Woonq Blog

These Sky-Terra concept skyscrapers look like giant pieces of artwork shooting up from the ground, but they do more than just look pretty. The network of interconnected towers, one of the entries in the 2009 eVolo Skyscraper Competition, creates a new city layer in the sky made of parks, amphitheaters, fields, and other public spaces. Unlike traditional buildings that block city residents from ever seeing direct sunlight, the Sky-Terra towers allow people to get plenty of sun without dealing with the pollution below.

Designed by San Francisco architect Joanna Borek, the towers rise to 1,600 feet and expand into a flat plaza layer with ample green space, 4-foot-wide streets for electric cars and bikes, rainwater collection systems, and interconnected foot paths. An elevator is embedded in the core of each tower to bring people up to the skyscraper plaza.

There are a couple of problems with the skyscraper. The first is the lack of sunlight below–holes and spaces in the plaza’s fins supposedly let light onto street level, but it still seems like less sunlight would reach the ground than with traditional skyscrapers. Then there is the wind and weather factor when you’re up top. But the Sky-Terra buildings were designed for already-clogged cities like Tokyo, and for these cities, some green space, direct sunlight, and fresh air might be better than none at all.

The transportation system consists of interconnected foot paths, as well as 4 foot wide streets designated for bikes or small electric cars. The remaining is meant to be green space which will assist in reducing urban heat island effect. Rainwater collection will provide water for landscaping needs, and the towers’ building materials consist of modular parts that would be mass-produced to conserve resources and energy. The plaza levels are designed with holes and spaces between the fins that allow light to beam down. The idea seems all smart and huge but I cannot imagine being stuck in the air and living there! So for holidays we go to earth?

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In our rush to renovate our dream house with the craziest and most creative that modern design can conjure up, we’re liable to forget how we enter and leave it. If you are thinking that modern door design is a matter of open-and-shut conventional thinking, these 14 examples should put you in the right frame of mind.

If ever a door was perfect for university student halls of residence, this is it. Once shut, the Ping Pong Door’s middle section swings down into perhaps the most neighborly door you’ll ever own (if your neighbor likes ping pong, that is). Expect this concept to expand to encompass every tabletop game under the sun – air hockey next, please.

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Would it surprise you to learn that a number of houses around the world, from New York to Amsterdam and Brazil to Britain have various claims to being the skinniest house in the world? Some are the skinniest by frontage measurements, others by widest or narrowest space, though they would all (it would seem) require extremely creative urban furniture.

Helenita, the woman pictured in the images above, designed this incredibly narrow house in Madre de Deus, Brazil. Though only 9 feet wide have this house. The structural physics of this building were surely a challenge, though the designer and resident is clearly proud of her creation.

This London, England house (left above) is just 5 feet at its narrowest, and 10 feet at its widest, and was sold for nearly a million dollars. Likewise extreme expensive, 72 1/2 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, New York City, USA (right above), which has been everything from a cobbler’s shop to a candy factory, dates back to 1873. However, the actual narrowest house in the United States is located in Long Beach, California.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands To anyone who has visited Amsterdam it should come as no shock that all four of the above candidates are located along the city’s canals. Notorious already for it’s tightly-packed and skinny structures, these buildings push even the limits of Amsterdam. The bottom image is of a house located along the Singel canal that just barely manages to fit a front on the street, though the house expands as it recedes from the street.

Great Cumbrae, Scotland is home to the Guinnes Book of Records title holder for the skinniest house frontage in the world, at just 47 inches at its narrowest. The so-called Wedge house, once it was discovered to hold the record, sold to a family from Essex as a vacation home for an undisclosed sum of money.

And The Slimmest Houses On Earth Are Made In Japan:

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