2011 August travel tips and stories. Vacations ideas, cruises spa and resorts

Located in the fashionable Aoyama district of Tokyo, Prada’s Tokyo becomes a landmark attraction due to its visibility. Designed by the Swiss architecture team of Herzog & de Meuron, this is a strikingly unconventional 6-story high glass crystal store. Amidst this beautiful symphony of mass and void spaces, the 5-sided polyhedral Prada Aoyama is as decorative as it is architectural and is both metaphorically and literally linked to its surrounding environment.
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Located in Tanjong Pagar Singapore District, the Pinnacle@Duxton is a 2.5 hectare unique residential complex housing a total of 1,848 units in 7 towering blocks. Soaring at 156m and consists of seven connected tower each is 50-storeys in height, this is the tallest public housing project in Singapore as of the year 2010.
Continue reading It is hard to miss

Designed by Sterling Prize-winning architects Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios LLP, this rusty-looking tower block is the Broadcasting Place located in Leeds, United Kingdom. Conceived as a public partnership for property group Downing and Leeds Metropolitan University, it is a landmark building rising to 23-storeys. It is an education & mixed-use development that provides approximately 110,000 sq ft of new offices and teaching spaces together with 240 student residences.
Continue reading A bold addition to the Leeds cityscape

Designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the tower is situated in the West Bay area of New Doha, Qatar. Owned by Shaikh Saoud bin Mohamed Al Thani, the building is close to the iconic pyramidal Sheraton Hotel built in the 1980′s. Opened in 2010, Burj Qatar is simple in form but with a unique architectural design. Marks the landscape it features several panoramic lifts.
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This a tea house located in Chino, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. Its name is Takasugi-an which translates roughly to “a tea house built too high”.  It was built by Terunobu Fujimori, a tea master, who has an interest in architecture and wished to push the limit of a traditional teahouse. Sits atop two chestnut trees, Fujimori designed and built the structure for his own use. Built in 2004, one of the interesting points is the method Fujimori used to support the tea tree house.
Continue reading The ultimate personal architecture

A serious contender for the world’s strangest hotel. Situated in the green heart of Linz, Austria, Das Park Hotel is a minimalistic hotel constructed from repurposed, incredibly robust drain pipes. This unique hotel has transformed standard concrete sewer pipes into hotel rooms.  Designed by Andreas Strauss, the hotel offers room with minimum space volume for maximum comfort.
Continue reading If you fancy spending the night, somewhere unusual, then visit the Das Park Hotel

The world is getting smaller as populations are booming and technology is improving. The answer may be found in whole cities being designed as this concept. 45 kilometres from Tianjin City and 150 kilometres from the Chinese capital of Beijing, the site of the Tianjin Eco-City is a fascinating, 30 sq km development designed to showcase the hottest new green technologies and to serve as a model for future developing Chinese cities. The Tianjin Eco-city is the result of a collaborative agreement between the governments of China and Singapore to jointly develop a socially harmonious, environmentally friendly and resource-conserving city in China. 
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In the forest in the tiny village of Harads, in municipality of Boden, far north of Sweden, one stunning tree hotel is located. Designed by Inredningsgruppen it resembles – what else – a bird’s nest. The hotel combine innovative modern design with ecological thinking in order to find new ways of valuing the vast Swedish forest. Opened in July, 2010, the Bird’s Nest consists of only six “rooms” each designed by a different architect to be completely unique. Each independent of the others, six different nests, each with its distinctive feature and its architecture.
Continue reading The hotel in the woods (or better: “on” them)

The Hull History Centre is an archive and local studies library that houses the combined collections of both the Hull City Council and Hull University archives and local studies resources. The materials have been acquired by donation, deposit and purchase, since the first days of the University and its initial establishment as Hull University College in 1928.
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At the time of its completion, the 88-story, 420.5 meters -high Jin Mao Tower was China’s tallest building and the fifth tallest in the world. Until 2007 when its height was surpassed by the Shanghai World Financial Center, situated next to the building. Literally “Golden Prosperity Building”, this landmark skyscraper is located in mainland China, in Pudong district of Shanghai.
Continue reading Golden Prosperity Building