The Minister’s Treehouse in Crossville, Tennessee is a 100ft structure built by minister Horace Burgess from the early 1990s through 2004. The entire building wraps around a giant tree and was built completely without blueprints, sprawling to an estimated 10,000 square feet inside, including a four-story swing set. Photographer Kristin Sweeting took a recent trip to the treehouse and took many of the photos above. You can also see more images by Chuck Sutherland who provided the image on top.
Designer Garth Britzman of Lincoln, Nebraska used recycled bottles filled with colored water to create stunning topographical shade canopy for a vehicle. I love how the natural shape of the plastic bottles makes the pooled water look like leaves. See more over on Behance. (via my amp goes to 11)
While not particularly the fine art you might be accustomed to on Colossal, it was impossible to pass this up. Guadalajara-based architects Hernandez Silva Arquitectos recently designed the interior of a new penthouse situated on top of a 1970s Mexican colonial building in Guadalajara, México. A notable feature of the home is a powder room situated atop an unused 15-story elevator shaft. Via Hernandez Silva Arquitectos:
A characteristic feature of the project is that a volume that was originally intended for a second elevator and was never installed becomes a powder room with a glass floor that looks down all the 15 levels, the PPDG penthouse is a great versatile modulated space, with great views all this with the concepts of transparency and the simplicity of materials.
What a fantastic if not completely terrifying idea. See much more of the residence on Home DSGN. (via neatorama)
Update: If this makes you queasy or uncomfortable, I urge you not to read about Skywalking.
A few days ago I happened upon a rather unique art project called Last New Year in the Austin American Statesman, showing photos of a dilapidated home recently transformed with a number of installations by a small arts collective called Ink Tank. The premise for the project was fascinating: the ensemble imagined a fictional group of people living in the home who would react to the prophesied end-of-times 2012 date. One of my favorite pieces from the show is a giant installation called The Purge by artist Chris Whiteburch who decided to imagine how the house itself would confront the impending doom. The result is a structure purging its contents, all manner of debris and structural material shooting violently through a window into a giant wooden splash.
One of the most fascinating things about this project to me was its similarity to Inversion House, another modified house installation created by sculptors Dan Havel and Dean Ruck in 2005, roughly 150 miles east in Houston. The resemblance is uncanny in that they are essentially exact opposites. Via phone Whiteburch says the similarity is purely coincidental and that he wasn’t even aware of Inversion House until somebody mentioned it after seeing his work. Unfortunately the Last New Year has been taken down, but you can see more images over on Ink Tank’s website. I want to thank both Chris and photographers Julie and Adam Schreiber for providing the imagery for this post.
For nearly a decade since the late 1970s artist Takanori Aiba worked as a maze illustrator for Japanese fashion magazine POPYE. The following decade he worked as an architect and finally in 2003 decided to merge the two crafts—the design of physical space and the drawing of labyrinths—into these incredibly detailed tiny worlds. Using craft paper, plastic, plaster, acrylic resin, paint and other materials Aiba constructs sprawling miniature communities that wrap around bonsai trees, lighthouses, and amongst the cliffs of nearly vertical islands. I would love to visit every single one of these places, if only I was 6 feet shorter. See more of Aiba’s work here. (via design you trust)
The Luminarie De Cagna is an imposing cathedral-like structure that was recently on display at the 2012 Light Festival in Ghent, Belgium. The festival was host to almost 30 exhibitions including plenty of 3D projection mapping, fields of luminous flowers, and a glowing phone booth aquarium, however with 55,000 LEDs and towering 28 meters high the Luminarie De Cagna seems to have stolen the show. ( via stijn coppens, sacha vanhecke, sector271)
How fun is this? Bâtiment (Building) is a mirrored installation by artist Leandro Erlich currently on display at Le 104 in Paris as part of their In_Perceptions exhibition. The piece is clever in its simplicity: a massive building facade is constructed on the floor near a towering mirror giving anyone reflected the uncanny appearance of being weightless. Optical illusions are familiar territory for Erlich, whose pool installation appears to plunge air-breathing gallery patrons several feet underwater. Bâtiment is on display through March 2012. (via present and correct, lonely planet)
The inside of Mattias Adolfsson’s sketchbook looks much better than the inside of mine. These are just a few of some fantastic spreads found in his series Flying Junk and Rococo Borg. Be sure to click the images for maximum HD sketch goodness. (via behance)
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© 2010-2013 Christopher Jobson, all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. I try my best to attribute images, videos, and quotes to their creators and original sources. If you see something on Colossal that's misattributed or you would like removed, please contact me. The Colossal logo and name Colossal are the trademarks of Christopher Jobson.
