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Interesting Stuff on the Internet

Interesting stuff on the internet is an article sharing my favourite recent online inspiration and distractions.

Revisiting one of my favourite Melbourne houses, the Cloud House by McBride Charles Ryan. From the front the house is an inconspicuous white Edwardian home, but things are not what they seem; when you step inside the home morphs into a dreamy cloud. Check it out here. 

A short and wonderful podcast on Sutro Baths investigates on the common human desire to be confronted with antiquity and physical reminders of human permanence (or impermanence). Definitely worth listening to!

Reading Paul Rudolph‘s new monograph, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph. Equally admired and maligned for his remarkable Brutalist buildings, Paul Rudolph (1918–1997) shaped both late modernist architecture and a generation of architects.

Thank you to the power of query, every day the distance between questions and answers shortens by milliseconds. In a world structured to provide the immediate gratification of “answers,” this article explores the need for our “questions” to be more meaningful and in doing so allows new invention. Super article in full here.

Photographer Ksenia Yurkova has an eye for the unusual. Her series Zarechny succeeds in capturing a rare relic of the Soviet era. The town of Zarechny sits some 640km southeast of Moscow. It is one of the 44 last remaining closed cities left in Russia; under Communism it was not even shown on the map. Although they are free to come and go, the city’s 62,000 inhabitants live encircled by a fence of barbed wire. Checkout the incredible photos here.

Pixel Perfect, the story of Eboy: where the 8 bit revolution all started. “Pixel art signifies a return to a simple time, when all the elements of a picture and style were individually identifiable,” Jesper Juul. 

Will architecture be the next victim of rapid digitalisation? Will drones and computers begin to take over the building of our cities? Will the computer programmer take over the role of the architect? 

Take a look inside one of the worlds largest man-made holes; everything is huge, including machines the length of two soccer fields and as tall as high rise buildings. Full article and images here.

How amusement parks hijack your brain: An amusement park is like no other patch of land on earth, they are perfectly engineered to push psychological buttons you didn’t even know you had.

Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene (Los Ferronautas) have built a striking silver road-rail SEFT-1 vehicle to explore the abandoned passenger railways of Mexico and Ecuador, capturing their journeys in videos, photographs and collected objects. Check out their vehicle and explorations here. 

The Mad-Genius Paradox: Creativity Could Be Tied To Both Sanity And Madness: Interesting arguments about whether there is a link between creativity and mental illness.

During a difficult week, a sneaky Oprah Winfrey quote caught my attention: “Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.” Oprah Winfrey.

The urban built environment is responsible for 75% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Notes from a convention, rethinking the American city here.

Fish! Thousands of fish have taken up residence in the charred remains of the shopping centre that lost its roof in a massive fire that broke out after its closure in 1997 due to building code violations. Full article and images here. 

Dedication to the cause: A filmmaker spends half his life designing a video game no one will ever play. Adam Butcher spent 13 years designing an eight-bit video game. Article here.

The city of Boston has been the stage for a long history of experiments with public space. Most notably, the Boston Common is the oldest public park in the country – and perhaps the first public urban park in the world. Originally a shared cow pasture until overgrazing led to a real-life example of “the tragedy of the commons”, the 50 acre plot of land later bore witness to the Revolutionary War, public executions, riots, protests, and concerts. Now, Boston is leading the way to adopt small parks as a means of activating and extending sidewalks into public space. Full article here.

Archdaily is currently doing incredible coverage of the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale Fundamentals. You can checkout all the action here, including some wonderful interviews with Daniel Libeskind, Phyllis Lambert and Rem Koolhaas.