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Lucasfilm Unveils "Sandcrawler" Singapore Office
An anonymous reader writes "The massive, slow moving Sandcrawlers from George Lucas' Star Wars films inspired the form of Lucasfilm's new regional headquarters in Singapore. Designed by Aedas, the Sandcrawler Building will house a 100 seat theater, Lucasfilm Singapore offices, a public podium and other employee spaces. Neither rusty nor slow moving in this case, the glassy and streamlined building will combine a high performance facade with lush gardens and foliage that spills over terraces, resulting in a highly efficient commercial space. With construction already underway, we can look forward to this real life Star Wars manifestation sometime in 2012."
Asia is in general much nicer looking than western world. They put a lot of thought on how things look, even to the finest detail, and have done so for centuries. This is visible in the old temples and buildings, but also in modern view - like Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. As someone who likes to travel and live there I can say it's much nicer than being around the concrete blocks western world has. We have really let ourselves go and forget what's nice in life, and just have shit like wal-marts.
Or some random chome chunk form a 1950's buick
either way, grats just what the world needs, another monstrosity of an ugly building
The sand crawler we all know so well was dirty, weather-worn and perhaps extemporised. In the circumstances methinks they should have gone with a shiny Naboo-inspired design.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
LOL I hate netfirms.
it says right there in the article, he needs a theater for his ego, its not as strong in the east
If memory serves, the sandcrawlers were the mobile headquarters for the Jawas, a smelly little species known for their skill in picking over and/or stealing the detritus of more advanced civilizations, bodging it up just enough to get it moving off the sales lot under its own power, and then skipping town.
This seems like an eminently appropriate architectural allusion for the 'late-Lucas' period of Lucasfilms' work...
So, how long till a special edition Star Wars re-release has sandcrawlers that look like that?
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I just hope they return to making movies that look half as good as the building.
Although, what I really mean is writing and acting half as good as the building looks. But that wouldn't have been as smooth an opening line.
Exercise a little google-fu and check out the Best Buy corporate HQ near the Minneapolis/St Paul airport... When they built that it seemed so appropriate and in line with their corporate attitude that they'd be headquartered in a bunch of sandcrawlers. We try to avoid buying from them but if we're running out of options, somebody in the family will always say "well, in the last resort we could go look what the Jawas have got... "
I had a
I guess Lucas would rather spend the money on the building that on better writers or a series of lawyers that prevent him from killing his own creations. Oh well. It's not my money. Lucas has ceased to be anything. Enjoy the building.
If it was Peter Jackson putting up a building... I can understand. But not Lucas.
Thank you. I'll be stealing that.
While I agree with most of your post, IMHO what really bothers most Star Wars fans is not the prequels, but the crap he pulled with the release of the "Special Edition" and the DVDs. He took great movies and filled them with CGI nonsense. Come on. An extended dance sequence in Episode VI with a freaking toad stripper? WTF Lucas??
hahaha! oh man, they really do look like a bunch of sandcrawlers.
Too accurate for Chinese people, only imperial storm troopers are so precise.
If your wife cooks you an amazing steak and gives you an amazing blow job, appreciate that she did that. Don't hate her because she didn't give you steak and lobster and a threesome the night after that.
No, but if the night after she promises to give you steak and lobster but instead serves you a turd sandwich, and the threesome is you and two big burly guys (and you're not into that) then you will complain.
i have to agree. their people, dying of cancer, take it so much more gracefully. they dont shout in the streets like those people in syria or tunisia. they just shut up and die, so admirable.
I completely agree with this. The SW eps. 1-3 were clearly made for children. Unfortunately, all we have heard about them around here is the child-like whining of the Star Wars fanboy losers. They hit their target clearly, and Lucas is laughing all the way to the bank, because even the fanboy rage is still publicity for him
The problem isn't that he didn't make another great movie.
The problem is he took that great movie and manipulated it again and again.
To use your analogy, he cooked us dinner and took us around the block. And now he's retelling us that same story night after night with new fabrications such as changing the steak to salmon and making us believe that we blew him instead.
Living on past accomplishments is one thing. Dwelling on them and reminding us frequently how great it was that ONE time. Not so great.
Star Pirates
"Neither rusty nor slow moving in this case, the glassy and streamlined building will combine a high performance facade with lush gardens and foliage that spills over terraces, resulting in a highly efficient commercial space. "
WTF is a high performance facade?
The new library in Canada Water, London is a sandcrawler-like building - www.canadawater.org
Larry Ellison is following suit by making his headquarters shaped like the Death Star. Coincidentally, it's aimed at Google.
Table-ized A.I.
...everyone has to walk single-file in and around the building...to hide their numbers.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Right next to the Dulles airport in Virginia there is the CIT Building that has a similar look. Address is 2214 Rock Hill Road, Herndon, VA 20170.
Great talk about this type of Architecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnq1SvmZUYU
Sandcrawler was rusty box on tracks. Building is horseshoe shaped and sits on poles. If building looks like sandcrawler to journalist, he/she should stop smoking that stuff or pass it to others. Two or three ground floors missing. Public podium available 24/7 for bombing and you don't have to dig anything to put explosives under the building. Interesting design. I hope they don't have earthquakes or terrorists in Singapore.
"Living on past accomplishments is one thing. Dwelling on them and reminding us frequently how great it was that ONE time. Not so great."
Yeah I agree. But that's what fanboys are doing to themselves, not what Lucas is doing to them.
Appreciate what you get in life. Raising your standards to ridiculous heights and flogging a dead horse is the fanboy's problem, not Lucas's
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you consider the glass-as-slow-moving-fluid concept.
My kids were bored by them. They weren't made for kids. They were made for chumps... and seeing as I went to the theater and watched them and own them now, I guess I'm one of those chumps.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If your wife cooks you an amazing steak and gives you an amazing blow job, appreciate that she did that. Don't hate her because she didn't give you steak and lobster and a threesome the night after that.
If you and your wife aren't happy today, it really doesn't matter at all that you were happy together years ago. You should still get a divorce.
Apparently, Lucas' designers expect that only white people will inhabit this building in Singapore. Look at the slide show.
I know exactly the buildings you're thinking of - just off 494/Penn in Richfield.
Weirdly enough, I was thinking of another Twin Cities building that my friends had dubbed 'The Sandcrawler': McNamara Alumni Center at University of Minnesota.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
They're bullshit artists, they get turds polished up real nice. I guess PR are the Jawas of the corporate world.
Twinstiq, game news
"The guy made a great movie."
I love it when manchildren try to throw around the "fanboi" epithet. Uh, you're gushing over a movie for children, not grown adults. We have nostalgia on our side for Star Wars, the prequels, which we can see with fresher eyes were fucking retarded.
right
but then you are dealing with people with serious issues about the ability to appreciate what they have, and therefore people who will never truly be happy, and therefore miserable people you should stop considering as valid examples of anything
there are pitiable creatures you should recoil from and never ever want to be near, as they are merely toxic influences in the lives of everyone they touch, because they simply can't ever be happy and content with modest things
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Appreciate what you get in life. Raising your standards to ridiculous heights and flogging a dead horse is the fanboy's problem, not Lucas's"
Perhaps we've grown up, but you haven't. Raising your standards is something that all should attain.
Let alone a whole building? Managing the cheap labor for their merchandizing?
no. wisdom is the difference between raising your standards too high and not raising them at all. it shows you don't know what you are talking about when you think just raising standards is the only issue here, and it doesn't speak very highly of your communication skills that my words represent something to you that i didn't even say
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I completely agree with this. The SW eps. 1-3 were clearly made for children.
Yep... way to engage the young'uns. The movie doesn't even have a main character.
My kids don't enjoy it at all, and if we throw it on they wander in and out paying attention to only the major fight scenes. These are kids who will watch The 10th Kingdom from start to finish in one sitting.
The problem with Star Wars I to III is that they are bad movies. Full stop. They don't satisfy anyone and they are chock full of bad decisions, bad acting, bad scripting, bad direction, they're just bad. And they are stuffed with CGI to the point of distraction.
And the CGI additions to the later episodes do nothing to make them better, they extend the movie and add nothing, except distraction. If they'd been in the original movie, they should have been cut out by a good editor.
And I have the video to prove it.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
The movie doesn't even have a main character.
The main characters in all six Star Wars films are R2D2 and C3P0. Kasdan tried to get away from it in Empire Strikes Back, which is everyone's favorite, so it's understandable why this fact is so conveniently overlooked.
I love how everyone becomes an expert film critic when bashing Star Wars episodes 1-3. The fact of the matter is, if the prequels would have lived up to contemporary critical standards they would have felt out of place next to episodes 4-6. The same goofiness we hate about Jar-Jar Binks was central to C3P0. We just have fond childhood memories of C3P0 which blind us to how annoying he really was.
I'm sure you would have been just ecstatic if Michael Bay made episodes 1-3. They would do everything 'right' and by doing so fail to actually hold all six movies together as a single cinematic experience. The point of the CGI enhancements to the older ones was an obvious means to this end. They came out before the prequels and Lucas wanted to make them fit together cinematically.
People seem to really forget that Star Wars is a series of adventure films. They get into some dark territory when they climax (episodes III/VI), but they build up to these climaxes with stories of adventure and fun. It's obvious that many filmgoers such as yourself wanted the prequels to be like Batman Begins compared to the Tim Burton films. But Lucas wasn't trying to redefine what Star Wars was -- he was just finishing a project he started a long time ago.
Hayden Christensen may have been a wholly mediocre actor, but so was Mark Hamill. Wouldn't it have felt weird for 1-3 to have stellar acting/writing and then move on to the ridiculousness in 4-6? I say keep it ridiculous the whole way through, which is just what Lucas did.
Personally, I think Star Wars as a whole series is the greatest work of cinematic art ever created. Yeah, I said it. Citizen Kane doesn't have shit on Star Wars.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Outsourcing is cool when you build a geeky office building.
This looks like the antithesis to a sandcrawler.
This is the same place that caned the American more than a decade ago and a Swiss national just last year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore
They apparently cane you regularly there in prison and school even.
I suppose all of our corporations opening offices there, including Lucasfilm, condone this or they wouldn't be there.
Food for thought.
The main characters in all six Star Wars films are R2D2 and C3P0. Kasdan tried to get away from it in Empire Strikes Back, which is everyone's favorite, so it's understandable why this fact is so conveniently overlooked.
Neither had any real part in episode one. They were not the main characters. Its absurd on its face to suggest that they were.
And even in later episodes, they were not the main characters, they were the comic relief. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo were the main characters... they had conflict and character development. The two droids... not so much.
I love how everyone becomes an expert film critic when bashing Star Wars episodes 1-3.
Including you?
The fact of the matter is, if the prequels would have lived up to contemporary critical standards they would have felt out of place next to episodes 4-6.
They still feel out of place.
The same goofiness we hate about Jar-Jar Binks was central to C3P0. We just have fond childhood memories of C3P0 which blind us to how annoying he really was.
JarJar just stands out in the prequels as a focal point for what is wrong with them. JarJar as "C3P0 2.0" is just fine, albeit unfortunate. But the movies failings go far beyond the pointless annoyance of JarJar. C3P0 actually had some good lines.
I'm sure you would have been just ecstatic if Michael Bay made episodes 1-3. They would do everything 'right' and by doing so fail to actually hold all six movies together as a single cinematic experience.
I hate Michael Bay movies.
But Lucas wasn't trying to redefine what Star Wars was -- he was just finishing a project he started a long time ago.
Then make a good movie. eps 1 to 3 sucked.
You mentioned Batman... good example. The original with Keaton and Nicholson was perfectly fine.
While many people would have liked Batman Begin's style re-envisioning of the series.
Continuing it in the same style doesn't mean its going to be terrible though.
Lucas could have made eps1-3 in the style of the originals without making them suck.
Batman Returns was awful. But Batman II with Walken and DeVito was just fine. I'd have been fine with a Batman Begin's prequels... I'd have been fine with a Batman II style prequel... but we got Batman Returns... no... what we got was even worse.
Hayden Christensen may have been a wholly mediocre actor, but so was Mark Hamill. Wouldn't it have felt weird for 1-3 to have stellar acting/writing and then move on to the ridiculousness in 4-6? I say keep it ridiculous the whole way through, which is just what Lucas did.
Yes Hamill wasn't the best actor. But Christensen's problem wasn't his acting, it was his script and direction. It was Batman Returns not Batman II.
It didn't continue the sillyness... it was just bad.
From TFA: "the space, which will be overgrown with foliage, will be a respite from the heat and the sun and cooler than surrounding areas."
Which will be warmer because of the heat and the sun reflected from the shiny building...
-sigh-
Batman II is Batman Returns and is fine.
I meant Batman and Robin as the turd sandwich.
Sorry for the confusion.
I just assumed this office was in charge of ways to further fuck up future releases of the original trilogy.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Maybe you could make a movie about wise zombies. That would be great.
Even Hamill could invoke gravitas without behaving like a spoiled adolescent. Ponder the final confrontation between Luke and Vader in RotJ, and then look at Christensen's sheer lack of chops in Anakin's final battle against Obiwan. Hamill was no Shakespearean actor, I'll grant you, but he was a helluva lot better than Christensen. Even with good dialogue, Christensen would have sucked. Hamill, at least, was watchable even with stuck with some of Lucas's infamously badly written lines.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In the previous two decades, I'm sure this had been seen often enough. A middle man allowed them to hide this redundancy.
OO-TEE-DEE!!
Oh yeah right, kids moives (Proceeds to drone on about trade disputes) ...
You really need to see the RLM review to get THAT BS talking point bitchslapped to oblvion
So George is following the trend of fucking over American workers, so he can hire overseas slaves.
Thanks George. American Graffiti... fucko
George Lucas is joining the walmart trend of fucking over American workers.
One of the problems is that it's getting harder to actually see this great movie he made. The closest we have at present is fan-edited preservations.
I don't know if you have seen anything from this supposed leaked copy of Blu-Ray release, but check YouTube if you haven't and come back here with comments.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
As a friend of mine remarked in regard to Singapore, "You know you're in a Police State when you are walking along some nondescript part of town and are greeted by a giant sign declaring 'THANK YOU FOR YOUR CO-OPERATION'."
No Wheels?
:T:R:A:N:S:
My guess is that it will be a renderfarm, datacenter and graphic design office. Singapore is targeting to be the new go to place for CG drones and game development.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
Can't you do anything original anymore? Are you such a living dead zombie that you have to base EVERYTHING you do on a nearly fourty year old movie that effectively ended your career?
This seems like an eminently appropriate architectural allusion for the 'late-Lucas' period of Lucasfilms' work...
It's telling that the inspiration for this building is an idea over 35 years old. And it came from the mind of Ralph McQuarrie, not Lucas.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The problem is, extending your metaphor, she promised steak again the second night but instead served up cat vomit. And the constant tinkering with the originals is the equivalent of telling us later that she dug the steak out of the trash.
Lucas probably does not even know about it, but the awesome RPG KotoR explains it very well.
Tatooine is world that features some minerals and ores that look very awesome to any prospector and companies, so they start mining operations that then turn due to the wild nature and danger of the planet turn into massive operations of mining and mercenarying. The ores are not as awesome as they seemed, so the effort does not pay and the companies abandon the planet after a couple of years or decades.
Settlements that were started fall apart and vanish in the dust and sand.
As Tatooine is far, far out in the rim of the galaxy, that is not generally remembered and the process repeats countless times (over thousands of years).
As explanations go, that is a rather good one. It does not appear in the original movies but it's a pretty decent background for the location in the game.
Not even the first sandcrawler building. The Hotel du Lac in Tunis (http://theswca.com/travel/tunisia/tunis/tunis.html) was standing prior to Lucas arriving in Tunisia in 1976. Potentially the building was the inspiration for the vehicle in the first place.