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...

Read More

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...

Read More

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...

Read More

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...

Read More

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...

Read More

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...

Read More

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...

Read More

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...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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...

Read More