ZAHA HADID'S NEW SUPER YACHTS ARE LIKE NOTHING THE SEA HAS EVER SEEN

Pritzker Prize winning starchitect Zaha Hadid is known for her incredible buildings but she’s added to her impressive portfolio with these super yacht designs. German builders Blohm + Voss recently revealed their collaboration with the designer for a mini-fleet of futuristic seafaring vessels. The largest, the 420-foot Unique Circle, will come with an area for underwater viewing and will have a swimming pool that is protected from natural elements by the deck. And if you have an "Titanic" concerns, never fear –their hulls can break through ice! Hadid said in a statement,

“As a dynamic object that moves in dynamic environments, the design of a yacht must incorporate additional parameters beyond those for architecture—which all become much more extreme on water. Each yacht is an engineered platform that integrates specific hydrodynamic and structural demands together with the highest levels of comfort, spatial quality, and safety.”

Hey, future Powerball billionaire, you could forgo any land residence at all and spend your days touring the globe on one of these beauties.

(via Architectural Digest)

NYC GETS A NEW PYRAMID

Starchitect Bjarke Ingels’ W57 is getting pretty exciting the higher it grows. Photographer Iwan Baan took this aerial view below just last week. Ingels describes the structure like this;

“The Durst pyramid and the maze have something geometrically in common in that all the cross-sections of the pyramid are straight lines but it describes a hyperbolic paraboloid. Here all the cross-sections that you can see are perfectly straight lines but as a result, you almost describe these arches. It is a cone that has been subtracted from a cube. It’s this weird combination of something that is actually straight lines that then describes these curving geometries. Maybe we do have certain obsessions we can’t escape no matter what we do.”

OK. It’s certainly an odd location on West 57 and the river, right as the ramp enters the West Side Highway, backed by a giant Con Ed transfer station but the site-specific design responds on all sides. It’s rental on top, with retail at the base, so it will be interesting to see what it does to street life in the area. Right now even driving by it is exciting. 

(Bottom photo, Iwan Baan; via Curbed)