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Minecraft: The Latest Architecture and News

Lessons from UN-Habitat: How to Design Spaces For and With the People?

The Un-Habitat or the United Nations agency for human settlements and sustainable urban development, whose primary focus is to deal with the challenges of rapid urbanization, has been developing innovative approaches in the urban design field, centered on the active participation of the community. ArchDaily has teamed up with UN-Habitat to bring you weekly news, article, and interviews that highlight this work, with content straight from the source, developed by our editors.

Discover in this feature the first lesson to learn from UN-Habitat, on how to design with and for the people. In order to create great public spaces, the only secret is listening to the community. Questioning “how can we design together”, this article presents cases in Ghana, Brazil, and India, focusing on street, market, and open public spaces implementation projects, where interventions took on participatory approaches and involved local residents from the beginning of the process.

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MVRDV Brings Minecraft to Life with RED7 Housing in Moscow

Dutch practice MVRDV have unveiled RED7, a housing project for Moscow and the firm’s first building in Russia. MVRDV won the competition to design RED7 for client GK Osnova in December 2017, and the project has been accepted by the architectural committee of Moscow. Designed with a Minecraft-like gradient of blocks, the project was inspired by its neighboring context. As a symbolic gateway into the city center, the design will include 289 apartments with external terraces and expansive views of Moscow's skyline.

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LEGO vs Architecture: BBC Film Explains How It's All Connected

Can you even call yourself an architect if you don’t have an old box of LEGO that you can’t bare to throw out stored away in an attic somewhere?

LEGO has become a part of architecture’s collective conscience – an inspiration, a modeling tool, a nostalgic driver, a raison d'être for architects who grew up piecing worlds together and imagining alternative realities. With the completion of BIG’s LEGO House in Billund, LEGO is once again in the spotlight. But, as this short documentary explains, it never really left.

Beautiful Minecraft

With a bit of imagination and a heavy dose of artistic talent, Minecraft blocks can be used to build almost anything. But as you'll see, some artists are taking Minecraft building to a whole new level.

Beautiful Minecraft is a compendium of stunning artwork built in Minecraft. Using millions of blocks and spending hundreds of hours, these artists have created floating steampunk cities, alien worlds, detailed classical sculptures, fantastical landscapes, architectural marvels, and more.

The results are simply beautiful.

15 Incredible Architectural Feats Made in Minecraft

With more than 70 million copies sold worldwide, it would be unfair to refer to Minecraft as just a simple game of textured boxes in a pixelated 3D world. After acquiring the makers of the game (Mojang) in 2014, Microsoft announced on Tuesday, January 19 that it also acquired MinecraftEdu, the official educational version of Minecraft, which is used as a creative tool in more than 10,000 classrooms in 45 countries around the world.

The infinite possibilities that the game offers have led millions of people around the world to make and share their greatest creations: cities, buildings and even the reinterpretation of historical structures. Minecraft's impact was recognized in 2015 when the Centre Pompidou dedicated an exhibition to its creative potential for children and adolescents.

We've rounded up 15 of the best models created on the platform. And if you use Minecraft, you can download most of them (via an external link provided by the creator) to add to your own account.

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How Minecraft is Inspiring the Next Generation of Young Architects

For many architects, an obsession with design came at a very young age - often, an architectural career begins with toys such as wooden blocks or that old classic, LEGO. In recent years though, a new contender has emerged to inspire young architectural minds: Minecraft. In this article, originally published on Autodesk's Redshift publication as "Minecraft Architecture: What Architects Can Learn From a Video Game," Kim A O'Connell looks into the growing influence of Minecraft in architectural design and education, including the growing presence of the global "Blockworks" team.

Since it burst onto the gaming scene in 2009, Minecraft has become one of the world’s most popular video games—so much so that Microsoft bought the game and its parent company for a whopping $2.5 billion in 2014.

Today, the world-building platform has also garnered the attention of architects and designers. Could a video game actually change the way architecture is taught and practiced?

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