7x7

teardrop trailer: veteran and prisoner-of-war designs for a camper-caravan realised after eight decades

what wizardry is this: BLDGBlog contemplates spells against autonomy

it’s dangerous to go alone – take this: Zelda fan automates his home controlled by playing the ocarina

no wine before its time: Moldova declares wine to be a food, a status that beer has enjoyed in Germany for centuries

don’t be jimmy: Colorado mass-transit just adopted an awful, crass mascot as an negative example for passengers, very unlike NYC’s good-mannered feline

ronald the grump: Sesame Street characters respond to news that they are being defunded

inter-city express: passenger train passes through residential apartment block in Chongqing 

tissot’s indicatrix

Even including a nod to the West Wing “Big Block of Cheese Day” episode that introduced most of us the Gall-Peters projection that right-sizes Europe and reduces polar flair, the Guardian reports that some Boston schools are dropping maps that have perpetuated this alternative geography for the past five centuries. Developed by a German historian in 1974 after researching a novel equal-area map from a nineteenth century Scottish catographer, some distortion is unavoidable (here is another non-traditional approach) when translating a three-dimensional globe to a flat visualisations but depicts landmasses by their relative size and hopefully eliminates some of the implicit bias of the West, reinforced by the industry-standard Mercator projection.

keystone

An architectural studio called oiio, as Hyperallergic informs, has released design proposal for a skyscraper they’re calling the Big Bend that’s being hailed as the world’s longest structure—at 1,2 kilometres in the form of a long, skinny arch. In an already crowded Manhattan neighbourhood, this innovative proposal occupies a fairly small footprint yet manages to optimise space for working and living. I wonder what it would be like to like the Wonkavator at this address.

red earth

Via Colossal, we are introduced to the detailed ephemeral warp and weave of artist Rena Detrixhe, who uses the sifted red earth from outside her Tulsa, Oklahoma studio to create intricate mandalas of blankets and rugs.
This dirt was collected by hand and is symbolic of the “beauty and pride of this place and also a profound sorrow,” witness to the forcible relocation of Native American populations with the Trail of Tears, further land-grabs and displacement, extreme weather, the hunting to the brink of extinction of the bison and the environmental disaster that the loss of grassland precipitated in the form of the Dust Bowl and presently the land of fracking.  Be sure to visit the links up top to see more of her work and the creative process.