CHRIS JORDAN – RUNNING THE NUMBERS

“Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming. ”

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Photos of Russian Daredevils

Be it climbing up as high as a 380-meter crane or a 22-storey building – two young Russians have got it all, and more, on their cameras. Vitaly Raskalov and Alexander Remnov call themselves skywalkers, and take incredible, vertigo-inducing pictures of each other on top of the highest buildings in Moscow and some other cities in Russia.

Armed with no special protective equipment but a camera, these thrill-seekers plank on top of the Russian Academy of Sciences or enjoy a nocturnal panorama from a turret in the Kiev railway station just for a good shot. It’s hard to imagine what these guys feel, when their pictures are enough to make one dizzy.

Posting in his blog, Vitaly was extremely happy about conquering the tower of the Moscow State University, which is generally protected with security cameras and special entry codes:

“For three years, I thought that it is impossible to get here, but as they say – everything is possible, the main thing is to want it bad enough.”

Beautiful, but don’t take this as an encouragement!

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Shipping containers and silos house students at Mill Junction

In Johannesburg, where student housing is sparse, one developer is taking extreme measures — by creating a 370-bed dormitory out of shipping containers perched atop a set of abandoned concrete grain silos.

Mill Junction will open its doors to students tomorrow, offering amenities like roof decks and free Wi-Fi. It’ll also offer the chance to live inside decades-old industrial infrastructure, which is either a plus or a minus, depending on the person. It’s taken less than a year to put the final pieces into place, a remarkably short amount of time to build a 15-story structure. That’s thanks to the virtue of the already-built structural system provided by the concrete silos, which have sat empty for years.

To ready them for human habitation, the empty silos had to be retrofitted with flooring and dorm rooms — not to mention windows, which had to be cut into the thick concrete:

According to a local news site The Citizen, the shipping containers themselves are over 50 years old — and the structure’s developer, Cintiq, had to import a special diamond-titanium blade to saw windows into the sides of each crate.

Using a massive crane, they were lifted into place and bolted together above the silos this summer:

Finally, they were given a fresh coat of paint, and plenty of interior finishes to make them livable. The spaces themselves are unusual — the shared dorm rooms are circular, while the communal spaces up top are low-ceilinged and thin.

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The Guangzhou Circle Mansion

Italian architecture firm A.M. Progetti recently completed work on a circular-shaped skyscraper based in Guangzhou, China, dubbed the Guangzhou Circle Mansion. Despite its appearance, the building's design bears no relation whatsoever to tasty dough-based treats.

Guangzhou Circle Mansion has a total floor space of 85,000 sq m (914,000 sq ft), spread over 33 floors, and is 138 m (452 ft) high, with the circular hole measuring 48 m (157 ft) in diameter. The building currently serves as home to the Guangdong Plastic Exchange, and also hosts several exclusive office units, plus a hotel.

According to the architects, the unusual double-disc design was inspired by the iconic value of jade discs in China and the numerological tradition of Feng Shui. Gizmag's knowledge concerning the ancient Chinese philosophy of Feng Shui is rather lacking, so we're going to take that on faith.

Additionally, when reflected in the nearby river, the building's shape also corresponds to the number 8, which is an admittedly very nice touch for this arguably gaudy project. The number 8 is considered especially lucky in Chinese culture, and A.M. Progetti correctly points out that the Beijing Olympics kicked off at exactly 8:08 am, on 8-8-2008, for that very reason.

It seems that not everyone's a fan though, as Sky News reports that locals refer to it as "the flashy rich people's circle."

Source: A.M. Progetti via Arch Daily and  Gizmag

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