The Revit Importer converts families and building elements to SketchUp’s native tags and components. It optimizes geometry creating a lightweight and well-organized SketchUp file that is ready-to-use.

Ondřej Císler from Aoc architects and Petr Tej from the Klokner Institute at CTU in Prague have designed a bridge over the Dřetovice stream in Vrapice, near the city of Kladno in the Czech Republic.

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Audience sightlines, accessibility and acoustics all make theater seating a hugely precise art. As part of their set of online resources for architects and designers, the team at Theatre Solutions Inc (TSI) have put together a catalog of 21 examples of theater seating layouts. Each layout is well detailed, with information on the number of seats, the floor seating area and row spacing. These layouts fall under three general forms; to supplement this information, alongside TSI's diagrams we've included the pros and cons of each type, as well as examples of projects which use each format. Read on for more.

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The Young Talent Architecture Award (YTAA) 2020 has been launched by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe. Announced during the Young Architects’ Forum in Barcelona, the award program encourages exchange between schools and seeks to improve the skills of architects from the beginning of their professional careers. YTAA recognizes the talent of recently graduated architects, urbanists and landscape architects, and provides the opportunity to work with architecture offices and institutions.

Modern Moroccan architecture is reinterpreting vernacular traditions. Taking its name from the Arabic al-maġhrib, or the “place the sun sets; the west”, the kingdom is a sovereign state home to numerous examples of Islamic design, as well as detailed art and ornamentation found within geometric patterns, friezes and open courtyards.

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Walking into an electrical store can be intimidating. At first glance all the lights are on, and the thousands of chandeliers and lamps are blinding. When you walk toward the lamps, you see shelves with dozens of options, shapes, colors, prices, and uses. In each package, informational tables with numbers that seem to make no sense at all. Lumens, color temperature, wattage. There are so many confusing terms. But before you give up on everything and rush back with the cheapest option, turning the lamp on only for it to make your house or the house you designed feel like a sinister back-country funeral home, some basic information can help you a lot. We know that good lighting design can greatly improve a building or even its occupant's productivity. And poorly designed lighting can ruin it or negatively affect its occupants. To help out, we've gathered some information that can help you the next time a light bulb burns out in your home.

Founder of the innovative architecture firm MAD Architects, Ma Yansong (born 26 November 1975) has helped to give China a name in the international architecture scene. The first Chinese architect to receive a RIBA fellowship, Ma explores contemporary architecture in relation to traditional eastern values of nature, resulting in buildings that are complex and contextually aware, but sometimes even surreal.

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Videos

Architect, educator and founding director of SCI-Arc, Ray Kappe, FAIA, passed away last week at the age of 92. Kappe experienced lung failure after battling pneumonia. As a renowned architect, Kappe designed more than 100 residences, pioneered a new approach to architectural education, and shaped both Los Angeles and California Modernism as we know it.

MoMA PS1 has announced that the Young Architects Program will be placed on a one-year hiatus. MoMA PS1, formerly P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, is one of the oldest and largest nonprofit arts centers in the United States devoted to contemporary art. The Young Architects Program founded by MoMA and MoMA PS1 was made to offer emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design a temporary, outdoor installation in New York.

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The international design firm Olson Kundig has designed a new sustainable option for after-death care. In fact, the architects created the world’s first facility for converting human remains into soil, a flagship building for Recompose in Seattle.

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Choosing the right lighting for any space can be a complex decision. Considerations need to be made with respect to the purpose, form and function of the lighting application. Design and aesthetics also play a role in the equation. With so many options for lighting on the market, it takes specialized knowledge and understanding to determine the best fit for your space. Even more challenging than finding lighting for a generic space, an art gallery or museum application can be difficult and even overwhelming to light properly. LED lighting has simplified a large chunk of lighting for art display.

In collaboration with Being development, OMA has won a competition to redevelop Van der Meulen-Ansemsterrein (VDMA) in central Eindhoven, in the Netherlands. The central site will be rehabilitated into “a vibrant urban hub with housing, offices, and public spaces.”

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London's largest co-working space is officially set to open in the summer of 2020. Designed as part of Victoria House in Bloomsbury Square by LABS Collective, the 150,000 square foot project combines office, retail and leisure space. With access to both the West End and The City, the co-working space will feature a range of rooms and layouts, from small private offices to entire floors.

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Up until now, space architecture has been mainly focused on engineering, centered on projects like orbital space stations or Martian exploration convoys, commissioned by world space agencies such as ESA (Europe) or NASA (USA). But in recent years, an increasingly broader spectrum of professionals (e.g. architects, sociologists) as well as entrepreneurs and investors (not all well intentioned) have joined the challenge of designing extraterrestrial built environments, the new space race of the 21st century.

The fast development of technology, the increase of world population and the climate change crisis create the perfect setting to think about life outside of our planet, and as these trends continue to evolve and converge, new opportunities to explore options beyond our traditional limits appear (NEOM), as well as new organizations which support this research (like SATC, SICSA). Even though no one is currently on Mars, many ongoing projects and simulations (MARS-ONE, Mars City Science) are already exploring how we will design, build and inhabit the new realms of humanity in outer space.

In some theoretical books, architecture and the human body are more or less the same, each depending on one another. Oftentimes, however, it is the body that undergoes detrimental adjustments to adapt to the architecture, not the other way around. 

In the newly released book X-Ray Architecture, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina argues that health facilities inspired modern architecture's most dominant formal signatures. 

The Midnight Charette is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by architectural designers David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features a variety of creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions. A wide array of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes provide useful tips for designers, while others are project reviews, interviews, or explorations of everyday life and design. The Midnight Charette is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.

This week Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet discuss strategies for acing your job interview! The two answer questions from callers and discuss preparation, the essential mentalities to have, talking and behavior tactics, what to bring and wear, asking for the right salary, finding out what the interviewers are looking for in the interviewees, and closing the interview. Call or text their Design Companion Hotline to ask your questions or to share your stories at 213-222-6950.

OPEN Architecture’s anticipated project Chapel of Sound has finally topped out on November 15th with the pouring of its broad concrete roof.

The project, which is expected to open in the summer of 2020, includes a semi-outdoor amphitheater, an outdoor stage, and viewing platforms, overlooking the mountainous rural area of the Jinshanling Great Wall. 

Encompassing a Buckminster Fuller–designed geodesic dome and an Alexander Calder sculpture, the intervention shows how the city is rethinking its world’s fair treasures.

The contemporary urban fabric of Montreal, perhaps more than any other Canadian city, was shaped by a single event in its modern history: the 1967 International and Universal Exposition, popularly known as Expo 67. With its record-breaking number of visitors, it was the most successful world’s fair of the 20th century and fueled a construction boom in the city that stretched into the late 1970s.

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Videos

India’s uprising from a dependent to an independent governance altered the way it was perceived by the world. The country’s evolution left architects and urban developers with important questions: How can they solve the economic and environmental disparities in India, and how can they implement an understanding in people about the potential of what they can achieve with their country’s culture and resources.

In a new extensive video interview by Louisiana Channel, Indian Pritzker Prize-winner Balkrishna Doshi narrates how he became an award-winning architect, his traditional Hindu beliefs and culture, and India’s juxtaposition of having nothing to keeping up with a world that is creating everything.

Opening in December in Shenzhen, China, the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture (UABB), organized by the cities of Shenzhen and Hong Kong, will discuss the theme of “Urban Interactions”. First to use Facial Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, the public exhibition will test new grounds to reflect on the impact of digital technologies on the urban environment.

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The Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture has created a new digital archive of student work in a comprehensive online database. As one of the few online collections of a school of architecture's student work, the database represents over eight decades of work, dating from the 1930’s through the present.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is an increasingly common acronym among architects. Most offices and professionals are already migrating or planning to switch to this system, which represents digitally the physical and functional characteristics of a building, integrating various information about all components present in a project. Through BIM software it is possible to digitally create one or more accurate virtual models of a building, which provides greater cost control and efficiency in the work. It is also possible to simulate the building, understanding its behavior before the start of construction and supporting the project throughout its phases, including after construction or dismantling and demolition.

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SNKH studio from Yerevan has been selected to design the Garage Screen summer cinema for the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia. The museum invited promising architecture firms to present their vision of temporary architecture and expanded the geographical reach of the competition to include Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kirgizstan.

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WERK and Snøhetta have been selected as the winners of the maritime center competition on the harbor of Esbjerg, in Denmark. The proposal puts in place a glowing building entitled Lanternen or the Lantern, a new addition that will gather communal activities.