The Living: The Latest Architecture and News

The fifth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial just announced its list of participants. Under the artistic direction of Floating Museum, a collective of artists, designers, poets, and educators focused on building connections between art, community, architecture, infrastructure, and public institutions, CAB 5 will be presented at multiple sites throughout the city. "This is a Rehearsal" will focus on the community and process-related aspects of architecture, emphasizing how it helps to improve urban life and foster communal responsibility. The participants, chosen by Floating Museum, will look at global environmental, political, and economic challenges while addressing local circumstances. The goal of CAB 5's more than 100 activations, including installations and performances, is to get people to think about how society is impacted by physical infrastructure, societal history, aesthetic, and spatial design.

The Chicago Architecture Biennial is a nonprofit organization that aims to bring together people from around the world to explore innovative ideas and collectively imagine and shape the future of design. The exhibition will open on September 21, 2023, and will be on view until January 2, 2024, spanning various locations across the Chicago metropolitan area. Over 70 creative practitioners, including artists, architects, designers, and performers, will be featured in this citywide exhibition.

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The construction industry's future will undoubtedly include "carbon reduction" as a mandatory task. Aside from locally sourced, virgin materials, an increasing number of new materials are becoming available. New materials can be developed in several ways, including low-carbon substitution, recycling, performance enhancement, and 3D printing. New materials will not only be more environmentally friendly and enable new construction methods, but they will also influence the starting point and direction of design concepts, resulting in new buildings with new perceptions and spaces.

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The 17th Venice Architecture Biennale invited architects to ponder the question “How will we live together”, eliciting various answers and interpretations. The International Exhibition unfolding in Giardini, the Arsenale and Forte Maghera presents 113 participants in the competition, coming from 46 countries, whose contributions are organized into five scales: Among Diverse Beings, As New Households, As Emerging Communities, Across Borders, and As One Planet. The following participants explore a variety of subjects, prompting a holistic re-evaluation of the collective in relationship with issues ranging from the urban and natural environment to climate action or the relationship with other species.

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The Chicago Architecture Biennial has announced the list of participants invited to contribute to the event’s second edition, which will be held from September 16 to January 7, 2018 in Chicago. More than 100 architecture firms and artists have been selected by 2017 artistic directors Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, founders of Los Angeles–based Johnston Marklee, to design exhibitions that will be displayed at the Chicago Cultural Center and throughout the city.

“Our goal for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial is to continue to build on the themes and ideas presented in the first edition,” explained Johnston and Lee. “We hope to examine, through the work of the chosen participants, the continuous engagement with questions of history and architecture as an evolutionary practice.”

Videos

You’ve probably never given much thought to the seemingly basic interior partitions of an airplane, but building codes are a walk in the park compared to the exacting standards of aviation design. Those thin panels that separate the seats from the plane's galley must also be capable of supporting the weight of flight attendant jumpseats and providing a removable section to accommodate emergency stretchers - not to mention the rigorous safety standards and crash testing that aviation components must satisfy. With all of these challenges in mind, The Living, an Autodesk Studio, in collaboration with Airbus and APWorks, have developed the Bionic Partition Project, which harnesses generative design and 3D printing to maximize the structural efficiency of the panel, reducing the weight of an aircraft, and saving fuel. And while this particular application is specific to a single aircraft type, the technological advances could have far-reaching implications.

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Fast Company has announced who they believe to be the most innovative practices in architecture for 2015. Topping this list is the online remodeling community Houzz, the BIG powerhouse and David Benjamin’s The Living. See the complete list, after the break, and let us know who you believe is the world’s most innovative firms in the comment section below.

The Holcim Foundation has announced the Winners of the Holcim Awards 2014 for North America, the award which recognizes the most innovative and advanced sustainable construction designs. Among the winners are BIG and The Living, with designs which the jury stated showed "sophisticated and multi-disciplinary responses to the challenges facing the building and construction industry."

The ten recognized projects share over $300,000 in prize money, with the top three projects overall going on to be considered for the global Holcim Awards awards, to be selected in 2015.

Read on after the break for the full list of winners

Our friends at The Creators Project have shared with us an awesome video of the latest MoMA PS1 installation: Hy-Fi. Designed by The Living, who have - in a fascinating move - recently been acquired by Autodesk, the tower's many organic, biodegradable bricks are grown from a mushroom root in five days, with no energy required and no carbon emissions. In fact, the tower will be composted after MoMA PS1's summer program is over. Learn more about this ingenious tower from the creator David Benjamin in the video above. And check out more images of the tower after the break.

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When you think about the future, how do you envision the built environment? According to this article, originally appearing on The Huffington Post as The Architecture of the Future is Far More Spectacular than You Could Imagine, the future is closer than we might think – current projects are already answering the imagined needs and desires of the next generation. From a tower with rotating floors to a park with the ability to cleanse raw sewage, check out fourteen projects believed to embody the architecture of tomorrow, after the break.

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The Architectural League of New York has announced the winners of their 32nd annual Emerging Voices awards. The coveted recognition program spotlights eight emerging practitioners in North America whose “distinct design voices” have shown the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape design, and urbanism.

“The work of each Emerging Voice represents the best of its kind, and addresses larger issues within architecture, landscape, and the built environment,” described the League.  “This year, in particular, saw firms entrepreneurial in spirit, pursuing alternate forms of practice, often writing their own programs or serving as their own clients.”

This year’s eight Emerging Voices are...

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The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 has selected "Hy-Fi," a “circular tower of organic and reflective bricks” designed by The Living (David Benjamin), as the winner of the 15th annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York. An exemplar of the cradle-to-cradle philosophy, the temporary installation will be built entirely from organic material via a new method of bio-design.