Stone Spray ~ Additive Manufacturing In Sand ;-)

ML crony Birago Jones spots Stone Spray!

Casa Planells ~ Jujol's Barcelona Masterpiece!

Catalan architect and Gaudí collaborator, Josep Maria Jujol, designed the stunning Casa Planells in 1922 at 332 de l'Avinguda Diagonal in the Eixample district of Barcelona!

Madrid Río ~ NYTimes Spots Urban Greenspace

Nice NYTimes piece by Michael Kimmelman on the Madrid Río -- In Madrid’s Heart, Park Blooms Where a Freeway Once Blighted...

"More than six miles long, it transforms a formerly neglected area in the middle of Spain’s capital. Its creation, in four years, atop a complex network of tunnels dug to bury an intrusive highway, also rejuvenates a long-lost stretch of the Manzanares River, and in so doing knits together neighborhoods that the highway had cut off from the city center. All around the world, highways are being torn down and waterfronts reclaimed; decades of thinking about cars and cities reversed; new public spaces created. [...] But Madrid Río is a project whose audacity and scale, following the urban renewal successes of Barcelona, Spain’s civic trendsetter, can bring to a New Yorker’s mind the legacy of the street-grid plan, which this year celebrates its 200th anniversary. That’s because the park belongs to a larger transformation that includes the construction of dozens of new metro and light-rail stations that link far-flung, disconnected and often poor districts on Madrid’s outskirts to downtown."

Very compelling! Plus check out photos by James Rajotte. And DotEarthling Andrew Revkin weighs in, noting how Madrid Joins Cities Replacing Concrete With Greenery and spots this Madrid Río promo...

Floating Solutions ~ Flexible Heavy-Lift Action...

I've written before about floating hospital ships, Shell's ginormous LNG processing ship, floatable power plants, and other flexible infrastructure (including lots of containerized stuff) and even a jail. Here's some new additions to the list! First, NEAPO's float-in three-storey apartment block built at Turku Shipyard and transferred in one go by water to the island of Hirvensalo, Finland... To build the Snøhvit LNG processing facility in the remote northern Barents Sea, Norway's Statoil commissioned the liquefaction plant from a Spanish engineering firm and floated it via heavy-lift to the Melkøya Island off Hammerfest... Perhaps the most (in)famous example of this is American billionaire Daniel Ludwig's Project Jari, shifting a Japanese-made paper pulp mill around the world and up the Amazon to a Brazilian wood plantation! Here'a a more recent example on a personal scale in this BBC Horizons show on Innovations on water featuring Dutch architect Marlies Rohmer and her waterfront development. Each of the dozens of apartments "floats" are made in a shipyard.