How to visualize architectural concepts in SketchUp using D5 Lite for faster design exploration.

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The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced that Martha Pomasonco, from the University of Lima in Peru, has been selected as the winner of the 2023 RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship in recognition of her outstanding project, "Upgraded Barrios" (Barrios Mejorados). 

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Videos

The International Creative Design Competition for Wuyi Mountain National Park No. 1 Scenic Byway will highlight the targeted positioning of making Wuyi Mountain a world-class tourist destination and the parlor of Fujian province, and showcase the unparalleled natural and cultural beauty of the Park to the world. Driven by creativity and innovation, the Competition intends to solicit architectural and planning improvement proposals from around the globe for 14 nodes firstly selected along the No. 1 Scenic Byway. 

The Competition, by gathering creative design forces around the globe, aims to drive the asset appreciation of natural and cultural resources in Wuyi Mountain National Park Rim Conservation and Development Belt, systematically enhance the value of the ecological products and advance the ecological civilization construction, thus creating the world-class scenic byways and world-class beautiful countryside, and establishing the Greater Wuyi Tourism Circle. The Competition is hosted by Nanping People’s Municipal Government, organized by Nanping Leadership Group Office for Works of Wuyi Mountain National Park Rim Conservation and Development Belt, and co-organized by Publicity Department of Nanping Municipal CPC Committee, Nanping Municipal Bureau of Natural Resources, Nanping Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism, Jianyang District People’s Government, Wuyi Mountain Municipal People’s Government, Wuyi New Area Administrative Committee, and Fujian Wuyi Tourism Group Co., Ltd.

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In recent decades, China's residential landscape has undergone a transformation setting primarily informed by social community ties now prioritizes the needs of rapid urbanization and modern lifestyles. Traditional courtyard houses of China once activated the urban realm, harmoniously blending private residential zones with public areas of the neighborhood. Today, the country is speckled with private developments and gated communities that have severed the connection between residential areas and the urban realm. Amidst this transformation, MAD Architects' Baiziwan Social Housing in Beijing emerges as a visionary attempt to reimagine urban living. By embracing a mixed-use program, this residential complex integrates itself with the surrounding neighborhood, fostering a renewed sense of unity with the bustling metropolis. Not limited to China alone, numerous housing endeavors worldwide have embraced this approach, reclaiming their ties to the urban realm.

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Videos

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Architects have always adapted their designs for the key building indicators of their time. After decades of focus on energy efficiency, embodied carbon is quickly becoming the key indicator for our next generation of buildings. Yet most of us are only beginning to understand the work of life cycle analysis (LCA), which is central to assessing the environmental impacts of building products both before, during, and after construction.

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Rebuild Foundation, run by Artist Theaster Gates, is converting the St. Laurence Elementary School into a new 40,000 sq foot arts hub on Chicago’s South Side. The formerly vacant elementary school in Chicago’s local St. Laurence neighborhood has been reimagined to redeem indoor and outdoor spaces, making it a cultural hub. Set to open in 2024, the building's adaptive reuse expanded the program and the landmark into a place of exploration, entrepreneurship, and creative education.

In the face of the environmental crisis and the need to mitigate climate change, adopting clean and renewable energy sources, such as solar energy, in architectural projects is becoming increasingly imperative. As a country with abundant sunlight incidence throughout the year, Brazil has enormous potential to take advantage of this energy source, which has become an increasingly attractive and viable option in the Brazilian scenario. There are numerous benefits solar energy can provide to both residents and the environment that make it a popular choice for residential use.

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Architects and designers are often looking for ways to make building facades and interior surfaces stand out from the crowd. But sometimes just the smallest change can have the biggest impact once you step back and see the whole picture. By employing an illusionary pattern such as dithering pixels or halftone dots, or by making subtle but intentional changes to the position or orientation of materials, flat surfaces can be transformed into curved, moving forms.

Halftone patterns work by reducing a solid surface of color into dots of decreasing size. As the dots gradually reduce to nothing, they leave nothing behind except a background color. The result is a flat surface with a gradient that mimics the shadows or highlights of a three-dimensional curve. Dithering, meanwhile, is the process of feathering multiple shades of the same color to blend them together. The effect allows designers to, on a large enough scale, create images with depth and curves, while using only a single color. Or even to create the illusion of an intermediary color.

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