World's Most Creative Buildings

The Basket Building (United States)

What started out as a dream by Dave Longaberger, Founder of The Longaberger Company, has been built Home Office into a giant basket to house the entire corporate offices of the company. Dave believed the idea was one of his best and would draw attention to the company, while simultaneously helping to build our brand. However, when he started spreading the idea of building a Home Office that was really a basket, he found that most people just thought that Dave was making a joke as Dave was a notorious practical joker. Not only did the bankers, architects and construction companies not take Dave seriously, neither did many of the employees who worked for The Longaberger Company, but Dave persevered. The dream was achieved on December 17, 1997 when the Home Office that is designed to resemble a basket finally opened for business.

The Dancing House (Czech Republic)

The Dancing House is the nickname given to an office building in downtown Prague, Czech Republic. It was designed by Croatian-born Czech architect Vlado Milunic in co-operation with Canadian architect Frank Gehry on a vacant riverfront plot (where the previous building had been destroyed during the Bombing of Prague in 1945). The construction started in 1994 and was finished in 1996.

The very non-traditional design was controversial at the time. Czech president Vaclav Havel, who lived for decades next to the site, had supported it, hoping that the building would become a center of cultural activity. Originally named Fred and Ginger (after Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers - the house vaguely resembles a pair of dancers) the house stands out among the Neo-Baroque, Neo-Gothic and Art Nouveau buildings for which Prague is famous.

On the roof is a French restaurant with magnificent views of the city. The building's other tenants include several multinational firms. (The plans for a cultural center were not realized.) Because it is situated next to a very busy road it depends on forced air circulation, making the interior somewhat less pleasant for its occupants.

The Piano House (China)

This unique piano house was built recently in An Hui Province, China. Inside of the violin is the escalator to the building. The building displays various city plans and development prospects in an effort to draw interest into the recently developed area.

Kansas City Library (United States)

Kansas City Library has one seriously cool façade. Local residents were asked to nominate influential books that represent kansas city, humungous versions of the winning nominations were then used as the exterior of the library car-park.

The Robot Building (Thailand)

The Robot Building, located in the Sathorn business district of Bangkok, Thailand, houses United Overseas Bank's Bangkok headquarters. It was designed for the Bank of Asia by Sumet Jumsai to reflect the computerization of banking; its architecture is a reaction against neoclassical and high-tech postmodern architecture.

The building's features, such as progressively receding walls, antennae, and eyes, contribute to its robotic appearance and to its practical function. Completed in 1986, the building is one of the last examples of modern architecture in Bangkok and has garnered international critical acclaim.

The Blue Building (Netherlands)

The borough of Delfshaven, Rotterdam, asked Schildersbedrijf N&F Hijnen to come up with a plan for a block of derelict buildings, which will eventually be demolished. The agreement with the neighbourhood is that the block will remain blue as long as there isn't a new plan for the area.

This was once one of the most unseen blocks of houses in Rotterdam, and by applying a layer of only 2 micron of blue paint onto it, it became Rotterdam's most photographed one.

The Astra House (Germany)

The strange building is actually a brewery in Hamburg, Germany. The floors can move up or down on it's skinny column core. As of now, the unique building has been destroyed. One of it's more famous beer brands was recently bought by a big refreshment corporation. And that beer brand was called Astra.

The Crooked House (Poland)

Polish architect of the Crooked House, Szotynscy Zaleski, was inspired by the fairytale illustrations of Jan Marcin Szancer and the drawings of the Swedish artist and Sopot resident Per Dahlberg. The most photographed building in Poland, the 4,000 square meter house is located in Rezydent shopping center in Sopot, Poland.

Sam Kee Building: six feet deep, world's thinnest (Canada)

The Sam Kee building is situated at 8 West Pender Street. It runs from the corner of Pender and Carral to the lane at the halfway point of the block. It is two storeys tall and 1.5 meters (six feet) deep. The story behind the building is as exotic as the structure with several intriguing twists and turns included in its telling. The City of Vancouver provided the original owner, Chang Toy, with a challenge when it expropriated all but two meters of his property as part of an expansion of Pender Street. No compensation was provided to its owner who was left with what most believed to be a useless property. In a creative turn of events fuelled by spite and some say a bet an architect was hired to design a building to fit the remaining property. The rest is history in more ways than one.

This building was home to 13 businesses at one time. It was the only place in Chinatown for residents to enjoy hot baths. There is a tunnel beneath the building that was used as an escape route from raids on Opium dens situated on neighbouring Shanghai Alley. The building is also fronted by the only remaining glass sidewalk in Chinatown. As part of the ongoing history of this structure, issues still arise between the owners and the city with respect to encroachment and overhangs. In spite of each side having an element of right it seems to boil down to the proverbial "tit for tat". It makes for an interesting study in civics.

Underground Fires that Burn For Decades

Sometimes a fire just won't go out. Uzbekistan is home to a place called Darvaz, nicknamed by locals "the door to hell." It's a semi-underground gas fire that's been burning nonstop for 35 years. Find out why, and see some close-up pictures of this hellmouth after the jump, plus another fire in Pennsylvania that has also been burning underground for over 30 years.

English Russia explains in a way that totally sounds like it could be dialog ripped from Alias:

The story of this place lasts already for 35 years. Once the geologists were drilling for gas. Then suddenly during the drilling they have found an underground cavern, it was so big that all the drilling site with all the equipment and camps got deep deep under the ground. None dared to go down there because the cavern was filled with gas. So they ignited it so that no poisonous gas could come out of the hole, and since then, it's burning, already for 35 years without any pause.

In the city of Centralia, Pennsylvania, locals accidentally ignited a huge coal mine that snaked underneath the town. Nobody knows for sure how or when it started, but many believe it was due to people burning rubbish near the entrance to the closed mine. Though many tried to put it out, the fire raged for most of the 1960s and some of the 1970s when the ground started collapsing and the roads began to buckle, like in this picture. A gas station owner discovered that the temperature in his underground tanks was hot enough to be extremely dangerous.

So the town was evacuated, and only a handful of holdouts live there still. Centralia's zip code has been rescinded, and the highway now routes around it. It's a ghost town. A ghost town that's still on fire.

10 - Futuristic Material

1. Aerogel

Aerogel holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records, more than any other material. Sometimes called “frozen smoke”, aerogel is made by the supercritical drying of liquid gels of alumina, chromia, tin oxide, or carbon. It’s 99.8% empty space, which makes it look semi-transparent. Aerogel is a fantastic insulator — if you had a shield of aerogel, you could easily defend yourself from a flamethrower. It stops cold, it stops heat. You could build a warm dome on the Moon. Aerogels have unbelievable surface area in their internal fractal structures — cubes of aerogel just an inch on a side may have an internal surface area equivalent to a football field. Despite its low density, aerogel has been looked into as a component of military armor because of its insulating properties.

2. Carbon nanotubes

Carbon nanotubes are long chains of carbon held together by the strongest bond in all chemistry, the sacred sp₂ bond, even stronger than the sp₃ bonds that hold together diamond. Carbon nanotubes have numerous remarkable physical properties, including ballistic electron transport (making them ideal for electronics) and so much tensile strength that they are the only substance that could be used to build a space elevator. The specific strength of carbon nanotubes is 48,000 kN·m/kg, the best of known materials, compared to high-carbon steel’s 154 kN·m/kg. That’s 300 times stronger than steel. You could build towers hundreds of kilometers high with it.

3. Metamaterials

“Metamaterial” refers to any material that gains its properties from structure rather than composition. Metamaterials have been used to create microwave invisibility cloaks, 2D invisibility cloaks, and materials with other unusual optical properties. Mother-of-pearl gets its rainbow color from metamaterials of biological origin. Some metamaterials have a negative refractive index, an optical property that may be used to create “superlenses” which resolve features smaller than the wavelength of light used to image them! This technology is called subwavelength imaging. Metamaterials would used in phased array optics, a technology that could render perfect holograms on a 2D display. These holograms would be so perfect that you could be standing 6 inches from the screen, looking into the “distance” with binoculars, and not even notice it’s a hologram.

4. Bulk diamond

We’re starting to lay down thick layers of diamond in CVD machines, hinting towards a future of bulk diamond machinery. Diamond is an ideal construction material — it’s immensely strong, light, made out of the widely available element carbon, nearly complete thermal conductivity, and has among the highest melting and boiling points of all materials. By introducing trace impurities, you can make a diamond practically any color you want. Imagine a jet, with hundreds of thousands of moving parts made of fine-tuned diamond machinery. Such a craft would be more powerful than today’s best fighter planes in the way an F-22 is better than the Red Baron’s Fokker Dr.I.

5. Bulk fullerenes

Diamonds may be strong, but aggregated diamond nanorods (what I call amorphous fullerene) are stronger. Amorphous fullerene has a isothermal bulk modulus of 491 gigapascals (GPa), compared to diamond’s 442 GPa. As we see in the image, the nanoscale structure of the fullerene gives it a beautiful iridescent appearance. Fullerenes can be made substantially stronger than diamond, but for greater energy cost. After a “Diamond Age”, we may eventually transition to a “Fullerene Age” as our technology gets even more sophisticated.

6. Amorphous metal

Amorphous metals, also called metallic glasses, consist of metal with a disordered atomic structure. They can be twice as strong as steel. Because of their disordered structure, they can disperse impact energy more effectively than a metal crystal, which has points of weakness. Amorphous metals are made by quickly cooling molten metal before it has a chance to align itself in a crystal pattern. Amorphous metals may the military’s next generation of armor, before they adopt diamondoid armor in mid-century. On the green side of things, amorphous metals have electronic properties that improve the efficiency of power grids by as much as 40%, saving us thousands of tons of fossil fuel emissions.

7. Superalloys

A superalloy is a generic term for a metal that can operate at very high temperatures, up to about 2000 °F (1100 °C). They are popular for use in the superhot turbine areas of jet engines. They are used for more advanced oxygen-breathing designs, such as the ramjet and scramjet. When we’re flying through the sky in hypersonic craft, we’ll have superalloys to thank for it.

8. Metal foam

Metal foam is what you get when you add a foaming agent, powdered titanium hydride, to molten aluminum, then let it cool. The result is a very strong substance that is relatively light, with 75-95% empty space. Because of its favorable strength-to-weight ratio, metal foams have been proposed as a construction material for space colonies. Some metal forms are so light that they float on water, which would make them excellent for building floating cities, like those analyzed by Marshall T. Savage in one of my favorite books, The Millennial Project.

9. Transparent alumina

Transparent alumina is three times stronger than steel and transparent. The number of applications for this are huge. Imagine an entire skyscraper or arcology made largely of transparent steel. The skylines of the future could look more like a series of floating black dots (opaque private rooms) rather than the monoliths of today. A huge space station made of transparent alumina could cruise in low Earth orbit without being a creepy black dot when it passes overhead. And hey… transparent swords!

10. E-textiles

If you meet up and talk to me in 2020, I’ll likely be covered in electronic textiles. Why carry some electronic gadget you can easily lose when we can just wear our computers? We’ll develop clothing that can constantly project the video of our choosing (unless it turns out being so annoying that we ban it). Imagine wearing a robe covered in a display that actually projects the night sky in realtime. Imagine talking to people over the “phone” just by making a hand gesture and activating electronics in your lapel, then merely thinking about what you want to say (thought-to-speech interfaces). The possibilities of e-textiles are limitless.

The Most Wonderful Places to Live