One man's amazing folly - Jim Bishop's homemade castle

Jim Bishop is an extraordinary chap. Despite having no training in architecture, stonemasonry, bricklaying, carpentry, ironworking, glass-cutting, floor-laying or any other skill associated with the building trade, he's built himself a castle.

Jim started construction of Bishop Castle, as it's called, on a plot of land in Southern Colorado, in 1969 and has laid every stone and shaped every plank himself. The building boasts an impressive and cathedral-like Ballroom and a tower over 160ft (49m) tall linked to the rest of the structure by pair of scary-looking aerial walkways. It's now a popular tourist destination with over 600,000 visitors a year and entry is free. Bishop is just happy to let people enjoy it. Weddings are now staged there.

In the mid 1980's, a friend of Bishop's was driving a truck full of discarded stainless steel warming plates from the Pueblo County Hospital to the landfill. He decided that Jim could probably put it to better use and so dropped it off. Bishop spent the winter building a chimney out of the steel, riveting thousands of hammered scales that he cut out of the plates to a metal frame. The resulting dragon is now perched over the Grand Ballroom and the addition of a burner from a hot air balloon (another donation) allows the dragon to genuinely breathe fire.

(Photo Texas Tongs)

There was a time when, all over the UK, people built follies. Many have now become beloved tourist attractions. Sadly, those days are gone with restrictive planning regulations and an army of NIMBY types insisting that nothing be built that is curious, odd or eccentric. At least in much larger countries like America you can still do this kind of thing. And the country is all the richer for people like Jim Bishop.

Official site.

A better use for The Shard?

The future of urban farming is under construction in Sweden as agricultural design firm Plantagon works to bring a 12-year-old vision to life: The city of Linköping will soon be home to a 17-story "vertical greenhouse."

The greenhouse will serve as a regenerating food bank, tackling urban sprawl while making the city self-sufficient. Plantagon predicts that growing these plants in the city will make food production less costly both for the environment and for consumers, a key shift as the world's population grows increasingly urban—80 percent of the world's residents will live in cities by 2050, the United Nations estimates. "Essentially, as urban sprawl and lack of land will demand solutions for how to grow industrial volumes in the middle of the city, solutions on this problem have to focus on high yield per ground area used, lack of water, energy, and air to house carbon dioxide," Plantagon CEO Hans Hassle says.



The greenhouse is a conical glass building that uses an internal "transportation helix" to carry potted vegetables around on conveyors. As plants travel around the helix, they rotate for maximum sun exposure. Hassle says the building will use less energy than a traditional greenhouse, take advantage of "spillage heat" energy companies cannot sell, digest waste to produce biogas and plant fertilizers, and decrease carbon dioxide emissions while eliminating the environmental costs of long-distance transportation. And growing plants in a controlled environment will decrease the amount of water, energy, and pesticides needed.
The greenhouse, which will open in late 2013, is already serving as a model for other cities—Plantagon hopes to install the transportation helix technology in regular office buildings around the world, eliminating the need to build entirely new structures. The tallest models even have a name: Plantascrapers.



Check out Plantagon's YouTube Channel for more great videos of their designs.

Source: Julie Ma at Good Environment