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.
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.
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.
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.”
An apartment that’s 32 square meters (344 sq. feet) is small. Really small. By way of comparison, that’s about the same amount of space it would take to park three mid-sized sedans (think Toyota Camry) side by side.
So, how many rooms could you squeeze into a 32 square meter apartment? If you are Hong Kong architect Gary Chang the answer is: 24!
Chances are that you have never visited an auto dealership purely for an afternoon of fun. That may change once construction is complete on a new car showroom megaplex.
Said new car showroom megaplex is not located in the United States, China or Germany, as you might expect. Instead, the Autopia Europia is being built in a suburb of Istanbul, Turkey. The massive building will be the world’s largest car dealership. Though we’d argue it will be much more than that.
Trying to categorize the lodgings offered by the Acido Dorado, located on the edge of California’s Joshua Tree National Park, is like trying to solve a Zen k?an.
Acido Dorado isn’t a house—it is too open to the elements for that. It isn’t a glamping (glamorous camping) experience and certainly isn’t a cabin—the setup is way too luxurious. The accommodations here aren’t indoors, though nor are they outdoors; rather, it is some ingenious melding of the two.
Spot Cool Stuff admits to being a LEGO purist. We like the basic plastic interlocking LEGO bricks that haven’t changed much since 1958, the ones that can be built into virtually any construction that can be imagined. We generally aren’t as big fans of many of the LEGO model sets (the trains series being a big exception) because their pieces can really only be used to build a specific shape, or specific plane or specific whatever. So it was with some surprise to us how great we found the LEGO’s newest series: LEGO Architecture.
