While in Barcelona last week I had the opportunity to visit the famed Antoni Gaudi cathedral La Sagrada Familia. It really is an amazing structure, and if you can you owe it to yourself to pay it a visit. There’s not a big rush — it started construction over 100 years ago and is due to be completed around 2050. A few pictures below and more here.

On a trip to Austin a few weeks ago I visited the flagship store of Whole Foods, which is located near the frog design office in downtown. It’s in the building that also houses their headquarters, and it’s pretty spectacular in an over-the-top kind of way.

If you’ve been into a recently built Whole Foods then the aesthetic will be familiar, this one is just larger. Much larger. It’s hard to convey the size in pictures as the way the space is carved up it doesn’t feel like a huge warehouse, it’s full of alleys and neighborhood. But it’s truly gigantic.

This supersizing extends to the display cases as well, as you can see in the pictures below. They are similar to the ones you’ll find in your local Whole Foods…except three times longer. And the variety of specialty prepared foods at different stations is amazing. I can imagine it being a difficult store to do your regular shopping in, as the layout is higgledy-piggledy (intentionally so I’m sure to get you to wander around). But it’s fun to visit.

Austin isn’t that huge of a city and I find it hard to believe that there are enough customers every day to justify the quantities of food they put out fresh (especially the prepared foods). Hopefully they are living up to their eco-credo and not throwing it out every day…

Here are a few pics. Click on them to get larger versions. 

The store is in the company HQ

The entrance
Lots of prepared foods at different stations

 
Fresh as well as prepared fish

Well executed displays

Mmm, BBQ. This is Austin, after all

Like your Whole Foods meatcase…but bigger!

More chocolate than you can shake a stick at 

Take a few minutes out of your day and look at this beautifully made and choreographed computer animation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. It exposes the structural underpinnings and gives a wonderful 360 degree view of the structure that shows it off better than any photo that I’ve ever seen.

Watch the video

See still renderings and surface wires

Modeled, rendered and animated in Luxology Modo on a Mac. 

Tip of the hat to the ever vigilent Dan Hill at City of Sound. 

The Olympic authorities getting ready for the Beijing Olympics next year have solved the air pollution prolem which has been causing concern for atheletes and visitors alike.

Turning to an unlikely but logical source, the city has commissioned The Sharper Image to construct a skyscraper that is actually a giant version of one of their patented Ionic Breeze air purifiers. As you can see from the photo, it is close to completion and has already started clearing the surrounding air. The skyscraper actually swivels from side to side as it works, which as you might imagine could cause some motion sickness for the 850 inhabitants. The famed architectural engineering firm Arup was retained to develop a special damping mechanism that minimizes the apparent motion. No word on the warranty offered on the lifespan of the building, or whether The Sharper Image’s arch rival Brookstone would try for similar bragging rights before the Olympics come around in 2008.

I was in Chicago a couple of weeks ago for my 10-year grad school reunion and spent an afternoon at the Millenium Park near the edge of Lake Michigan. There is an orchestra shell designed by Frank Gehry which punches a striking profile in the sky as one approaches from downtown, silhoutted against the lake is immediately behind it. It’s clearly a Gehry and designed to impress, but what I enjoyed much more were the relatively modest sculptures arrayed around it. In particular these sculptures managed to be public in the true sense of the world and it was wonderful to see how people, and children especially, engaged with them.

The most fun one is known as The Cloud Gate, and was designed by British artist Anish Kapoor. It is 110 tons of stainless steel polished to a mirror finish. Its location allows it to reflect the fantastic Chicago skyline, and at a more intimate scale it reflects the immediate environment and the people around it. The most trippy effect is standing directly underneath it and staring up, it’s like being inside a mirrored sphere. Children have a great time seeing their fun-house reflections in it, but adults too can’t help but express joy.

The other sculpture is The Crown Fountain by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa and it is of a much larger scale. Two huge rectangular slabs face each other, water falling from the top of each on all sides. The facing sides of each are filled with a single moving image courtesy of LCDs arrayed over the surface. On one a caucasian face, the other a black one, at least when I was there. Apparently there are over 1000 images of Chicagoans used on the fountain. I can say from having lived in the city that it is still wracked by racial divisions and the fountain clearly plays on that. But it is playful at another level, as the kids romp in the huge waterfalls and in the shallow pond that forms in between. (The Millenium Park website shows water spouting from the mouths of the faces like old fountain cherubs, but that wasn’t happening while I was there.)

While the Gehry pavillion was bombastic, the sculptures were more concerned with effacing themselves and letting the people come to the fore. Chicago has one of the best architectural and public sculpture heritages in the US, and these are two worthy additions.