Unusual Life

The PCI Residence glows, literally — the home’s exterior is made up of 100 percent recyclable polycarbonate walls, which illuminate the home from dawn to dusk, as well as a custom LED lighting system. Chris Pardo, co-founder of Pb Elemental Architecture, says the design plan behind this home “was based on the concept of interacting with and utilizing nature.” Among other green building techniques, the PCI Residence incorporates rooftop solar panels, in-floor radiant heat, a rainwater-harvesting system and low-impact materials such as raw concrete, raw steel, glass, concrete board and bamboo.

Link to Unusual architecture in Michigan

• Architect Liz Diller shares her firm DS+R’s more unusual work, including the Blur Building, whose walls are made of fog, and the revamped Alice Tully Hall, which is wrapped in glowing wooden skin.

The Klein Bottle House is located in Rye, Australia and designed by Rob McBride. the unusual home design was inspired by its namesake: the klein bottle. this 19th century invention is used to describe a form which has no distinguishable inside or outside. the architects also wanted to move away from the paradigm of designing buildings based on orthogonal methods and instead imbrace the complexity inhernt with computer aided design (cad). while the desigm imbraced mathematics and digital design it also references
the vernacular australian cement sheet beach house. the house recently won the Harold Desbrowe-Annear award in architecture. it is made from concrete sheets and black metal, which are both folded and twisted
to create the multitude of angles.

Clingstone, an unusual, 103-year-old mansion in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, survives through the love and hard work of family and friends. Via Grow-a-Brain

This custom, 3,200-square-foot home in pricey Redondo Beach, Calif., was built mostly from shipping containers in an attempt to hold down building costs. The home, designed by Peter DeMaria, still retains the marine-grade plywood floors originally found in the six containers, which serve as bedrooms and bathrooms.

Shipping containers provide home in a box

Is Apple the Newman of Microsoft ?

Well, Microsoft has released two milestone announcements today.

The first, which most readers may be aware of with today’s media coverage, is that Microsoft has negotiated a $10 million dollar deal with Jerry Seinfeld, who will appear as a key celebrity pitchman in ads along with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, in an effort to invigorate it’s image in the ongoing Apple Inc. young hip dude versus the Microsoft Corp. stodgy old-fart guy.

This new $300 million ad campaign, one of the largest in Microsoft’s history, and pitting it against Apple will no doubt insure minimal market “shrinkage” for a company which identifies itself only as Microsoft.

We here at Unusual Life are devout lifetime fans of Jerry, attend his sold-out shows at the Paramount, and watch Seinfeld reruns incessantly, so we salute you Bill for crashing at Jerry’s place or whatever you’re going to do in the ads. This sounds like great fun and I want to sit in on those ad brainstorming meetings.

As much as this excites us however, The second bit of news Microsoft announced today is the release of the much anticipated Photosynth online software.

Photosynth is an amazing new way to share and experience photography in a 3D environment.

Our introduction to Photosynth here at Unusual Life happened a couple of months ago when we were contacted by our pal Janet Galore, asking if Microsoft Live Labs could film at our home for a new top secret software project called Photosynth to be released soon.

Apparently, for their Photosynth “How To” software release video they were looking for an interesting home with some cool art, and the right amount of synthy quality…?

Of course!, we replied, and the film crew with talent Laura Foy arrived two days later for the shoot, which was lots of fun. I immediately began researching Photosynth, and realized that in the near future I would have a new tool that would fundamentally change the way that I thought about taking photos in a most profound way. At the shoot, my initial conversation with David Gedye set my mind spinning with creative possibilities and practical applications of synthing photos together in 3D environments: online virtual galleries, travel, real estate, anything to do with sharing visual information.

Like the best of any viewer created online community, it opens the doors to a whole new experience in open community visualization and interactive possibilities.

And guess what?

You can create your own synth - fast, easy, and free.

Here’s the Photosynth release video, featuring our living room. Here is a Flickr Set of the Photosynth shoot at our place, and the actual Synth that was created of our “92% Synthy” home by Photosynth group manager, David Gedye.

MoMA’s Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling

New World of Coca Cola — Atlanta

Quench your thirst for information about a quintessential American beverage at the New World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta. This multisensory, multistory museum includes a 4-D theater (combining 3-D with graphic special effects) and a display of the world’s largest collection of Coke memorabilia, including an original Coca-Cola-themed Norman Rockwell painting. There’s also a pop-culture art gallery, a fully-functioning bottling line and a tasting room with more than 70 Coca-Cola products on tap.

Food Museum Slide Show

Buckminster Fuller with models of the Standard of Living Package and Skybreak Dome. “[Fuller] believed that his task was to innovate in such a way as to benefit the greatest number of people using the least amount of resources,” Kolbert writes in The New Yorker. There is an exhibition about Fuller at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “By staging the retrospective, the Whitney raises—or, really, one should say, re-raises—the question of Fuller’s relevance,” Kolbert writes. “Was he an important cultural figure because he produced inventions of practical value or because he didn’t?”

The New Yorker Bucky Fuller slideshow

Buckminster Fuller Exhibit at The Whitney

Instead of throwing those glass bottles away, many folks have wondered how to recycle and build with these ubiquitous items.

This photo show walls being constructed on a build in New Mexico by Mike Reynolds at one of his “earthships”.

Apparently back in the 60’s Mr. Heineken came up with the idea of makeing the beer bottles and size and shape of bricks, while concerned about the about of litter and wastage beer bottles were causing. They never came to be, however.

Building with bottles has often been a choice of folk artists, early settlers and the poor in some countries, as they used whatever resources they had to build shelter. Agility Nut has a wonderful website featuring bottle houses around the world.

The Airlie Gardens Bottle House was created by a local artist, Virginia Wright-Frierson in 2004. It is officially named the “Minnie Evans Sculpture Garden Bottle House” after an artist/gatekeeper that worked at Airlie for many years. This bottle house is also referred to as the “chapel”. Frierson used bottles of all shapes and sizes as well as cement and chicken wire in its creation.

Beer Bottle Chapel created by Martin Sanchez of Riverside California

Ann’s Bottle House B&B in Arizona

Tom Kelly’s Rhyolite Bottle House

The Bottle Houses of Prince Edward Island

Artists Madeline Gins and Arakawa say that their house in East Hampton, N.Y., opposes death and may extend life. Originally called the Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa), they say its architecture makes people use their bodies in unexpected ways to maintain equilibrium, and that will stimulate their immune systems.

The couple also built nine “reversible destiny” loft-style apartments in Mitaka, Japan.

The house on Long Island, which cost more than $2 million to build, is their first completed architectural work in the United States - and, as they see it, a turning point in their campaign to defeat mortality.

The house, which is still unoccupied, was commissioned in the late 1990s by a friend who sold the property to an anonymous group of investors after the project dragged on and costs mounted. But it is ready, Arakawa and Ms. Gins said, to begin rejuvenating whoever moves in.

In addition to the floor, which threatens to send the un-sure-footed hurtling into the sunken kitchen at the center of the house, the design features walls painted, somewhat disorientingly, in about 40 colors; multiple levels meant to induce the sensation of being in two spaces at once; windows at varying heights; oddly angled light switches and outlets; and an open flow of traffic, unhindered by interior doors or their adjunct, privacy.

All of it is meant to keep the occupants on guard. Comfort, the thinking goes, is a precursor to death; the house is meant to lead its users into a perpetually “tentative” relationship with their surroundings, and thereby keep them young.

A House Not for Mere Mortals from the New York Times

Immortality House Audio Slideshow

(Thanks to Earl and Rhonda Brown for the tip!)

Frank Lloyd Wright slideshow

New Nestle chocolate museum in Mexico City.

New cultural buildings by big-name ‘starchitects’ have been going up around the country. Here are recent highlights from nine cities.

Amazing museum photo tour