This article was originally published by Common Edge as "Separating Architecture From the Building Arts Produces Soulless Structures."

Truth be told, many architects I know are a little uneasy about their lack of building knowledge. Since architecture without construction is largely a graphic arts exercise, this is either deeply ironic or grimly paradoxical. To bridge this yawning gap, architects today typically hire a slew of consultants—roof, skin, curtain wall, interior, sustainability, preservation—who join the growing influence of software-driven structural and mechanical engineers to absorb much of what architects once assumed they could handle.

A new museum dedicated to the life and work of French fashion icon Yves Saint Laurent has opened in the Moroccan city of Marrakech. Designed by Studio KO, the building sits a short distance away from Jardin Majorelle – the home acquired by Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé in 1980. With a large permanent exhibition space designed by scenographist Christophe Martin, showcasing the collections of it's namesake, the museum also features temporary exhibition spaces, a research library and archives, an auditorium, bookstore, and a terrace café.

This article originally appeared on guggenheim.org/blogs under the title "How Analog and Digital Came Together in the 1990s Creation of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao," and is used with permission.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary this month, has been hailed as a pinnacle of technological progress since its October 1997 opening. While the use of the modeling software CATIA (Computer Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application) was without question groundbreaking, some of the greatest moments of ingenuity during the building’s design and construction were distinctly low-tech. Developed between 1991 and 1997, the curved and angular titanium-clad building was conceived at the turning point between analog and digital practice. This profound shift enveloped and permeated every aspect of the project, from the design process and construction techniques to the methods of communication technology put to use.

In the decade since the start of the financial crisis, there has been an explosion in the number of architectural practices that have pursued unusual and ingenious business models—among the most popular of which is the concept of the developer-architect, who serves as their own client. With his architecture firm and development company JSa, Javier Sanchez has been proving this concept since long before the financial crisis hit. In the latest interview of his City of Ideas series—and the third of his interviews with Mexican architects after Enrique Norten, Alberto Kalach and Mauricio Rocha and Gabriela Carrillo—Vladimir Belogolovsky speaks to Sanchez about the benefits of working as one’s own client and how JSa leverages its business model to improve the city.

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This article was originally published by RenderPlan as "How to Render an AutoCAD Floor Plan with Photoshop."

Rendering plans in Photoshop is an essential part of presenting your work to your client or to convince a competition jury to pick your design as a winner. Whenever you publish your work for books, websites or presentations the design quality of your plans will be your business card to future clients and the audience you build around your practice. Let’s start step by step.

This article was originally published by The Architect's Guide as "The 7 Best Architecture Podcasts For Architects, Hosted By Architects."

As an avid podcast listener I thought I would put together a list of the best architecture podcasts that are also hosted by architects. I think it is helpful to get insight into the design and business side of architecture from someone who has been through the process personally.

So, in no particular order, here are my picks for the best architecture podcasts currently available.

Have you registered for your free library card? If you haven't, you're missing out on some serious perks! The Internet Archive has a lending feature that allows users to electronically "borrow" books for 14 days. With over 2,000 borrowable books on architecture, patrons from across the globe can read works by Reyner Banham, Walter Gropius, Ada Louise Huxtable and Jonathan Glancey. There are also helpful guides, dictionaries and history books.

This article was originally published by The Architect's Newspaper as "Ai Weiwei’s fences take on borders and belonging in NYC exhibit."

In Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, a new exhibition by Ai Weiwei presented by the Public Art Fund, the artist and activist takes on the security fence as a medium for urban intervention, with New York City as his canvas. Some of the works might be easy to miss, like the chain link fences suspended over a gap between two buildings on East 7th Street, just steps from Ai’s old basement apartment. But others, like the monumental Gilded Cage at Doris Freedman Plaza in Central Park, or Arch, nested under the Washington Square arch, are unmistakable and grandiose.

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How do we determine the actual height of a building? Where do we place the dimension line? The history of measuring skyscrapers dates back to 1885, way before AutoCAD or Revit dimensions, when the Home Insurance Building in Chicago was among the first to boast of being the world's tallest building, but the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH)—or the Joint Committee on Tall Buildings, as it was originally called—wasn’t formed until 1969. Recognized by many as the foremost authority on tall buildings, the CTBUH is often cited in determining the world’s (or country’s or city’s) tallest building. However, the CTBUH is not the only organization with a stake in measuring buildings; the global building information database Emporis is also a major player. Between them, these two organizations provide 10 different ways to determine a skyscraper's height, which we have summarized below.

Although the Louvre pyramid, often recognized as his masterwork, created a luminous icon for presenting culture, IM Pei’s early museums were characterized by the harsh shadows of brutalism. Project by project, the Chinese-American master developed a sophisticated, open architectural language. Pei’s holistic approach for welcoming museum visitors comprises powerful symbols which utilize sunlight to its fullest during the daytime, while employing the magical glow of illumination in the evening.

Whereas most assessments of the Louvre have praised the achievements of the luminous pyramid as seen above the ground, the actual design challenge laid underground, in offering visitors a successful underground space. Later, Pei transferred his language to multiple other museum projects, where light was always a key factor in defining museum experiences. In a year of celebratory events such as “Rethinking Pei: A Centenary Symposium,” which begins tomorrow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, an examination of Pei’s use of light in museums can contribute an important cultural emphasis.

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Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, both partners at OMA, have been tapped to design the recently-announced expansion of the New Museum in New York. OMA will design a new building adjacent to SANAA's tiered-box museum. The project is expected to break ground in 2019 and will give the New Museum an additional 50,000 square feet (4,650 square meters) for "galleries, improved public circulation and flexible space for the institution’s continued exploration of new platforms and programs." This will be Koolhaas' first public building in New York. According to the New York Times, the New Museum—the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art—has already raised 50 percent of the cost.

This article was originally published on The Architect's Guide as "How To Ace Your Web (Skype) Architecture Job Interview."

Love it or hate it, online job interviews are becoming more and more common. Especially given how the architecture job search process is no longer limited to your immediate area.

I worked abroad for many years and I have experienced applying from both the U.S. and Europe. I learned a few tips and tricks along the way that should be helpful if you are faced with this interview type.

Bjarke Ingels Group's (BIG) LEGO House, which opened to the public earlier this month in Billund, Denmark, has already entered the canon of the iconic. By reframing the "toy scale of the classic LEGO brick" to the architectural scale, a vibrant collection of exhibition spaces and public squares "embody the culture and values at the heart of all LEGO experiences." In other words, it's playful, bright, and almost exclusively rectilinear!

Photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu has turned his lens to the new LEGO House, providing insight into a building which delights and surprises in equal measure.

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In this video, Spirit of Space visits Exhibit Columbus to see Wiikiaami, a parametrically designed structure by studio:indigenous. Beginning in 2016, Exhibit Columbus is an annual event which invites people to travel to the small, but architecturally fascinating Midwestern town of Columbus, Indiana. Free and open to the public through November 26th, Exhibit Columbus displays 18 unique, site-responsive architectural installations.

Every year, 3 million Muslim pilgrims from over 120 different countries travel to Makkah (commonly transliterated as Mecca), Saudi Arabia, to perform Hajj (pilgrimage) in the Islamic month of Zilhaj. Due to the ever-increasing number of visitors each year, overcrowding has led to deadly accidents and stampedes in the past; to ensure crowd safety and better circulation, the Makkah Development Authority (MDA) engaged Otis, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of people-moving products, and successfully oversaw the redesigning of the Jamarat Bridge.

Watch the video above for a summary of the architectural design of the Jamarat Bridge, or read on to see a 7-minute mini-documentary about the structure's development.

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This article was originally published by Common Edge as "A Top Building Researcher Asks: Why is Architecture Afraid of Science?"

Recently we’ve written a fair amount about the state of architectural research. The general consensus appears to be that it lacks rigor and, even more importantly, is not grounded in good science. Steven J Orfield has some strong opinions about architectural research. He’s been conducting it—for architecture and design firms, as well as Fortune 500 companies—at his Minneapolis-based Orfield Laboratories for more than three decades now. Late last week I talked to him about why architects are afraid of science, how he would introduce it into the schools, and his work in the field of universal design.

More than a thousand meters above sea level on the slopes of the Alborz mountain range in Gilan, northern Iran, a remarkable village dating back to 1006 AD bustles with life. The unique ochre-brown structures of Masuleh follow the slope of the mountain that the village nestles on—or rather, grows from—giving the village its most unusual quality: the roofs of many of the houses connect directly to, or even form a part of, the street serving the houses above.

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This article was originally published on the blog of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the largest platform for contemporary architecture in North America. The 2017 Biennial, entitled Make New History, will be free and open to the public between September 16, 2017 and January 6, 2018.

The Tribune Tower has stood at the heart of Chicago’s cultural heritage for almost a hundred years. Like the spire of a secular cathedral, it still symbolizes the rise of the “city of big shoulders” and its defining role in the American Century. But the building is more than a Chicago icon. The story of its origin has proved to be one of the most enduringly influential narratives in 20th Century architecture, key to understanding the skylines of cities all over the world.

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