The historical local markets of San Lorenzo and Sant'Ambrogio in the centre of Florence, Italy, have been a meeting point for local people for decades; a privileged location from which a sense of community, belonging and sharing has grown. The structure-symbol for local residents and a major tourist attraction, they recently underwent a series of renovation works to update their image and strengthen relations with customers and retailers, with a view to preserving their identity and authenticity.
The Hainan Science Museum - construction progress. Image Courtesy of MAD Architects
The Hainan Science Museum, designed by Ma Yansong / MAD Architects, is progressing through its construction phases. The project began its design phase in 2020, broke ground in November 2021, and completed its main structure in June 2023. The museum, located on the west coast of Haikou City in Hainan Province, aims to be a landmark that integrates modern architecture with natural surroundings, promoting the convergence of technology and nature. The museum is expected to finish its curtain wall and landscaping by June this year and open for visitors in 2025.
Construction has reached the roof level in Zaha Hadid Architect’s development above Hong Kong High-Speed Rail West Kowloon Terminus. Adjacent to the West Kowloon Cultural District, this development connects established and emerging neighborhoods with a network of public gardens and landscaped plazas. Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), it seeks to integrate seamlessly with the surrounding station and rooftop park, offering civic, office, and retail spaces.
Camping, as defined in dictionaries, involves temporarily staying outdoors, setting up makeshift accommodations, and settling in natural surroundings. In architecture, tents symbolize these aspects, representing a typology that has endured across centuries and cultures, often linked with notions of impermanence and vulnerability.
In light of this common understanding, the term 'glamping' emerged in the early 2000s, blending 'camping' with 'glamour,' suggesting a fusion of camping with luxurious amenities. However, despite its recent popularization, the concept is far from original. Camping has not always been seen as the antithesis of luxury.
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Meeting room with Pyrymyd DECO. Visualization: Studio Spacer. Image Courtesy of Intra Lighting
We talk a lot about designing for the senses these days; about human engineering, ergonomics, people-centric products. It’s particularly a hot topic when it comes to looking at the modern working environment. If today’s office is to compete with home, it needs to bring similar feelings of comfort, but promote productivity and collaboration at the same time. Designers and architects are responding with increased attention towards auditory comfort, finely-tuned lighting, and cosseting touches via texture, color and shape.
https://www.archdaily.com/1017114/a-multi-tasking-ceiling-system-for-both-sound-and-light-controlEmma Moore
Architects are known for returning from travel with more photos of buildings than people and for having an esoteric vocabulary of their own. Of course, these are clichés that are not always true. But something that unites most designers is the tendency to pay attention to each detail that makes up a project, be it the material that covers the facade, the junction between different floors, how the doors open, the type of window frame, how the forms were put together for concreting, and more. But a detail that often goes unnoticed – and that makes a huge difference in interior design – is baseboards.
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The Phoenix will be built at about half the cost, time, and carbon footprint of a typical multi-family building in the San Francisco Bay Area. Image Courtesy of Autodesk
At the turn of the century, architects embraced 3D parametric modeling through building information modeling (BIM), and in the last 10 years connected BIM to the cloud to improve coordination and productivity. But BIM struggles to unify data and workflows across the entire plan, design, build and operate lifecycle. Integrating AI—along with granular data and automation—will empower the next generation of architects with a more connected and outcome-based approach to design, enabling them to focus on outcomes like building performance or sustainability from the very beginning of a project.
Housing Salinas - For Everyday.Life. Image Courtesy of For Everyday.Life
United Kingdom-based office For Everyday.Life (FEL) is one of the three selected winners for the Open Category of ICON’s Initiative 99, an open competition aiming to promote affordable home designs that can be built for under $99,000 employing ICON’s 3D printing technologies. FEL’s project, titled “Housing Salinas,” focuses on community living while applying principles of long-term sustainability, and social and environmental responsibility.
Gustav Düsing and FAKT have just won the competition to design an adaptive reuse project in Siegen, Germany. Following Gustav Düsing’s recent win of the EU Mies Award 2024, the NAS project was developed through a comprehensive participatory process involving students, faculty, staff, and community members. The New Architecture School (NAS) is an adaptive reuse proposal transforming the former printing facility into a new type of central campus. Aspiring to act as a dynamic urban entity, the design combines academic pursuits with cultural and public spaces.
Beyond being a prefabricated material currently produced in large quantities, the use of concrete blocks in architecture continues to evolve to meet the demands and needs of contemporary societies that are constantly changing. Whether in interior or exterior spaces, their use can align with concepts of circular economy, resource efficiency, sustainability, and more, with the goal of creating habitable spaces while also understanding their constructive advantages and disadvantages, their expressive and aesthetic qualities, and so on.
Italian architect and designer Antonio Citterio is renowned for creating spaces that transport individuals to a mood as much as a physical place. He’s a designer of sets and a storyteller as well as a creator of objects. As he says: “I always imagine the product in a movie set, an ambiance where people interact with the product and the space.” His latest collaboration with AXOR—a collection of distinctive bathroom fixture designs—is a paradigm of his craft, expanding the idea of the objects into idealized "light box" domestic spaces, in which they feature. One of these spaces is his "Nature Bound Vacation Home" concept.
https://www.archdaily.com/1016627/a-bathtub-and-sink-in-a-single-sculptural-element-antonio-citterios-vision-for-a-nature-retreatMark C. O'Flaherty
A ground scraper is essentially the opposite of a skyscraper - a large building that sprawls outward horizontally instead of soaring vertically into the sky. Though no strict definition exists, groundscrapers are generally described as extremely long but low-rise buildings with over 1 million square feet of space, sometimes called sidescrapers or landscrapers. The term came into the spotlight with Google's plans for their massive $1.3 billion London headquarters. Designed to be only 11 stories tall but over 1,000 feet long, this vast office block epitomizes using horizontal expansion to create immense space for thousands of employees.
Architecture opens up new perspectives, leads the eye across endless expanses and gives a deep sense of absolute freedom. In the Cole Residence, a fantastically situated estate high above Los Angeles, these qualities merge together. A dance transports the audience to another world.
Conceived by Sky-Frame, a leading international supplier of frameless sliding door systems, the film—directed by Boris Noir—conveys the attitude to life that the brand wants to convey with its products. The architecture of the buildings we live in influences how we perceive our environment, how we move around in it and how we shape it. A view, not a window.
In January this year, Romanian architect, designer, and educator Oana Stănescu has been named the curator of Beta 2024 - Timișoara Architecture Biennial, now in its fifth edition. Based in New York and Berlin, Oana Stănescu is internationally recognized for her diverse portfolio of interventions around the world, challenging the confines of the profession and addressing significant societal issues. Recently, Stănescu, along with the team behind Beta, announced the theme of the main exhibition, taking place in Timițoara, Romania, between September 13th and October 27th.
The Lindau Art Museum is hosting an exhibition titled “Christo and Jeanne-Claude - A Lifelong Journey.” Running from April 13th to October 13th, 2024, this display marks the first comprehensive museum exhibition on Christo and Jeanne-Claude in southern Germany, created in collaboration with the Christo and Janne-Claude Foundation. Featuring artistic drawings, detailed collages, early objects, and photographs, the exhibition documents the lifelong journey that led the artists to their famous large-scale temporary projects.
Chroma Pool. Image Courtesy of Courtesy of Agrob Buchtal/photo: Rasmus Hjortshøj
Tinnerbäcksbadet, a leisure center established in 1965 on the shores of a lake in Linköping, Sweden, was showing signs of aging. To revitalize the area and meet the ever-changing demands, the city launched an international architectural competition for a new facility. The winning design, conceived by the Danish firm 3XN, blends modernity and functionality. This integration into the surrounding urban landscape, with the new structure serving as a focal point in a newly reimagined neighborhood square, was crucial to the project's success.
However, it is in the material details and subtle undulations of its layout that the genius of the design is revealed, guiding visitors and users to the indoor spaces and verdant extensions surrounding the bathing lake. The project exudes warmth and sophistication with its palette of natural, earthy colors, through the extensive use of exposed wood, concrete, and ceramic tiles. Manufactured by Agrob Buchtal from natural raw materials, these tiles contribute to the space's elegance while promising longevity, a hallmark of truly sustainable architecture. Covering 18,000 m², the ceramic surfaces play a fundamental role in promoting visual comfort and unifying the entire structure.
Organizing, shaping, stacking. Transforming raw materials from the soil into architecture. This is a challenge that many Latin American architects embrace, demonstrating that scarcity can be daunting but also a rich opportunity to unleash creativity.
The use of materials extracted from the local soil serves a dual purpose. In regions with limited industrialization, using locally sourced materials makes economic sense because industrial materials such as concrete and steel are expensive and often require long-distance transportation, adding to their cost. Environmentally, choosing locally sourced materials from the start of a project reduces transportation needs and carbon emissions, supporting sustainability efforts.
The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.
A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.
This week David and Marina of FAME Architecture & Design discuss the benefits and negatives of working for small and large architecture offices as a young professional. The two share their own experiences and cover why working at different-sized offices can be beneficial.
https://www.archdaily.com/1017054/the-second-studio-podcast-dynamics-of-working-for-small-and-large-architecture-officesThe Second Studio Podcast
In response to the diverse topographies and natural conditions throughout the Argentine territory, the works of Luciano Kruk propose an architecture that works in harmony with the environment, the landscape, and the nature in which they are situated. Whether immersed in a forest, on sloping terrain, or on a rural plain, among other geographies, his intention is to enhance the relationship between the interior and exterior of the architecture, using concrete as the main material in most of his projects.
Urban infrastructure intended for city connectivity disrupts urban patterns and often leaves behind a series of spaces without a properly defined use. Fortunately, the notion of space beneath infrastructure is being redefined, as architects are generating public spaces nestled under flyovers, bridges, and other urban structures.
Formerly neglected spaces, overlooked or dismissed as mere leftovers of urban planning, are now transformed into dynamic environments for community engagement and artistic expression. Architects, city planners, and the users themselves are embracing the challenge of reclaiming forgotten or underutilized areas and developing innovative solutions, integrating greenery, art installations, and sustainable elements into the urban fabric.
In pool design, one big challenge is to make sure that the pool blends in with the rest of the architecture. If it is being designed from scratch, the materials must meet the necessary design criteria, as well as the technical requirements of areas exposed to the elements and in direct contact with water.
These were the premises that Sebastián Arquitectos took into account in this project for a villa—Casa EA!—, using a single floor tile collection by Gres Aragón. Set in the midst of Litago nature reserve, at the foot of Mount Moncayo in Zaragoza (Spain), the villa blends in beautifully with its surroundings.
In 2021, MVRDV unveiled the design of a terraced office building created for the agriculture company Lankuaikei. Set within a rapidly developing area of Shanghai, the 11-storey structure is covered by a curved technological roof that follows the stepping structure. The project is conceived as a showcase of the company's vision of food production, with an extensive sustainability agenda encompassing various strategies. These include extensive use of greenery, integration of renewable energy, and the use of low-carbon materials. The construction process is now captured by StudioSZ Photo / Justin Szeremeta, revealing an intermediary state where the bare-bone structure begins to reveal the shape and scale of the building. Structural construction details are also visible at this stage,
