In an ironic turn of circumstance, the financial generosity of a company's customers has contributed to the company owing more than $100 million.

A San Diego Superior Court judge ruled yesterday that Starbucks has to pay nearly $106 million in restitution to an estimated 120,000 current and former baristas in California because the coffee company illegally allowed supervisors to share in tip pools over the past eight years.

According to the Associated Press, California state law prohibits managers and supervisors from sharing in employee gratuities.

5 Tantalizing Designs of Awesome Architectural Insanity
This one is for an IMT reader who requested more coverage of architecture-related topics. (More to come soon, Mr. Widman...)

Archangelsk, Russia: Nikolai Sutyagin started this wooden skyscraper as a simple two-story structure. Then he just kept building. The building now stands 13 stories (144 feet) tall and is under threat of demolition out of safety concerns by authorities. Sutyagin built this odd structure taking what he learned (and earned) as the owner of a small construction company. While imprisoned for allegedly beating and imprisoning a worker, his business went to pieces. Yet the strange wooden skyscraper remains. (via WebUrbanist)

Hamburg, Germany: The gritty site of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron's Elbe Philharmonic, a pier at the edge of the industrial harbor on the Elbe River, evokes the city's long commercial shipping history. These Swiss architects proposed to place the translucent glass hall directly atop an abandoned 1960s-era brick warehouse at the end of the pier rather than demolish it. The warehouse will serve as a parking garage. Scheduled to open in 2010, and conceived as an extrusion of the brick base and crowned by a series of crystalline peaks, the hall evokes a ship drifting in the harbor. (via New York Times)

Galloway, Scotland: A 52-year-old software engineer has built a habitable straw house for just £4,000 (US$7,929). Steve James sweat-out "10 months of actual building time" over four years to put together his straw domicile, dubbed "The Gatehouse." Constructed with a timber frame, straw walls protected by lime mortar and a turf roof, James picked up a Velux roof window, shower tray and front window from other people's unwanted building materials, as well as a "Tudor-style" paneled wood ceiling assembled from solid pine changing cubicle doors "salvaged from old Victorian public baths." James proposes his DIY straw house points to an affordable solution in the face of inflated house prices, and that a three-bedroom version could be yours for only £10,000 (US$19,825). The downside: Amenities are basic — it is a straw house — and the domicile is extremely susceptible to nature and a certain fairy tale antagonist. James describes the fruits of his labor as a "cuddly house." (via BBC News)

Los Angeles, California: What started as a few random art projects for Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant who moved all around the U.S. before settling in LA, became a vast and semi-abstract architectural structure known as the Watts Towers, complete with a gazebo, fountain, bird baths and other assorted structures reaching up to 100 feet in height. These were comprised of shells, scrap metal, pottery shards, rocks, glass and pretty much any other random material he could find. For the main structural elements, he employed steel, cement, mortar and wire mesh. Rodia assembled all of his creations without the assistance of scaffolding. (via WebUrbanist)

Madrid, Spain: Hotel Puerta America, completed in 2005, is unlike your typical hotel. Conceived as an architectural showcase, this hotel commissioned a different architect to design each floor. Yes, each floor. Individual floors were outfitted by different world-renowned architects, including Foster and Partners, Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, John Pawson, Jean Nouvel and Ushida Findlay.

For the design of the fourth floor of the hotel, Plasma Studio created a series of crystallized spaces, with fractured and distorted rooms and hallways, using a "repetitive rhythm of partition walls, service ducts and entrance doors as a sectional framework from which a differentiation of the corridor skin was devised," according to the UK firm. In other words, the perpendicular partition walls were pulled along their axis, while the entrance doors produced resistance.

See also: Built to Last ... and Dance and Heal and Think

Top 10 Creative Global Constructs

Houses For Sail

Foldable, Stackable Cars
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are planning to knock up a full-scale model of their "City Car" — an experimental vehicle that "folds" itself in half for tight parking spots.

Reuters reports of the car:

Once at your destination, the vehicle's computers would, at the press of a button, look for a parking spot behind others like itself, then fold roughly in half so you could stack it there as you would a shopping cart.

The dozen or so engineers and architects on the MIT team are confident their computer-generated work is on target. The designer of the vehicle's foldable frame, Franco Vairani, explained to Reuters that hundreds of the City Cars could be parked around cities at charging points and available for hire with a quick swipe of the credit card. Team engineer Peter Schmitt added that the car would boast "independently powered robotic wheels and be controlled using a computerized drive-by-wire system with a button or joystick".

The MIT team, led by architecture professor William J. Mitchell, figures the vehicle's revolutionary wheels would solve urban transportation problems, with pollution-free electric drive and the ability to park in one-eighth of the space of a conventional car.

"We have reinvented urban mobility," Mitchell proclaimed.

Of course, the vehicle hasn't been built yet. A miniature mock-up version has gone on display, and there are plans to build a full-scale model this spring.

Cheers.