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Empire State Building

New York

Watch the Empire State Building Dance to Alicia Keys

By Caroline Stanley on

If you happened to be gazing at the Empire State Building last night, say around 9pm, then you probably noticed that it looked a bit more lively than it normally does. Don’t worry, you weren’t hallucinating from Cyber Monday-induced stress. What you were seeing was actually the iconic landmark’s first-ever light show — synched to Alicia Keys’ “Girl on Fire” and “Empire State of Mind” — courtesy of the building’s new Philips Color Kinetics LED lighting system. As Mashable reports, “The new system has lighting capabilities from more than 16 million colors, along with effects such as ripples, cross-fades, sparkles, chasers, sweeps, strobes, and bursts.” Sounds impressive, right? Click through to see video footage of the view from across the river in Hoboken, then let us know in the comments: What song would you like to see the Empire State Building dance to next? … Read More

Architecture

Fascinating Construction Photos of World Famous Buildings and Bridges

By Claire Cottrell on

After spotting these vintage photographs of the construction of the Empire State Building, we got to thinking about one of the reasons why great architecture is so much more than a work of art you can walk through: it’s awfully complicated to create. Explaining the poetic importance of the field, Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest American architect of all time, made a lofty statement, claiming that “the mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”

If there’s one thing that these photos of grand buildings and bridges under construction confirms, it’s that being defined as the soul of humanity is well deserved. From the seemingly magical emergence of the Eiffel Tower to the eerie drama of an incomplete Brooklyn Bridge, click through to see the fascinating documentation of some of the world’s most famous designs as they’re being built. … Read More