That’s the claim of Sam Lubell, in his Editorial “The Intern Catch-22” for The Architect’s Newspaper. Lubell puts it this way:

When the kids at NOTLabs first got their hands on a MakerBot Replicator, the ingenious 3D printer that can make just about anything you want, they quickly got down to business – making LEGO and Kinex connectors, that is. As inconsequential as their decision may seem, it got us thinking: today, building blocks, but tomorrow? Buildings themselves.

The future isn’t as far as you may think. In the next two articles, I’ll introduce you to three visionaries who are already applying 3D printing technology to revolutionary effect: an engineer hoping to improve the human condition, a robotics expert with the goal of completing the Sagrada Familia (or at least putting a structure on the moon), and an architect at MIT using nature-inspired materials to turn the design world on its head.

If these three examples are anything to go by, 3D Printing will revolutionize the world as we know it. But it begs the question: at what price? Will it offer architects the freedom to design without the pesky limitations of built reality? Or, like the scribes made redundant by Gutenberg’s printing press, will 3D printing make the architect go extinct?

The Challenge: Convert Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu Stadium into “an architectural icon for Madrid and an internationally-recognized exemplar of sports infrastructure.”

The Contenders: Three teams, each made up of two all-star firms (one Spanish, one not).

The first all-star pairing? Herzog and de Meuron with Rafael Moneo…

Find out which other famous Architects are the competition, after the break.

The hand-drawn work of Chris Dent takes on the modern metropolis – depicting architecture in a way that is at once meticulously accurate & playfully imaginative.

The bank architect’s goal is to create a secure edifice. The bank robber’s? To subvert the edifice. And yet consider their commonality: their interaction with space. Both analyze plans and consider inefficiencies, both inhabit the space much differently than your average spectator. In fact, the Robber’s relationship with space is far more physical, urgent…nuanced. As Mehruss Ahi, a recent graduate from Woodbury University, puts it in his senior thesis: “The Architect is the Bank Robber…and the Bank Robber is the Architect.”

Ahi suggests a Robber-like “spatial hack” of the bank: an identification of its inefficiencies/vulnerabilities/paths of circulation. He also notes the necessity of giving priority to large storage space for goods rather than money (due to “the migration of banking services to the Web”). This new perspective, Ahi argues, will allow architects to design a smarter, more secure bank. The bank of the future.

Ahi’s assertion about the need for physical storage space (as banks turn to the Web), got me thinking. Our world depends less and less on physical storage, and more and more on the bits of information flying through the wires and cables of the internet. Ahi’s theory, while an interesting insight into bank design, is even more powerful when applied to the bank’s modern day equivalent: the Data Center.

Architects love LEGOs, this is a well-known fact. So what could be better than a real-life bridge made out of the colorful toys themselves?

Unfortunately, of course, the LEGOs are actually an optical illusion designed by street artist Martin Heuwold of MEGX - but that doesn’t make the project look any less awesome. The bridge, painted last fall, is part of an Urban renewal project in the city of Wuppertal meant “to reinvigorate the city and increase residents’ quality of life.” The High Line-style bridge is actually part of a larger 10-mile cycle path being built on what was once the city’s Northern Railway.

More pics of the LEGO Bridge, as well as a LEGO forest & a real-life Monopoly board on the streets of Chicago, after the break…

Story via A/N Blog and Colossal

No architectural gem is safe from Detroit’s foreclosure crisis – not even two of Mies Van der Rohe’s very own creations. The Lafayette Towers, two 22-story towers of 584 units, originally part of a major urban redevelopment project in the late 50s early 60s, are up for auction July 18th.

But be warned, there is a catch…

Find out the fine print, after the break.

Your Macbook Air has come at a price. And I’m not talking about the $1,000 bucks you shelled out to buy it.

I’m talking about the cost of lightness. Because the dirty secret of the “Cloud” – that nebulous place where your data goes to live, thus freeing up your technological devices from all that weight – is its very physical counterpart.

Data Centers. Giant, whirring, power-guzzling behemoths of data storage – made of cables, servers, routers, tubes, coolers, and wires. As your devices get thinner, the insatiably hungry cloud, the data centers, get thicker.

So why are you struggling to picture one in your mind? Why do we have no idea what they look like? What they do? Where they are? Because Data Centers have been hidden away and, although carefully planned, intentionally “undesigned.” The goal is to make the architecture so technologically efficient, that the architecture becomes the machinery, and the machinery the architecture. In the words of author Andrew Blum, Data Centers are “anti-monuments” that ”declare their own unimportance.”

But if architecture is the expression of our society’s values and beliefs, then what does this architectural obliteration mean? That we are willfully ignoring the process that creates the data we daily consume. As long as the internet works, who cares where it came from (or at what cost — and there is a considerable cost)?

So can design change our alienated relationship to our data? Should it? And if so, how?

Seeing as it’s the 4th of July, we thought we would take a moment to reflect on the state of Architecture in our country today. Where are we? What’s important to us now, July 4th, 2012? And what does the future look like?

In a word, yes.

While the Cultural Policy Center of the University of Chicago would never put it that way, that is essentially the conclusion of their “Set in Stone” Report, released today.

The Report, a consolidation of 15 years of research involving over 800 building projects and 500 organizations, gathered hard evidence to find out: what influences a cultural building’s success or failure? The question is a relevant one: between 1994 and 2008 there has been a building boom of performing arts centers, museums, and theaters in the U.S., costing cities billions of dollars. And unfortunately, supply has outrun demand.

The biggest problem the Report identifies is that cities and towns, many of which have recently experienced improved education/income and enthusiastically undertake these projects, often overestimate the actual need for these centers in their communities. Thus, when they run into financial difficulties (most do: over 80% of the projects surveyed ran over-budget, some up to 200%), the centers become economic drains rather than cultural boons.

In other words: Just because you build it, it doesn’t mean they will come.

So what does make for a successful Cultural Center? More after the break…

Katerva isn’t looking for ideas that will improve the world in small increments. We are looking for paradigm-busting ideas. Our Award winners don’t simply move the needle when it comes to efficiency, lifestyle or consumption; they change the game entirely. This is a celebration of radical innovation and an acceleration of much needed change.

The year is half way through, and so are TED’s City 2.0 Awards. The Award, which offers $10,000 to 10 innovative ideas in Urban Transformation, has been awarded – so far – to an eco-artist, a Wikipedia of house-building, a noise mapper, a couple of sign-post rebels, and a public-health activist and educator.

More about the Award-Winning Projects…after the break.

“Every second, 2.8 million emails are sent, 30,000 phrases are Googled, and 600 updates are tweeted. While being absorbed into this virtual world, most rarely consider the physical ramifications of this data. All over the world, data centers are becoming integral components of our twenty-first city infrastructure As cloud storage and global Internet usage increase, it’s time to talk about the physical space of data.” - CLOG (5)

What does it look like to give the virtual, physical form? As every CLOG edition, Data Space explores “from multiple viewpoints and through a variety of means, a single subject particularly relevant to architecture now” (5) and this subject, how to design “the infrastructure of invisible data” (103), could very well be the defining question of our age. 

It seems that those born on June 25th were born under some Architectural star…

Antoni Gaudí (1852 -1926), the Catalán architect best known for his whimsical style and his inimitable masterpiece, the still unfinished Sagrada Familia, would have turned a ripe 160 years old today.

As if it weren’t enough that The New York Times just wrote a story on computer programs making architects obsolete, now it seems that computers are actually on the Architect-attack.

A new computer worm, known as ”ACAD/Medre.A,” has surfaced, and it has a very specific goal: find AutoCAD drawings, send them to China.

Find out how the worm works, and if you could be affected, after the break…

If you read our infographic, then you know that Public-Interest Design is one of the few growing sectors of the architecture industry. From the prevalence of Design-Build curriculums in Architecture Schools to the rise of the 1% program and non-profits like Architecture for Humanity, Public-Interest Design (PID) is hitting its stride.

Which is why we’re so excited that two of PID’s biggest players, Design Corps and SEED (Social Economic Environmental Design), have teamed up to create SEEDocs, a monthly series of mini-documentaries that highlight the inspirational stories of six award-winning public interest design projects.

The latest SEEDoc follows the story of the Grow Dat Youth Farm - a brilliant example of what we call “Urban Agri-puncture” (a strategy that uses design & Urban Agriculture to target a city’s most deprived, unhealthy neighborhoods) that is changing the lives of New Orleans youth.

More on this inspiring story, after the break…

Every June 21st since 2003, Go Skateboarding Day has rallied skateboarders around the globe – in skateparks and public plazas, downtown nooks and parking lots – to grind, ollie, and kickflip it with the best of them.

If I didn’t lose you at “ollie,” you’re probably wondering: what the heck does this have to do with architecture?

Well, I could talk about the architectural challenge that a skate park, as an interactive public space with specific topological requisites and social implications, offers architects. I could show you some cool testaments to the fact, such as the Architecture for Humanity-sponsored projects in Afghanistan and Manhattan, opening today.

But, rather selfishly, I’m more interested in what skateboarding has to offer us beyond skateparks. A skater, unlike your typical pedestrian, experiences space just as intensely and consciously as an architect himself, albeit in a different way. He/she is alive to the possibility of space, not in its totality, as an architect would be, but as a collection of tactile surfaces to be jumped on, grinded, and conquered.

The skater offers a revolutionary perspective for the architect: one that allows you to see buildings beyond what they were intended to be, to see (and design) buildings as “building blocks for the open minded.”