While Interviewing Cherie Blair last week, I looked out the window and saw this
Architecture
Matera, Italy /
Matera is a town built into caves using negative architecture and one of the oldest and continuously inhabited human settlements in the world. It was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its underground cistern and water collection system. The main cistern has a water capacity of five million liters and took over 200 years to dig/carve out of the rock!
Athens /
Old stuff, since 495 B.C.
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House made of 6 shipping containers & insulated with NASA ceramic infused paint. Pure genius (Taken with instagram)
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The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic was designed to withstand a nuclear bomb and, in the event of an apocalypse, act as a Noah’s Ark for plants. It was designed to be a a beacon, a symbol of hope looking out over the over the Barents Sea. Built in 2008 by the Norwegian government (for $9 million), it houses 526,000 samples of seeds; scientists hope these might be interbred in order to adapt global agriculture to climate change, thereby averting mass starvation. The vault extends 146m into the sandstone mountain; at the end, there are three airlocked refrigerated caverns with space to preserve up to 4.5 million strains of plants. Full story here.