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."

Comments

I applied

[commlinx]

But apparently 140 other characters got in before me :/

Re:I applied

[Joce640k]

In other news, a solitary hash symbol is now called a "hashtag"

Re:I applied

[Sarten-X]

Of course... with a word after them, they become "channels".

Re:I applied

[Barefoot Monkey]

That's what caught my attention from the summary as well. Referring to hashes as "hashtag symbols" is rather circular. What's next - hashtagsymboltag symbol?

Re:I applied

[hey!]

You just don't know how architects are indoctrinated^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H trained to think.

A building doesn't exist in isolation, it is part of a dialog with its environment, particularly other buildings. The building itself isn't a hash tag -- it's a hash sign; it *converts the buildings around it into hashtags*, thus calling attention to the fact that the implied statements of their architecture *are indeed statements*. This building is a postmodern sigil. Obviously the architect of this thing must be an a**hole. Who does he think he is, reifing the semiotic implicatures of other architects' work?

Re:I applied

[SuricouRaven]

It's called a pound symbol because ASCII (And the character sets that once competed) didn't have a £ symbol. They were designed in the US, and with only seven bits to work with there was no room for symbols with little use in that country like accented characters and non-dollar currencies. So until the coming of unicode and other means of character encoding, typing a £ in the UK tended to break things - the only way to represent it was the upper-ascii character that not all software supported. The workaround was very simple: People used a # symbol in place of the £ and shouted curses about stupid selfish yanks.

To this day, when I am using MUCKs, I cannot send a £ symbol. The software, written long before unicode, simply drops the character as invalid.

How long

[SJHillman]

How long before someone hacks it to play a giant game of tic-tac-toe?

Re:How long

[Anonymous Coward]

How long before Microsoft buys adjacent land to build a similarly-sized "C" tower?

"Dutch" as in "Danish"?

[phloe]

BIG are danish... not like the cake (which is a lie anyways)

Zergs!!

[blackicye]

This skyscraper will probably have a Protoss tower nearby, powering it.

Re:Wow

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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...

It's also called an octothorpe

[QuietLagoon]

The hashtag or "#" symbol is also called an octothorpe.

The latest punctuation-inspired architecture

[Comboman]

This is just the latest in a long line of punctuation-inspired architecture:

^ Pyramids

/ Leaning Tower of Pisa

~ Guggenheim Museum

|| World Trade Center

or the "pound" sign

[Comboman]

I've always called it the "number sign", but most voice mail systems refer to it as the "pound key" for some reason.

Re:Back in my day...

[stderr_dk]

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...

Bad news for neighbors

[GameboyRMH]

All other buildings on the street will be disabled when this is finished...

Re:Wow

[Jeng]

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.

Not Creative

[jimmerz28]

"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.

"hashtag" symbol? Really?

[flimflammer]

Since when is the symbol called "hashtag"?