Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture: Before - Via Google

The devastating earthquake and tsunami that ravaged northeastern Japan in early March caused unimaginable damage and heartbreak to many. In response, Google has created a website named “Mirai e no kioku”, meaning “Memories for the Future”. The website allows the people of Japan to share photos and videos of their cities in an effort to preserve the memories collected over generations that may have been lost during the disaster. Google has also provided thousands of miles of Street View imagery that includes “Before” and “After” comparisons of the hardest hit areas.

Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture: After - Via Google

© http://zumthor.tumblr.com/

We recently came across a photo expose chronicling numerous projects by Peter Zumthor. It features an extensive gallery covering models, drawings, and photos of his projects in various states from construction to completion. Be sure to check the site out here, and catch a glimpse into the inner workings of Zumthor.

Courtesy of Tour de Force 360VR

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin turned 100 this year. As part of the commemoration Tour de Force 360VR produced an award winning “guided” 360 degree virtual tour of the estate. The center of Frank Lloyd Wright’s world was Taliesin near Spring Green, Wisconsin. It was his home, workshop, architectural laboratory and inspiration for nearly all his life. Our international award winning Tour de Force, allows visitors from around the world to experience this place in ways only a personal visit could provide before. The response has been dramatic. More information on the tour after the break. read more »

© Iwan Baan

Zaha Hadid Architects have launched a new interactive website that has a large archival library of the many works, built and un-built by the firm.  Looking through this vast collection of projects, it becomes obvious how much of Zaha Hadid’s work is public architecture: between urban projects, museums and galleries, this architect’s project are made for masses.  We are the real users of her architecture.  The new website allows visitors to not only appreciate her work, but participate in an internet forum of sharing a common appreciation for the work.  Each project can be “starred” and added to YourZHA, which becomes a log of her work that the visitor to the site can then refer back to.

Zaha Hadid’s work has been well received by the people for whom the architecture was built.  Last month, the new Riverside Museum celebrated 500,000 visitors within its first few weeks of opening.  Read more about it here.

YourZHA is but one of the interactive features on the site.  Browse through the hundreds of projects each coupled with descriptions and images.  The website also features a news section where visitors can be kept up to date on lectures, competitions, galleries and phases of various projects.  Visitors can also do a keyword search through the archives in a number of categories from architecture, design, masterplans, awards, publications, people and videos.

Check it out for yourself here: http://www.zaha-hadid.com/.

Caterpillar (Courtesy of Immersive Kinematics)

Immersive Kinematics, a new research group at the University of Pennsylvania, shared with us their newly launch website. The research agenda expands the roles of architecture and engineering focusing on integrating robotics, interaction, and embedded intelligence in our buildings, cities, and cultures.

It owes much to the unique commitment from the School of Engineering as a partner and collaborator beyond the classical roles of architect and engineer. We’ve just started working, and will have more uploads to come with expanded research. The group offers a class teaming architecture and engineering students in mechatronic projects.

Check out their website here.

REX’s website, voted as one of the Top 10 Architect’s websites by our readers.

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Every day we spend quite some time visiting architect’s websites (maybe even yours!) to be up to date with new and ongoing projects.

It’s a very fun part of our job, especially when websites have a good design and usability. However from time to time we stumble upon websites that are very difficult to browse, or present projects in a way that you can’t even understand them.

You know that we as architects have the ability to design “from a spoon to a city”, and a website should be among those things we can (and should) design, especially when it is one of our most important marketing tools. I’m not saying that you should learn HTML and code your own website, but as we know from our work, an informed client is a good client. Therefore, having a good idea on what your website should offer to its visitors can help you relate with the person you hire to maintain it, the same way we love when a client has a clear idea on how they want their building to be… and not asking for a “green roof” just because they read it in some random magazine.

Below you will find a few tips that can help you on this process. I’m very confident that some of you may already know about some of them, and it’d be great if you could share your comments based on your experience.

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It’s been a year and a couple of months since we first started ArchDaily.

With the one mission of “broadcasting architecture worldwide” we have already published 1,200 architecture related posts and our readers have engaged with more than 12,000 comments in architecture related discussions.

Architecture is the most frequent word we use. We are architects and we love architecture. With this in mind, we have again decided to search and rank the best sites devoted to architecture only. This is not an easy job and of course it can be considered a subjective topic (as it is with every ranking). In order to reduce subjective observations, this year we have decided to consider only a recognized third party ranking system: alexa.com.

Based in our extensive architecture and Internet experience complemented with previous feedback from our readers, we came out with a list of 20 English written sites devoted to architecture only and ranked them according to alexa.com. Alexa ranks with a number 1 the most popular website in the world, which is now google.com.

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We are architects, and during the last few years we have been reading and commenting on several architectural websites. As many of you do, we love to watch, learn and discuss about architecture online, with people from around the world. One day we decided to put all these sites together to get the whole picture on architectural sites, and then order them according to our likings. But in the meanwhile, we noticed it wasn’t that easy, because each one of us had different interests and approaches.  In our listings, several sites were repeated, but in different places.

So, we decided to find a way to make a standardized procedure to rank and order these sites. Then we noticed Michiel van Raaij at Eikonographia repeated the ranking he started in 2007, the MoPo (Most Popular Architectural Blogs). Although Michiel did a very accurate job, he restricted it to English blogs from individual authors, leaving out several of our favorite blogs from either foreign languages or multiple authors, and some other sitess that mix architecture with other related subjects (design, sustainability, trends, etc).

To expand this rank, we decided to put together some common criteria. The most logical criteria should be the amount of visitors, but this is almost impossible since most sites don’t publish these stats. But there are some other factors you can use to measure the relevance of a website: (a) Rank of websites based on an estimate of their traffic, by Alexa, (b) Google Page Rank and (c) and the frequency of the updates, an average of the entries published in the last 2 months (done by us). That´s how we came up with YAMoPo (Yet Another MoPo).

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