Frank Gehry will be behind the new addition to Facebook’s Menlo Park campus. You may know Gehry as the guy who built the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A.

Gehry, who is known for his ability to create beautiful yet functional spaces, will bring that talent to the new Engineering building. Facebook says that it will be able to house 3,400 employees when completed.

“It will be a large, one room building that somewhat resembles a warehouse. Just like we do now, everyone will sit out in the open with desks that can be quickly shuffled around as teams form and break apart around projects. There will be cafes and lots of micro-kitchens with snacks so that you never have to go hungry. And we’ll fill the building with break-away spaces with couches and whiteboards to make getting away from your desk easy,” says Everett Katigbak, Facebook’s Environmental Design Manager.

The outside will feature an eco-friendly space filled with trees and a rooftop garden on top of the structure.

Employees will be able to travel between the current campus and the expansion via underground tunnel (cool).

Facebook says they plan to break ground on the addition in early 2013.

Stone Spray is a 3D printing system that combines sand and soil to build architectural designs. The project is headed by a group of students at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. While you could build a killer sandcastle with the technology, it’s far more ambitious than that. They hope to one day construct buildings and bridges using the material.

Their ambitions may just be realized, and soon, thanks to the materials they use. It only uses sand and soil, but the resulting combination is as strong as concrete. It also has one trump card that other 3D printing systems have yet to implement. It can print in multiple directions so complex designs are entirely possible.

Like all ambitious 3D printing projects, this is still in the small object stage. They can’t start implementing the technology on a large scale just yet, but it’s coming. Just like Contour Crafting, Stone Spray may help build houses in low-income communities and third-world countries. By eliminating the risk posed by regular construction and requiring only the energy created by solar panels, we might just have the first renewable construction system on our hands.

Check out Stone Spray in action below. It can already build awesome sand sculptures.

Stone Spray Project from Stone Spray on Vimeo.

[h/t: Tree Hugger]

[Image Credit]

Mies was born in 1886, and began his architectural career in 1908 when he became an apprentice at the studio of Peter Behrens. There, he worked side by side with other modern architecture pioneers Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. In the 1930s, he worked as the last director of the Bauhaus, the “German School of Building” that was actually opened by Gropius.

In 1937, he came to the United States and wast tapped to head the architecture department at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He worked from Chicago for his whole 31-year career in America. Here’s what the IIT has to say about his vision, on his birthday:

Mies van der Rohe believed that architecture should expressed the essence of its civilization – that the same things guiding our lives should build our homes, museums and offices. His buildings speak to our hope for simplicity, shaping our lived environment, and in doing so, illuminating life itself. Today we celebrate this legacy.

Today’s Google Doodle is modeled after one of his most famous buildings – Crown Hall. It is currently the home to the College of Architecture at his beloved IIT. The building encapsulates Mies’ style – a 220′ by 120′ rectangle with a sparse steel frame and glass panes. The top floor is one giant space, what he called a “universal space.”

It was completed in 1956 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

Google’s remedied that problem (to an extent) with the addition of 45° views to 24 cities (14 in the United States, 7 throughout the rest of the world) that give you a much more recognizable view of the cityscapes. With this new 45° imagery, Maps users can now see the architecture of buildings with much more stunning detail. For instance, let’s compare the 45° and 90° views of Ulm Minster, a Gothic cathedral in Ulm, Germany. Here it is seen at 90°:

And here it is in greater splendor (at the same magnification) at 45°:

The difference in quality is jarring. Like, how did any of us make any functional use of Google Maps in that 90° rendering? The beauty and depth of that cathedral is breath-taking in the 45° angle, whereas that 90° angle looks like the remains of some boot-squashed techno-beetle.

You can still toggle between 45° and 90° via the menu in the upper-right corner (but after demonstrating the dramatic difference above, why would you want to?). Google seems to know that you will want to primarily use the 45° view because if a city is included in the update, the satellite view will automatically switch to the 45° view once you’ve zoomed in far enough. Also, before you get ahead of yourself, you won’t be able to orbit around objects – you only get one 45° view of cities.

Satellite view on Maps, have to zoom in so far before it automatically toggles to 90 degree to 45 degree view. You can adjust this in the options menu that hangs in the upper-right corner of the map.

For instance, this is you flying over Baiona, Spain:

View Larger Map

This is you flying over Ulm, Germany:

View Larger Map

Here’s Memphis, TN – try to find Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel:

View Larger Map

If this is the direction that Google Maps is going with their their near-earth satellite views, then I can’t until they’re able to expand the imagery to cover the rest of the planet.

In other words, cue the intense music because researchers at Yale think it’s only a matter of time before people are able to use lucid dreams to not just learn abilities but possibly invade the dreams of others.

According to The Daily Mail, Yale researcher Robert Morgan thinks these regions of the brain can be accessed for improved social control and decision-making. “We know that by engaging circuits in the brain we can change its architecture,” Morgan says. The Daily Mail continues:

Being in command of dreams opens up opportunities to manipulate them for learning and training – although it may not be quite as precise as learning to play the violin while asleep. Instead, ‘lucid dreamers’ can control areas of their brain to open up and ‘learn’ while they sleep. What’s more, it seems that merely being a lucid dreamer seems to give you an advantage.

So as the subtitle above suggests, take a hint from Mr. Jack Donaghy:

Because the next time you doze off on a plane you may wake up with a stirring hunger for some kung-fu robbery. Be careful, readers.

And according to L.A. Times Architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, it will be a “retrograde cocoon.”

In a piece published over the weekend, Hawthorne discusses his perceived problems with the expansive new campus. He uses Steve Job’s proclamation that the new building would be “like a spaceship landed” to criticize the proposed campus as “doggedly old-fashioned.”

Though the planned building has a futuristic gleam — Jobs told the council “it’s a little like a spaceship landed” — in many ways it is a doggedly old-fashioned proposal, recalling the 1943 Pentagon building as well as much of the suburban corporate architecture of the 1960s and ’70s. And though Apple has touted the new campus as green, its sprawling form and dependence on the car make a different argument.

Not only is he critical of the design and the implied anti-green effects of the new campus, but he also criticizes the Cupertino city council for not pressing Jobs enough on the details behind the new project.

At Jobs’ initial proposal, the city council appeared giddy with excitement. This led to a lot of chatter about their “fanboy” reactions to Jobs. Hawthorne asks why the council didn’t press Jobs about the actual architect behind the project. He discusses Jobs’ tight-lipped practices when it comes to design, saying –

In his appearance before the City Council he said Apple had “hired some great architects to work with — some of the best in the world, I think.” But he never mentioned the high-wattage name of Norman Foster or the London firm Foster + Partners, whose logo is stamped on the preliminary plans for the campus. (Those plans are available for download on Cupertino’s website, cupertino.org.)

It is a measure of Jobs’ tight grip on Apple’s reputation for in-house design innovation that even after hiring a celebrity architect like Foster he would keep that architect’s name under wraps; even now, three months after Jobs took the plans public in that council meeting, the Apple press office refuses to confirm that Foster + Partners indeed designed the project.

You can see Job’s proposal and the council’s reaction in this video -

In a nutshell, Hawthorne’s criticism is that the new campus “wraps its workers in a suburban setting,” away from the connection of the city. The new campus can be described as isolated and disengaged from civic space. Does the city council’s “enthusiasm” for the new project serve as a promotion of a “car-dependent approach to city and regional planning” that was good in the 70′s, but not so good anymore?

It’s all about connection, or in this case, the lack therof -

Still, the new Apple campus, which the company describes as “a serene and secure environment” for its employees, keeps itself aloof from the world around it to a degree that is unusual even in a part of California dominated by office parks. The proposed building is essentially one very long hallway connecting endlessly with itself.

What do you think? Does a huge suburban campus like the one proposed by Apple promote isolation?

Read more about the actual plans at cupertino.org.

The Cathedral, which sits in Moscow’s Red Square, has been part of the Kremlin and Red Square UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990. It was begun in 1555 at the behest of Ivan the Terrible and completed in 1561, and is celebrating its 450th anniversary.

Here’s how it is described on its official site, saintbasil.ru -

It is for nearly 450 years now that this architectural ensemble of inimitable beauty and grandeur has been filling our hearts with joy, excitement and pride.

The Cathedral of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God upon the Moat was built in fulfillment of a vow made by Czar Ivan the Terrible before his campaign against Kazan in 1552 and with the blessing of Metropolitan Makary. The cathedral was constructed under the supervision of Russian master builders Postnik and Barma in 1555-1561. Uniquely conceived by Metropolitan Makary, the cathedral was to epitomize the image of the Holy City of Jerusalem.

As a result, its nine churches, most of which were consecrated in memory of major events of the victorious Kazan campaign, were built on a single foundation.

It has been secularized and now operates as a state museum.

Here’s a photo from Wikipedia -

And here’s an awesome Lego version -

Also, here’s some YouTube video from inside the cathedral -

What do you think of today’s St. Basil’s Google Doodle? How does it rate in comparison to other recent Google Doodles? Let us know what you think.