architecture

A 220-story Sky City tower in the Chinese city of Changsha could take the crown as the world's tallest skyscraper next March with an astounding height of 2,749 feet, edging out the mega Burj Khalifa that currently stands 2,722 feet over Dubai.

What makes the 11-million-square-foot Sky City so astonishing isn't its height or its appearance but rather the three-month construction plan to create the building that kicks off at the end of the year. Broad Group -- the company responsible for assembling the skyscraper -- plans to achieve these insane building speeds by using 95 percent prefabricated modular pieces that are sort of similar to a giant Lego set to construct the building. … Read more

Some readers experienced a bit of claustrophobia a couple of months back upon reading that construction had started on what may be the world's narrowest house. If you're one of them, you might want to hold your breath. Construction on Keret House is complete, and we're going inside.

The dwelling -- located in a passageway in Warsaw, Poland's Wola district -- measures 4 feet at its widest point and 27 inches at its narrowest. The exterior looks like a 30-foot-tall rectangle lodged between two buildings, but amazingly, inhabitants will find all the amenities inside. … Read more

How would you like to live in a puzzle in the sky? How about right on top of Manhattan?

After a long delay, a rather puzzling 60-story condo building in New York's Tribeca district could soon start becoming a reality. It's made up of a pile of stacked residential units, a design that earned it the nickname "the Jenga Building" after the 1980s game of wooden blocks. … Read more

Is there anything more blissful than escaping gravity's grip by jumping on a trampoline? What if you could do that while going from point A to point B?

Paris architecture firm AZC has come up with a crazy way to cross the Seine River -- huge inflatable trampolines. Just hop from bank to bank. … Read more

"SimCity is a game about endless choices," says lead designer Stone Librande. "Ultimately, you can do whatever you want."

While that isn't entirely true -- you can't play offline -- at least we can get a sense of how the fifth iteration of the city management game works in a nine-minute clip released today by Maxis and EA.

The video shows how the game plays essentially from the beginning as Librande creates a casino-themed city from scratch. Seasoned SimCity 4 players may notice vast differences in the user interface, which seems easier to navigate while simultaneously adding a slew of new options. … Read more

"There's that pesky speed of light." That cautionary remark was offered by Lee Ziliak of Verizon Data Services, speaking on a panel at the 451 Group's Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit last week. The context was that hybrid cloud environments may logically appear as something homogeneous, but application architectures need to take the underlying physical reality into account.

Latency, the time it takes to move data from one location to another, often gets overlooked in performance discussions. There's long been a general bias toward emphasizing the amount of data rather than the time it takes … Read more

Good news for giraffes! Construction has started on a house that's being called the world's narrowest.

The dwelling -- located in a passageway between two buildings in Warsaw, Poland's Wola district -- measures 47 inches at its widest point and 27 inches at its thinnest.

Polish architect Jakub Szczesny of the architecture collective Centrala conceived of the super-slender abode for acclaimed Israeli writer Etgar Keret, who will live and work in the space for part of the year.

When Keret's not using the home, artists and intellectuals from around the world will be invited to stay there for days and weeks at a time. … Read more

Fast on the heels of Apple nabbing a designer from chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, AMD turned around today and hired an Apple chip architect.

Jim Keller, 53, will join AMD as a corporate vice president and chief architect of AMD's microprocessor cores, reporting to Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster, another former Apple employee.

"Keller will lead AMD's microprocessor core design efforts...with a focus on developing both high-performance and low-power processor cores that will be the foundation of AMD's future products," AMD said in a statement.

Keller had been a director in the platform architecture … Read more

LA JOLLA, Calif.--Cottages shouldn't stick out way over the edge of buildings, but when they've been picked up by mysterious forces and dropped out of the sky, that's exactly what can happen.

Welcome to Korean artist Do Ho Suh's "Fallen Star," a small, New England-style house that was unveiled in June atop -- and well out beyond the roof of -- the Jacobs Engineering School building at the University of California at San Diego here.

I've come to explore "Fallen Star" as part of Road Trip 2012, and though I'… Read more