REUTERS/Claro Cortes IV

When this photograph was taken, in Beijing, there was a thick fog that cut visibility to a few dozen metres and paralysed flights in and out of the national capital on Wednesday, disrupting China’s week-long Lunar New Year celebrations.
But indeed it created a magical atmosphere, and the photographer do his share, perfectly composing the picture; with the bridge, the reflection and the passer-by all in the ideal position.
This kind of wonderful bridges are typical of Chinese and Japanese garden. They are called Moon Bridges and are built in stone or wood. As part of formal garden design the bridge will be placed where its reflection is seen when the water is still. The half circle is intended to reflect in the calm water below the bridge, creating a full circle between bridge and reflection, a reference to the shape of the full moon. This picture clearly do justice to this concept.
The most famous chinese moon bridge is the Jade Belt Bridge also known as the Camel's Back Bridge, an 18th century pedestrian Moon bridge located in the Summer Palace in Beijing, one of the six famous bridges of the Kunming Lake.
In my opinion however the anonymous one, pictured in this shot, with its simplicity is even better, or maybe is just the magic of a foggy morning in the park..

Have you ever thought that all the energy we spend in a gym is summarily dissipated and that maybe we can reuse this human expenditure of caloric energy? In other words, all that energy that we constantly waste in the gym can now be used for something actually useful. Can you imagine yourself running on a treadmill while actually recharcing your cell phone?
Architect Mitchell Joachim, in collaboration with Douglas Joachim, a personal trainer, came up with a much more ambitious cocept: Multiple soft floating micro-island gyms on waterway paths. Energy is derived from human motion and converted to usable electric energy stored in on-board batteries that can be used for the propulsion of the gym itself providing costantly changing spectacular views during your no-more boring training and transporting less-motivated citizens. Not only! The energy provided could even be used to purify water or many others uses you have just to imagine. Cool concept isn't it?

Click here to see the original project

The site WebUrbanist, a nice blog mainly focused on architecture and urban design, has prepared an interesting article about modern sink and wash basin designs.
As you can easily see, if you've always thought at sinks as white and round things more or less always with an identical shape, you're quite wrong then, because designers have worked much to style and innovate them. The following ones are my favourites:

This is the Ammonite Sink. As you can imagine from the name it has been inspired by those wonderful fossil shells:


The following three instead are serie called Kanera which surface resamble itself a liquid, the ceramic holds water like a seaside rock pool:


Like the prevoius also the third one is nature inspired. Erosion Sink is designed like a geographical map of a drainage basin with its contour lines.


Plugless Sink by designer Maja Ganszyniec is remarkable for its clever design that avoid tha useless water waste you usually have with a normal plugged basin (everybody keeps the water going until they've finished washing hands, tooth or whatever, this way instead, with no plug, you learn to fill the basin with water and use it until you've finished avoiding the waste of tens of unused litres of water down for the plug. Once you’ve finished with your bowl of collected water, tip it backwards into the spillway and you’re ready to go again.


Origin Sink is for sure the most Zen-inspired of the bunch. Lift the stone at the source of the river and the water starts its way down to the end of its journey, a plughole capped by another stone.:


The last one is in my opinion the less elegant and the most kitch by far but for sure it's absolutely original and weird. The Moody Aquarium Sink from Italbrass is infact a sink coupled with a fully-functional fishtank. The soap dishes on either side of the basin are entrances into the tank for feeding and maintenance.

source

If you think that drainpipes are a really boring and dull part of the urban landscape now you are going to probably change your mind... because creatives can always turn the tide. Here above you can see an intersting concept of a drainpipe/flower pots in Seattle


Here below another version of the same concept, still in Seattle


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However the drainpipe that clearly wins hands-down a creativity challenge is the following one, the so-called Funnel-Wall at the Kunsthofpassage in Dresden, Germany.



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Finally, a quite different concept, how to embellish a gutter pipe with a little bit of creativity. A work of Banksy, the British street artist with an international reputation:

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Click the image to enlarge it

This is something quite amazing: a town inside a lake, and with "inside" I do not mean on an island... I mean under the water level!
It's the ancient city of Seuthopolis, in Bulgaria, which dates from the fourth century before Christ. Back then Seuthopolis was the capitol of a country named Odrissia. It was the city of the Thracian king Seuthus the third – hence its name. The remains of the city weren’t found until 1948 during the construction of a new dam. When the lake filled up in 1954 the city disappeared under water, twenty meters of water. Now, the city is going to be unearthed with what is probably one of the most insane architectural projects ever.
This is going to be done with the construction of a huge circular dike that'll be 420 m in diameter and 20m high. People will be able to access the recessed city by boat, heading down into it to see the city. A pharaonic project you wouldn'expect from Bulgaria, which seems to be mostly focused on tourism rather than archaeology.

Visit the official site for all the infos


Click the image to enlarge it


Click the image to enlarge it


Click the image to enlarge it


Click the image to enlarge it


Click the image to enlarge it


Click the image to enlarge it

As I've already done many times on the Travel section of this blog I post something about a place that inherit to be much more reknown than how it actually is. Chand Baori is a stepwell situated in front of the temple of Harshat Mata near the village of Jaipur Abhaneri in the state of Rajasthan. A stepwell is a well in which the water can be reached by descending a set of steps. These kind of wells are quite common in India and Chand Baori is the deepest one. It is so big and majestic that you can imagine it as a sort of counter-Pyramid which deepens inside the earth instead of stretching skywards. The most interesting aspect however is the incredible web of stairs that leads to the water that resembles a nightmare by M.C. Erscher and makes it a really amazing place. It was built in 9th century and has 3500 narrow steps and 13 stories. It is 100 feet deep.

Carlo Borlenghi

The Olympics 2008 are almost here. Tomorrow all the world will see the long expexted Opening Ceremony. Unitl now however, the most attention-getting things have been for sure the two biggest buildings of the event (and their construction): The Bird's Nest and the Water Cube, as they've been nicknamed due to their unique shapes.
In the following pictures by Carlo Borlenghi we can see them reflected in the water of the hundreds fountains surrounding them.


Carlo Borlenghi

Carlo Borlenghi

Carlo Borlenghi

Do you know what's a Nautilus? yes it was the Captain Nemo's submarine, but mainly it is a mollusc, a cephalopod with a many-chambered, spiral shell.
Inspired by this particular shell, the architects from Senosiain Arquitectos realized this incredible house for a couple from Mexico City.
The open concept inside the house is dominated by smooth surfaces, spiral stairs and natural plantings that makes the inhabitants feel like they're living inside a snail who swallowed the entire contents of somebody's back yard. While the house is surrounded on three sides by the bustling Mexico City, its West side (where most of its portal-style windows are located) has a breathtaking view of the mountains.

read more on Dvice

The story I'm going to tell you happened on February 2007 and probably some of you have already heard about it. The Infinity Tower (that you can see in the two picture above, is one of the many huge skyscrapers and futuristic architectural projects that are currently under construction in Dubai. This tower in particular, when finished, will be 330m high (the tallest helix-shaped building ever) with 80 floors and will stand in the marina district. This closeness to the sea (just a few meters is the main reason of the accident you can see perfectly described in the pictures below.
A crack opened in the diaphragm wall adjacent the marina and the water started sneaking in, growing rapidly as the crack enlarged. All the workers managed to escape and after 4 minutes the groundwork was totally flooded. This accident had caused one year delay in the construction