This is the Turning Torso tower in Malmö, which at 190 metres is Sweden’s tallest skyscraper. The most striking thing about this tower is that it appears to be twisted around its axis. It has nine segments of five-story pentagons that are offset from one another, meaning that the topmost segment is set at ninety degrees to the ground floor.

The Turning Torso was designed by world famous Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava (some of whose work we’ve featured in the past), and represents part of a growing trend for elaborately warped and twisted “torqued towers“.

In San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park the new M.H. De Young Museum was completed in October 2005 - replacing the original building that had been damaged in an earthquake. To prevent damage to the new building, it can move almost a metre thanks to a system of sliding plates and fluid dampers. It’s also entirely clad in copper, which will eventually oxidize, taking on a green colour reflective of the surrounding vegetation.

From many places around the park, the most striking feature of the building is the 44 metre Hamon Tower, the impressive twist of which can be clearly seen from both an aerial and ground-level point of view.

Tower designers aren’t just rotating their towers either - although still under construction in Google’s images, the China Central Television Headquarters building was completed in December 2008, and its design almost defies belief. Especially when you consider that this area is also prone to earthquakes!

Technically the CCTV building isn’t a traditional tower, but rather a “continuous loop of six horizontal and vertical sections covering 381,000 square metres of floor space”. This is probably best summed up by the building’s local nickname - “Big Shorts”.

There are several other torqued towers around the world that are either in planning, or already under construction. However I wonder how many of them will be delayed or cancelled due to the current economic climate?

• 1 World Trade Center, New York City, (formerly known as the Freedom Tower), will have a roof set at 45° from the bottom.
• The Infinity Tower, Dubai, will feature a 90° twist like the Turning Torso, but will be nearly twice the height.
• The Chicago Spire, Chicago, also designed by Santiago Calatrava, will be 160 metres taller than the Sears Tower.
• The Burj al-Taqa, Dubai, will feature a twisted hyperboloid design, and will generate all its own energy.

Finally, check out the totally insane Signature Towers and equally ludicrous Dubai Towers Dubai which are both planned for construction in Dubai.

See the amazing skyscraperpage.com for more jaw dropping future skyscrapers.

Thanks to stephan and Vectoor.

Shanghai is the most populous city in China, and as befits a population over 20 million, the city has been blessed with the largest skatepark in the world.

SMP Skatepark has an incredible 13,700 m² of skateable space, much of it incorporating local stone and granite. The park has two street skating areas, multiple bowls, a full pipe (video), a 52 m long wooden vert ramp, and a 2000 m² competition area.

The closest rival to the SMP park in sheer size is not where you might expect. Not that a skating holiday in the Cayman Islands would be anything less than totally freaking awesome of course.

The Black Pearl skatepark is a 4,800 m² concrete park with a wide selection of bowls, transitions, and street terrain. If you get bored of all that skating, the blue area to the south is actually a surfing machine that’s capable of moving around 570,000 litres of water every minute, producing a surf wave over 3 metres tall!

All of which makes me wish I was 16 again.

For more skateboarding sights, see our posts on Marseille Skatepark, Kona Skatepark and Danny Way’s Mega Ramp.

Thanks to WebUrbanist.

Matryoshkas, or Russian dolls, are sets of wooden figures of decreasing sizes placed one inside the other. With a Russian name and a long Russian history, you might be slightly surprised to discover that the world’s largest Russian doll, is in Manzhouli, China.

This 30m high replica Matryoshka was built in 2007 to act as a tourist attraction. It features pictures of Chinese, Mongolian and Russian girls to reflect the ethnicities of the region. The plaza also includes 200 smaller dolls decorated with famous people from around the world.

This Inner Mongolian city is China’s busiest land port of entry, handling 60% of imports and exports to Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as trains between Beijing and Moscow. The huge train yards and station indicate the importance of rail in this region.

The border between the two countries is marked by another impressive plaza, gates and the usual posts of officialdom.

Photos of the doll and other areas of the city can be seen at Panoramio.

Thanks to Micradott.

The Singapore Flyer is a 150 metre-tall observation wheel located on Marina Bay, overlooking Singapore’s city centre - and for the moment, it holds the title of the world’s largest observation wheel.

The next tallest observation wheel is the Star of Nanchang (sadly not-yet-built in Google Earth¹, but here’s a ground-level photo), which was the world’s tallest from when it was built in 2006, right up until the opening of the Singapore Flyer in February 2008. This is odd, because at 160 metres the Star of Nanchang should never have lost the title!²

It transpires that the Singapore Flyer has been built on top of a three-story building, taking it to a total height of 165 metres and into the record books. What a con!

Observation wheels seem to be de rigueur these days³ - just last weekend Melbourne got in on the act with the 120 m Southern Star, which we can see under construction on Australian Street View.

Elsewhere, Germany is busy building the Great Berlin Wheel (location), which at a planned 175 m would take the title from the Singapore Flyer.

Unless of course China gets there first, as the Beijing Great Wheel (location) is due to be completed first, and will rise to a staggering 208 metres.

All of which is great news for the Great Wheel Corporation, who will then be the owners of all three of the tallest observation wheels in the world.

There’s lots more at Wikipedia about the Singapore Flyer, the Star of Nanchang, the Southern Star, the Great Berlin Wheel, and the Beijing Great Wheel.

Thanks to John Andresen and Glenn Baker.

Today sees the finals of the first ever Olympic Bicycle Moto Cross competition which takes place here at the Laoshan Bicycle Motocros Venue in Beijing. BMX racing is brand new to these Olympics, and races take just over 30 seconds round a winding and bumpy 400m-long course.

Um… yes, those of you paying attention will notice that despite Google updating their Beijing coverage, the updates don’t appear to have extended this far, so the actually very cool looking course is only visible as a rough clearing at this time.

However, the US team needed to practice for this event, and the course they had built at the United States Olympic Training Center, California, is visible¹. So, despite no two BMX courses being exactly the same, we get a pretty good idea of what the Chinese one might look like from above.

The dark semi-circles are actually huge tarmac corners that in Beijing yesterday saw several dramatic spills and collisions. World Champion and GB gold-medal hope Shanaze Reade (19) crashed quite hard on the first corner, but still managed to qualify for today’s finals on her second run².

There is actually a 3D model of the Beijing course visible in Google Earth, for anyone who wishes to get a closer look at the exact layout of the course!

Thanks to VGT.