Vintage Illustrations

Kunsthaus Graz

The ‘Kunsthaus Graz’ by Sir Peter Cook and Colin Fournier is located right in the his­toric center of Graz, on the west bank of the River Mur. This ‘friendly alien’ has rapidly become a bridge between the historic and the modern, and plays an important role to the city of Graz as a center for the arts. 

Landscape Hotel

Architectural firm Jensen & Skodvin have completed what could be the world’s very first “landscape hotel”, designed to focus on the outside environment instead of the inside. Located in Norway, The Juvet Landscape Hotel is based on the idea that a structure should blend into its surrounding environment, offering amenities that are oriented outwards towards the surrounding nature.

Camera Obscura

By Abelardo Morell

Electricity

Swedish studio Belatchew Arkitekter wants to transform a Stockholm skyscraper into a wind farm by covering it in thousands of electricity-generating bristles.  “What is usually considered to be the most static of all things, the building, suddenly comes alive and the construction gives the impression of a body that is breathing,” explain the architects.

Digital Art

by Jeremy Kool

Tailored Molecules

With the hand of nature trained on a beaker of chemical fluid, the most delicate flower structures have been formed in a Harvard laboratory—and not at the scale of inches, but microns. These minuscule sculptures, curved and delicate, don’t resemble the cubic or jagged forms normally associated with crystals, though that’s what they are. Rather, fields of carnations and marigolds seem to bloom from the surface of a submerged glass slide, assembling themselves a molecule at a time.

By simply manipulating chemical gradients in a beaker of fluid, Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and lead author of a paper appearing on the cover of the May 17 issue of Science, has found that he can control the growth behavior of these crystals to create precisely tailored structures.