Visual permeability, ventilation and a strong identity appeal, the hollow elements have increasingly found their place in contemporary architecture. Whether in large buildings or small residences, they appear in different shapes, materials and compositions, helping to determine the degree of interaction between interior and exterior space. This artifice in a residential construction is an important tool to ensure privacy and intimacy, without losing the possibility of connections to the outside and natural ventilation.
Since the beginning of the war, over 7.1 million people have been internally displaced within Ukraine. In response to this growing humanitarian crisis, Kyiv-based practice Balbek Bureau has developed a modular temporary housing system that aims to provide a dignified dwelling to internally displaced Ukrainians. RE:Ukraine is designed to adapt to different types of terrain and settlement density while being deployed in a short time frame. While the project was intended for areas of Ukraine that are not under fire, the framework can also accommodate refugees abroad.
In most countries around the world, value is placed on older buildings. There’s something about the history, originality, and charm of an older home that causes their value to sometimes be higher than newly constructed projects. But in Japan, the opposite is almost always the preference. Newly-built homes are the crux of a housing market where homes are almost never sold and the obsession with razing and rebuilding is as much a cultural thing as it is a safety concern, bringing 30-year-old homes to a valueless market.
In the architectural conversations taking place today, sustainability is a key topic of interest. Architecture firms embrace the term as a key part of their design ethos, and architecture schools globally have integrated designing “green” architecture as a core component of their curriculums. This sustainability conversation has also filtered down into more individual actions one can take within their immediate context. Online, for instance, guides abound on how you can make your home more eco-friendly and energy-efficient.
John Chapman House. Image Courtesy of Plus Architecture
Student housing takes on many forms around the world, but most commonly, it’s envisioned as close quarters in a bleakly designed dormitory. While prospective students choose universities based on academic rigor, athletic programs, extracurricular activities, and future career opportunities, they’re now wanting to know what living on and off-campus will be like- and it has forced designers to rethink the traditional designs of dormitories into something more innovative that better reflects what students want (and expect) in their university homes.
In urban design, suburbs can be a contentious topic. That is in part because the term lends itself to nebulous and ever-changing definitions. In its simplest form, the suburbs are residential communities within commuting distance, located a fair bit away from the heart of metropolitan areas. The American context sees suburbs viewed with some hostility, with racist ‘redlining’ practices a dark legacy to particular suburbs in the country. In a more superficial sense, American suburbs have often been criticised for their uniformity in appearance – portrayed as soulless dwellings absent of a sense of community.
Recently, the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times about the causes of unaffordable housing in New York City. He blamed the crisis on a few things, including a powerful financial “monoculture” in the city, NIMBYs, and the city itself blocking new construction. That last element, however—that the city blocks new construction—is an increasingly popular myth that needs examination.
Royal Manor Mobile Home Park. Image Courtesy of MH Village
The future of manufactured homes may reinvent the form of something that already widely exists- trailer parks. All across the United States, these small homes are being reimagined by architects by utilizing more sustainable materials, inventive construction techniques, and value engineering to create affordable homes and reinvent the once negative connotation that surrounded this housing typology.
Modernist House - From Aya: Life in Yop City by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie, translated by Helge Dasche. Image Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly
The comic strip, la bande dessinée, the graphic novel. These are all part of a medium with an intrinsic connection to architectural storytelling. It’s a medium that has long been used to fantasise and speculate on possible architectural futures, or in a less spectacular context, used as a device to simply show the perspectival journey through an architectural project. When the comic strip meshes fiction with architectural imagination, however, it’s not only the speculation on future architectural scenarios that takes place. It’s also the recording and the critiquing of the urban conditions of either our contemporary cities or the cities of the past.
Kinetic Cities, courtesy RMA Architects. Image Courtesy of RMA Architects
Rahul Mehrotra is an urbanist, educator, and founding principal of Mumbai- and Boston-based Rahul Mehrotra Architects (RMA Architects). Across India, Mehrotra has designed projects that range from master plans to weekend houses, factories, social institutes, and office buildings. Over decades, his endeavors in urban activism have culminated in the founding of the firm’s Architecture Foundation, which focuses on creating “awareness of architecture in India” through research, publication, exhibitions, and inclusive public dialogue surrounding architectural ethics and values.
The built environment we inhabit can be hostile, both on an individual architectural scale and in a wider urban context. Homeless people, for instance, are dissuaded from resting on public benches by the menacing presence of spikes and other forms of exclusionary design. From a global lens, we see the impact that borders have amidst anti-immigration hostility, imposingly exemplified by the Melilla border fence on the Morocco-Spain border. This “hostility” can be found in a large number of settlements around the world, settlements that have been formed as a result of organic migration or settlements predicated on control – like company towns.
Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong. Image Courtesy of 'City of Darkness Revisited’
Cities are growing, and they are growing upwards. This is far from just being a contemporary phenomenon of course – for more than a century, high-rises have been an integral part of urban settlements worldwide. This growing of cities encompasses a complex web of processes – advancements in transport links, urbanisation, and migration to mention a few. This growth of cities, however, is all too often linked with governmental failure to adequately support all facets of the urban population. Informal settlements are then born – people carving out spaces for themselves to live amidst a lack of state support.
California, as with most American states, has a housing crisis. Unlike the rest of the country, it is actually working to ameliorate the situation, with private and public initiatives that critics can’t help but label inadequate. The Bay Area made accessory dwelling units legal by changing zoning laws, but that has hardly made a dent. Some cities are now pushing for additional upzoning to give developers more room to bring new buildings to market at lower rents. There are all sorts of studies, university sponsored or underwritten by the industry, that recommend more-or-less radical fixes for a seemingly unfixable problem. Environmentalists are naturally cast as villains because they don’t condone greenfield developments. And Californians are tough on their elected officials, as the current governor learned last year.
https://www.archdaily.com/975506/new-construction-is-not-always-the-answerMark Alan Hewitt
West Campus Neighborhood, Austin, Texas. The University of Texas campus is in the foreground. Image Courtesy of Jack Myer/The Daily Texan.
Juan Miró, co-founder of Miró Rivera Architects reflects in an opinion piece on the student housing situation in the United States. The architect explores different dormitory conditions across the country and questions whether these leading public universities "enthusiastically endorse the idea of putting thousands of its students in windowless rooms in the name of density and efficiency".
Data shows that many more people are living alone, but the surprising fact is that living alone does not necessarily correspond with an increase in feelings of loneliness. Architecture has been evolving towards increases in privacy and private space for centuries. This video looks at architectural designs that attempt to reverse those trends by designing living scenarios that incorporate more opportunities for public engagement. These include Studio Gang’s City Hyde Park project in Chicago with its angled balconies. But the video goes deeper to look at examples that radically rethink residential architecture, its construction, design, and inclusion of public space.
Valuing formal simplicity and delicate attention to details and finishing, Studio MK27 was founded in the late 1970s by Marcio Kogan and currently has more than 30 members based in São Paulo and other collaborators around the world. Its work, as described on its website, seeks to fulfill the task of rethinking and continuing Brazilian modernism.
Buildings contribute nearly 40% of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, so the push is on to “get to zero” on many fronts. What happens when ambitious goals like zero energy meet a conventional building industry that’s structured on repetition and cost, in a market that struggles to keep up with massive demand? This is often—too often—our challenge.
The first wooden housing modules of Juf Nienke, a new circular prefabricated timber housing project by SeARCH, RAU, and DS landscape architects, has been installed in Amsterdam. The project will feature 61 rental homes made entirely of wood, and will sit at the entrance of Centrumeiland, a newly raised piece of land on Lake IJmeer that features 1500 housing units. It is set to be one of the most sustainable apartment buildings in the Netherlands, incorporating an innovative cross-laminated timber construction and utilizing recycled materials.
