Your Afternoon Time-Lapse Video Fix

As much as we love to read around here–and even though we rely on the printed word (and the e-printed word, or whatever you want to call it) for our livelihoods–by some Friday afternoons, we’ve reached our limit; it’s all we can do to drag our text-saturated eyeballs across another line of type. If you’re […]

As much as we love to read around here–and even though we rely on the printed word (and the e-printed word, or whatever you want to call it) for our livelihoods–by some Friday afternoons, we’ve reached our limit; it’s all we can do to drag our text-saturated eyeballs across another line of type. If you’re feeling about the same–and a quick nap isn’t an option–then perhaps a video diversion will help. And we think we have just the thing: a collection of time-lapse architecture videos from around the Web.

(Thanks to Metropolis’s Criswell Lappin–who, by the way, recently celebrated his tenth anniversary as creative director–for sharing the first two examples.)

Sam O’Hare’s The Sandpit has been all over the Web recently, and it’s no wonder–it’s an amazing portrait of a miniaturized-looking Manhattan, stitched together from 35,000 still photographs. (To get the full effect, you should really watch the HD version on Vimeo.)
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Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a story on a $2.5 million “modular mansion” assembled on a Bethesda, Maryland, lot in a mere 32 hours. (Because when you pay $2.5 million for a house, you want it done fast.) Here’s the time-lapse record.
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And here’s Frank Gehry’s Serpentine Pavilion coming together in 2008–accompanied by the composition Frank’s Build, assembled by Simon Fisher Turner from audio recorded at the construction site.
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This is just depressing.
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This last one is only vaguely architecture-related, but we couldn’t resist: in 1999, an unlucky employee of Business Week named Nicholas White went out for an evening smoke break and, on the way back to his desk, got stuck in one of the building’s elevators–for 41 hours. The entire ordeal was captured by security camera. You can learn more in this 2008 New Yorker story–that is, if your eyeballs are ready to get back to work.
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