Michael Silverberg

An interactive drone installation planned for the London Design Festival in September has been canceled, the project’s sponsor, Swarovski, said in a statement, citing concerns over the ”safety of members of the public in close proximity to the drones.” The Drone Aviary would have taken over the Victoria and Albert Museum’s garden with a swarm of a dozen or so drones covered in Swarovski crystals, “offering the public a chance to interact with ‘semi-autonomous’ creatures,” according to a now-removed description of the project from the festival’s site. “This would have been the first time that drone technology has interacted with the public in a museum setting,” Swarovski said in the statement.

There must be something in the water. With the launch last week of an Indiegogo campaign for City Beach NYC, a group in New York City now has a plan for a floating crowdfunded artificial beach to go along with the floating crowdfunded artificial pool already proposed in 2011.

This post has been updated.

The Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí would have turned 162 last week, but his peculiar Gothic surrealism is once again contemporary, seen in the creeping organic forms of today’s computer-assisted starchitects. The Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona was his masterpiece, even though it was less than a quarter finished when he was struck and killed by a tram in 1926. Current plans to complete it set the end date at 2026 or 2028, depending on whom you ask.

The University of Stuttgart’s Institute for Computational Design has built an ultra-thin exhibition hall that showcases the technical possibilities of computational design and robot-fabricated structures. It also looks like a giant peanut.

As an insurgency threatens to drag Iraq back into sectarian civil war, plans are still underway to build a vast new $1-billion parliamentary complex in Baghdad. The well-known London-based, Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid has been tapped to design a 2.7-million-square-foot building on the 49-acre site, even though her proposal—which remains secret—came in third in the international architecture competition.

The Moscow city government is asking citizens to weigh in on the fate of the Shukhov radio tower, a rusted icon of Soviet constructivist architecture that’s threatened with demolition. Designed by Vladimir Shukhov, the 92-year-old steel-lattice structure has been called Russia’s Eiffel Tower, but years of official neglect have left it badly in need of repairs.

When a big organization rebrands itself, it’s usually a big undertaking. The whole process of conceiving and implementing a new design can take many months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the end of that, you’d think the last thing they’d want is to give away the design.

Two years before Apple’s new spaceship-like campus lands, the 2.8-million-square-foot site in Cupertino, California, is still mostly a big pile of dirt. But that dirt pile is getting shapelier by the day, as the foundation is laid and preparations begin for constructing the building proper.

When a fire ripped through the Glasgow School of Art on May 23, it destroyed part of the Mackintosh Building, a beloved, world-renowned landmark designed by the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. As smoke billowed from the century-old structure, students, teachers, and alumni stood outside and wept.

From Venice to New York, the world has no shortage of art biennales and triennales. But Oita, a medium-sized manufacturing city in the southwest of Japan, hopes to make its mark next summer as the host of the first Toilennale—an arts festival celebrating toilets.

This October is the 20th birthday of Comic Sans, perhaps the most hated typeface in the world. Rather than celebrating, many people will mark the anniversary by wishing that the childish-yet-ubiquitous font would just go away.

The publishing industry isn’t alone in thinking that the entire continent of Africa looks just like The Lion King. Last night, after the US national soccer team’s 2-1 World Cup win over Ghana, Delta tweeted this photo, with the Statue of Liberty representing the US and a giraffe on the savannah standing in for Ghana:

In Canada, haunting is big business. The Retail Council of Canada estimates that Canadians spend about C$1.5 billion ($1.4 billion) on Halloween every year, more per capita than Americans. Since 2010, the industry has even had its own annual conference, the Canadian Haunted Attractions Convention.

The last few months have seen sci-fi thinking applied to the most pedestrian of designs: pavement. To replace streetlights, the Netherlands is testing glow-in-the-dark highways painted with a “photo-luminizing” powder that charges during the day and glows a Tron-like green at night (though apparently not in the rain). Meanwhile, an Idaho couple has raised over $2 million on Indiegogo for their almost certainly quixotic dream to turn every blacktop in America into a giant solar cell.

Fred Phelps died in March, but the group he founded, the Westboro Baptist Church, is still picketing funerals. The US group often shows up at memorial services for soldiers or gay victims of hate crimes, armed with signs bearing horrific messages including ”God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” The poster designs are crude but effective, like a warped reading of Leviticus produced by the Colby Poster Printing Co. ”We aren’t about being ‘cryptic,'” a Westboro spokesman told an interviewer from the Walker Art Center.

Fellow fans will probably agree with writer Teju Cole’s description of the World Cup as ”beauty in epic form.” But what about all the World Cup viewers who will be parachuting into the drama mid-epic? Imagine picking up the Odyssey just as Odysseus returns home to Ithaca, or diving into Beowulf after Grendel’s death but before his mother shows up. How can newcomers hope to catch up on the serpentine back-stories, closely guarded heartaches, and blood rivalries without getting lost?

Since it debuted in 2005, Guitar Hero has lured tens of millions of videogamers with rock ‘n’ roll fantasies. But let’s say your daydreams are less Flying V and more flying veery—you’d rather look through the binoculars of Peter Winter, once ranked the world’s top birder by the American Birding Association, than feel the weight of Tony Iommi’s or Carrie Brownstein’s guitar strap. Then Bird Song Hero, a new interactive site from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is the game for you.

The National Football League announced on Wednesday that the Super Bowl, the American sports world’s annual tribute to Spartacus and capitalism, is abandoning its gladiatorial pretensions. While this year’s game was Super Bowl XLVIII and next year’s will be Super Bowl XLIX, the 2016 game will drop Roman numerals from its logo—it’ll be Super Bowl 50, not Super Bowl L.

Struggling to open a jar is one of life’s more ridiculous indignities. But for people who are elderly or disabled, the ordeal can be a real and daily frustration. Why can’t jars be just a little easier to open?

This post has been revised and updated with comment from a Twitter spokesperson.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially began yesterday, and the storms, as they do every year, will alternate between male and female names, drawn from lists created by the National Weather Service. This season, look out for Hurricanes Cristobal, Edouard, and Teddy—and especially Hurricanes Dolly, Bertha, and Fay.

Over the past year, the secret US government documents that Edward Snowden disclosed have been cascading through the pages of newspapers and magazines around the world. But could the next chapter of the story play out in the halls of a museum?

Back in 2000, an architectural lighting designer from Pula, Croatia, had an idea: What if the shipyard cranes that loomed over the port city’s industrial waterfront could be turned into shape-shifting monuments?