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Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation teams up with Lindal to offer replica Usonian home designs with a modern twist

2024-06-24T13:07:00-04:00

Your chance to build a version of one of Frank Lloyd Wright's seminal Usonian home designs has now become available thanks to a new collaboration between the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the Seattle-based home construction company Lindal Cedar Homes.

Replica designs inspired by the Bachman-Wilson home, Gordon House, and Seth Peterson cottage count among the nine available for purchase. Lindal says each has been "updated for modern living," offering clients customization on top of the experience of being "liberated" (as Wright liked to imagine) by their unique combination of openness, light, and an organic relationship to nature.

'Crystal Springs' (inspired by Bachman-Wilson home design). Image courtesy Lindal Cedar Homes

The foundation’s CEO, Stuart Graff, commented, "The Lindal Imagine series reflects a modern embodiment of Frank Lloyd Wright’s principles; sensitive to the attributes of Usonian design while meeting the demands of contemporary living."

'Mirror Lake' (inspired by...

Legoland replica of SoFi Stadium the largest Lego stadium in the world

2022-03-22T17:09:00-04:00

Inglewood’s futuristic SoFi Stadium is considered an architectural feat. Now, the structural marvel has been rendered in miniature form. A Lego model of the stadium — where the Rams recently captured their first Super Bowl title in the L.A. area — will be unveiled to the public Thursday at the Legoland theme park in Carlsbad. But don’t call it small.

The miniature SoFi Stadium is now the largest Lego stadium in the world. It will join Legoland California’s Miniland U.S.A. attraction, an area of the park that features models of U.S. cities, such as San Francisco and Washington D.C.

Video courtesy CBS Los Angeles

The HKS-designed stadium is made from around half a million Lego bricks and is 30 feet long, 15 feet wide, and 4 feet tall. Its assembly required more than 6,000 hours of work by 25 professional model builders. The structure arrived at the park in more than 60 pieces and was assembled on-site, which took place over the course of four days.

Image: Legoland California

The stadium’s distinctive roof reportedly required 3,500 pounds of Legos. Inside the model lies a recreation of the L.A. Rams’ starting roster for Super Bowl LVI, along with an audience of 3,000 Lego people.

Noah's Ark theme park in Kentucky sues their insurance company over rain damage

2019-05-28T15:16:00-04:00

Genesis, this is not. This is the fate of the multimillion-dollar Noah’s Ark replica and theme park in Northern Kentucky, Ark Encounter, which is suing insurance carriers over coverage for rain-related damages to the property. The company is seeking to recoup what it says were $1 million worth of repairs, as well as attorneys’ fees and costs, and an unspecified amount of punitive damages.

Lawyers of the Ark Encounter — the buzzy Noah's Ark theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky that opened in 2016 — filed a lawsuit last Wednesday against the park's insurance company for breaching their coverage policy obligations, after heavy rains in 2017 and 2018 caused a landslide on the park's access road. Reports state that the damage was repaired and the 510-foot ark replica was not at risk.

“By refusing to pay all but a very small proportion of Plaintiffs’ covered claim, the Defendants have failed to meet their Policy obligations and failed to handle Plaintiffs’ claim properly and in good faith, causing Plaintiffs to incur significant additional loss and expense,” the lawsuit states, WLWT reports. The def.endants cited faulty workmanship as the cause of the road damage.

Correction: The headline of this post was edited to indicate that heavy rains caused property damage at Ark's Encounter, not flooding.

Artist Kurt Treeby recreates demolished buildings in tissue-box form

2019-04-29T17:18:00-04:00

Trained as a painter, Buffalo-based artist Kurt Treeby has since turned his interest in fiber work and architecture into an opportunity to reflect on loss in the built environment, recreating buildings in plastic canvas and yarn—often as tissue boxes.

For those saddened by the loss of important works of architecture, Kurt Treeby is creating a tissue box to help mourn the misfortune. Buildings such as the BEST products showroom designed by SITE and Paul Rudolph's Shoreline Apartment complex are being transformed by the artist, who turns the lost works into tissue-box replicas using yarn and plastic.

In his artist's statement, Treeby says the work is meant to examine "the architectural ecosystem of production, consumption, and destruction embedded into the social, economic, and physical landscape of cities." The result of a painstaking process involving thousands of precise stitches, his works function as "as the visual embodiment of the restoration process, as historical records, and as personal memories; all imperfect and incomplete."

A 1950's replica town in San Diego aids patients with memory therapy

2018-09-17T14:12:00-04:00

On August 13, a brand-new town in Southern California welcomed its first residents [...] on a light-industrial stretch of Main Street in Chula Vista, a San Diego suburb. Then they emerged in Town Square®—a 9,000-square-foot working replica of a 1950s downtown, built and operated by the George G. Glenner Alzheimer’s Family Centers. Unlike the businesses around it hawking restaurant supplies and tires, Town Square trades in an intangible good: memories.

The new 50's replica town in San Diego is the largest US investment in reminiscence therapy for dementia and age-related cognitive impaired patients. The industrial warehouse has been transformed into a fake town of 14 storefronts complete with a diner, a movie theater, a pet store, a park-like square, and a city hall. Patients are aided in therapy by props from the years between 1953 and 1961. Several other locations are forthcoming, the next planned for a former Rite Aid in Baltimore.

A fake Harlem in Sweden and other architecture illusions documented by Gregor Sailer

2018-07-13T16:01:00-04:00

The caption to the photograph reveals that this isn’t New York at all, of course, but Sweden: a life-size replica of Harlem in a forest in the west of the country, near Gothenburg. The asphalt and snow are real enough, but nearly everything else is fake. The streets are void of people and cars; the store fronts are life-size photographs, printed on canvas and hung on steel frames. Welcome to the Potemkin village: a place of clones, impostors, facsimiles, frauds. Maybe don’t plan to stay.

Why is there a life-size replica of Harlem in Sweden? This bizarre space turns out to be a test track for self-driving cars. Why Harlem? Even Austrian artist Gregor Sailer who photographed the space doesn't know. Sailer traveled around the world to capture 25 of these false architectural landscapes for his project titled “The Potemkin Village”.

Check out some of these unreal images below:

“Carson City VI/Vargarda, Sweden, 2016” © Gregor Sailer

“Jeoffrécourt, French Army, France, 2015” © Gregor Sailer

“Holland Town VI, Gaoqiao New Town, China, 2016” © Gregor Sailer

“Complexe de Tir en Zone UrBaine II, French Army, France, 2015” © Gregor Sailer

“Schnöggersburg X, German Army Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany, 2017” © Gregor Sailer

“Junction City IV, Fort Irwin, U.S. Army, Mojave Desert, California, U.S.A., 2016” © Gregor Sailer

Find out more on these imitation spaces captured by Sailer from Andrew Dickson.

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Could L.A. be getting a second Hollywood Sign?

2018-02-20T15:37:00-05:00

Community leaders and affected homeowners have mixed reactions regarding a consultant’s recently released recommendations on how to best provide relief for residential communities besieged with Hollywood Sign tourists. The recommendations, released in January and commissioned by Los Angeles City Councilmember David Ryu, ranged in impact from the jaw-dropping, like the idea of installing a second Hollywood sign, to the mundane, like improving signage for lost tourists.

The Los Feliz Ledger gives a detailed account of various recommendations currently being discussed among community leaders to drastically improve access to L.A.'s iconic landmark sign while also easing the traffic burden on locals in the adjacent Hollywood Hills neighborhoods.

One idea from a 65-page report commissioned by Los Angeles City Councilmember David Ryu is to install a replica Hollywood Sign on Griffith Park's north side facing the San Fernando Valley: "Some said that it was an interesting, out-of-the-box idea that could satiate at least some tourists’ desire to see the sign, albeit a replica, and would therefore lessen traffic in Los Feliz and the Hollywood Hills. Others however, said they did not see a duplicate’s sign value."

China's extreme "duplitecture" photographed next to its Paris equivalent

2018-01-11T18:02:00-05:00

Photographer Francois Prost's recent photo series, Paris Syndrome, reveals just how far China's "duplitecture" went in the city of Tianducheng. Pairing images of China's replica city with its Paris equivalent—side by side it can be initially unclear which is the original.

Tianducheng features its own 100m high Eiffel tower, a haussmanian style neighborhood and a Versailles garden inspired park. The Paris copy was built 11 years ago and deemed a ghost town until just last year when the population rose to 30,000. Now Tianducheng is in many ways just another suburb with middle class people going about their daily lives.

Have you spotted which is the real Paris? All images on the left are of Tianducheng and all on the right are of Paris.

This duplitecture goes way further than simply copying a famous structure as an attraction; this is an entire city designed to have real people live in it. Dig further into the oddities and ideas around this phenomena in CityLab's article.

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Noah's Ark replica opens in Kentucky biblical theme park to “compete with the Disneys and the Universals”

2016-07-12T15:09:00-04:00

The park’s centerpiece features three decks of exhibits explaining Answers in Genesis’ views of the biblical flood account..[It] also features a two-story restaurant, aerial zipline cables and the Ararat Ridge Zoo... “...in a world that we see becoming very secularized before our eyes, it’s really time for Christians to do something of this size, of this quality, that competes with the Disneys and the Universals to get a message to the world.”

This might be worth a pitstop for anyone planning a U.S. summer road trip. Envisioned by the Creationist apologetics ministry Answers in Genesis, a replica of Noah's Ark — measuring 510 feet long, 85 feet wide and 51 feet high — opened last week as the centerpiece of the Ark Encounter theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky. As it goes, the theme park [which apparently has a total construction cost of more than $150 million] is “more than just entertainment” and aims to promote the ministry's views on evolution. As it goes, criticism ensues.

China Has a Fake Paris, and It’s a Ghost Town

2013-08-05T18:35:00-04:00

That’s a nice photo of Paris, isn’t it? Nope! That’s not Paris and no, it’s not Disney World or even the Las Vegas Strip; it’s a replica Paris in China. What makes this clone of Paris even more weird is that it’s a ghost town. Only about 2,000 people live there, which means that those giant skyscrapers, with 700+ units tend to only have around 30 people living in each of them. This city has become a place to take wedding photos for Chinese citizens who can’t afford to travel to the real Paris...