14 DAY TRIAL // The idea of a mobile lab isn't exactly alien to us. After all, those things have been around pretty much ever since the first trailers were invented. What is, however, alien in appearance if not origin is that thing in the photo on the left.
We doubt that the first thing anyone would assume about it is that it is a mobile research lab. The contraption looks more like an alien drop ship or something along similar lines.
Yet a traveling research station is precisely what it is. Called Secret Operation 610, it is designed by Amsterdam-based creative office Rietveld Landscape.
Well, the terrifying vessel was actually a commission on the part of the Treaty of Utretcht Foundation, Province Utrecht and SKOR.
Right now, students at Delft University of Technology are using the menacing laboratory to develop a program for silent, carbon-free flying.
Although things might not stay silent once they actually succeed in their efforts and start shouting “At last, my greatest invention is completed!” from the top of their lungs. Like a certain, child prodigy we all know and love (or love to hate) but who is, alas, not actually real.
But we digress. Anyway, the Secret Operation 610, at the moment, is parked at the Soesterberg Air Base, a site outside Utrecht. As an operational unit, it was closed in 2008 (it was established in 1911), but next year, it will become the new National Military Museum (opening in fall 2014).
“The interior is designed in a way that people can work here in different ways,” Rietveld Landscape’s Arna Mackic told Gizmodo.
“The chairs are hinged and foldable and the table automatically comes out from the ceiling. Also there are two extra more relaxed seats in the head of the sculpture where the view is phenomenal.” And hey, it doesn’t hurt that they’ve got an old runway right outside that’s practically tailor-made for testing out their efforts.
