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DIY: The Latest Architecture and News

Tiktok’s Influence in Countrysides and Cities

TikTok is a social network for sharing short videos that offers extensive features to edit them. It is possible to include filters, subtitles, soundtrack, gifs, make cuts and use creativity at will. As with Instagram and Twitter, you can follow other people's profiles and interact, liking their posts, making comments and even sharing via WhatsApp.

This Concept Uses a Pre-Fabricated Timber System to Enable Modern, Self-Built Homes

Solutions from the past can often provide practical answers for the problems of the future; as the London-based design and research firm, Space Popular demonstrate with their "Timber Hearth" concept. It is a building system that uses prefabrication to help DIY home-builders construct their own dwellings without needing to rely on professional or specialized labor. Presented as part of the ongoing 2018 Venice Biennale exhibition “Plots Prints Projections,” the concept takes inspiration from the ancient "hearth" tradition to explain how a system designed around a factory-built core can create new opportunities for the future of home construction.

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Call for entries MEDS Workshop 2018 - DiverCity

Update: The deadlines for this opportunity have been extended 

  • Call For tutors : Extended till January 28
  • Call for participants : Ends on February 28

MEDS workshop “Meetings of Design Students” is an international workshop that takes part each summer in a different country, focusing on various issues, themes, topics and settings that will help any designer expand their expertise. It is a chance to get in touch with diverse approaches to design, different building techniques, traditions and skills. MEDS workshop is both practical and educational because it focuses not only on creative theoretical designs, but actually compels participants to execute these designs during the 2-week span of the workshop. You can apply to MEDS as a tutor or as a participant.

Open Source Plan for a Modular Urban Gardening Structure Offers a Flexible Design for Locally Grown Food

As a response to the fast-paced city life, GrowMore is an urban gardening modular design with endless configurations to suit even the most unexpected of spaces. Designed by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum, the modular building kit provides an opportunity for social interaction and locally grown vegetation, reminding people to pause and connect with nature.

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How to Build A Tiki Bar in 18 Easy-to-Follow Steps

Although we’re conditioned to buy most of our furniture in one piece, or at least have it ready-to-build IKEA-style, there’s something special about creating something from scratch. Building something from its raw materials lets you see its journey from start to finish, with you learning about the craft it along the way, whether by yourself or with friends. The team at ArchDaily is sharing our very own built Tiki Bar – complete with instructions. Read on for some summer nostalgia you can build in your own backyard through a step by step Tiki DIY guide:

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How to use a Scrum Board to Maximize Personal and Team Productivity

If you're reading this, you likely work in the design world, and as a result you may have heard of Scrum. It’s a design method originally introduced by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the 1980s to describe a process for product development, and later formalized for software development by Jeff Sutherland in 1995. It relies on the organization of a team and its tasks around the principles of focus and flexibility: focus on a singular task within a given time period, and flexibility in response to changing client demand, user feedback, and design challenges. Scrum keeps a project on schedule with the Sprint, where the entire team is working towards one important milestone within set dates, and continuously communicating potential impediments to hitting the deadline.

IKEA Lab Releases Open-Source Plans for DIY Spherical Garden

Fresh off winning the “Design of the Year” for their refugee housing solution, the “Better Shelter,” IKEA is again making waves for a pioneering, flat pack solution to societal needs. Developed by the IKEA innovation lab Space10 alongside architects sine lindholm and mads-ulrik husum, the spherical “Growroom” is a DIY garden structure intended to help people “grow their own food much more locally in a beautiful and sustainable way.” And now, plans for the structure have been made available online for free via Space10’s open source platform, giving anyone the opportunity to build their own 3-dimensional garden.

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Video: How to Build Your Own Spiral Staircase Using a CNC Router

In this video, Ben Uyeda of HomeMade Modern demonstrates how to build a sleek, contemporary spiral staircase using just a standard schedule steel post, plywood and a CNC router (along with a healthy amount of wood and construction glue). To build the staircase, Uyeda uses the CNC to cut out 12 shapes of incremental size from a plywood sheet, which he then stacks and fits around the post to secure into place.

HomeMade Modern has also made the CAD files available for free, so handy woodworking types can attempt the construction themselves.

QUIKRETE One Bag Wonder

For $2500, what can you do with one single bag of any QUIKRETE® Concrete Mix? From traditional home improvement projects to fixtures of modern décor, project ideas using QUIKRETE are limitless. We wonder - What will you create with ONE bag of QUIKRETE...

"DIY For Architects": This Parametric Brick Facade Was Built Using Traditional Craft Techniques

With their latest facade construction, Iranian architecture firm Sstudiomm explores the potential that brick can offer by utilizing parametric architecture. Instead of relying on unique construction elements for assembly on-site at a later date, in their new project (called, in full, "Negative Precision. On-Site Fabrication of a Parametric Brick Facade // A DIY for Architects") the firm considers how a simple mass-produced element like the brick can be assembled in unique ways by taking advantage of digital technology. While firms like Gramazio Kohler have already developed industrial methods of assembling brickwork following parametric designs, Sstudiomm aims for a more lo-fi approach, creating parametric brick walls using little more than the traditional construction methods found in Iran and a dose of ingenuity.

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Live Out Your Adult Treehouse Fantasies With the Skysphere

After childhood, treehouses are usually stowed away in tandem with the fantasy and adventures associated with youthful imagination. As it turns out though, there can be a wildly elaborate, adult counterpart to this early life staple. The Skysphere, a project designed by Jono Williams, is the ultimate 21st century DIY treehouse project. Actually a small pod-like inhabitable platform attached to a steel column, it is more like the homegrown equivalent of Toronto’s CN Tower, Tokyo’s Skytree, or the unrealized Phoenix Observation Tower by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).

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5 Things Architecture Can Learn from the Tiny House Movement

As the global economy grows uncertain, homeowners are getting more creative in order to afford essential residential spaces. The tiny house movement has gained a foothold worldwide, encouraging the construction of homes as small as 150 square feet (14 square meters), with many smaller housing models cropping up on a daily basis. Home to residents of all ages, tiny houses have evolved far beyond the cramped quarters of Airstream trailers of decades past and, though they were once considered an architectural farce, tiny houses are becoming an increasingly popular solution to weather the economic storm and increasingly relevant to the field of architecture.

With their increasing respectability - and their popularity increasingly exposing the drawbacks of other housing types - we take a look at some lessons that while key to the tiny house movement, are still applicable in the larger architectural arena. Read on to find out what tiny houses can contribute to the race for better space.

How Walter Segal's 1970s DIY Community Could Help Solve Today's Housing Crisis

In recent years, DIY approaches to building houses have become increasingly popular, as increasing cost and decreasing availability have caused some prospective house-buyers to embrace simple methods of fabrication and the sweat of their own brow, as discussed in this recent article. However, this trend has much earlier precedents: in 1979, self-build pioneer Walter Segal had already embraced these progressive concepts in a development known as "Walter's Way," an enclave of self-built social housing in southeast London. According to Dave Dayes, a Walter's Way resident and an original builder on the project, Segal believed that "anybody can build a house. All you need to do is cut a straight line and drill a straight hole." The houses were built entirely of standard wood units assembled onsite in Lewisham.

In this video, London based non-profit The Architecture Foundation steps into the utopia of Walter's Way, a micro-neighborhood founded on principals of communal living for people of all backgrounds. The film has been released in connection with Doughnut: The Outer London Festival taking place September 5th, which will bring together writers, historians, architects and economists for "an adventurous celebration of all things Outer London and a critical reflection on the rapid transformation that the city's periphery is currently experiencing." The Architecture Foundation aims to introduce central Londoners (and the world) to the radically functional housing concepts in practice at Walter's way.

5 Things the Tiny House Movement Can Learn from Post War Architecture

One of the many problems with being deeply engaged in a niche subject such as architecture is that you can easily lose sight of what a "normal" person's perspective is on a topic. Through experience, we often assume that a rising trend that we notice on a daily basis has passed completely unnoticed by the general populace, and it's usually difficult to see when a topic has reached the critical mass to become a genuine social phenomenon. So imagine my surprise when I saw a joke about an architectural trend on a popular webcomic. Two months ago, Toothpaste For Dinner published an image of a character smugly telling his friend "that's cool... my Tiny House is a lot smaller, of course" as they tower over a comically small abode. Suddenly it became clear to me that the Tiny House movement was not just a curiosity for architects.

This realization leads to a number of questions: why are Tiny Houses such a big deal? What promise do they hold for society? And is there anything the movement is failing to address? These questions led me to conclude that, for better or worse, the Tiny House movement might just be the closest thing we have right now to a utopian housing solution - and if that's true, then the movement has a big task on its hands.

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Kickstarter: DIY Concrete House Ring

Dream of one day making your own home? Well, here's a fun mini alternative in the meantime. The "DIY Concrete House Ring" is a high quality silver and concrete ring that lets users experience the process of 'making'. The ring itself is made from a DIY compact kit, and comes in two familiar architectural silhouettes - gable roof or saltbox roof - and in either light or dark concrete. The project was developed by Linda Bennett, author of "10 Things They Don’t Teach You in Architecture School" and "Searching for a Job in Architecture? 10 Things You Need to Know…" via her blog, archi-ninja. Check out the project's debut on kickstarter (which offers fantastic perks for backers) for more information.