The world's ugliest church buildings

RealClearReligion has scoured the globe to come up with this set of 35 pages depicting the ugliest churches in the world.  Be they Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, non-denominational or whatever, these edifices may not be an affront to God... but they are an affront to human eyeballs!  Some of them can't really help it: they were obviously a convenience store or movie theater before being converted into places of worship.  But most of them - like the Church of Santa-Monica in Madrid, Spain - will have you scratching your head and wondering: "what the heck am I looking at?"  Others, such as Kappal Matha Church in Uvari, India, simply defy all attempts at rationality.  One can't doubt the faith being expressed in these sanctuaries... but there is no loss of bewilderment about what their architects were intending when they designed them!

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33 most beautiful abandoned places in the world

Nothing of man lasts forever.  In the end, all crumbles to dust.

But some things sure do give us haunting beauty during the course of their long toil to entropy.

BuzzFeed has compiled photos of 33 places build by man throughout the world, left to ruin but gorgeous to behold.  There is quite a poignancy in these images.  I thought the one on the left - of the remains of the bobsled track from the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo (at the time in the now-disbanded country of Yugoslavia) - was especially moving.

That was one of the most well-remembered Olympiads of the past half-century.  And now, look at what remains  A long concrete chute, left to decay amid the foliage.  A few years after those games, Yugoslavia disintegrated into ethnic warfare and religious strife which cost the lives of countless thousands.

"All is vanity", as the Preacher at Jerusalem cried.

There are plenty more photos at the link above.  Some are of structures that will leave you wondering how the heck they were built at all and others... well, you'll be bugging your eyes out trying to figure out what the heck it is you're looking at (try staring at the one of the House of the Bulgarian Communist Party without getting a migraine).

Tip o' the hat to Danny de Gracia for a great find!

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Bob Buckley turns in a BEAUTIFUL story about tobacco barns

When it comes to North Carolina architecture, there is no more ubiquitous an example than the humble tobacco barn. You can barely drive half a mile in the rural farming areas without seeing at least one or two dotting the landscape. With some of them dating back a century and more, they once exemplified this state's agricultural acumen like nothing else could.

And it is not without some sadness that in the modern era, most of them have fallen into disuse. Once they hummed with hard work and a handsome payoff. Now, no more. But the barns still stand: a testimony to times gone by and a tradition that many families maintained for generations.

For those reasons and more (not the least of which is the gorgeous cinematography and editing by Stewart Pittman) I can't recommend enough that y'all check out this Buckley Report story by WGHP Fox 8 reporter Bob Buckley. Buckley and Pittman deserve an Emmy for this, easily...

Special thanks to good friend Mark Childrey for being the first to spot this and passing it along!

(Along with props to historian extraordinaire Bob Carter for a great exposition about tobacco farming :-)

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Scott Adams tries to build a "green" house

In addition to being a great cartoonist and creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams has emerged in recent years as being a brilliant and respected commentator on a wide variety of subjects. In a piece that he wrote for The Wall Street Journal Adams turns his keen intellect on the challenges of building an eco-friendly house... and the quickly-mounting problems that come with seriously undertaking the endeavor.

Here's a snippet...

As a rule, the greener the home, the uglier it will be. I went into the process thinking that green homes were ugly because hippies have bad taste. That turns out to be nothing but a coincidence. The problem is deeper. For example, the greenest sort of roof in a warm climate would be white to reflect the sun. If you want a beautiful home, a white roof won't get you there. Sure, you could put a lovely garden on your roof, because you heard someone did that. But don't try telling me a garden roof wouldn't be a maintenance nightmare. And where do you find the expert who knows how to do that sort of thing?

Second, the greenest sort of home would have few windows because windows bleed heat. In particular, if your lot has a view to the west, forget putting windows on that side because your family members will heat up like ants under a magnifying glass. Try telling your architect that you don't want a lot of windows on the view side. He'll quit.

Remember to skip the water-wasting lawn. White pebbles are the way to go if you want to save the Earth. I was born with almost no sense of style whatsoever, and even I hate looking at pebble lawns, although I do respect the choice.

There's plenty more at the link above. Or just click here if you're lazy. Hey, it's Monday morning...

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Creepy new biotechnology

Researchers have created a new type of solar energy cell that uses the corneas of blowflies as the primary method of gathering light for conversion into electricity.

Meanwhile those brilliant eggheads at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - who previously brought us such wonders as the Internet and the Global Positioning System - have developed a new technology that turns humans into batteries for powering gadgets like cellphones (but for now is being considered primarily for use in the military). Thankfully, artificial intelligence has yet to arise that would no doubt enslave us to the Matrix.

Elsewhere in the world, the concept of the In Vitro Meat Habitat has recently been introduced. There's really no other way to put it: this is a house made out of meat.

And while you are lounging in your living room of liverwurst, what more fitting attire than clothing grown from bacteria?

After reading stuff like this, I can't shake the notion that somewhere, out there in this all too scary world, somebody is hard at work on making Soylent Green...

Yeah you laugh now. But just watch. It wouldn't surprise me if sometime during the lifetime of most of us that this will happen... if not at least seriously suggested by politicians, "experts", whatever.

The microbe-grown clothing is pretty cool though. If I recall my comic books correctly, that is much like how Tony Stark manufactures his current Iron Man armor: with bacteria "growing" it via nanotechnology. So that might be worth watching...

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World's scariest swimming pool...

...will make you think you're swimming over the edge of the world itself:

55 stories above the streets of Singapore, the Sands Skypark in Singapore provides a swimming pool, casino and greenway held aloft by three skyscrapers. The skypark is almost 1,250 feet long and the pool itself is 500 feet long.

What happens if you go over the side of the pool? You and the water get safely dumped into a basin that pumps the water back up to the pool. You, presumably, will have to walk up stairs or take an elevator back up to swimming altitude.

Click on the link at designboom for more information about the Sands Skypark and its swimming pool in the sky!

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High-class Hobbit hole

This subterranean house in Vals, Switzerland is just the sort of place that Bilbo Baggins would have loved had he been able to blow his loot on such conveniences as digital satellite television and outside lights...

The house, designed by SeARCH and Christian Muller Architects, includes "all the facilities a common house has, such as a guest room, an entertainment area, but also 'specialized' interiors like an underground pathway. The entrance is a wide oval opening that you are driven to by some traditional stairs made in stone. Large windows make it noticeable and draw attention to the inside décors- that is when the people living there are up for some company."

Dig down here for more photos of this amazing house!

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New wallpaper protects against bullets and bombs

Want to seriously protect yourself and your loved ones against flying debris, bullets and bombs? Consider covering your living room in X-Flex wallpaper. Developed by Berry Plastics in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the X-Flex Blast Protection System is touted as wallpaper that will stop a wrecking ball and worse with a single sheet of the stuff. X-Flex is two sheets of polymer wrap with a Kevlar-like material sandwiched in between. It's self-adhesive and covering an average-sized room takes less than an hour. Berry Plastics obviously had the military most in mind for employment of their product, but the company is already seeing a market for X-Flex in buildings constructed in areas prone to tornadoes and hurricanes.

I'm wondering how 'spensive this stuff is. X-Flex probably has a hideous price tag. But if nothing else I could see papering your bathroom with it and hunkering down in the tub during a tornado and really being secure :-)

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The thus-unheralded virtues of the sci-fi corridor

Martin Anderson at Den of Geek has written an essay about the corridor in science fiction, praising it as an effective tool for establishing setting, emotion and plot. Such an overlooked design and yet as Anderson notes, the sci-fi corridor has become as inspiring as it is ubiquitous. Quite a good lil' read :-)

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Rotating Skyscraper: I ain't goin' inside that thing!

This scheme has "Bad Idea" written all over it...

An Italian architect is planning what he calls the first "building in motion": an 80-story tall skyscraper where the floors rotate around a central axis independently of each other.

Got that?

Imagine a twelve-hundred foot tall licorice stick, that's held upright and twisted back and forth. That's the kind of effect that David Fisher is aiming for with his Dynamic Towers, which will be built in Dubai and Moscow. These are going to be apartment buildings. And as each floor spins 360 degrees, the entire building's shape will constantly shift and change.

Its designers claim that wind turbines built between the stories will power the entire building, letting it be completely energy self-sufficient. Powerful elevators will also allow residents to park their cars within their own apartments.

It's also being said that construction of each tower will only take twenty months, with six days time required to install each story. The stories for the building will be pre-fabricated in Italy, then shipped to the construction site. The final assembly will require eighty technicians, according to Fisher and his associates. Utilities like electricity and plumbing will connect to the central core via attachments similar to in-flight refueling used with military aircraft.

I'm not going to begin to write down all the bad scenarios that are possible with living inside such a thing. But if David Fischer can pull this off, it might be worth a trip to Dubai or Moscow to check it out. He's also planning a smaller one for New York City. Hey, at least a building like that would deter King Kong from climbing it, right?

Here's a video illustrating how this thing is supposed to work...

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