Most architectural photography these days is about capturing a building's "hero shot," that single perfect image and angle where the light flits through the glass and, for a second, real life looks like a perfectly executed digital rendering. These are not those photos.
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9 of the Year's Best Photographs of Buildings
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11 Sci-Fi Films That Actually Deserve Reboots
Hollywood's favorite pastime is remaking movies, or at the very least, slapping on another sequel and making millions. While that's all fun and good—I'm looking forward to the new Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Terminator like everyone else—many other sci-fi films also deserve adequate reboot/sequel attention.
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The Forgotten Space Artist Who Envisioned the End of the Space Race
In the fourth piece of our series on legendary aerospace artists, we pay tribute to an illustrator who's responsible for creating some of the most inspiring cutaway illustrations of all time—yet we hardly know anything about him, and his name is in danger of being forgotten. We're about to change that.
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Rare World War I Propaganda Shows the Biomech Soldier of 100 Years Ago
One hundred years ago, at the beginning of the 20th century, the first golden age of advertising met humanity's deadliest conflict: the First World War. The emerging art of graphic design, aided by the invention of lithography and later chromolithography, was suddenly used for propaganda—and the results were terrific: a bold, optimistic, merry and extremely fictive vision of a gory war that killed millions.
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The Weirdest Stuff We've Launched Into Space
From the minute we started sending humans into space, authorized and unauthorized paraphernalia have gone with them. Even unmanned spacecraft hauled oddities to the far reaches of our solar system. Here are a few items that have reached where most of us will never go.
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Happy Birthday Ames! Awesome Photos From 75 Years of Aerospace Research
On the 20th of December, 1939, the second laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was founded. The facility at Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, California, would later be known as NASA's Ames Research Center after the founding chairman of NACA, Joseph S. Ames—but no one could foresee how iconic Ames would become.
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7 Wonderful Gadget Stories to Warm Your Holiday Heart
Technology is a great gift to give for the holidays. It can provide hours, and days, and weeks, of entertainment and even help inspire kids for a lifetime.
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Nothing Is Better Than These 80s Internet Depictions of Technology
Ever spend time imagining what the world was like the year you popped into it? I love it. Because man, 1983 was ridiculous. And terrible. And awesome. Michael Jackson did his first moonwalk. AOL, Microsoft Word and My Little Pony came into existence. The first consumer Camcorder came out (Sony!) and weighed 7353009 pounds. And the internet looked something like this:
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The Coolest Churches, Mosques, And Synagogues of the Year
Religion is changing—from the stained glass industry
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9 of the Weirdest Wikipedia Pages We've Ever Seen
With the right state of mind, enough time on your hands, and a can-do attitude/darkened worldview, your casual Wikipedia browsing can quickly devolve into hours spent amongst the site's weird, bizarre, and morbidly fascinating black holes. Making it virtually impossible to uncover all of the site's many dark and dusty corners—but damned if we didn't try.
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8 Gadgets With the Dumbest Names
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The Spectacular Art of Painting With Soap Bubbles
If you don't know how they're made, Jiří Georg Dokoupil's paintings might look like microscope photos of phosphorescent deep-sea hydrozoa, or maybe computer-generated cartoon characters. Turns out, they're actually the permanent evidence something way simpler: bubbles.
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American Architects Pick the 11 Best Buildings of the Year
There's no better compliment—and no more blistering insult—than one from your peers, especially when it comes to professions that trade in super-specialized knowledge like architecture. So when your peers talk, you listen.
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The 25th Anniversary Icehotel Features An Ice Movie Theatre
This year marks the 25th anniversary of crazy Swedes building an entire hotel out of ice each fall. In celebration of decades of mostly redundant work, they've made an extra-special 25th anniversary edition, complete with ice chapel and ice movie theatre. And the bar, of course.
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To Fix Midtown, You Must First Break Midtown
New York has fantastic public transit. It's by far the best in the country. Sorry not sorry. But there is one way in which it falls short: There are meagre ways to get across town, especially at critical points like 42nd street, where you must either choose NYC's shortest and nastiest subway line or the snarling mess of street traffic.
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These Failures Are the Worst Sports Mascots Ever Designed
Creating a good, crowd-rousing, kid-pleasing mascot is more difficult than it might appear. Some just look too goofy. Others fall into the lowest crevasse in Uncanny Valley and scare the shit out of people. Most Olympic mascots
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9 Gadgets (and Other Tech) to Be Excited About in 2015
2015 is the year of the Future, thanks to that one rambunctious, time-traveling teen with a hoverboard. As we're still in the opening moments of 2015, we're allowed to be hopeful. Last year we saw a lot of awesome but also a lot of "just wait until next year!" Almost every major company talked of things just on the horizon. That's why I asked last week what rumored and not-so-rumored tech you were most excited for
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37 Rare and Beautiful Images of the NYC Subway in the 1980s
When most people think of the subway in the 1980s, they think of scary things. A few years ago The New York Times likened the state of the city to "a house of horrors." But as a newly published set of nearly 500 photos show, New York City's underground wasn't always so horrific. It's bizarrely beautiful in all its squalor.
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The Eerie Ruins of 11 Abandoned Hotels
Tourism is a funny thing. Sometimes hot spots are hot, prompting opportunistic developers to build. And sometimes they're not. (The outbreak of a civil war is a great way to shut down a tourist destination.) Photographer Dietmar Eckell has spent the past several years visiting the hotels and resorts that got left behind.
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What You Can See From the Tallest Observation Decks On Earth
It's only been a few years since humans could climb more than half a mile above the surface of the Earth without the help of jet fuel. It's easy to forget that buildings that reach this high into the atmosphere are a new phenomenon in our world—at these heights, it's more like aerospace engineering than architecture.
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