2010 February travel tips and stories. Vacations ideas, cruises spa and resorts

This resort is frequently regarded as one of the best ski and snowboard destination in the world. Whistler Blackcomb is located in Coast Mountain Range. The Twin Mountains offer 8,171 acres of skiable terrain, ranging from beginner to expert slopes. Just a two hours drive of Vancouver, Canada, Whistler Blackcomb boasts a wide range of accommodation and a world-class terrain parks. It really is all you could ask for in a ski and snowboard resort.  The ski and snowboard season lasts from mid-November to early June.
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San Dona de Piave is a typical medium-sized town in the Venetian region, Italy. There is a small neighborhood park located in the middle of the town. The design of the park is creative with mediocre architectural solution for the houses, little or no public services to animate the new space, but more that that the strongly “residual” character of the plot assigned to the park, with little public accessibility and cut off from the main street by a planned parking lot.
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The purpose and design of the fortress is that of a panic room – a refuge for plantation bosses, merchants, and their families. Small enough to be survived with a sweep of spyglass, yet large enough to support sugar plantations, St. Kitts was settled in the seventeenth century by English and French entrepreneurs. Photo by: Traci L.A.
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For centuries the need for security has driven the fiercely tribal inhabitants of Yemen to live together in towns that can be easily defended. Although there are district regional differences, the vernacular house is a tower, built to a height of up to 30 m. Sana’a, the capital of the Yemen, has about 14,000 of these tower houses. Typically they are six stories high, made of mud bricks decorated with thick layers of whitewashed gypsum.Opening, doors, and windows in the houses are usually emphasized in white. Photo by: twiga_swala
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Josh Schweitzer‘s ”monument” is aptly named, for although it is a domestic dwelling, in appearance it is more of a monolith and clear statement of the architect’s philosophy. The monument was built by the architect as a retreat for himself and five friends, and is located just outside the Joshua Tree National Park, California. It is a strange area of rugged and barren beauty, a high desert peppered with jagged rock, spiky yucca plants, cacti and Joshua trees. The house sits amid boulders, and its bold colors reflecting the drama of desert life. Photo by: SoLostAndFound / Bill Lindsay
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Sverre Fehn, the Pritzker Prize winner of 1997, is particularly known and celebrated for his exceptional and inventive use of concrete and wood. When approaching his Norwegian Glacier Museum, visitors are greeted by Fehn‘s remarkable vision and a memorable exercise in the flexibility of concrete. The museum is situated in a valley below the largest glacier in northern Europe, the Jostedal Glacier, and is deliberately evocative of its icy neighbor. Photo by: Trondelarius
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The Ryugyong Hotel with its 3,000 rooms and seven revolving restaurants should be the largest hotel and one of the tallest building in the world. It has, however, been left uncompleted for more than fifteen years, due to lack of good quality concrete coupled with financial problems. With the hotel standing 330 m tall, Pyongyang‘s skyline is marked forever by this rough concrete construction, the first structure over 100 floors built outside the United States. Photo by: wordthecat
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The Bonnefantenmuseum is the focal point of an early 1990s redevelopment in a former industrial quarter of Maastricht. Jo Coenen drew up a masterplan of a new city quarter, which had formerly been the site of the nineteenth-century Sfinx-Ceramique, an earthenware pottery factory. Photo by: koenpanis
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Visitors leaving Groningen train station are greeted with late twentieth-century Postmodernism‘s most astonishing buildings. The Groninger Museum, designed by Alessandro Mendini may seem willfully random, but the plan is based on museum collections and functions. Photo by: KAPturer
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