As one of the leading minds of art-nouveau in the UK, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (7 June 1868 – 10 December 1928) left a lasting impression in art and architecture. With a surprisingly brief architectural career, Mackintosh managed to stand out at the international level in art and design with his personal style known as the "Mackintosh Rose" motif. Born in Glasgow in 1868, Mackintosh is known for his play between hard angles and soft curves, heavy material and sculpted light. Though he was most well-known for the Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art, Charles Rennie Mackintosh left a legacy of architecture-as-art that transcends the Glasgow school and exemplifies trans-disciplinary architecture.

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"The role of public buildings should be the first to show quality, sustainability, and an embrace of the people," says Copenhagen native and architect, Dan Stubbergaard, in this recent video from the Louisiana Channel. In COBE: Monuments of the Future, Stubbergaard speaks in favor of architecture that reinforces the welfare state, beginning with the philosophy behind the process: "Our buildings are like a hard disk of our memory or history" says Stubbergaard, "and you can see that this was the best you could do at that time."

Founder and creative director of COBE in Copenhagen, Stubbergaard focuses his practice on work varying from public space to large urban planning. Stubbergaard explains how architecture can be a way to understand how cities grow, live, break down and grow again. It is the architecture, the buildings and structure that direct people to the most popular cities, as it is "embedded into the history."

Videos

Norman Foster attended the recent groundbreaking ceremony for 425 Park Avenue, which will be the first full-block high-rise office building to be built on New York City's Park Avenue in the past 50 years. Foster+Partners, in collaboration with Adamson Associates, designed 425 Park to be a new icon in the Manhattan skyline, featuring a tri-blade, sheer wall top. In addition to its LEED Gold certification, the 560,000m² tower will be the first in New York to be WELL certified.

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Architect Alban Guého's “Flood” installation for Paris' 2015 Nuit Blanche arts festival aims to serve as a stark reminder of climate change and the impact humanity has on the world. The 50-square-meter (538 square-foot) installation is composed of weaved filaments that connect the ceiling to the floor. A thick, dark liquid (either oil or black paint) will slowly flow down each string, trickling into a black pool. Flood seeks to address the theme of this year’s Nuit Blanche, which is to echo the issues stemming from COP21, Paris’ Sustainable Innovation Forum.

Millions of refugees across the globe, due to global conflict or natural phenomena, are forced to leave their homes and live in low-quality, temporary housing. The majority of these shelters lack a fundamental component of safety and well-being: floors. Emergency Floor is an initiative developed by Sam Brisendine and Scott Key to solve this problem, and bring safety to refugee shelters and the people in them. With their new Indiegogo campaign, Emergency Floor is working to provide efficient, inexpensive flooring that is directly geared towards assisting relief agencies.

Learn more about Emergency Floor after the break.

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Izaskun Chinchilla Architects have made their recycled, upcycled, and bicycled “Organic Growth Pavilion” a reality on New York’s Governors Island. One of two winners of the “City of Dreams” pavilion competition (hosted by AIANY Emerging New York Architects Committee and the Structural Engineers Association of New York), Izaskun Chinchilla Architects carried out a kickstarter campaign to fund the pavilion’s construction.

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Atelier YokYok has created an immersive experience of string and light for their "Shooting Vaults” installation at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Cahors, France. Created in collaboration with Ulysse Lacoste and Laure Qaremy, the project will be on display through the month of June.

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São Paulo is the financial center and largest city of Brazil, and victim to a seemingly unending water crisis. The situation stems from over-populated neighborhoods lacking in a regulated infrastructure, with buildings that are uncoordinated in their development and maintenance leading to pollution in nearby water reservoirs. In 2009, the government of São Paulo sought to address this issue by expropriating the homes of 200 families, who were then moved back in 2012 to a new construction designed by Hector Vigliecca; the Novo Santo Amaro V Park Housing.

In this video from The Architectural Review - which supports their full building study - Vigliecca and current residents of the complex reflect on what the valley of unregulated infrastructure used to be like, and how it has developed to the present day.

With a high-density population and a history of internal armed conflict, the city of Medellín in Colombia lacked substantial public space, but had an overwhelming amount of industrial infrastructure in place. But as profiled by The Architectural Review, recently architects and urban planners of the EPM group saw this imbalance as an opportunity, and so in the uninhabited patches of land surrounding over one hundred fenced industrial lots, the UVA or Unidades de Vida Articulada (Units of Articulated Life) program was born. Including initiatives to build public classrooms, launderettes and cafés, the UVA projects were conceived together with the local population through a series of workshops, where every resident was invited to express their vision for the new public square through writing and drawing. Medellín, existing at the convergence of several hills, provides a wide variety of unique landscapes for architects to experiment on - and through the UVA projects, EPM Group demonstrates how architecture can empower a community from the first day of design. Read more about how this project will continue to instigate positive change at The Architectural Review.

Too often, architects and designers treat nature as separate from humans or human creations. Nature is fought, or protected, or considered as something to accommodate for through a retroactive checklist. In contrast, Barberio Colella ARC's Lanterns Sea Village is a conceptual plan to create short-stay housing that integrates natural systems with people and buildings. The team behind the project, Micaela Colella and Maurizio Barberio, designed the small residences to approach housing from a more adaptive perspective.

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Videos

Designers are trained to consider the context for a finished building, but often neglect to consider the construction phase. When architecture is primarily judged based on the impacts it has on their surroundings once they are built, what can be learned from the process of building? The time-lapse is a method that can help architects to do just that, as it can capture years of complex development in a matter of minutes. This can uncover patterns of impact on social and economic levels, as months to years are played back over several minutes.

What is shown by time-lapse videos, though, can be as disturbing as it is interesting; when uncovered, the construction process is a revealing process, and the ramifications in regard to energy consumption can be as monumental as the buildings themselves. The time-lapse allows the viewer to get a better understanding of the types and amounts of materials being put into the construction of buildings, and the impact construction has on its immediate surroundings. By comparing time-lapse videos of different projects, what insight can we gain about how the physically generative process of architecture affects people and place?

Charles Rennie Mackintosh is considered to be one of the most influential artists and architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and earlier this year his work was displayed in an exhibition at the Royal Institute for British Architects (RIBA), following a five-year research project by the University of Glasgow. Among the exhibition of over 60 original drawings, watercolors and perspectives spanning the entirety of his career, highlights included models of his unbuilt work and original designs for the Glasgow School of Art. Watch the short documentary above on the five-year research process by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), who funded the University of Glasgow's work.

In recognition of the opening of One World Observatory in New York City, EarthCam has published a full time-lapse of One World Trade Center's construction. Thousands of high-definition images capture the incredible undertaking of construction and planning that took place from October 2004 to Memorial Day 2015. The camera flies the viewer across the site, showing how the building and its surroundings have taken shape over the past 11 years.

Thousands of years ago, a small civilization of hunter gatherers migrated to the coastal regions of Southeast Asia. These people progressed into a widespread tribe of travelling sea dwellers. To this day, they remain a stateless people with no nationality and no consistent infrastructure, sometimes living miles away from land. Yet these people are one of the few civilizations whose collective life practices have survived so long through human history. They are called the Badjao, and they have a surprising amount to teach us about architecture.

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