Awesome Architecture

Located in Berlin, Germany, this innovative apartment building does away with traditional garage spaces – offering drive-in elevators which bring your vehicle directly outside your living space for ease of access. (Thanks Joe!)

Designed by Chinese architecture collective, Penda, this temporary dwelling, constructed from bamboo and rope modules, is designed to allow visitors to sleep in the midst of nature without any impact to its surroundings.

Everything is awesome! Kite Bricks envisions a new approach to building, using interlocking blocks that work like giant LEGO blocks. They bricks would have built-in channels for cables and pipes, and snap-on wall and flooring sections.

Bangkok’s New World shopping mall was abandoned back in 1999. Later, an unknown person started populating its flooded basement with koi and catfish. Jesse Rockwell captured these amazing photos of its unusual residents.

Designed by Lujac Desautel, this yacht is like a section of an upscale skyscraper set afloat. The large glass windows reflect the surrounding waters, and the structure offers dedicated living spaces for passengers and crew.

The Allgood Trio’s Sesame Steps is a small elevator hidden under staircases, for use by the elderly and the disabled. The elevator can be installed even under existing stairs to preserve a building’s form and appearance.

While not as impressive as the other transforming apartments we’ve seen, the residences in De Rotterdam show how we can make the most out of our homes through thoughtful planning and space-saving furniture.

Like the Wheelhaus and the ÁPH80, ESCAPE is a mobile home that is delivered fully assembled and ready to be connected to utilities. It comes with basic furniture and facilities, with an option to have additional amenities pre-installed.

Beautiful transportable cabins. Each unit has one bedroom, one bathroom and a kitchen/living room with lighting and cooking appliances included. You can also order multiple units to be connected to create a larger house.

Calvin Seibert recently shared some of the sandcastles he made on the beaches of Hawaii. As with his previous sandcastles, Calvin made structures that blur the line between organic and man-made.

Created by Universal Everything, Walking City is an exploration of the design patterns of architecture as they gradually evolve. But rather than a building, the subject is a walking structure. Inspired by the 1960s works of Archigram.

Ad agency The Barbarian Group has 125 employees, and they all use the same desk. Made by Clive Wilkinson Architects, the Superdesk is an 1,100 foot-long, 4,400 sq.ft. surface that provides spaces to work and to hang out.

Träullit are modular soundproofing tiles made of wood, cement and water. They come in different shapes and colors and can be installed with magnets or glue. They also provide insulation and modulate humidity. Contact Baux to order.

An easy to transport prefabricated home with a cement wood board exterior. The 290sq.ft. home has a bedroom, a living room/kitchen area and a bathroom, and comes with the necessary wiring and plumbing. Video here.

Ok, so you can’t actually climb to or from your parking spot at this garage in Utrecht, but the structure becomes much less of an eyesore with its two attached climbing walls. It also features a nice bike shelter and public transit connection.

Phillip K. Smith III turned a 70-year old dilapidated cabin into a light-based installation that embodies the word reflection in more ways than one. By day it mirrors the desert, by night it shines with LEDs. More here.

French architect Jean Prouvé designed prefab homes back in the 1930s & 40s. To prove how amazing these homes were, art dealer Patrick Sequin disassembled one of his homes, packed it up, and had it reassembled it at Design Miami.

A 3D-printed Rubik’s cube’s moves were made to correspond with lights on the Ars Eelectronica Center using an Arduino processor and Bluetooth modem to relay information to special software and allow passersby to try and solve the puzzle.

Amsterdam/Beijing-based NEXT architects won the competition for the bridge for the revitalized Meixi Lake district in Changsha, China. The 150-meter-long bridge has a Möbius-inspired design, with multiple undulating paths for pedestrians.

The first fully immersive, solid, human-scale, enclosed structure that is entirely 3D printed. Digital Grotesque was fabricated entirely with custom-built algorithms. The 16 square meter room was printed at a resolution of 0.1mm.

Designer Till Konneker rose to the challenge of living in a tiny studio apartment by building this awesome all-in-one piece of furniture that serves as entertainment center, armoire, storage closet and bed. He needs to license this thing to IKEA.

John Z. Blazevich is selling his 50,000 sq. ft. home in Rolling Hills, CA. Zoning restrictions forced John to keep the house a single level above ground, but underground it’s a different story. Five stories to be exact. More here.

While LEGO has made a number of architectural kits of famous structures, this 1210-piece set embraces the spirit of LEGO, encouraging you to build numerous structures from real-world examples, as well as your own.