Dr Wong – Emporium of Tings. Web Magazine.

Undulations in the green roof of the Macallan Distillery by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners hint at the bulbous whiskey stills situated below.

Cut into the hills of Speyside, the new distillery sits on the Easter Elchies estate in Scotland, which has been home to the single malt whiskey since 1824.

Costing £140 million, the centrepiece of the whiskey-making building is a rippling timber roof formed of 380,000 individual components – almost none of which are the same.

“The vision was always ambitious, but this enabled us to challenge our own thinking to create something so dramatic and awe-inspiring,” said Graham Stirk, senior partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and lead architect on the Macallan Distillery project. Continue reading

Four engineers from MIT have opened a fast-food restaurant in Boston that uses mechanical woks to autonomously prepare meals in under three minutes.

Billed as the “world’s first” robotic kitchen, the Spyce restaurant employs a series of seven automated cooking woks in place of human chefs. These robots are designed to simultaneously prepare food in three minutes or less.

The project was born from four MIT engineering graduates’ dissatisfaction with the high price tag placed on quality, fast food.

In a bid to “reinvent” fast-food dining, they came up with the Spyce: a robotic kitchen that can serve up to 200 meals per hour costing around £5.60 each (approximately $7.50). Continue reading