Space Popular | Tag

Architects and Designers Should Take the Lead in Creating Immersive Environments

March 03, 2023

For the past year, I have been in conversation with architects and designers who are involved in the creation of immersive environments. They see themselves as naturally responsible for leading the construction of these environments, and this should serve as a reminder that architects have the potential to take on this role.

Despite how obvious it might sound, the metaverse has mostly been designed by developers and graphic designers, Therefore, it should work as a wake-up call for architects to be involved since they have skills particularly apt for it.

Whether the metaverse can be utilized as a narrative to claim a changing role for architects remains to be seen, but 2023 could be the year.

Space Popular Adapts Aldo Rossi’s Concepts of Urbanism to the Virtual Realms of the Metaverse

January 16, 2023

Through the “Search History” exhibition at MAXXI Museum in Rome, Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, directors of the architecture and art studio Space Popular, set out to explore the work of Also Rossi and to translate his notions of “urban fact” and “analogous city” to the virtual realm. The installation is a reflection on the proliferation of metaverse platforms and the concept of virtual urbanism. The exhibition is part of the fifth edition of Studio Visit, a partnership between Alcantara and the MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, which challenges designers to put forward a personal reinterpretation of the works of the masters in the MAXXI Architecture Collections.

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From Architecture School to Practice: How Famous and Emerging Figures Made the Transition

November 13, 2020

Architecture school is a place of experiment and a testing ground for innovative ideas. The academic work and student projects can bring to light the focus of an entire career, shape the backbone for an architectural theory, and crystalize values. How do their studies and formative years reflect on the later work of different architects? Taking a journey along decades, we explore the transition from architecture school to practice, the reverberance of academic explorations and early projects in the work of several architects and practices, highlighting the different pivotal steps that have shaped the beginning of their architectural journey.

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10 ArchDaily Interviews Reflecting on the Future of Architecture

October 15, 2020

In order to inspire our audience, generate critical debates, and develop ideas, ArchDaily has been continuously questioning architects about the future of architecture. To define emerging trends that will shape the upcoming cities, examining “What will be the future of architecture?” became an essential inquiry. More relevant during these ever-changing moments, discover 10 interviews from ArchDaily’s archived YouTube playlists that will highlight diverse visions from 10 different pioneers of the architecture field.

Space Popular on the Future of Digital Architecture: ArchDaily Interviews

April 07, 2020

Since their founding in Bangkok in 2013, Space Popular have offered an eclectic series of architectural spaces, objects, and events that cross digital and physical space, speculating on how the two realms could blend together in the near future. Directed by Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, both graduates of the Architectural Association in London, Space Popular has completed buildings, exhibitions, artworks, furniture collections, and interiors across Asia and Europe, as well as engaging works of virtual architecture.

Freestyle - Architectural Adventures in Mass Media

March 02, 2020

RIBA presents its first virtual reality (VR) exhibition, exploring moments across 500 years of aesthetics in architecture.

What makes a style? How is a style collectively agreed upon and shared? Drawing on RIBA’s world-class collections, Space Popular uses virtual reality to examine styles of the past and to consider the technology’s impact on contemporary spaces and buildings. Historic artefacts will be displayed alongside newly commissioned content, inviting you to enter a beguiling virtual universe to experience how popular cultures and technologies impact architecture and its style evolution.

Making connections across mass media and style, Freestyle takes the visitor on a journey through

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

June 21, 2018

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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Architecture Is Moving Into a Realm Where History Plays as Much a Part as Medium

November 13, 2017

In this essay British architect and academic Dr. Timothy Brittain-Catlin presents the work of Space Popular, an emerging practice exploring the meaning of and methods behind deploying virtual reality techniques in the architectural design process.

Architectural practice, especially in the UK, is moving fast into a realm where history plays as much a part as medium. But the ways in which architects work have been transformed entirely from those of the past, generating a fundamental conflict: how in practice does design through virtual reality use history? In the earliest days of fly-throughs we all realised that we could show our work to clients in a way that even the least plan-literate could understand. We could develop details three-dimensionally and from different angles, even representing different times of day. But what next? How do we engage historical knowledge and experience of buildings?

Towards an Architecture of Light, Color, and Virtual Experiences

September 25, 2017

This essay by Space Popular references an installation currently on display at Sto Werkstatt, in London. You can experience it in virtual reality, here.

The Glass House has no purpose other than to be beautiful. It is intended purely as a structure for exhibition and should be a beautiful source of ideas for “lasting” architecture but is not intended as such. According to the poet Paul Scheerbart, to whom it is dedicated, the Glass House should inspire the disillusion of current architecture’s far-too-restricted understanding of space and should introduce the effects and possibilities of glass into the world of architecture.

Bruno Taut [above] described his Glashaus for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne, Germany, as a "little temple of beauty"; as "reflections of light whose colors began at the base with a dark blue and rose up through moss green and golden yellow to culminate at the top in a luminous pale yellow.”[1] The Glass Pavilion, designed based on its potential effects on those who perceived it, was supposed to create vivid experiences. The site was the human mind.

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Space Popular Reignite the Concerns of "The Glass Chain" Letters By Way of Virtual Reality

September 17, 2017

"The Glass Chain" (Die Gläserne Kette in its native German) was an exchange of written letters initiated by Bruno Taut in November 1919. The correspondence lasted only a year, and included the likes of Walter Gropius, Hans Scharoun, and Paul Gösch. In the letters, the penfriends—thirteen in all—speculated and fantasized about the possibilities of glass, imagining, in the words of Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes (Space Popular), "fluid and organic glass follies and colourful crystal cathedrals covering entire mountain chains and even reaching into space."

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Space Popular: The Latest Architecture and News