May 23, 2013

Now This is Living: The DNA-Shaped Agora Garden Building

A luxury apartment building is now under construction in Taiwan, and its design was inspired by the double helix of the DNA molecule.

bigthinkeditor

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

A luxury apartment building is now under construction in Taiwan, and its design was inspired by the double helix of the DNA molecule. The building, named Agora Garden, will twist at a 90 degree angle, and not just because that’s a cool thing to do. The design creates more surface area, and enables suspended open-air gardens to hang from one level to the next, unobtrusively.

And of course, that’s not all. The designer, Vincent Callebaut Architecte, says all the building materials will be made of recycled or recyclable materials.

See the full slideshow for this project here.

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Pixelated red human figure on a black grid background with blue symmetrical curves and white geometric shapes adjacent.

Hard Science

The Arecibo Message fifty years later

In November 1974, astronomers used the radio telescope at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory to send a hello to the universe.

Bronze statue of a bearded man embodying stoicism, riding a horse with one arm extended forward, set against a black background.

Thinking

3 clues that Stoicism is a religion in disguise

All religions have three traits: metaphysical commitments, ethical guidance, and daily rituals or practices. So does Stoicism.

An open book with abstract designs: the left page displays a horizontal row of color blocks, while the right page features a hand touching a network of connected circles, highlighting strong connections.

Business

Why our “weak-tie” connections are actually super-strong

Sure, “who you know” matters — but your best contacts will be the ones you don’t know very well.

Starts With A Bang

Could dark matter be the same thing as dark energy?

Two parts of our Universe that seem to be unavoidable are dark matter and dark energy. Could they really be two aspects of the same thing?

Close-up of an analog weight scale needle pointing to zero grams, with a black background.

Hard Science

You’re made of energy: The strange truth about where mass comes from

“A person’s mass is made not of ‘stuff’ in the way we normally think about it, but rather our mass is made of energy.”

Up Next

Some good rules for life in general

Daniel Dennett has posted a fantastic set of “seven tools for thinking” in an article in the Guardian that has gone so viral that if you haven’t seen it yet, […]