With the Box Office right next to the train tracks, passing trains help set the rhythm of the day. Fortunately, the exceptional insulation of the units keeps them nice and quiet inside. Yesterday, however, I looked out the window, and saw a real mechanical marvel: a Track-Relaying Train. The train was about 200 yards long, most of which was devoted to storing new ties. A gantry system ran above the cars, depositing ties back to the business-car. The train lifts the rails, munches up the old ties, and deposits fresh ones in their place.

This is the business section of the TRT, which is moving to the right. Note the ties going in and coming out.

The flatbed cars full of ties, as seen from Stack's roof deck.

In other Box Office news, Google maps found our pile of containers. This looks like it was taken sometime in the spring. Interestingly, Street View has not yet updated; it still shows the building that formerly occupied the site.

Google Maps view of the Box Office under construction.

The island of Lindisfarne, off the coast of England, upcycles their old herring boats into sheds. A cool twist on the Viking funeral:

In energy news, Google has invested in a 350-mile-long transmission backbone for wind power in the Atlantic ocean.

And finally, a neat film about crane operators. We have previously featured crane operators in Dubai who chose to live in their crane-cabs because of the time and distance involved to descend each day.

Movies on Wheels

From England, a lovingly restored midcentury “Mobile Cinema.” At one point, there were 15 of these tooling around the countryside, but only one remains. The 1967 truck is a great combination of midcentury concerns: streamlined mobility, new forms of entertainment, and democratizing access to technology. (BLDG Blog)

Fauxcrete Jungle, anyone?

If your house is too fancy to have real unfinished concrete walls, or just want to have the look without the grit, then a Norwegian company will sell you silkscreened faux-concrete wallpaper. (Website)

The tiny vehicles below were obliterated a split-second after this photo was taken.

The New York Times features the filmmakers who captured the atomic bomb tests of the ’40s and ’50s. The photos are fascinating, documenting a time of a naive faith in technology and progress, even after the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the specter of the Cold War.

An information desk, made of information.

This information desk at the University of Delft makes for an interesting commentary on the function of libraries and the future of the book. At least it looks cool! (BoingBoing)

Hurricane Earl, as seen from space (NYT)

The name might sound like a boxer from the ’50s, but Hurricane Earl is churning its way up the Atlantic seaboard. Winds are gusting up to 165 mph in the Category 4 storm, which reminds us why architects and builders take the long view when doing their work. The effects of the Hurricane of 1938 –which inspired the modern tracking and naming system–can still be seen across New England, if you know where to look.

Casa Areia, Portugal

The Portuguese architecture firm Aires Mateus has built an incredible beachside retreat. While the sand floors might not be wholly practical, the buildings respond superbly to their site and purpose.

From the “Classes I Wish I’d Taken” Department: Undergrads Crash NASA Satellite Into the Ocean. Students at the University of Colorado got to decommission a satellite for credit. I say that any class that lets you interact directly with outer space is pretty cool.

Modern Birdhouses in London

And finally, some cosmopolitan birds get modern digs in London. The title of the project is “Spontaneous City in the Tree of Heaven,” after the common name for the tree species (which, incidentally, is increasingly being seen as invasive)

Skydivers over Florida with the space shuttle in the background.

Spatially and artistically, the above photo of skydivers watching the space shuttle launch is extraordinary.

Realized in three dimensions.

Stack design intern  (and Box Office welder) Geoff Hawley threw together a mockup of our “cube” logo out of recycled steel.

There’s more below the fold…

Train traffic controllers hard at work

GE has a new train traffic control system that they claim can increase average train speed by 10 to 20 percent. The system is yet another example of how databases and computing technology, when applied to very practical and real-world industries, can generate huge gains in productivity and efficiency.

From the greener building department, BuildingGreen has a great article on the embodied energy and global warming potential of different types of insulation. We use open-cell cellulosic sprayfoam, which has one of the lower impacts on the list.

A small piece of Taylor Medlin's thesis project, "Towards a New Antarchitecture"

Via BLDG Blog, a stunning exercise in architectural modeling. Student Taylor Medlin used wax, sculpted ice, and several ingenious lensing methods to portray his ideas for building sustainably in Antarctica, or as he puts it, “Antarchitecture.” The craft, precision, and ability to evoke his ideas clearly make the model a success.

BLDG Blog points out this architectural prank/sculpture from artists Julien Berthier and Simon Boudvin: a fake door installed against a wall in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris. It’s almost touching that the door is faithfully cleaned of graffiti by the city.

Stack continues to follow the Deepwater Horizon disaster closely. It’s events like this that redouble our commitment to green and high-performance buildings.  The Infrastructurist lays out the technical causes of the disaster, while CBS news has a harrowing (and damning) survivor account.

Speaking of the Gulf, this stunning 1944 map, prepared by the US Army Corps of Engineers, shows the wildly variable course of the river over millennia. John McPhee meditated on the futility of controlling these changes in his 1990 book The Control of Nature.

Fast Company provides a slideshow of the “Year’s Sexiest Houses,” as judged by the AIA.

The mapping crew conducts their flyovers

Early in the morning in NYC, an intrepid flight crew has been using LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) to produce a highly accurate map of New York City. The information will be used in disaster preparedness and sustainability efforts; comprehensively understanding  a place helps in managing it. The effort reminds me of an essay by Adam Gopnik that beautifully describes the impossibility of mapping a place as ever-changing as New York. (NYT)

Via inhabitat, a very cool armchair that prominently celebrates its recycled origins.

GE provides a fascinating and interactive look at energy consumption by appliance. It’s possible to sort by consumption by watts, dollars, and even equivalent gallons of gas. Click here for the interactive version. At Stack, we admire elegant ways to handle complex information, especially related to sustainability and energy consumption.

There’s more below the fold…

The Safe Trestles site plan

The legendary surf spot Trestles needs improved access, and the finalists were recently announced. The plans will get surfers safely over train tracks and protect sensitive ecosystems.

And finally, a clever cover from the most recent issue of the New Yorker. Cape Cod artist Bob Staake, riffing off Cervantes and Cape Wind, designed the cover, entitled “Tilt.”

A wind farm off the coast of Denmark (NYTimes)

First, the good news: after nine years of regulatory wrangling, the Cape Wind offshore wind turbine project got the go-ahead from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Roadblocks remain, but there’s no question that the approval is good news for the wind industry in general. Developers favor offshore sites because of steadier winds and easier access to large coastal populations. (NYT)

And now, some bad news: a giant oil rig suffered a bad explosion and ultimately sank in the Gulf of Mexico. The really bad news? The 450-ton subsurface machinery that is supposed to cap the well in precisely this situation has failed, dumping thousands of gallons of oil into sensitive habitats. Even robots sent down to revive the valves can’t shut it off.

This photo from treehugger.com shows the scale of the accident -- each of those ships is several hundred feet long.

From the used-to-be-good-news department, this incredibly outdated ad from the Humble Energy Corp, now part of ExxonMobil. Can you imagine an energy company running this ad today? Via.

Via io9, a roundup of “weird urban ecosystems” — several of which, including Garbage City in Cairo and Subtropolis in Kansas City, have appeared here on the StackMachine. Especially intriguing are Moscow’s metro-riding dogs.

The island ghost city of Gunkanjima in Japan (via i09)

And finally, from the silver-lining department, an interesting effect of the Rhode Island floods on fisheries. Apparently the sewage and other organic matter stirred up by the floodwaters is dramatically increasing phytoplankton blooms, which is great news if you’re a Narragansett Bay fish, and therefore a Rhode Island fisherman.

The blue line means more fish food this year -- NOAA via NYTimes

BLDGBLOG takes on the volcano (image: AFP/Getty)

BLDG BLOG explores the architectural implications of the killer volcano cloud (click on the photo above). The Infrastructurist has a great infographic explaining the overall impact.

Here's a new twist on green design. Fari Sarieddiene makes a lawn chair...

Cognitive scientist blogger Jonah Lehrer takes on commuting, and characteristically leaves us with insight into buying cars.

inhabitat points to the AIA's top green design projects. Shown here is Kroon Hall at Yale University

Out of Italy, Studio Dosi has this intriguing design for a provincial headquarters. The green exoskeleton -- almost an organic Pompidou Center -- helps regulate the building's systems.

This week I had the pleasant duty of attending a workshop hosted by the Boston Society of Architects entitled “Toward Net-Zero Energy Houses in New England,” with presentations by Albert, Righter, and Tittman, Transformations, Inc., and Byggmeister Associates. While many of the concepts were familiar from our Box Office project, any conversation involving R-values and kBTUs/sf/yr is music to a green-building-geek’s ears.

A useful diagram from Albert, Righter, and Tittman

According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, there are 8.6 million robots in the world.  Still, better robots than zombies.

The Infrastructurist thinks that 3D imaging is the future of infrastructure construction. While we at Stack think it’s the future of all construction, it is clear that infrastructure projects, with their complex pathways and myriad interactions with other systems in congested environments, are a particularly ripe application.

Imaging sample from Parsons Brinckerhoff and WSDOT

90 percent of the world’s subsurface office space isn’t in Moscow or Toronto….it’s in Kansas City, Missouri. Welcome to SubTropolis, a 5-million sf underground facility built in an old limestone mine. The Atlantic touts it as a way to save energy — as they quote inhabitants, the weather forecast down there is always “mid 60s and overcast.” Personally I would go crazy without the sky, but it raises the intriguing possibility of housing certain services — distribution centers, warehouses, or data centers — below the surface, where they can be close to the center of things without taking up valuable land and energy.

Instead of a corner office as a promotion, you get a pillar. (via the Atlantic)

Via BLDGBLOG, a very cool architectural installation: a room full of lights that records heart rates by turning on and off in rhythm. Each row of lights records a new person’s heart rate, and each rate moves sequentially down the room as new rates are recorded, resulting in a ceiling that twinkles in tune with its occupants’ hearts. Pretty poetic, and it raises an interesting set of possibilities around architectural biofeedback.

A photo of Pulse Room installed in Quebec, from the artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.