Here's a house built from Legos. Considering how much Legos cost the owner can never sell it at a profit.

Unless the TWXSTERS feature it in their LEGO MOVIE.

You know, you didn't have to put the fence that high up.

The Hungarian exhibit at this Shanghai expo -- OR: COMMUNISM IS BACK!!!!!

Hungary inveiled the design for their pavillion for next year’s Shanghai World Expo, designed by Tamás Lévai. Gömböc, as a hungarian invention, is the central element of the exhibition, a two meter high solid plexiglass moving object.

What is Gömböc (pronounced as ‘goemboets‘)? [How about gumbo for honorary Cajun country? --ED] ‘Gömböc’ is the first known homogenous object with one stable and one unstable equilibrium point, thus with two equilibria altogether on a horizontal surface. It can be proven that no object with less than two equilibria exists. The discovery of the inaccessible path has led to the idea of GÖMBÖC. The pavilion as wood is intended to represent this path, and since it is of immaterial nature [unless one of those sticks falls down vertically], we are trying to evoke it with non materials: empty space, light and sounds.

TRANSLATION: COMMUNISM IS BACK!!!!!

The other day we mentioned synagogues that weren't built thanks to the Great Depression, and how they looked like anything. This -- building could be a what? A factory? A library? A research lab? It's a school, actually. Part if the problem with starchitecture is that starchitects are so enamored of themselves they leave no sense of place, and their buildings could be anything.

The visa section of the Swiss Embassy in Beijing? The automotive section of a Kmart!

Keeping in mind this is optimally photographed, we'll admit not EVERYTHING from the starchitect crowd has to be a practical joke.

In a magazine we'd never heard of until we happened on this piece about Leonard Bernstein -- is TNR starting to use others as crutches? -- Diana Muir Appelbaum offers a testimony to the catastrophe the Great Depression proved for our culture, not least in architecture. The Temple Israel in Boston would have been a fine addition to any city. We wonder indeed that builders don't dust off old plans rather than paying the HIP! hacks who get themselves posted in ARCHDaily! for buildings that leak, or rot, and that rot in any case.



But look at these designs for the Union Temple in Brooklyn. By including these our author unintentionally highlights what's wrong with current Judaism. Doesn't the picture on the left suggest a bank of the era? And the one on the right a downtown train station? Come to think of it that other building could have been a fine university library. Banks, train stations, libraries -- a synagogue can be anything, and perhaps that's the problem with Judaism.

We know some people love their cars but isn't this going a bit too far?

And why isn't the Maserati watching television?

Restaurant? How about an ultra-hip funeral parlor?

And this in New York, which has as much of a problem with these unneeded projects as Vegas.

How many future maintenance problems can you spot?

Hey! I think the clowns put up the circus tent!

I don't care how stable it is, it LOOKS lopsided.

And this in the country that built the apartment house that collapsed in one piece.

Big Brother is watching you.

Or is this part of some designer prison?

A big high-tech tribble!

NOT ARCHDaily!



The living room (with its white orchid, gargantuan quasi-Picasso and giant shiny black vases), was designed by a musical theater actor named J. Cameron Barnett, whose résumé's skills section lists interior decoration only after "hip-hop dance, knowledge of German, cheerleading jumps, drag."

J., stick with -- cheerleading.

This is a new mass-transit station -- in Detroit. What will it look like in fifteen years?

A one-hole golf course!

It's supposed to be the Swiss pavilion at some Shanghai expo -- so why does it vaguely resemble the U. S. of A.?