Learn how to make cinema-like video renderings with Lumion animation tools

The City of London Corporation’s Planning and Transportation Committee has approved plans for the Museum of London's new home at West Smithfield. Designed by Stanton Williams and Asif Khan with conservation architect Julian Harrap, the project is one of the largest cultural projects happening in Europe. The proposal aims to transform the existing campus into a 24-hour cultural destination that celebrates its historic structures.

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Architectural visualization company Brick Visual has been loading its most complex scenes into Chaos Group’s real-time 3D ray-traced engine, Project Lavina, since the private beta first launched. With the first public beta now available, Attila Cselovszki, CDO at Brick Visual, shares how adding Project Lavina to the architectural visualization (arch-viz) pipeline has revolutionized the way they work.

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Metropolis catches up with the High Line Network, a consortium of North American reuse projects that has been sharing notes and best practices through the pandemic.

Since the pandemic began, the High Line Network—a group of North American infrastructure reuse projects founded in 2017—has been conducting regular teleconference calls among its members, comparing notes on operations and sharing best practices and advice with fellow members. With many open or planning to reopen soon, and as the pandemic continues, many observers expect these projects will become even more popular among the public, since they provide outdoor space where visitors can walk, bicycle, and safely enjoy themselves—usually at an appropriate distance from one another. Especially now, the network believes its constituent projects can deliver tremendous and much-needed social, health, environmental, and economic benefits.

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As one of the leading architects of the British High-Tech movement, Pritzker Prize-winner Richard Rogers stands out as one of the most innovative and distinctive architects of a generation. Rogers made his name in the 1970s and '80s, with buildings such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Headquarters for Lloyd's Bank in London. To this day his work plays with similar motifs, utilizing bright colors and structural elements to create a style that is recognizable, yet also highly adaptable.

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When urban spaces become the medium for expression, protest, criticism, and defiance, the audience is limitless. Pedestrians and bystanders of all ages and ideologies become spectators of demonstrations that walk the line between art and activism and transform the city's streets, walls, and sidewalks into canvases for diffusing ideas on a massive scale. Banksy once said that "a wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with." This call to arms has rung true for many as they take to the streets in a bid to make themselves heard. 

City officials in Barcelona have found an incentive to help increase the city’s available rental housing units. Authorities are threatening to forcefully buy empty properties to create more affordable housing if landlords don’t manage to fill their vacant rental assets within a certain time frame.

This article is part of "Eastern Bloc Architecture: 50 Buildings that Defined an Era", a collaborative series by The Calvert Journal and ArchDaily highlighting iconic architecture that had shaped the Eastern world. Every week both publications will be releasing a listing rounding up five Eastern Bloc projects of certain typology. Read on for your weekly dose: Historic Hotels.

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In partnership with Make Architects and Sir John Soane’s Museum, the World Architecture Festival (WAF) has announced the call for entries for the fourth edition of The Architecture Drawing Prize. Launched in 2017, the prize is conceived to celebrate and showcase the art and skill of architectural drawing.

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Whether you're looking for an upgrade or to replace broken pieces for floors or walls, tiles are always an effective and readily available option for any project that you have in mind. With their relatively low production cost, tiles are rarely reused or recycled and, if they are, it's usually for their original function.

Catalonia in Venice - air/aria/aire, part of the Collateral Event of the Biennale Architettura 2021, is an exhibition curated by architect Olga Subirós, commissioned by the Institut Ramon Llull, with the participation of 300.000 Km/s, an urbanism studio in macro data-based strategic planning. Reflecting on the central theme of the Biennale “How will we live together?” the project investigates the role of architecture and urbanism within the context of the climate emergency and the public health crisis.

A new train station by Toronto-based architecture studio PARTISANS has been approved for The Orbit, Canada's city of the future project. Designed to be a new central neighborhood for the Canadian town of Innisfil, the station was made in response to the potential arrival of high-speed mass transit that connects to downtown Toronto. The Transit Hub aims for rapid and responsible growth, fostering sustainable development and preserving the core attributes of Innisfil's landscape and community.

New Generations is a European platform that analyses the most innovative emerging practices at the European level, providing a new space for the exchange of knowledge and confrontation, theory, and production. Since 2013, New Generations has involved more than 300 practices in a diverse program of cultural activities, such as festivals, exhibitions, open calls, video-interviews, workshops, and experimental formats.

New Generations launches a fresh new media platform, offering a unique space where emerging architects can meet, exchange ideas, get inspired, and collaborate. Recent projects, job opportunities, insights, news, and profiles will be published every day. The section ‘profiles’ provides a space to those who would like to join the network of emerging practices, and present themselves to the wide community of studios involved in the cultural agenda developed by New Generations.

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The Getty Foundation has announced over $2 million in grants for 13 significant 20th-century buildings as part of the Keeping It Modern program. Launched in 2014, this is the final year of grants for this conservation initiative to help professionals worldwide engage in the proactive research and planning needed for the long-term preservation of modern buildings.

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JKMM Architects, winners of the two-stage design competition to extend the National Museum of Finland has submitted the proposal entitled “Atlas” for outline planning permission. Schedule to be completed and to open to the public in 2025, the project is part of Finland’s on-going investment in culture during its post-pandemic recovery period.

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As the world is moving into a post-pandemic time, museums are finally resuming their work under strict social distancing and health measures. Arc en rêve d’Architecture in Bordeaux, France has reopened its main gallery with an exhibition by Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine, entitled Homo Urbanus. Shown for the first time in its complete version, the exposition offers a vibrant tribute to public spaces.

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The Hirshhorn Museum's new plan for renovating its sculpture garden is receiving criticism for undoing postwar landscape features. The plan by Japanese artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto aims to open up the site to the National Mall and create space for large-scale contemporary works and performances. The concept is made to raise visibility for the garden and welcome more visitors to the museum.

It takes more than creativity to create exceptional designs. Effective collaboration is an essential element in any successful project, as well as in day-to-day business. Using the right tools can help architects and designers overcome project obstacles and elevate their designs. Real-time rendering tool Enscape has introduced a collaborative issue-tracking feature, aptly named Collaborative Annotation, in their latest software version 2.8. This new feature promises to provide architects and designers with a more collaborative workflow.

Structural components can be the main stars in architectural projects, contributing to the understanding of how the building's intrinsic forces are organized and distributed. Cables are constantly being used to steal the scene: they subvert the logic of supporting structures and build stable systems using tension, creating both a sense of strength and lightness in the building.

This kind of element is found in buildings of many different sizes, ranging from the steel cables of large and majestic suspension bridges to the cables on residential roofs. We have picked a series of Brazilian houses that benefit from this delicate and powerful structural component in different ways, showing the versatility of its potential applications.

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Seeing the Earth from a great distance has been proven to stimulate awe, increase the desire to collaborate, and foster long-term thinking. Daily Overview aims to inspire these feelings — commonly referred to as the Overview Effect — through their imagery, products, and collaborations. By embracing the perspective that comes from this vantage point, the team believes they can stimulate a new awareness that will lead to a better future for our one and only home. Check out Daily Overview's Gallery of Amusement Parks and follow the team's work on their Instagram.

Whether we like it or not, every architect is a recycler.

The phrase “Swamp Yankee” is neither a diss nor a stereotype. Swamp Yankees lived in pre-20th-century New England. They were those poor folk who could only afford to live near water – where disease, vermin and bad weather regularly wrecked lives. Those folk never threw anything out that could be reused (someday). They bartered and they salvaged as a way of life. There was never waste (“waste not, want not”). Swamp Yankees made recycling a lifestyle. Sustainability was not a Green choice – it was the way they survived.

I am a Swamp Yankee Architect. 

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