friendly behavior and even to determine whether indoor plants are good for your mental health.
HafenCity is one of the most significant developments utilizing elements of environmental psychology today. Indeed, Jürgen Bruns-Berentelg, the executive chairman of HafenCity Hamburg GmbH, which is overseeing the development, seems downright enthusiastic about what he describes as the psychological development of "a post-modern community."
"At the end of the day, physical structures are also social and cultural," Bruns-Berentelg notes.
These psychological tricks must have worked, because a couple years later Spiegel moved ... to HafenCity.
We also got prior art from this forum. I wanted to add something from the Grand Rapids, but all the constructions there seem to be from the previous millennium. But do not despair, there are plenty others threads to pick at.
The reconstruction of Antwerp Central Station started in 1998, 20th century, but it is is still within the period as the reconstruction was completed in 2007, this century.
That made me realize that this building too will be a showcase of 21st century architecture when it is done in 2026 or thereabout, even though it started in the 19th century, in 1882:
Took a trip to Stockholm. Good choice. While Western Sweden and Norway are deluged with the remains of the weather that flooded parts of England, the weather in Stockholm is just peachy.
"The Russians are coming", or russerne kommer, was a part of Norwegian Cold War psyche as well. It was even turned into a song, [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjXTZGMeWOc[/video]
The Norwegian game plan in case of a Soviet invasion was to let nature do the work for them, blowing up all tunnels and bridges from North to South. A Norwegian version of Tora Bora mountain complex nearby the city of Tromsø was a particularly hard defence. The Russian plan was to nuke it, which might take care of the defenders or not (and/or start a nuclear war if one wasn't already happening), but which would also make an impassable mountain complex into a radioactive impassable mountain complex. The alternative would be to bypass Norway and go south through the North Swedish marshes. Not only would that expose them to torture by mosquitoes, but it would be no easy terrain either, and well-defended. (What every Norwegian with military connection seemed to know, but somehow the Swedes were ignorant of, was that Sweden wasn't neutral, but a de facto NATO member in war time.)
If there were and Team USA were in sniffing distance of a medal, it would be covered. Of course it is the same phenomena everywhere, the trick is to get an athlete from a major sponsoring country to get a medal. Cross-country skiing is currently dominated by the Norwegians, and speed skating by the Dutch, which is a kiss of death for these exciting and intensely dramatic sports.
You shouldn't take Facebook legends too seriously. The story has made the rounds in Norwegian too. There the punchline was that it was an on-duty doctor trapped in the hospital toilet for not washing his (of course a he) hands. Semmelweiss invariably came up.
Where is it that buses are expected to have, WiFi?
Hmm, could be cool to have a WiFi transport world map. I generally expect long-distance buses and trains to have WiFi. Regional buses (buses outside cities) generally don't, but the buses in Värmland county in Sweden do. In principle. Local buses, municipal buses, generally don't either, but a few like Copenhagen and Karlstad, Värmland do. Of these I prefer Karlstad, as Copenhagen requires a phone registration, a step which usually means that the network will be available on the next trip. Seoul was a disappointment as yes, there was WiFi in the metro, but no you had to have a subscription (unless I've missed something).
Airports more commonly have free WiFi as well, usually with phone confirmation.
Video in itself should be safe, at least on the weekdays Adobe Flash don't have an exploit. The 'video' tag should thus be safer than 'iframe' which should be safer than 'object' (which is usually implemented as iframe++). (In principle 'video' shouldn't be worse than 'img') All these tags are safe in themselves (unless you mind that they are enabling a GET request outside your domain, but then again, so does [img]), but the scope for trouble if something goes wrong is greater.
I think it is always a healthier approach to whitelist (list what you allow) rather than blacklist (list what you don't allow). Future proof in my book is to proof against future exploits, not to proof against future syntax changes. Both will come, but the former is more devastating. (OTOH the latter could be more work intensive if there is a lot of syntax changes). As long as the next script in the chain knows what it can get from the previous and behaves appropriately, it should work out, but if what it can expect is anything, there could be a lot of things to consider.
E.g. the null byte \0 terminates strings, is a syntax error in XML, and in HTML as well. There is a class of exploits appending \0 where you don't expect it, e.g. inside an URL. With a little luck it could interrupt the script parsing the URL and dump the rest of the string after \0 unchanged. This is probably OK, but what about the next exploit we haven't thought of?
It was going to 2,200 condominium units, but that had to be reduced because of the recession, so it got sued for that, too.
Moving on, we have HafenCity in Hamburg, to be done 10-15 years from now. Spiegel wrote a loving article, 
