No, New York and Mumbai are not underwater (not yet, anyhow). The pool is a clever attention grabber for HSBC by Ogilvy & Mather Mumbai ad agency. HSBC wanted to raise awareness on the dangers of global warming, so the agency glued an aerial photo of a city’s skyscrapers to the base of a swimming pool … the effect – a submerged metropolis. Well done.

Hel Yes designer Linda Bergroth customised a run of the mill greenhouse and turned it into a chic summer getaway. By adding steps made from reclaimed bricks, solar panels and a wooden floor, the structure blends in with its surroundings and offers a beautiful view from the inside out.

While living in San Diego a few years back I had a 400-square-foot studio apartment in the University Heights district. In an effort to conserve space I bought a sofa bed from IKEA, a cleverly designed piece with wheels that locked into place, making it easy to fold and unfold. I soon realized that I was usually either too busy or too tired to make the change (or to replace the upholstery with bed clothes), and would end up either sleeping on the ‘sofa’, or entertaining on the ‘bed’.

Gary Chang would no doubt be disgusted by my inefficient use of space. In 1988 Chang, a Hong Kong architect, paid $45,000 for a 344-square-foot apartment in Hong Kong’s Sai Wan Ho district. It was the same apartment he had lived in with his entire family (6 people in all, including 1 tenant) since he was 14 years old. What followed over the years was a series of transformations, all with the same goal of maximizing space and creating more flexibility of use

The latest iteration, completed in 2006 and dubbed “Domestic Transformer” by Chang, has 24 possible configurations, allowing for a variety of uses – living room, library, kitchen, laundry, lounge, spa, dining area, wet bar, and a screening room complete with a hammock – achieved with a series of sliding wall units on overhead tracks that shift to create and reveal completely different rooms.

Chang, who operates the architecture firm EDGE Design Institute out of Hong Kong, hopes his creation will inspire others, particularly developers, to be more creative in their approach to space planning, helping to alleviate the overcrowding and space shortage problems prevalent in many Hong Kong homes.

Instantly one of the world’s most stunning libraries, The Stuttgart City Library by Yi Architects is a cavernous gem where the books and visitors provide the color to an otherwise neutral environment.  The visual center is its grand atrium, a five-story open chamber reminiscent of New York’s Guggenheim museum.

Commissions couldn’t come much darker than that of enshrining the memory of 91 murdered souls on a treeless, granite coast along an unforgiving sea at the world’s end. Bringing light and perspective, both figuratively and literally, to that work might seem an impossible responsibility. Yet, the Steilneset Memorial for the Victims of the Witch Trials in Vardø, Norway, seems to memorialize the events of the former fishing village’s dark past in a way that is poignantly sympathetic to its somewhat bleak future and does it with surprisingly fragility.

A quixotic verging on confusing collaboration between the incomparable Peter Zumthor and the late French-born artist Louise Bourgeois, the Steilneset Memorial owes much of its success to the Swiss architect’s masterful play of material, controlled use of light and understanding of the vernacular; the memorial’s gangling diagonal wood framing and punched openings (all 91 of them illuminated with a single lamp each representing a “witch” burned at the stake during the trials) are direct interpretations of the fish drying racks and small, curtainless windows prominent in the seaside village. Unfortunately, Bourgeois’s installation of an eternal flame burning from an aluminum chair in a separate Cor-Ten and glass pavilion (also by Zumthor) is heavy-handed and unnecessary given that Zumthor’s 410-foot longhouse of wood and cable suspended fiberglass alone brings surprising power and light within its stark, hauntingly morose context.

No heels allowed! Artist Tomas Saraceno’s Cloud Cities installation consists of large transparent spheres that lend themselves to an overall molecular aesthetic. Suspended in the air, visitors can walk inside the spheres as they tentatively balance above the ground. Currently on display at the Hamburger Bahnof Museum in Berlin, Germany,

By Veronica Christina

In an attempt to feel a little of the Burning Man magic I must sadly skip this year, I started searching the web for little snippets of BRC magic. Seeing the images of years past collected in one place, I became awestruck, as I have many times on the Playa. The loving act of creating these beautiful structures, many of which take months to build, for the enjoyment of your fellow man, only then to let them go at the end of a week, is a beautiful metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life. Welcome home.

Carved directly into the sandstone cliffs of Wadi Rum, Jordan, this 47 room hotel designed by Florida-based architects Oppenheim Architects+Design, will be made from rammed earth and cement mixed with local red sand.  The architects won a global competition and will execute this unprecedented project to be complete in 2014.

From the Oppenheim website:

“The structure of the lodges will be carved into the sandstone cliffs, utilising the existing geological geometries of the rock to devise the form. Other structures are comprised of rammed earth and cement mixed with the local red sand. The minimal yet powerful gestures of the architecture, both built and carved serves to create harmony, and balance while framing and amplifying the surroundings.”

“The interior and exterior are deliberately blurred establishing maximum impact with minimum effort. Inspired by the primordial, Oppenheim used his expertise in sustainable design to create passive means of cross ventilation, taking full advantage of the natural cooling effect of the rocks, and proper positioning allowing the project to minimize energy consumption and maximize comfortable healthy living.”

By Erin Feher

I’m kind of obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios. Loved the black plague, burned through “The Road” in two days flat and almost every New Year’s Eve I pop 28 Days Later into the DVD player. I know, I know, I’m just some spoiled white girl who craves the excitement of turmoil because I’ve never really lived through it. Maybe, but I’ve also watched the general population become increasing frustrated with the lack of significant action in the face of events that so clearly require it (global warming, oil gushing into the ocean, the collapse of education, etc.).

Between the national logjam that is the House and the Senate, the environmental impact reports and public hearings, we have gone from a society of “Get her done” to a society of  “let’s talk about this for 18 months until the idea is so diluted that we can’t remember what it was we wanted to do in the first place.” So I’m starting to believe that real change may only happen when we stop pretending everything is OK and acknowledge that rage-infected zombies are going around eating people’s faces and projectile vomiting blood everywhere, and that something needs to happen, and quick.

And if not zombies, what about a world-record-breaking murder rate of 380 per 100,000 citizens? Follow me here. That was the murder rate in 1991 in Medellín, Colombia, where Pablo Escobar and the blatantly open and notoriously widespread drug ring he oversaw was one of the most overt examples of the criminality and general lawlessness that defined the city. It was a real life The Day After Tomorrow, except instead of hiding indoors from a sub-zero snowstorm that could chase you down the block and freeze you solid where you stood, the residents of Medellín were basically hiding from bullets and all the scientifically proven things they can do to you. With things in such turmoil, there wasn’t much of a status quo to defend. So changes were made. A new constitution was written and approved in 1991 and in 1993 Escobar was gunned down and killed by police on the roof of his house. The local government initiated an earnest collaboration with Medellín’s private-sector leaders and emerging networks of societal-improvement organizations to transform the city. Homicide rates plummeted by 50 percent between 1991 and 2000, and the police even turned the lens in on themselves, rooting out corrupt cops by the hundreds.

Medellín today is what I imagine (can you tell I spend no shortage of time imagining?) the setting to the sequel to 28 Days Later would be like if the idiots who made it actually bothered to watch the first one (do NOT rent 28 Weeks Later. Zombies or not, it is horrible)—a society that is a little rough around the edges but is sprouting with grand new things. Gondolas float above the city, providing access to and from what used to be the deadliest hillside neighborhoods, brand new roads connect towns that you once needed to hitchhike with guerilla kidnappers in four wheelers to get to, and best of all, incredible new architecture in the form of public parks, libraries and schools is putting Medellín on the tourist map—not to mention vastly improving the quality of life for its citizens. So much good stuff has happened that the story of the transformation of Medellín through bold and innovative design is currently part of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s Nation Design Triennial, “Why Design Now?”

And while I’m not suggesting we import our own drug lords to terrorize citizens in order to get the powers that be (and a few heroic citizens, ahem, Will Smith) off their asses, I do think it’s not such a bad thing to imagine the worst case scenario once in while in order to inspire some ballsier decisions. Or, like me, you can imagine it simply because its fun to barricade yourself in your apartment and send Morse code messages with Christmas lights so the blind but undoubtedly contagious “infected” don’t find their way into your home.

By Veronica Christina

Traveling is awesome. Traveling to the world’s destination cities is even better. Traveling to awesome cities and having to dip into your child’s college fund for a hotel room you only sleep in, not so much. In an effort to save our cash and provide us with the oh-so-photographic novelty of touching all four sides of our hotel room at once, The Arch Group has designed Sleep Box. A mobile cube (2m (l) x 1.4m (w) x 2.3m (h)) made of wood and MDF,  SleepBox was designed to “allow very efficient use of available space and, if necessary, a quick change of layout”, making it perfect for places where demand dictates need. The hostel-specific SleepBox features bunk beds, flip-out tables and sockets for computers or phone chargers and not much else.

These tiny cubicles are already gracing the airports and train stations of Europe allowing for a safe and cheap alternative to the big city hotels. They’ve become such a hit that Japanese government officials are in talks to provide all public train stations in Tokyo with a few – proving once again that size doesn’t matter.