Since we published our review of 5 cool shipping container buildings, many more have been built. One of those: The Box Office in Providence, Rhode Island USA.

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Covering a typical house recycles between 600 and 1,000 car and truck tires

Nearly any solid object could be used to construct a roof. Choosing roofing material that’s durable—and protects what’s underneath—is the tricky part. Here’s a review of three unusual objects that creative designers have used for their home roofs:

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Spot Cool Stuff has mixed feelings about building grandiose tourist infrastructure like the Langkawi Sky Bridge and the Grand Canyon Skywalk. We want to keep natural spaces natural. Yet some of the architecture that encroaches upon nature is fantastically cool.

So it is (sort of—we’ll get to that part soon) with the proposed Glacier Discovery Walk in Canada’s Jasper National Park near Banff.

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There’s something inherently cool about taking a structure conceived for an animated movie or TV show and building it for real.

Spot Cool Stuff regulars may remember our piece on the the real life Simpsons house constructed in Nevada. Building an accurate rendition of that was difficult enough—and it was a regular suburban dwelling. Imagine the challenge of building the house featured in the Pixar hit movie Up. That house was attached to balloons and was able to fly!

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The foundation this unusual office, literally and figuratively, is the Box of Secrets

If you are looking at this page while sitting in your drab office cubicle you may want to look away now, lest you be tempted to quit your current job apply for one with PONS or HUOT. Both acronymed companies share an architecturally stunning office in Paris.

Their office is dubbed ‘A Table Through the Forest.’ Look at the photos below and you’ll see why.

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Fans of Spot Cool Stuff’s architecture posts—especially those who wish we’d be able to publish them more frequently—would do well to check out Open Buildings.

The goal of the Open Buildings website: collect as much information as possible about the world’s cool architecture.

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You’ve seen it in so many James Bond movies: a villain makes the floor drop away sending a would-be hero falling into a pool of water filled with piranhas or electric eels or the like. Well, remove the piranhas and the eels and the plans for world domination from that equation and you have the makings of a cool idea: a swimming pool that can be hidden beneath a floor.

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There may be no country in the world as into hiking and mountaineering as Switzerland. The Alpine nation is criss-crossed by trekking trails and dotted with remote hiking shelters.

Most of those shelters are basic—a roof, a few beds, an outhouse, perhaps a wood burning stove. But one Swiss shelter is very much not basic: the Monte Rosa Hütte. It’s been nicknamed the Bergkristall (mountain crystal) and those who have visited are calling it “the mountain hut of the future.”

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