This project is rooted in an entertaining exercise: clients ‘from the future’ seeking a multi-functional abode that can be configured to fit their needs. The quirkiness does not end with the design itself, though, as even if the finished-layout photographs feature curiously pixelated occupants.

Created by Dash Marshall, there are four core components to this futuristic “space age” project – first, some space-saving strategies: (1) replacing hallways with sliding walls to eliminate relatively-useless circulation areas, (2) a flexible living-plus-bedroom with a walk-in closet, all enabled by a thick pivoting wall, giving the feel of secret rooms.

Next, things get futuristic – (3) flush-fitting, easily-vanishing, built-in storage the recedes from view when not in use and (4) a reflective, glossy, and rounded interior to bounce light throughout and make the entire residence feel more open.

As engaging as the apartment is in and of itself, this entire sequence from concept to realization to representation also shows a level of consistency not always found in design work – every step reinforces and reflects the core ideas that went into the process and final product. The story is told in part by the choice to computer-blur people in the final pictures, and even to round the corners of the photographs themselves.

“This client came to us with an apartment in the Kips Bay complex designed by IM Pei in the 1960s. We responded by designing a space capsule temporarily docked here on earth.”

“They wanted a home to charge up between missions: a place where every boot and book, every single little thing could be hidden away. They wanted something that would make the most out of their 715 square feet.”

“We measured and labeled the total volume of possessions (569 cubic feet) so we would have the necessary data to design a place for each and every thing to be hidden away.”

“Central to our strategy is a rotating storage wall called the Transformer. By moving a series of translucent sliding panels the floor plan to be reconfigured easily for different levels of privacy.”

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The Pioneer station will have a capacity of 28 guests, with areas for work and recreation. The Voyager will be much larger, with room for 400 guests, and will open sometime in 2027. Both space resorts will offer some semblance of gravity for patrons, thanks to their spinning circular designs.

“The station rotates, pushing the contents of the station out to the perimeter of the station, much in the way that you can spin a bucket of water — the water pushes out into the bucket and stays in place,” said architect and Orbital Assembly COO Tim Alatorre in an interview with CNN. This engineering will allow for comfortable dining and bar experiences as well as traditional sleeping positions.

However, the fun of weightlessness will still be an option for extraplanetary travelers. The gravitational pull will decrease as one moves along the station’s spokes toward the center. The degree of gravity will also depend on the hotel’s rotation speed.

“The interiors of Pioneer station, in particular, are designed to function in both zero gravity and partial gravity,” Alatorre explains. “They are highly flexible to respond to the needs of a variety of tenants on the station.”

The Voyager plans also call for a zero-gravity basketball court where guests can fly through the air and dunk like their favorite NBA stars.

In terms of the length of stay, the company envisions guests coming for a long weekend among the stars. “We expect the duration to be as little as four days or as long as two weeks,” says Rhonda Stevenson, Orbital Assembly CEO. “It depends on cost and also the ability to acclimate to a space environment.” Both space inns will include office areas for those seeking longer-term accommodations.

While no daily price has been announced, it is likely to be prohibitive in the beginning. The Voyager Station itself will run $200 billion in construction and launching costs. Travel + Leisure reported that a three-and-a-half-day stay might be as much as $5 million. However, that may not be as outrageous as it sounds, as it currently costs $55 million to stay at the International Space Station for any length of time. And Virgin Galactic is planning to charge $450,000 for a trip into the Milky Way that lasts just 90 minutes.

Orbital Assembly maintains that space travel will eventually become accessible to enough people that prices will be comparable to those of cruise tickets. Alatorre assures, “The goal has always been to make it possible for large amounts of people to live, work, and thrive in space.” The Pioneer hotel especially will allow “people [to] start to experience space on a larger scale, faster.”

Interested vacationers can sign up on the company website to reserve a spot on the Pioneer station.

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Since launching in 2011, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has made more than 44 orbits of our solar system’s largest planet. The attached visible-light JunoCam has been capturing the gas giant in all its glory over the past six years and sending the images back to Earth.

Not only has NASA open-sourced all the files, but it has also requested the help of volunteer “citizen scientists” around the world to help process the data. In June of this year, it began the Jovian Vortex Hunter project, “aimed at studying the different types of clouds that form on Jupiter, in order to better understand how the atmosphere of the largest planet in the solar system works,” according to Ramanakumar Sankar, the project lead and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota.

“With your help,” Sankar added, “we could learn so much about the Jovian atmosphere and processes that form the amazing clouds that we see.”

Astronomers from all parts of the globe have since created incredible representations of Jupiter’s clouds and surfaces, ranging from the ultra-realistic to the overly artistic. Here are a few stand-outs from the almost 500 images submitted so far:

Frosting Clouds

At the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2022 in Granada, Dr. Gerald Eichstädt used the JunoCam’s data on reflected light to create a 3D model with individual “needles” corresponding to the height of Jupiter’s clouds. The resulting picture looks like it could be the whipped frosting top of a cupcake.

“The Juno mission provides us with an opportunity to observe Jupiter in a way which is essentially inaccessible by Earth-based telescopic observations. We can look at the same cloud features from very different angles within only a few minutes,” says Dr. Eichstätdt. “This has opened up a new opportunity to derive 3D elevation models of Jupiter’s cloud-tops. The images of the wonderful chaotic storms on Jupiter seem to come to life, showing clouds rising at different altitudes.”

Saturated Hues

Using images taken from only 3,300 miles above Jupiter’s cloud tops, citizen scientist Björn Jónsson made a side-by-side picture of the planet’s colors as they would be interpreted by the human eye and the colors with deeper saturation to sharpen the smaller cloud features.

Blue South Pole

While most of Jupiter’s surface appears to be a reddish-brown color, footage from the JunoCam taken 11,747 miles above the planet’s clouds revealed that its North Pole is actually covered in icy swirls of blue. Dr. Eichstädt and fellow citizen scientist Seán Doran processed that data into an image of gorgeous denim-colored whirlpools, showing how the higher altitude clouds cast shadows on their surroundings.

Candy-Colored Moon

Calling it the “Fall Colors of Europa,” citizen scientist Fernando Garcia created a kaleidoscopic image of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. Using data captured during the JunoCam’s close fly-by on September 29th, 2022, Garcia gave the moon (which is thought to have twice as much water as Earth does) a psychedelic makeover.

South Pole Cyclones

Citizen scientist Roman Tkachenko pulled data from the JunoCam to color-enhance an image of the storms and cyclones at Jupiter’s south pole in intricate and striking detail.

Jupiter — Van Gogh Style

Turning Jupiter’s Northern Jets into artistic whirls akin to those in Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, citizen scientist Brian Swift used digital paint to highlight an aerial view of Jet N5.

The Juno spacecraft is expected to continue orbiting Jupiter for another six years fir a total of 80 passes around the gas giant, collecting images the entire time. That leaves plenty of time for more scientists and artists to get in on the action to make their very own masterpieces.

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Dubbed “Moon World Resorts,” the idea is to recreate the Moon on a grand scale right here on our home planet, no rocket trip required. As Moon World Resorts co-founder Michael R. Henderson recently told CNN Travel, the moon is a “recognizable brand…seven and a half billion people know it, everybody loves it.” He hopes his ambitious idea will spur travelers everywhere to flock to the spacey, ultra-luxurious new hotel.

Though the project itself has been in development for nearly 20 years, artist renderings envision a futuristic space where guests can enjoy all the perks of a traditional top-notch resort while pretending they’e floating in a far-off space station. Of course, no trip to the moon would be complete without a space walk. A lunar experience inside the hotel will allow guests to simulate the feeling of actually walking on the moon. As Henderson says, “we will give you the ability in your lifetime to walk on what you believe will be the lunar surface.”

Unfortunately, as with most architecture projects of this scale and scope, Moon World Resorts has also come with its share of “tremendous technical challenges,” according to Henderson. He’s currently working with co-founder Sandra G. Matthews alongside “independent engineers and architects to make the concept a reality,” according to CNN Travel.

If all goes according to plan, the Canada-based entrepreneurs plan on eventually expanding Moon World Resorts to other continents, too. This will depend largely on securing licensees willing to invest in the project — but as we now know all too well, it’s pretty hard for rich people to say “no” to space.

For his part, Henderson remains hopeful that Moon World Resorts will eventually get past the conceptual stage and become a full-on reality. He believes that the first hotel could open as early as 2027 as “a destination in its own right,” drawing visitors from around the globe who want to experience the thrill of the final frontier from the comfort of the planet they know and love.

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A collection of researchers from France’s École Polytechnique school of engineering, Germany’s Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) laboratory, and the University of Rostock attempted to simulate the conditions found on the two massive planets made from ice rocks and ice-forming molecules.

The interiors of Uranus and Neptune are composed mainly of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, a combination of elements that are actually found in similar proportions in PET (polyethylene terephthalate), the polymer that makes up everyday objects like plastic water bottles and plastic packaging. Thankfully for their research, PET sheets are cheap to come by.

Even though the icy giants are the coldest planets in our solar system, with temperatures reaching lows of -373 °F, the interiors can still top 10,000°F, with an atmospheric pressure a million times greater than that on Earth. To mimic these conditions, the researchers brought their plastic bottle material to California’s National Accelerator Laboratory to make use of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), an extremely powerful, hard x-ray free electron laser.

After firing ten ultra-concentrated laser pulses per second at the plastic, the PET reached temperatures of 10,832 °F, comparable to the inner temperatures of Neptune and Uranus. The impact of the laser on the plastic bottle also created a shockwave that compressed the material at a pressure equal to those on the icy giants. The result was flashier than expected, producing an explosion of nanodiamonds.

“We discovered that this extreme pressure produced tiny diamonds,” explains Dominik Kraus, HZDR physicist and University of Rostock professor.

Kraus adds that “the nanodiamonds are indeed diamonds in terms of crystal structure. The same crystal structure as on many wedding rings, just a million times smaller. So yes, these are actual diamonds. On the short timescale of our experiments, they have not enough time to grow further. However, inside planets where we could have growth times of millions of years, the diamonds could be gigantic — kilometers or larger.”

The discovery has both terrestrial and celestial implications. Here on Earth, diamonds might now be produced to perfection. “So far, diamonds of this kind have mainly been produced by detonating explosives,” says Kraus. “With the help of laser flashes, they could be manufactured more cleanly in the future. The X-ray laser means we have a lab tool that can precisely control the diamonds’ growth.”

This could also be a new way to manufacture nanodiamonds used as “quibits” for quantum computing and sensors, or to create the tiny diamonds that are used for many industrial strength abrasives and polishing agents. In the space arena, the findings could help expand our knowledge of the most common type of planets floating around in the universe, including the fact that they may have continual sparkling diamond showers.

“Planets like Uranus and Neptune, and slightly smaller, have been found to be the most abundant planets outside our Solar System,” Kraus says. “Understanding those planets will therefore also help to get further inside where life could exist outside our Solar System.”

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Created by artists Ella and Nicki, Hugh Broughton Architects, Professor Lucy Berthoud, Dr. Bob Myhill, PEARCE+, and public input, Mars House features an inflatable gold foil structure designed to sit on the surface of the red planet, and a subterranean level beneath it. The prototype is currently on display in the English city of Bristol along with a four-month public program of workshops, events, and research that will ultimately help determine what the interiors of the house look like. For now, it’s just a shell providing space for small research groups to collaborate on projects that help us envision what a future life on Mars could look like.

“The two-story 53-square-meter house is powered by solar panels and designed to be lightweight and withstand the environmental challenges that would be faced on Mars — such as average temperatures of -63 degree Centigrade and exposure to galactic and cosmic radiation,” says PEARCE+ Architects. “The upper level is designed to sit on the Martian landscape and is formed using a pressurized inflatable gold-coated foil, making it lightweight enough to be transported to Mars.”

The architects note that: “in Bristol the foil is filled with air so it can be reused, but on Mars it would be filled with Martian concrete made of regolith (soil) and the water found below the surface, to provide protection from galactic and solar radiation. The house has a glazed elevation, with views towards Bristol’s Princes Wharf standing in for the Martian landscape. Inside, a hydroponic living room is designed to surround occupants with plants to aid relaxation. This will feed into a circular waste water system linking the plants with the ablutions and kitchen water systems.”

The entirety of the structure can currently be seen above-ground in the Martian House’s Bristol location, so we can imagine what the underground portion would look like as well. This area would occupy lava tubes that naturally exist beneath the surface of Mars, protecting inhabitants from high levels of radiation. It contains an environmental control room that houses all life support systems for the house, two tiny bedroom pods, a shower, and a low-water “Martian loo.”

All those who interact with the project in person will be welcomed to contribute to the design of its interior components, which include everything from furniture and appliances all the way down to toothbrushes. This level of public participation turbo-charges creativity, introducing a wide range of ideas that might just help us figure out real-world solutions for our quest to populate the most promising planet in our solar system. Check out the schedule of events lasting throughout the rest of October here.

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Now, a new kind of space tourism vehicle is on the horizon. Last month, the Florida-based company Space Perspective unveiled their design for a spherical space capsule meant to ferry passengers to infinity and beyond.

Resembling something like a high-tech hot air balloon, the “Spaceship Neptune” will be the largest craft of its kind to ever fly so high, according to Space Perspective representatives. It will also boast a one-of-a-kind “splash cone” at its base to make ocean landings softer and safer, in addition to a slew of luxe amenities meant to elevate the space travel experience. A stellar room with ample windows, the capsule will allow passengers perfect panoramic views of the cosmos, while its “Space Lounge” equipped with a telescope and interactive screens makes the experience more immersive.

According to the company, the Spaceship Neptune is already under construction at the Space Perspective Shuttle Landing Facility, appropriately located at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Commercial flights are expected to begin as soon as late 2024. And while Space Neptune won’t actually reach space, it will be slightly different from the flights offered by companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, which only reach orbit briefly.

Instead, the Space Neptune’s flights will offer a more leisurely ascent to approximately 100,000 feet, giving guests out-of-this-world views of the atmosphere set against the vastness of space. From initial liftoff to splashdown, the passengers (which can include up to eight people, plus a pilot) will be treated to a relaxing and gentle ride over a total flight time of six hours. Additionally, passengers will not experience zero-gravity weightlessness during the trip, as they aren’t technically reaching space. This makes for a more comfortable and easy experience for all, and a chance to enjoy the thrill of space travel without the rigorous astronaut training.

Still, it doesn’t seem like Space Neptune’s flights will differ too much from its competitors in the way of exclusivity. After all, all space flights are expensive, and the ticket prices will likely remain firmly out of reach for people without deep pockets. However, they are significantly less than Virgin Galactic’s $450,000-per-seat price tag, currently selling for about $125,000 each. According to Space Perspective reps, almost 900 people have already purchased tickets for the trip in the balloon pod.

As more and more companies venture into space travel, more affordable space flights may soon be on the horizon, and not just for celebrity A-listers. The Arizona-based company World View is already planning a similar experience to Space Perspective for a significantly lower price tag, approximately $50,000 per seat. And while 50k is still out of reach for most of us here on the ground, with new developments in space tourism, it’s easier than ever before to envision a future when we can finally touch the sky.

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All-in-One Vertical Wall Planter

Mars Green is made of clay to emulate soil, making it easy to grow vertically. That clay is also capable of absorbing a lot of water — up to 1800 milliliters (60 ounces) at a time. And the LED light ring isn’t just decorative. It actually provides your plants with the light they need to thrive. The grow light has virtually endless programmable configurations, not just in a rainbow of hues, but also strobing, shifting, and flickering patterns (the creators claim there are 16 million options).The idea is to create a miniature self-contained habitat similar to what we might need to turn the real Mars green.

“We discovered that unglazed clay has great water absorption properties, which is how we came up with the idea to make a 3D planter as opposed to a regular pot,” the creators explain. “Many versions and a lot of trial and error led us to the perfect process to create clay that’s as fertile as soil. What makes Mars Green easy to set up and maintain is the special clay mixture and the many pores created during the baking process.”

How It Works

The red ore used as the base is rich in trace elements like iron, manganese, and potassium, which are essential to most plants’ growth. Its porosity also makes it extremely water-permeable. It’s capable of supporting many types of plants, including ferns, lichen, mosses, ivy, creeping Jenny, tillandsia, peperomia, creeping fig, and more.

Exactly how do you plant into a hard surface? There are a few different methods depending on which plants you choose. Gather ferns and spread their spores on the surface, apply powdered moss, or stick bits of lichen and seeds into the tiny cracks. Add water, and they’ll spring to life. If your plants need support growing from the vertical surface, strands of elastic cord are included.

Kickstarter backers get early-bird pricing on the Mars Green vertical wall-hanging planter, just $59 each. You can also snag two planters for $98. Orders will ship this September. When this round of crowdfunding is over, the price of each unit will rise to $99, and the designers will make the product available to the public later this year.

About the Designers

In their own words, “YAT is a team of technology enthusiasts and designers. We specialize in the development and design of highly innovative products. We love to create our space with greenery, and we’re also loyal RGB players, and we love the tech-savvy home atmosphere. In 2019, our studio moved to Dehua, where ceramic products are famous all over the world, and we learned a lot about the possibilities of clay creation. After two years of polishing, Mars Green is finally on the market, hoping that it will bring more fun to your life.”

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Calling the space photos “really gorgeous,” Jane Rigby, NASA’s Operations Project Scientist for the telescope, said: “that’s something that has been true for every image we’ve gotten with Webb. We can’t take blank sky [images]. Everywhere we look, there’s galaxies everywhere.”

The Webb telescope got its start back in 1996 under the name Next Generation Space Telescope. As an international program, NASA combined forces with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency during the following two decades of research and development. It was finally launched on Christmas Day 2021 with the goal of being the premier observatory of this decade. It’s also the largest infrared telescope currently in space.

For the first six months, the telescope’s equipment calibrated as the device glided into its halo orbit, a spot between the sun and the moon where the gravitational forces from both keep it on a specific path. Once the calibration was complete, Webb was able to send its first set of data. These are some of its biggest discoveries:

Deep Field

The first deep field captured by Webb is galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, itself a collection of thousands of galaxies. “This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours — achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks,” NASA explains. Those 12.5 hours allowed Webb to pinpoint light from one galaxy that had traveled 13.1 billion years before reaching the giant telescope’s mirrors.

Baby Stars

Webb also captured a chunk of a “stellar nursery” roughly 7,600 lightyears from Earth. Called NGC 3324, it is situated at the northwest corner of the Carina Nebula. The image shows an amazing mountain of space dust as stars begin to form. “The blistering ultraviolet radiation from the young stars is sculpting the nebula’s wall by slowly eroding it away,” NASA said in a statement. “Dramatic pillars tower above the glowing wall of gas, resisting this radiation. The ‘steam’ that appears to rise from the celestial ‘mountains’ is actually hot, ionized gas and hot dust streaming away from the nebula due to the relentless radiation.”

Star Deathbed

Webb was also able to immortalize the death of a star in the Southern Ring Nebula, with exquisite detail thanks to the mid-infrared technology.

Five Galaxies in One Image

Webb also shined its lens on a cluster of galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet, a great celestial laboratory for studying the effects galaxies have on each other. The returned picture of this area is the largest of the telescope’s images to date, with over 120 million pixels and a conglomeration of almost 1,000 separate image files. The photo is actually about one-fifth the size of the Moon’s diameter.

Puffy Giants

The telescope also took in data on WASP-96 b, a giant gas planet outside our solar system. While NASA didn’t release any pictures of this one, they did put out a spectrum analysis of the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists also found the “chemical fingerprint” of water in the swirling gas, itself an epic discovery.

The James Webb Space Telescope developers designed it to pull in images for at least five years, but they are hopeful it will last at least ten. The longevity will most likely be limited by how much fuel it takes to maintain the halo orbit around the sun. No matter how long it lasts, it’s clear the cutting-edge device is already providing us with incredible new insights into our universe.

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Using a helium balloon, a Styrofoam cooler, an extendable rod, and an Insta360 ONE X2 action camera, the students assembled a device that could reach into the limits of the Earth’s atmosphere. During that week of work, educational specialists from Hi-Impact, whose mission is to bring technology and media into the school curriculum, taught the children about how the helium in the balloon expands as the altitude increases (with most reaching a height between 60,000 and 100,000 feet above Earth). They learned how the atmospheric pressure decreases the higher it rises, finally forcing the balloon to burst. They also studied how to predict the flight path of the balloon based on wind forecasts and the size of the payload.

Based in Northern England, Hi-Impact has been visiting schools around the UK for over a decade now, teaching students to construct their own weather balloons and getting them excited about science. Their materials list has adapted over the years to provide better space flights and images of Earth. In particular, the addition of the Insta360 camera has been key to capturing awe-inspiring photos from the planet’s outer atmosphere.

“The 360-degree camera gives Hi-Impact the ability to see everything that goes on during the flight — from the excited faces at takeoff, through the rain as it passes into the clouds, and eventually the blackness of the sky and the burst of the balloon before drifting back down aided by a parachute,” explains Simon Sloan, the company’s Innovation Manager.

After the students launched this year’s balloon, it rose over 80,000 feet high over the course of two hours before popping and falling back to Earth roughly 125 miles from the launch site. The multiple trackers placed on the payload (and monitored by the students) allowed Hi-Impact to easily find the device and collect plenty of data. Thanks to its camera footage, students were even able to watch the balloon explode at the pinnacle of its climb.

While the balloon was certainly short of the 327,000 feet it takes to technically reach space, the St. Bridget’s floating camera was still able to produce professional quality photos of the full curvature of the Earth, complete with a layer of puffy clouds draped over the deep blue oceans. Plus, the Insta360 was able to withstand the extreme temperatures, which fell as low as -49 degrees Fahrenheit on this flight.

This isn’t the first year of weather balloons for St. Bridget’s, either. They began their relationship with Hi-Impact several years ago, and the students have looked forward to the annual event where Years 5 and 6 take control of the launch and run mission control. “This is always an exciting few days for the school,” St. Bridget’s administration says.

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“We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity,” says EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei. “These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very center of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.”

The Event Horizon Telescope previously made headlines in 2019 when it produced the first ever image of the event horizon of a black hole, this one at the center of the active elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (referred to as M87*). They were also seeking proof of the mysterious Sagittarius A* at the time, but were repeatedly frustrated. The Earth’s atmosphere tends to absorb the submillimeter radio waves the telescope uses to capture its images, and all the gas and dust in between our planet and Sagittarius A* can blur any results.

Even more challenging is the fact that as black holes go, Sagittarius A* is weak. Black holes feed from material around them, like gas clouds, asteroids, and stars, but just a trickle of material is seen making it all the way into Sagittarius A*.

“The gas in the vicinity of the black holes moves at the same speed—nearly as fast as light—around both Sgr A* and M87*,” says EHT scientist Chi-kwan Chan, from Steward Observatory and Department of Astronomy and the Data Science Institute of the University of Arizona, USA. “But where gas takes days to weeks to orbit the larger M87*, in the much smaller Sgr A* it completes an orbit in mere minutes. This means the brightness and pattern of the gas around Sgr A* was changing rapidly as the EHT Collaboration was observing it—a bit like trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail.”

Exactly why Sagittarius A* is taking in gas so slowly is still a mystery, but take its “weakness” relative to other black holes with a grain of salt. It still has a mass approximately 4.3 million times the mass of our sun, according to Nobel Prize-winning research led by Andrea Ghez, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Event Horizon Telescope team is made up of more than 300 researchers across 80 institutions. Their images are made possible by a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, which allows astronomers to combine data from radio telescopes across the world as if they were one big telescope. When the images of Messier 87* and Sagittarius A* were captured, the network consisted of eight telescopes, but three more have since been added.

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Not many people outside Nvidia’s employees will ever be able to get the full experience, but CNET got an exclusive tour of the interiors that gives us a pretty good idea of what it would be like to work there. A walkway lined with trees and shaded with solar panels leads from the Endeavor to the Voyager, and just inside the entrance, you’ll see what looks like a series of jagged mountain-shaped structures inside the main envelope of the building. A stairway scales the central “mountain,” which is where employees meet up and work.

Climb to the top of that mountain, and you can gaze out at the interior landscape of seating areas covered with pergolas to shield them from the afternoon sun. White multi-level mezzanines on either side contain more conventional office spaces. Grasses, vines, and shrubs spill out of long built-in planters that cover virtually every surface of this space, including a sizable green wall. Triangular skylights overhead allow daylight to pierce the roof and keep the plants happy.

At the peak of the mountain is a faceted black structure meant to evoke the image of an abstracted volcano. Inside this “caldera” is a long live-edge wooden table for meetings. As you climb down the back, you see more seating areas, conference tables, and an amphitheater where employees watch presentations. Outside the Voyager but beneath the “trellis” (a canopy covered in solar panels), employees enjoy elevated “bird nest” areas to meet and lounge. These circular enclosures contain sculptural benches, café tables, and an open roof that floods the space with sunlight. Four acres of garden separate the Voyager from the Endeavor.

It’s an unusual design, but Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang wanted a building that gave every employee a view. All offices face outside windows, and employees can choose to work anywhere on campus, not just at stationary desks. The plans were launched well before the pandemic began, but now that the campus is complete, Nvidia sees it as a worthwhile investment. Sure, a lot of employees are choosing to work from home, but if you want to draw your employees back to the office, a gorgeous design like this one is a great way to do it.

If you haven’t seen inside the Endeavor, it’s pretty worth checking out. Architecture firm Gensler designed it around a glass-enclosed elevator core that whisks employees up from an underground parking lot and into a faceted black metal “cocoon” that forms the heart of the building. Just like the Voyager, the Endeavor features a multitude of skylights.

“We worked hard to get the right specifications of glass makeup to allow us the right quality of diffused and soft sunlight in the space,” says Hao Ko, principal and managing director at Gensler. “The final result — where the daylighting is evenly dispersed throughout and evenly experienced by everyone — is a testament to the upfront work we did in design.”

Check out the full tour of the new Voyager building over at CNET.

The post Nvidia’s Voyager HQ Seduces WFH Employees Back with a Dazzling Design first appeared on Dornob.

Founded in 2018, Bosie is a Gen Z-oriented brand aimed at “constantly exploring fashion that is suitable for both men and women. Through retro childlike fun and unique products, we can break the shackles and boundaries and show the innocence, seriousness, freedom, and romance of adults.” The Huaihai Road store is their 27th retail location and the fifth to be designed by Leaping Creative, but it’s certainly the most noteworthy of them all.

“The retail trend in China nowadays is day by day focusing on offering an exciting and fresh shopping experience. By working closely with the brand founder, we approached the design by defining the actual customer expectations for a shopping destination,” adds Zen Zheng, the Design Director of Leaping Creative.

And what is it that Gen Z wants? Novel experiences that take you on a journey. Bosie isn’t just a clothing store — it’s also a supermarket, ice cream café, pet supply store, and multimedia museum. The clothing isn’t categorized by gender or even type of garment. The displays are a lot more fluid than that, following particular moods and themes. As shoppers wind their way through the new flagship location, they’ll find a Jetsons-like setting designed to make them feel like they’re traveling through space and time.

The design embraces a slightly retro-futuristic vision of space travel. Reflective stainless steel sheets and lots of glass frame minimalist clothing displays and oversized decor, including an installation resembling a rocket engine. At the entrance, two semicircular glass elevator shafts have been modified into floor-to-ceiling LCD screens playing Bosie lifestyle content to draw passersby inside. A set of spiral stairs shaped like a UFO lead to the escalators. Conveyor belts, capsule-shaped fitting rooms labeled “no gender border,” and porthole windows add to the effect.

Even the restrooms, water dispenser, and vending machines look like they came from a 1970s sci-fi movie. Upstairs, the Bosie brand mascot, a goose, is reinvented as a 17-foot-long fiberglass machine. There’s a pet hotel so shoppers can drop off or interact with dogs and cats, and a photo booth labeled “Time Machine.”

The mannequins don astronaut helmets, and accessories are displayed in a high-tech laboratory-style environment. All of these elements come together to produce exactly the kind of space young people flock to for TikTok content, drawing even more attention to Bosie, which is quickly becoming a cult favorite. It’s a great example of what we can expect to see from retail design over the next decade as more brands embrace the idea of shopping as an interactive experience.

The post Bosie’s New Shanghai Store is a Space-Themed Interactive Experience first appeared on Dornob.

In a 17-year-long collection he calls “Hubble? No! Satellite? No!,” the 62-year-old Juha Tanhua turns interesting-looking gasoline puddles into an array of shimmering comets, nebulas, and galaxies that look very much like the real things. It all started in 2005, when on assignment as a photo journalist, he noticed a pretty pattern pooling beneath his feet.

“When I was parking my car in Fellman Park in Lahti City (southern Finland) to take some photos to the newspaper, I noticed that next to my car there was an oil spill on the asphalt and it looked a little bit like northern lights,” Tanhua told My Modern Met. “I took a couple of photos and forgot the whole thing. Months later, I found that photo again and began walking in parking lots after rain to take pictures of these oil spills.”

“I named them oil paintings,” he adds, “because it looked like artworks under cars.”

At first, Tanhua wanted to faithfully represent each puddle he found with minimal editing, but over the years he has experimented with adjustments to the contrast, shadows, and highlights to bring his celestial doppelgangers to life. He notes that “when I shoot against black asphalt and underexpose the image, the rocks on the asphalt turn into stars.” Tanhua’s editing work is so convincing that the viewer immediately sees interstellar clouds and red quasars instead of gasoline and tire marks.

The natural elements also play their part in creating these beautiful galactic scenes. Rain acts as a brush that “paints the artwork,” creating intriguing organic streaks and designs.

While the photographer notes that “Lapland is the perfect place to take photos of galaxies, nebulas, and other space objects because there is really not much light pollution,” he prefers the view below to a telescopic vista. “I don’t look up, but down,” he says. “It’s not space above us; it’s space under our feet. You can find subjects to photograph even in dull places like parking lots. Expect nothing, get everything.”

Tanhua’s work is a testament to the wealth of artistic inspiration in even the most commonplace settings. “I found a microcosm under parked cars,” he says.

Tanhua got his start in photography at age 15, when his father returned from a trip to Japan and gifted him an Olympus 35 DC compact model camera. After beginning an apprenticeship in 1979 at a local photography studio, Tanhua began a career in journalism. Today he works as a freelance photographer, having created 10 solo exhibitions over the past few decades. His works are on permanent display at the Finnish National Gallery and Lahti Art Museum. He currently resides in the small village of Vuolenkoski, in the south of Finland.

His full collection of “space” photos is available to view on his website.

The post Juha Tanhua’s Oil Spill Photos Reveal Hidden Galaxies first appeared on Dornob.