The design comes from France, and they seem to cost about 8000 eu, which is too much, but still about 250,000 less than an actual house, which is also too much, but which makes the first price seem like a bargain but you still can’t afford it. They have auxiliary benefits of a) being able to float when the floods come and b) the roof acts like a giant magnifying glass allowing you to light cigarettes simply by holding them aloft.

There are loads of videos on youtube – but almost all of them seem to feature people talking cobblers for ages at the start. This is the most straight-to-the-point one.

They look amazing actually

Proper space-ship like… although to be 100% pedantic about it, they do also look a lot like the thing that the Tralfamadorians made Kurt Vonnegut live in, when they kidnapped him and took him to Tralfamadore. No photographs of this place exist on the entire internet, but I managed to snag this from a youtube video…

… a process made all the more tricky because hundreds of films students have made “interpretations” of their own, which have fuck-all to do with the original. This is crossing a line in my opinion.

So anyway – for some reason the Tralfamadorians gave him Valerie Perrine – which is an odd choice… even back then. Personally I would have gone for Tanya Roberts on account of her being the greatest 1970s Barbarianess of all time… starring in such classics as The Beast Master

And she was also in I Paladini – storia d’armi e d’amori… which is probably the greatest barbarian movie from the early 80s, of all time… a sort of Barbarian Spaghetti Western. Tanya gets her dress trashed by bandits in the opening scene.

Although obviously if I got trapped on Tralfamadore, and got another chance at choosing etc, I’d probably go for the blonde one…

But anyway, Tanya Roberts was also one of Charlies Angels,

and possibly the worst bond-girl ever, apart from Grace Jones which was obviously preposterous. That video above appears to be some sort of fan video. I don’t know what’s happening to the world… I mean we gen-Xers exist in this atemporal plastic bubble of trash culture, but making iffy fan videos seems to me to be crossing a line somehow.

Like… Clarence off True Romance might have theorised about having sex with Elvis to random women in bars, and later had visions of him in the bathroom just before a massive gun fight etc… Clarence was Gen-X… and if he had to have sex with a guy… if he absolutely had to… he’d choose Elvis. But he wouldn’t make dodgy fan-vids of him. Crossing a line.

Anyway, Alabama off True Romance is probably my most ideal woman for getting trapped in a massive Zorb on another planet with and being peered at by aliens etc, from any movie from the 90s ever.

I’ve seen that movie about 30 times. Usually in a similar state to Floyd.

That’s all I’ve got to say on the matter.

Absolutely brilliant

Reminds me a bit of that pendulum thing that turned up recently.

The more our buildings are made by machines, the more organic they can (potentially) look… which is a coincidence, because the more my brain is sucked into The Machine, the less attention I pay to my surroundings, the more organic my surroundings become.

Blurb here

“Dai Haifei (戴海飞), 24 years old form Hunan province, built and placed an egg shaped small house in a courtyard in Beijing, as his home. Inspired by his company’s design, Dai Haifei built the “egg” house with bamboo and it only cost him 6,427 yuan. Now he has been living in it for almost 2 month, rent free. The following is his diary on Douban describing how he builds the egg house.”

Though if you tried this in any city I’ve lived in, you’d get moved on… instantly.

The making-off photos on Flickr are excellent. They guy’s an artist.

And it winds up looking like this

And it’s solar-powered. Genius.

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This is cool because anything Geodesic is automatically cool, as is anything modular… inflatable? Often cool. Not always. In this case cool as well though.

Interesting website. It’s actually the worst website in the world, only it looks deliberate – like wry German Geocities-punk. Utterly dreadful – and there’s a reason why information is presented in certain ways… why the web has evolved etc. Breaking that for ironic stylistic reasons will render your information obscure. That’s the price.

Still – whatever. Inflatable domes. Fucking brilliant.

Mind you, I can imagine them becoming mind-bogglingly hot – each one is like a little solar-oven (or like, a solar-still). You’d have to make them out of that mirrored stuff that cardboard wine-casks are made out of. But you could have windows! And as they’re modular, open windows! Or mosquito screens. You could make versions that are mirrored on the inside, making giant parabolic solar things. You could use them in floods.

The thing about this stuff is that you could drop bales of them out of the back of aeroplanes over disaster-zones. When you’re done (or if arseholes with guns make you move on), you deflate them and pack them away.

So obviously this caught my eye.

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Which is cool – it looks a bit like that clear Rubicks cube from earlier…

And would be absolute hell to live – the glass floors/ceilings mean that by chucking your socks, shirts, pizza boxes all over the floor in one room, you’d actually be making the mess of a ceiling in another.

It is actually quite cool – it would be excellent for mooning at the neighbours when they were having a dinner party in their similarly transparent abode… but… hmmm…. I don’t know. I think I’d go more for something like this:

Which is kindof indescribable.

It seems to be some sort of great big geodesicy hippie house

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built on similar principles to one of those pub games where you pull the bits out one at a time until the whole thing falls over, but inside they’ve put this giant knitted technicolour placenta… which would probably be a bit of an inconvenience once the novelty had worn off… and you’d probably wind up giving it to the people in the glass house at the top… to cover their chilly see-through abode, give them some warmth and privacy etc.

Lastly there’s this:

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and I can’t tell if it’s real or not.

But it looks a bit more like what a proper UFO interior ought to look right – right down to having a proper bikini-clad crew, like they would’ve done in the 70s – although they do seem to be a bit blurry. I think I’d have something with a proper view of space as well – and a greenhouse bit.

It’s worth visiting the site that they come from to read the utter nonsense that the designers(?) have written about it: “The big sinuous trees having long swaying arms which seem to float in the air searching for a melting embrace form a Pantagruelian Ring a Ring o’ Roses of phytomorphic souls by means of evocative reflects of the drops on the ceiling. “.

or

“In this wrapped space man is placed in a counter-reality which enables him to rediscover himself and to establish a new body and mind balance. All the ingredients contained in this signs ensemble such as light, materials and colours make it a destabilising symbol which underlines the new relationship among man and space, man and time, and man and present-future”

Brilliant. I’ve long suspected that the point of going to art school isn’t to learn how to do art, but to learn how to write unbelievably pretentious bollocks about it so you can charge an arm and a leg for it.

Well… this goes further than that. It almost reads like machine-generated poetry written by spambots. Beautiful (sniff), beautiful.

Cool design though. I wonder if the mirrors would get foggy… and the condensation would drip off them like rain.

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No matter what it was, this would be cool. It could be anything – cellphone… a spaceship… some sort of lava-lamp… cool. It would even be cool if it was some sort of “intelligent” sex toy solution with an intermittent wiring fault which caused it to cut out at the crucial moment – just when you’d had a massive hit of amyl. Even then it would be cool.

But it’s none of these. It’s a house, and someone’s actually made it.

Faantastic. I want to live in a UFO – preferably a flying one – otherwise it’s just a UO – but in this case a UO would do.

Mind you – this one seems to be covered by what looks (from a distance) like bin-bags half-filled with old socks and such… But which on closer inspection are scaly things.

I’m not sure about scaly things – I’ve had experience with these things before – and the problem with them is, you spend the rest of your life trying to clean bird crap off them, because the little spaces etc behind each one, are ideal places for birds to live, especially pigeons. And pigeons crap a lot. Believe you me.

I imagine the scaly bits are for privacy etc – but again it’s a bit of an own-goal… because pigeons would nest on the inside of them, and would be watching your every move… your every move.

The bloke who designed this building also made this, which is also cool

Which is excellent as well. I don’t care what it is. Whatever it is I want one.

from dailytonic and architonic.

Which caught my eye largely on account of having lots of shiny pictures etc

But which is quite a neat idea… especially as (apparently) in California, the amount of electricity saved by painting rooves white would be more than that saved by putting solar-panels on them. “Living Skin” on buildings could be quite useful for smaller buildings… a type of reflective air-conditioning.

The other thing of course… and this is an idea that the designers of themselves will be kicking themselves over… “it’s so obvious, why didn’t I think of that?” etc…

… you could put mirrors on a building and turn the whole thing into a giant fresnel lens… hooked up to a sensor on a tree outside so whenever if finds itself becoming a) warm, b) wet, c) smelly… the building focuses the sun on the offending dog and reduces it to ashes before it has time to say “arf”, providing valuable nutrients for the tree.

It’s a win-win situation, unless you happen to be the dog etc.

Seriously though – you could use it to incinerate litter, or burn chewing gum off pavements. It lasts for a million years you know, chewing-gum. Amazing. They should’ve made the pyramids out of it.

Still… this all reminds me of those wooden mirrors.

or variants therof

The Future is so here already… for some people. For the rest of us, the only way the future isn’t going to pass us by is if we make it ourselves… out of our own LEDs and things.

Ok, that’s a crap name. I’m not calling it that.

I’m still working (and by working, I mean sitting around and doing fuck-all) on my DIY camper-van idea… because every year I go on a grand-tour and… which tends to mean going up and living in Tallinn for a month… because you can get a whole posh apartment there for a month for the same price as a low-grade hotel across the water in Scandinavia costs for less than a week.

And for double that price you could make a campervan… and at the end of it, you wouldn’t just be left with a hole in your pocket. You’d have a campervan.

But I don’t like existing camper-van designs. They’re pokey and boxey and… well, there seem to be a lot of really nice designs for shipping containers around at the moment. I’m a web-dev. I need a view. I need quite a lot of space for lounging about in. I don’t need to cook, I do need a shower every morning.

So what I have in mind is something modular – to fit any sort of van… or in fact any sort of smallish space at all. A squat say. A portable squat-kit that is actually really cool, rather than being a bit crusty.

So anyway, I collect things that might be useful… and this would be useful because… it would be useful to have a bed where you can adjust the heights…. so it can still be flat when you park on a slope.

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I saw these other things the other day as well… modular cushions:

And (also via) these modular bathroom fittings have potential as well,

Or would have were it not for the arse-quakingly bad design of the originating site which means it would be easier to make your own out of your own hand-mined (using stone implements) iron ore, than it would be to find what you’re looking for on the web.

Off-Gridity innit. Connected Off-Gridity.

All of this stuff (however) is for (an by) design fetishists who pay maximalist prices for their minimalism. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in getting people the fuck away from banks and landlords… although that said, the most expensive bit is still a bank of solar panels to keep your batteries topped up.

Over the weekend, people came and took things, left other things behind… and by Monday, the skip was filled with entirely different stuff. Reminds me of the The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk, which is a really cute idea. Seems to work as well.

Anyway, I scored a load of old ornate gold-leafed picture frames. Put them up on the wall, sans-picutres… which neatly leads into this:

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Which I really like… although harbouring the sneaking suspish, that randomly placed and sized windows might be better on the outside than the inside.

Still…. cool, and another example of how our new frontier is the Ruins of the Unsustainable might not necessarily be bad… in fact it might be so good, that we wind up creating more unsustainability just so we can “recycle” it and turn it into something really cool, before it’s had a chance to go through it’s initial incarnation.

Faux-cycling. Or something.

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Anyway, I also like this because the people who made it also made those crapalot bags for emergency sanitation etc, and their website is a) bright orange, b) about 3 inches wide, and c) is about 80,000 pixels taller than it needs to be… all of which is cool. And D) everything seems to be pretty much on the same page. That’s cool as well.

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It’s a type of window / glass that can be turned into giant moving billboards – or entire coverings for buildings, that change at whim etc. As far as I can gather, it’s a concept, which basically means it’s just a drawing, which basically means that it might just as easily have been a drawing of a perpetual motion machine or something.

About which I might be completely wrong of course. It’s happened before.

Anyway, the site that it comes from has some pretty cool other-stuff… dynamic surfaces etc. There’s quite a neat demo of a robotic membrane

with non-embeddable video on the site – looks like the robotic muscles aren’t quite figured out yet – but in terms of basic trigonomics etc, this is great – I’ve had this vague notion to make something similar via Ponoko for a while now – as soon as they start offering polyproplyene, that I could use for the hinges. Something like this would be ideal for modular solar concentrators. You might even be able to make the robotic muscles from springs and string.

This is tangential to what I meant in the recent rant about “by the time we get robots good enough to pass for human, it will be kindof irrelevant”