For those interested in Luigi Serafini’s Codex, I posted a hack translation of the accompanying «Decodex» that came with the most recent edition.

Look, we’re idiots: None of us knows what, exactly, goes into city planning, but we assume it’s probably a lot of distinguished gentlemen emailing each other about math, statistics and blueprints. But somewhere along the line, somebody accidentally CC’ed the insane asylum, and we wound up with the following civilizations that simply should not be.

(via @tylercowen)

Cristóbal Vila created a beautiful CGI fly-through — from construction to completion — of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

(thanks, Chris)

Chicago Screenshots is a (slowly growing) collection of Chicago-centric movie and television stills, presented as architectural and urban landscape photography.

From 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. [Friday, December 9], the modern skyscraper [the Aon Center] overlooking Millennium Park will be acting as a movie screen onto which the Art Institute of Chicago will be projecting Andy Warhol’s eight-hour silent, black-and-white epic “Empire,” which consists of one long, unbroken shot of New York’s Empire State Building. Said to be the first outdoor U.S. screening of this landmark — if not exactly action-packed — film, the event marks the very public, logistically challenging kickoff to the Art Institute’s new exhibition Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977, which opens to members Saturday and to the public Tuesday.

In a world full of McMansions where the structure takes up all the land, the Eames made structure and nature one.

(via @gary_hustwit)

Like a keypunch card it was, in a way. Long. And slim. And punctured.

I lived in it for a couple of years. Strange to say (perhaps), I might have lived there happily for many another year.

But that is a very long story. And it moves both backwards and forwards.

A series of moats and fortresses were built over the West Brabant Water Line region of the Netherlands during the 17th century in order to provide protection from invasion by France and Spain. Fort de Roovere was surrounded with a shallow moat that was too deep to march across, and too shallow for boats. In turn the earthen fort had remained protected –until now.

This trench-like bridge was designed by RO & AD Architects to allow tourist access to the fort in a natural, thoughtful way.

(via inhabitat)

Not that these photographs are any good, but they give you the idea of some must-see things to do in Rome once you’ve saturated yourself of all the usual tourist attractions. The above was taken in the crypt below Santa Maria della Orazione on via Giulia. Here’s a photograph from the outside of the church by A. Bava, that Coop featured in a recent elimae & which you might also recognize from a few of my Roman rubbings. If you enter the church & tip-toe past the praying nuns, you’ll get to a back hall left of the altar  & some stairs leading down into a crypt with cases of skulls, chandeliers made of bones & all sorts of other deathly architectural devices.

Yesterday we also went up past Villa Borghese to the Copedde quarter, a cluster of buildings designed by Gino Copedde in an odd mish-mash of styles, like the bastard child of Gaudi & Luigi Serafini. As Elisabeth Rosenthal describes it:

Each of the oddly arched and angled buildings surrounding this circular Piazza combines elements of every architectural style known to man: Gargoyles, Moorish tiles, Roman columns, cast iron chandeliers, Grecian urns, mosiacs of Genovese sailing scenes, a Japanese goldfish pond. Look twice, because often the elements are turned on their head: Some of the Gorgoyles under the eves are actually angels, Ionic columns hold up nothing, the distinctively shaped head stones that should be at the top of an arch are placed at the bottom instead.

Not that this photo does it justice, because the devil is in the detail.

And while you’re up there near Villa Ada, you can visit the Catacombs of Priscilla, which I didn’t take any photos of to respect their no camera policy. Unlike the catacombs in Palermo,  these ones have been ‘cleaned’ of corpses, at least in the areas where they let tourists go, but still some nice murals.

And of course, the most spectacular sight to see of all this time of year is to just look up at the sky around sunset. But I’ll likely have more to say about that after the fact, right now just enjoying it in the moment.