Some of the best ideas are born in the bar and now a group of architects seem to have turned to the bottom of a bottle for inspiration.
Croatian architects Entasis won a competition to design new towers in Zagreb, with an eye-catching design featuring two leaning towers and two straight towers in clusters.
Local stirrers have renamed the 1+1 project the Drunk Towers because they look like drunks leaning on a lamp post.
Perhaps the project was born after a pub session got creative?
The towers will be 145m high and are slated for completion by 2011 if the approval process goes to plan.
Russia has scrapped plans to build an eye-catching 600m tower designed by Lord Foster and might replace it with a car park.
Russia Tower was planned for Moscow and would have been the world's tallest naturally ventilated building but has been axed due to the financial crisis.
France's first eco-motorway and biggest road infrastructure project to date has been finished following 4 million man hours put in by more than 8000 workers.
The 101km A19 Artenay-Courtenay was completed this week, four months ahead of schedule.
Linking the A10, A6 and A77, it will complete the outer bypass of the greater Paris region.
It is the country's most eco-friendly road thanks to steps taken to prevent any water running off the motorway without being treated first.
To achieve this, the road has 107 run-off treatment basins as well as animal crossings and lots of trees to suck up that carbon dioxide.
Apart from its environmental credentials, the project is also being praised for its record fast completion.
It took just four years to get it up and running from the signing of the concession contract, which concessionaire Arcour claims shows how effective its operator-designer-builder business model is.
Below is a clip of the road's completely bizarre launch, which included line dancing, a giant inflatable giraffe, the Blues Brothers, a man making fire from a stick and donkeys.
Nothing says j'aime la France like some boot scootin' Blues Brothers (hoping my Babelfish worked with that one).
American artist Mike Bouchet has proved why house building should be left to the professionals with his entry into the Venice Biennale of modern art (see video link below).
Good old Mike decided to bring a bit of suburbia to Venice in the form of an ugly American house.
But it seemed his construction skills weren't up to scratch and Venice's infamous rising waters claimed the floating house in a matter of minutes once it was towed into place.
Australia's tubby tradesmen will be encouraged to swap their sausage sarnies for salads under a Federal Government initiative to tune-up their health.
Amid concerns the tradies are getting too fat and have higher levels of obesity than office workers, a government-funded van will roam worksites to monitor weight, cholesterol, blood pressure and blood glucose.
The tradies will get a card stating how healthy they are and how they might be able to improve - a few less cans after knock-off Friday, perhaps?
Aussie health minister Nicola Roxon explained: 'Just as utes, vans and trucks need regular tune-ups to keep them functioning at maximum efficiency, so do men require the same tune-ups.'
Hahahaha! Good luck finding fat chippies - most of them have been laid off because of the recession.
In what sounds like the stuff of sci-fi fantasy, engineers have proposed building a dome over the US city of Houston in Texas.
Covering 1.9 million square metres and the city's entire downtown core - including skyscrapers - the dome would help solve the city's environmental problems and protect it for the future.
Houston is regularly at the mercy of sweltering summer temperatures, high humidity and was battered by hurricane Ike last year.
Engineers have gone past merely talking of a dome, and have outlined a plan of how exactly they would construct one.
They say they would use ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), a material that weighs a fraction of glass and can withstand massive winds.
They would use heavy-lifting helicopters and helium-filled air ships to lift the dome pieces into place.
I really hope this scheme goes ahead, if only for the fact we'll be able to tell critical, complaining Houstonites 'people in glass houses...'
The sweet sound of birdsong could return to the cities and industrial heartlands of the UK under a batty plan to build skyscrapers for animals.
The 12m man-made tree towers are designed to provide valuable habitat for birds, bats, butterflies, insects and foxes in areas where urbanisation has pushed local species out.
Designed by Neil Oxlee of Garnett Netherwood Architects, the man-made tree towers won a competition launched by Holbeck Urban Village in Leeds to return the area's biodiversity.
The towers would be made of recycled materials from nearby buildings facing demolition and would allow the animals to 'reclaim their urban landscape'.
There are no plans to start construction of the towers, but the scheme has the support of wildlife enthusiasts and Leeds City Council.
Taiwan has recently finished building a new sports stadium that will generate 100% of its electricity from solar power.
The 50,000 seat dragon-shaped Taiwan solar stadium is clad in 8844 solar panels that illuminate the track and field.
A test run in January found that it took just six minutes to power up the stadium's entire lighting system, which includes more than 3330 lights and two huge vision screens.
The stadium officially opens later this year and was designed by Toyo Ito.
Chances are you are checking out this blog as part of an effort to stave off having to do your boring and mundane job. Or perhaps you are a tall building expert - either way this nifty device could be right up your alley.
Called the rescue reel, and looking like something from the 1950s, it is actually the latest gadget to help people escape from tall buildings, say if a plane crashes into it, for example...
Basically you hop into the one size fits all harness, attach the included anchor to something up high and rappel down the side of the building.
An automatic centrifugal brake will stop you from zooming down at speeds that would impress Batman.
Personally, I think a device like this is going to get used for a lot of emergencies other than plane crashes and fires - how about the 'I missed my deadline and the boss is coming straight for me' emergency or the Jaffa Cake emergency. Whee!
As a side note, I can't see this being used by workers at the Burj Dubai...
Work is underway on what is being billed as the world's most energy efficient skyscraper, which will have the ability to generate all its power onsite.
The Pearl River Tower in Guangzhou, China was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and is slated for completion in 2010.
The 310m high tower boasts wind turbines, solar panels and fuel cells that will all work together so the building does not have to be plugged into the local grid.
As well as using the latest sustainable technology, the building looks quite good too.
Designed in a flowing, wing shape, it features big indentations designed to push air through wind tunnels located on the building's mechanical equipment floors.
Solar panels will heat hot water and massive fuel cells in the basement will produce electricity by extracting hydrogen from natural gas that will be piped into the building.
With such a sustainable headquarters, who do you think will be taking on the lease? An energy aware company committed to social and environmental responsibility?
Um, try Guangdong Tobacco Company. Hmm, cigarette companies somehow manage to do it again. Although advertising is banned, they've attached themselves to what will be one of the most talked about projects in the world when it is completed.
The developer Bruce Ratner had threatened to cap the building at the 40th floor to ensure it went up at all. When work was halted, builders were only up to the 38th floor.
But this week work on the iconic building, which we gave a great rap here, resumed abruptly.
Ratner has reassured fans that uber architect Frank Gehry's wavy-wall design and full height will stay thanks to the paring down of labor expenses and the falling prices of construction materials.
The resumption is also part of a new agreement to get construction in the city back on its feet. Construction unions backed a series of concessions on work rules that proponents said would save builders as much as 20% on labor costs.
