Architecture

Geometric Shapes /  by Reuben Hernandez

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While Interviewing Cherie Blair last week, I looked out the window and saw this

Matera, Italy /  by Reuben Hernandez

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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 /  by Reuben Hernandez

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Old stuff, since 495 B.C.

/  by Katherine Yaksich

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 .

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.