Urban Planning Blog

I love the quirky homes on the West coast. The cities on the west coast have a unique sense of character which although can be weird at time is mostly refreshing from the sameness that we encounter in the American urban wasteland. Seattle Dream Homes, a real estate resource network showcases unique home designs and not just your run-of-the-mill cookie cutter subdivision homes.

One such quirky home is Lisa Petrucci’s home. Looks like an ordinary home from the outside, complete with a pink flamingo in the yard, it is a virtual delight from the inside. It certainly seems like a house that has been lived in and not like those fancy homes that are meant only for the architectural magazines photo-ops. Lisa has an amazing collection of dolls, photo frames, and exotic artefacts. I liked this “reading center” section of her home. It looks like a children’s dream home.

Technorati Tags: dream homes, Seattle, art, interiors, houses, residential, real estate

Now that’s what I call a “green car”

[image source: Daily Dose of Imagery]

Technorati Tags: green car

I guess this would be a kid’s dream come true. It certainly took a while for Gary Hatley’s dream for a treehouse to come true.

Gary embarked on the treehouse project. He had used a do-it-yourself
deck-building book to guide himself through construction of the deck,
which is 12 feet in the air, and he applied the same recipes for safety
to his treehouse.

He abandoned the age-old practice of nailing salvaged wood scraps to
a tree at haphazard angles, and decided to make an ultra-safe,
professional quality treehouse surrounding a tree but supported by
separate treated telephone pole posts, secure in the ground.

A year and about $4,000 in materials later, he had built a dream
tree home for his children featuring a secret door, windows and a
bridge connecting the treehouse to the elevated deck [source].

Technorati Tags: tree house, trees, building, children

Wouldn’t you kill for a view like that? Well, except you don’t have to.

A company of architecture of Barcelona and a group of aircraft
engineers of Florida (EUA) are developing a prototype of room of space
hotel, baptized like Galactic Suite, so that the tourists and astronauts who are decided to travel to the space have a site where to lodge.

Read more.

Technorati Tags: space, hotel, technology, Galatic Suite, architecture

After I wrote about iPod-powered walking tour narrations offered by a Cleveland-based website, we can get more lazy and get a video tour instead. TurnHere is collecting reader-submitted videos of neighborhoods all over America:

Want to become part of our certified professional network? Send us a 90-second video about a place—-a neighborhood, a landmark, a bar, a street or trail.  Use an interesting local narrator.  Entertain and inform us. (Watch the films on the site for an idea of our style and format.)  If we like your video, we’ll put it up on TurnHere.

You could spend hours (well, if we have a ton of them) watching these interesting videos or you could be walking for real down there. Well, until I get enough money to travel around simply to experience a sense of a place, I’ll stick to this cool website. But I wonder how much can you really cram into 90 seconds. I don’t want a MTV-style music video of my neighborhood.

Technorati Tags: video, neighborhood, America, suburbia, video tour

A beautiful video that makes us face up to the truth.