I talked briefly in my last post about the burj dubai tower in Dubai. It really is a credit to Adrian Smith (the architect) who designed one of the most stunning and beautiful super tall high rise skyscrapers the world has ever seen. The tower was topped of earlier this year at 818 metres with a total floor area of 334 killometres. If that doesn’t impress you then the fact that the development cost over 4 billion pounds and holds 8 world records for everything from the highest free standing building to the worlds fastest elevators. 110,000 tonnes of concrete were used in the foundations of this behemoth alone.. I can’t wait for it to be finnished and to see it on Google Earth.

A lot of the most interesting and powerful happenings in the architecture world are no longer happening in the western world. Over in Dubai there are scores of skyscrapers going up.. including 2 that claim they will be the tallest in the world. Meanwhile in China experts are predicting there is going to be 50,000 new skyscrapers built in the next 20 years… thats roughly 200 per month.. 50 per week and, if they don’t work weekends, 10 new skyscrapers per day.

It’s a shame that most of the big architectural projects have moved away from the west, but sure looks like some exciting things will be happening over the other side of the word. Anyone fancy learning Chinese?

Some of my favorite statues are the relly unusual ones (often with a really dodgy sense of humor) This collection of really wierd ones from around the world:

This rather fantastic example really shows the architects sense of quirky humour. I am pleased that the the officials in charge allowed them to put up this rather fantastic statue of a man riding an upside down hoarse.

This one in LA really captures that “one of those days” feelings we all get form time to time. This is a really good statue by a really talanted artist.

No explanation is given for this statue in norway, because i honestly dont think there is one. I think it’s utterly brilliant.