“Mini Forests”, Wooden Lego, and Poets Responding To The News

I bring you the finest reading material every week in my Linkfest

Clive Thompson
10 min readJun 17, 2022

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Infinity roof, by Archi-Union Architects

Friday!

The week is nearly done.

And so, thus, are you.

Stop working, folks. You can pretend to toil while you flip open dozens of tabs, filled with the Internetal delights of my weekly Linkfest — the best online reading, collected by moi pour vous.

1) ♾️ The “infinity roof” of Daoming Town

Daoming Town in Sichuan Province, China, has this spellbinding building: A pavilion with a figure-eight “infinity roof” covered in ceramic tiles (photo above).

The province is known for its historic tradition of bamboo weaving, and the building was done in homage to that. As Colossal writes …

Constructed in just 52 days back in 2018, the multi-use pavilion stretches 1,800 square meters and contains space for exhibitions, gatherings, and dining. The steel and wood structure supports a twisting, infinity-shaped roof of small ceramic tiles, which slopes down near a reflective pool at the center of the building.

Evoking the brushstroke of a traditional Chinese landscape painting and situated amongst a bamboo forest, the Mobius-style design is meant to capture the relationships between interior and exterior and heritage and innovation. “The new definition offered for traditional paradigms and the rethinking of rural and urban issues provide a lens for thinking about the meaning of architecture in the present time,” said lead architect Philip F. Yuan.

I’d love to visit this sometime! More photos at that Colossal post.

2) 🧱 Making Lego bricks from wood

The Ruiz Brothers have put together a guide for milling Lego bricks from wood. As they write …

This project shows you how to turn scraps of wood into wooden building bricks. These wooden building bricks are LEGO compatible, so they can be used in LEGO builds and…

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Clive Thompson

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net