The versatile Chilean group Supersudaka designed this unusual house located in Talca, Chile.

The process was so unsteady, that all possible architectural design resources available where exercised to cope with the challenge of this house in the Chilean Central Valley.

Everything was in constant change: the program, the surface, building permits, the contractors, even the view !

Made with a metallic structure covered entirely with wood and glass, the house has been in constant change resulting a mix, a bastardized design with a patio and roof terrace.

Real estate mogul Victor MacFarlane has placed his huge St. Regis penthouse on the sales block for $70 million, a figure that would obliterate the previous record price tag for a San Francisco residence.

Commandingly sited atop the highest floors of the Five-Star St. Regis Hotel & Residences in San Francisco, this one-of-a-kind, palatial penthouse features over 20,000 expansive square feet, including 2,900 square feet of terraces – one of the largest personal residences in all of San Francisco.

The property also features 2,900 square feet of terraces with 360-degree views of many San Francisco landmarks. Glass walls also offer plenty of light and the foyer has a winding staircase and two-story waterfall.

There are six bedrooms, seven baths, four powder rooms, four fireplaces, two offices, a wine storage room, a gym with a sauna and steam room and a 13-seat cinema. It is definitely one of the most striking apartments in the country.

The asking price for the completed condo works out to $3,500 for each of the roughly 20,000 square feet. MacFarlane bought the property, originally three unfinished units on the top two floors, for about $30 million in late 2005.

The question remains, however, whether anyone will be willing to pay that much for one now.

(The Ohio-born MacFarlane is the chief executive officer of MacFarlane Partners, a San Francisco real estate investment firm with $11 billion under management. He has been managing money for the California Public Employees Retirement System since the early 1990s.)

Even though the economy is grim, big malls are opening around the world. We recently mentioned the opening of the Westfield Mall in London and now the Dubai Mall has officially opened boasting the largest number of retailers in the world.

As we mentioned earlier this year, the mall boasts a gold souk, a 10-million litre (2.2 million gallon) aquarium and an Olympic-size ice rink in addition to rows and rows of stores.

The mall is situated at the foot of Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower), already the tallest building on earth at around 700 meters (2,300 feet) and still under construction.
The mall is scheduled to house branches of some of the world’s best known retail chains, such as Marks and Spencer, Galeries Lafayette and even Bloomingdales, which has never before had stores outside the United States.

London was yesterday, the official home of Britain’s largest shopping mall with the launch of the $2.8 billion Westfield London Shopping Centre in Shepherd’s Bush , a massive 265-store, glass-roofed shopping center. The centre’s owners, Westfield and Commerzbank AG are confident that the looming British recession, the worst since 1991 will not negatively affect the potential profits of the centre’s future.

Steven Lowy, managing director of Australian based Westfield said that the project was built with the future in mind. The new mall is targeted to serve 20 million shoppers per year and Westfield aims for sales of £1 billion ($2 billion).

One reason why Westfield managers are so confident about the success of their new mall is the fact that London’s 7.5 million residents were only served by four regional shopping centres. Source overseaspropertymall

Another day, another spectacular tower in Dubai: The Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower, a curvy building “inspired by the geometrical order of a snowflake and the aerodynamics of a Formula 1″, will not only appear in Dubai but in six other cities around the world.

According to the architects who worked in Beijing’s Water Cube, the design will allow for an easy construction process and an efficient use of energy, all while making the building change its look through the day.

The building features an iconic silhouette and a facade characterised by vertical slots with private balconies. A series of reflective fins generates a vertical dynamic and gives the building a constantly changing appearance.

The fins track the sun, control the solar shading and dissolve the rationality of the plan into a continuously evolving building volume. The facade’s continuous surface enables curvature with a lot of repetition and the potential for standardisation in the building process. State-of-theart engineering and innovative materials will be used to achieve a fully sustainable performance. The construction will begin in early 2009 and the tower is scheduled to be completed in June 2011.

Well, it seems like now all you have to do to have a skyscraper named after you is to win seven Formula 1 championships so you better get started, the clock is running.

China’s property market has taken a steep turn for the worse if we are to believe the various reports that are beginning to surface in major online publications right now.

The signs of trouble are not a total shock to the system of any alert investor, as many would have been aware of the implications when China started to ban major development projects at the beginning of this year due to heavy pollution in the city of Beijing. [...] This ban has caused a huge shift in building frenzy as many developers prepared for the future by building extra. This has created a massive oversupply of mainly inner city apartments and now that the Olympic Games have been and gone, the market has slowed down.

But this isn’t the only reason, the global credit crunch is affecting Chinese developers who can’t afford to hold on to their empty properties until better times happen to come around so they are forced to slash property prices by up to 30% [...]