After thinking about Tokyo and what a bafflingly unfamilar place it is I was inspired to go and have a look at some of my photos. At almost three years’ remove they look even more fantastical. This unremarkable street scene, for example, looks more than anything to me like a scene from some kind of futuristic, apocalyptic, science fiction film:
I really want to go back. You can see the rest of the set here.
I’m mesmerised by this YouTube video, which shows a massive counterweight suspended inside Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building (for now) acting against the tremors felt from the Sichuan earthquake on May 12. I don’t quite understand the physics behind it, but the weight, which more or less stays still as the building sways around it, apparently dampens the effect of the movement. You’ll find an explanation from someone who knows what they’re talking about over at BLDGBLOG:
As earthquake waves pass up through the structure, the ball remains all but stationary; its inertia helps to counteract the movements of the building around it, thus “dampening” the earthquake.
This is tower two of the International Finance Centre in Hong Kong. Doesn’t it look just like a razor? I took the photo because the helicopter scudding past it makes it look like an advert for something hi-tech, though I’m not sure what.
It’s 415 metres tall, which makes it the tallest building in HK, but I can’t tell you where it ranks among the world’s tallest buildings, because it keeps changing and it depends on whether you count things like a spike on top as part of a building. Anyway, it’s tall – but you can’t go up it, which I think is a great loss. In Tokyo and New York the top floors of skyscrapers are opened up as public spaces, with viewing galleries, bars and exhibitions, which is just about the most civilised thing I can think of and I wish more places did it. But it doesn’t happen in London, and it seems it doesn’t happen in Hong Kong either.
Although I think the glory of Hong Kong is in looking up at it from ground- (or sea-) level, so perhaps it’s not such a loss.
Look!
(Photo: Chris Mitchell)
It’s a sink on top of a toilet, in which you wash your hands with the water that then refills the cistern. This is the smartest piece of design I’ve seen for weeks.
For more Japanese (of course) space-boosting cleverness, see the full article – A Very Short Walk Around a Tokyo Apartment.
I’ve just come across this design for an eco-efficient but super sexy new skyscraper on the Dubai waterfront. If it’s genuinely possible to build green skyscrapers, and to make them look this good (though it may lose something in the translation from paper to stone) then all kinds of possibilities open up, especially in housing, where before long we are going to be forced to have some new ideas.
Edit: having spent five minutes investigating, I see there are lots of designs for green skyscrapers out there. If I get a chance I’ll link to some of them later on.
Last week b3ta.com linked to a video of a horrifyingly steep and desperately unsafe-looking mountain path in Spain. Now Lloyd’s posted the videos, as well as some related pictures which are equally disturbing. Inspired by this, and by my successful posting of a video clip, which also made me think of Tokyo, I went looking for footage of the two rollercoasters that my intrepid siblings went on at Fuji-Q, the theme park outside Tokyo in the shadow of Mount Fuji.
The first, Dodonpa, is the world’s fastest-accelerating rollercoaster, taking you up to 107mph in two seconds. Apparently the moment it shoots out of the tunnel causes physical pain (there are so, so many reasons I don’t go on these things):
And then there’s Fujiyama, which when it was built was the world’s tallest roller coaster, and the POV footage genuinely makes me feel sick, and it’s definitely nothing to do with the amount of wine I drank last night, although the fact that I can’t embed the video may be. I’ll go old-tech and link to it.
If I’d seen that video in advance, I would have forbidden the whole thing. As it was, I let them go off to almost-certain death unknowingly, and spent a happy day by myself in Tokyo, climbing the Mori Tower, which is also quite tall, but which, happily, stays still:
This is a cool video, made by taking photos of the same view in Tokyo over 35 years and then putting them all together really fast. But I’m mainly posting it to see whether I can post videos.
Edit: Woohoo!
Glad All Over 