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South Korea Plans Hashtag-Inspired Skyscraper
cylonlover writes "The hashtag or "#" symbol has taken on a lot more use in recent years, especially with the rise of social media tools like Twitter, where it's used to highlight popular topics. So in a way, it's a fitting model for an apartment building designed to act as a self-contained neighborhood, which is exactly the idea behind the Cross # Towers planned for South Korea. Dutch architectural firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), is modeling the look of the proposed building after the familiar symbol, by placing two interlocking bridges between two skyscrapers, which will also support outdoor park areas to mimic the sort of spaces you'd normally find on the ground."
But apparently 140 other characters got in before me :/
How long before someone hacks it to play a giant game of tic-tac-toe?
BIG are danish... not like the cake (which is a lie anyways)
This skyscraper will probably have a Protoss tower nearby, powering it.
The hashtag symbol will probably be passe by the time they finish the building.
What is wrong with you?
This is the most exquisitely retarded thing I've heard in a long time.
It would utterly fail to surprise me if this 'hashtag inspired' thing is not so much the original plan(Hey guys! Let's substantially reduce the salable volume of the building, while making the engineering more complex and the construction potentially more expensive!) as a creative justification for design choices enforced by some mixture of local zoning requirements concerning density, light-blocking, or other building/city integration variables and the customer's desire to have a particular mixture of interior and windowed space to sell...
You don't generally deviate from building a big box covered in glass just because you are that enthusiastic about twitter or whatnot, you do it because you can't get away with putting up a big box covered in glass. The artistic side of architecture demands that there be an aesthetic 'concept' for the design, to go along with the renders and the scale model display; but it comes down to being an optimization problem in the face of local constraints...
Hmm, living in an octothorpe sounds like you might be looking for a fight. At least hashtag seems like you might get some down home cooking.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
. . . sounds about right to me.
Especially, since the architectural firm is Danish. Hash sometimes does that to you.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The hashtag or "#" symbol is also called an octothorpe.
in korea, they call this the sharp symbol. so, sharp just sounds like a cool name for apartment complexes. there are several complexes all over the country built by posco (i think) with the # symbol on them.
further, many complexes, like the daewoo trump complex i lived in had an elevated playground and fitness center. so, while this is a kind of neat variation. it is hardly news.
LOL, The semicolon, apostrophe and exclamation point pose special challenges
Gently reply
I technically have a twitter account, I sent about 2 tweets, subscribed to some morons and some PR agents fronting for some media people, watched for awhile, said WTF is this and never used it again. I would assume this is a rather large fraction of their "subscribers".
You've just described my google+ experience so far.
This is just the latest in a long line of punctuation-inspired architecture:
^ Pyramids
/ Leaning Tower of Pisa
~ Guggenheim Museum
|| World Trade Center
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Their rather well-designed website is big.dk...
Only if by "well-designed", you mean a website that's consists of one page, where the lower 2/3 of that page seems to be random words in ALL CAPS thrown together without any order or meaning whatsoever.
A site that depends on Flash shouldn't be called "well-designed". EVER!
If you have mod points, there's a drop-down box on each post, where for instance some people may look at your post and select "-1 offtopic".
Beyond that, relax - if you don't have mod points, don't worry about it. I find them distracting anyway when I'd rather just read and occasionally post, when I have them it changes the experience negatively. I'd prefer to be able to opt out of moderation but haven't found a way of doing so.
...is that it's the first in a series of buildings to be built over the next 20 years. The next 4 are inspires by the letters ""L", "U", "L", and "Z".
I've always called it the "number sign", but most voice mail systems refer to it as the "pound key" for some reason.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Back in my day hashtags had to do with IRC!
You must be new here.
# clearly has to do with the C preprocessor.
Or it indicates that you're logged in as root.
Or that you're about to start a nice game of Tic-Tac-Toe to stop the game of Global Thermonuclear War on the WOPR.
Or all of the above...
alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" ; # https://pipedot.org/~stderr & http://soylentnews.org/~stderr
You've just described my google+ experience so far.
Ahh but see
I'm REALLY unimpressed. The most important and influential web 2.0 company is used by ... practically no one. The emperor has no clothes!
The situation is similar, yet the G+ gets endless trash talking about how irrelevant it is and twitter gets endless trash talking about how important and influential it is. That is the difference.
I've given up on figuring out a world wide IT/programmer counts. Best I could figure is github is well over a million users (not projects, but registered user count), we'll say that twitter is at most only 20 times more influential than github... however... there are a lot more programmers than github users.
I think I have enough circumstantial data that I can comfortably stand by my claim that there are more # using programmers than # using twits.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
All other buildings on the street will be disabled when this is finished...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yep, even mentioned in tfa.
Originally the designers wanted to build just two incredibly tall towers, but height restrictions forced them to get creative. They essentially lopped several floors off of their original specs and reused them as bridges, giving the whole structure a unique look that will stand out among the Seoul skyline.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Here is a link to the FAQ, it should answer that as well as other questions you might have.
http://slashdot.org/faq
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Kids playing 200m above the ground - groundbreaking idea... In other news: admins like to delete anything critical on their blog.
"Originally the designers wanted to build just two incredibly tall towers, but height restrictions forced them to get creative."
So originally it was boring as hell. It's sad that "designers" have to be forced to be creative.
'#' Means "Channel" to me. Always has, always will. I am of an age where that's what I learned and lived, and that means I am now too old to be able to change!
I was under the impression that the hash tag is used by twits (tweeters? twitterers?) to tag other users in posts/tweets/whatever they are called.
So you might be right that there are more # using programmers than # using twits, on a "unique users" basis, but I think they have you beat on frequency. For every time a programmer using the # symbol once, there are probably 1000 twitter users using the # symbol in a post talking about Ashton Kucher's bowel movements, or something else equally discussion-worthy.
(I'm not exactly sure when a # symbol is used by someone on twitter, I've used twitter even less than G+. They are all tools to achieve specific outcomes, so far I haven't had a need that either one met.)
Since when is the symbol called "hashtag"?
Close enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Prince had his name changed to a symbol that wasn't even punctuation, or pronounceable.
So... I would say that yes, it is legally possible.
Freur beat him too it.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I suppose this is an improvement over a design from another Dutch firm for residential towers in South Korea: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2072308/MVRDV-architects-reveal-plans-South-Korean-buildings-look-eerily-like-Twin-Towers-exploding.html
Already been built, in Pisa.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It depends on what you mean by 'believe'.
Do I believe in the conceptual verbiage? No. I view that as a part of the marketing effort that goes into getting one design adopted over another(and, possibly, an honest reflection of the designer's thought process, possibly not; it could be that their solution to a particular set of design constraints was, psychologically, inspired by the 'concept'. It could also be that an entirely different person rationalized the design after the fact. Hard to say and not terribly relevant.)
However, I do believe that this game of aesthetic and conceptual rationalization is, undeniably, part of the process by which architecture gets done. Designs have to be 'sold', both within an architecture firm to coworkers and bosses, and to customers in order to be built. Since the buildings that actually exist are the ones that were successfully pitched, it is very likely that most of the newer ones have this 'conceptual' package produced for them at some point, likely along with some nice little scale models of the area, high-quality prints of 3D rendering from a variety of angles, and similar.
The open spaces they mention seem a bad idea to me. At that altitude the wind is much stronger than on the ground. Even in good weather, you'd be sitting in a gale up there.
Not a twitter user either, but from what I've seen # identifies a topic keywork, @ identifies another user.
Twitter just stole the character from IRC, anyway. I suggest everyone who used the Internet before about 1996 gets together and demands it back.
When they finish the ASCII set, it will be called Perl City.
Lisp City has a lot of nested bridges.
Table-ized A.I.
Just get somebody chubby to stand on the left side of Pisa.
Table-ized A.I.
has never been to Korea.
The close-up of the kids running and playing doesn't remotely begin to approach the density that is going to exist if that opens here. Not to mention when is the last time a kid played with one of those round things and a stick?
If this is supposed to be like a self-contained neighbourhood, then it's "just" Corbusier over again.
...not to mentioned ridiculous architectural designs keeps people like me (structural engineers) employed :)
maybe borland should have sued port authority of new york for building the twin towers, since // is/was synonymous with their compilers (borland coming after the twin towers is of course just a technicality)