A guide from Graphisoft on how to create powerful design presentations with Archicad through the use of Archicad version 25.

Herzog & de Meuron has released details of their proposed Forum UZH, creating a new center for education and research on the city campus of the University of Zurich. The new building is a seen as a crucial element for ensuring the future viability of Zurich as a higher education hub, upgrading and consolidating an existing aging, dispersed campus.

Due to be completed in 2027, the Forum UZH will occupy a prominent corner site, combining expansive public space with the firm’s recognizable clean, contemporary language. Situated in the old city’s university quarter, dominated by stand-alone buildings set back from the street on below-ground plinths and terraces, the Forum UZH forms the 21st-century embodiment of the stately urban campus.

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MVRDV have released images of their ambitious design for the Taipei Twin Towers, set to revitalize the central station area of the Taiwanese capital. The two towers are characterized by a “pile of blocks” that create a vertical urban neighborhood, complete with interactive media facades.

The site is currently occupied by the city’s main station, containing railway, airport lines, metro networks, and underused parks and plazas. Under the MVRDV scheme, the two towers will be built over the top of the station, offering retail, offices, two cinemas, two hotels, and the unification and redevelopment of surrounding plazas.

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Since its discovery in 8700 B.C., copper has been one of the most used metals in the history of humankind. It has a variety of uses from coins and weapons to statues and even architecture. One of its first architectural uses was in Ancient Egypt for the massive doors of the temple to Amen-Re at Karnak in 300 B.C.

The versatility of the material continues in architecture to this day, allowing for a variety of unique designs and uses. The innovative, efficient, and lightweight material is versatile in its use, ranging from facades to roofs, interior applications, and high tech solutions. Sustainable in its natural form, the material is 100% recycled. As the state of architecture becomes more focused on sustainability, copper becomes the ideal material for the buildings of today.

Below, we’ve selected 7 projects that use architecture's original bling.

To live in a residence designed by a renowned architect is a dream for many, however, a dream that will most likely never come true. But, there is an alternative. Many architecture enthusiasts have rented or even bought apartments in iconic buildings designed by their favorite architects. 

In regards to the work of Oscar Niemeyer, fluidity and flexibility may best express his plans and typologies.

Below, we've selected four apartments in buildings designed by Neimeyer that reinterpret his original plans.

C.F. Møller Architects and BRUT have won a competition for the design of an ambitious urban development in Ostend, Belgium. The neighborhood of 500 houses demonstrates a method of using a human scale to improve the quality of life the residents and the urban realm.

The project centers on the De Nieuwe Stad quarter, where an existing social housing scheme from 1972 has become outdated. The competition for the site’s complete redevelopment attracted 54 firms, from which C.F. Møller Architects and BRUT.

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For thousands of years, concrete has been a foundation of the built environment: the most widely used man-made material on the planet. However, as architects, and the public alike, sharpen their focus on the causes and effects of climate change, the environmental damage caused by cement has become a subject of unease.

As exhibited in a recent in-depth article by Lucy Rodgers for BBC News, cement is the source of about 8% of global CO2 emissions. The piece was written off the back of the UN’s COP24 climate change conference in Poland and found that in order to meet the requirements of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, annual cement emissions must fall by 16% by 2030.

Architect Daniela Lamartine has designed a floating community to address Sweden's national housing crisis. Called Floathub, the project creates a new mobile lifestyle to achieve long-term economic and residential security. Floathub would be created with a co-operative trust where residents become developers and owners through collective action. The trust would manage and build the floating typologies using CNC technology to enable a self-sufficient mobile lifestyle on water.

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Venice captured all architects' hearts and minds last year, but 2019 —a Venice-less year— will be still a year full of biennials and festivals around the world (many of which we're proud to be official partners of). The excitement is already building. 

From Chicago's new approaches to the traditional practices to Shenzhen's future technology prospect; from Oslo's degrowth agenda to Brazil's focus on everyday architecture, it's time to start saving dates for the following biennials around the world!

Rotterdam and Athens-based practice Anagram Architecture & Urbanism has designed an "Urban Theater" for the Ioannina Cultural Park National Competition in Greece. The proposal suggests an open and accessible public space that creates a new identity and captures the imaginary of the city. Connecting the city with the lake of Ioannina, the new public space presents a unified and flexible space for both everyday leisure time and large scale events to take place.

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Designing commercial spaces has historically been a challenge. In these environments, spatial distribution plays a fundamental role, even more so if we have a few extra square meters. With this being said, the study of these spaces in plan and section can be a great starting point. It not only allows us to analyze the logistics and circulation of customers but also helps us find efficient variations and innovations that will enable your store to stand out from the others.

Below, we've selected a series of 25 examples in plan and section that can help you understand how different architects faced the challenge.

A bus inspired by the Bauhaus school in Dessau will take to the streets during the school's centenary year to visit four cities around the world. The bus is part of the larger SPINNING TRIANGLES project by SAVVY Contemporary that is curated by Elsa Westreicher. Marking the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, the project aims to investigate, challenge and act against the neocolonial power structures inherent in design practices, theory and teaching.

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Morris + Company has unveiled images of their competition-winning vision addressing London’s homelessness crisis. The M+C scheme, produced for the New Horizon Youth Center and Mayor of London-led competition, repurposes the abandoned York Road tube station into a hostel and co-working space.

Titled “Stepping Stones”, the project seeks to provide “an inclusive, viable, and holistic site strategy that can support a managed and balanced community by providing homeless young residents with a sage, supporting stepping-stone into appropriate long-term housing solutions.”

New photographs have been released of OMA’s Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC), as construction continues in Taiwan. Consisting of three theaters, each functioning autonomously of each other, the OMA scheme seeks to depart from the traditional consensus of performing arts centers as simply containing a large auditorium, medium-sized theater, and small-size black box.

OMA sees “no excuse for contemporary stagnation,” using the TPAC as an opportunity to experiment with the inner workings of theaters, leading to a dynamic external presence. Hence, the TPAC’s three theaters plug into a central cube combining stages, backstages, and support spaces into a single, efficient entity, allowing stages to be modified or merged for unforeseen scenarios. 

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This article was originally published on Common Edge as " Why Architects Still Struggle With Disability Requirements 28 Years After Passage of the ADA".

The recent death of President George H.W. Bush occasioned assessments of his administration’s legislative achievements, one of which was the far-ranging Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a civil rights act signed into law in 1990. The law included accommodations for people with disabilities in buildings. In the ensuing decades the ADA has had a significant impact on the design and construction of the built environment in the U.S. To gauge the impact of ADA, how it has evolved, common misconceptions about ADA, and its role in promoting social equity in architecture, I spoke with Peter Stratton, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Accessibility Services at Steven Winter Associates, who works with architects and others in the construction industry on the application of the ADA design standards. (I worked at the Connecticut-based Winter firm between 1996 and 2006; Stratton was a colleague.)

For the fresh architecture student, the “jury,” “review,” or “crit” is far from glorious—sounding more like a death knell than a customary critique session. The concept, as Kathryn Anthony explores in Design Juries on Trial: The Renaissance of the Design Studio, goes as far back as the 1980s when the Ecole Nationale et Speciale des Beaux-Arts in Paris became the first art and architecture school to experiment with a format that would soon be adopted by architectural schools across the world. While some schools have taken steps to loosen traditional hierarchies, others continuing to reinforce them, much to the terror of fledgling first-year students who aren’t used to being “tried.”

So what can one really do to ease into this rather uncomfortable aspect of architectural education? Below is a fairly simple list of dos and don’ts that could go a long way in helping you out.

The work of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer is currently being featured by the city of Rio de Janeiro. Throughout the month of January, mock-ups and engravings signed by the architect can be seen in Barra da Tijuca, in the city’s West Side. There, visitors can discover the history of Brazilian architecture and see some of Niemeyer's most famous work. The RioCVB created the exhibition to celebrate Niemeyer's legacy and showcase Brazil's landmark buildings.

Design practice Snøhetta has created a series of secluded wooden shelters for Norway's largest hospitals. Sited in the forest, the shelters were created on behalf of the Friluftssykehuset Foundation. Designed to make hospitalization easier for patients and their families, the outdoor retreats offer a physical and psychological respite from treatments and the isolation that can follow long-term hospitalization.

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Researchers at New York’s Columbia University have unveiled a method of vibrantly replicating the external and internal structure of materials such as wood using a 3D printer and specialist scanning techniques. While conveying the external profile and patterns of natural objects is tried and tested, a major challenge in the 3D printing industry has been replicating an object’s internal texture.

In their recent study “Digital Wood: 3D Internal Color Texture Mapping” the research team describes how a system of “color and voxel mapping “led to the production of a 3D printed closely resembling the texture of olive wood, including a cut-through section.

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Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) has announced the completion of the third-tallest building in Shenzhen. The China Resources Headquarters, a 400-meter-tall commercial office tower, stitches together retail, residential, and office functions surrounded by 2,000 square meters of public space.

The tower, inspired by the shape of winter bamboo shoots, seeks to “invigorate Shenzhen’s urban fabric while providing one of the country’s premier companies with a visual icon symbolizing its historic growth and prominent stature.”

The world’s largest ice festival has opened to the public in China. The Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival in Heilongjiang, North-Eastern China draws 18 million visitors, marveling at the festival’s spectacular castles and sculptures. In total, the 2019 edition saw 120,000 cubic meters of ice and 111,000 cubic meters of snow crafted by thousands of artists in temperatures as low as -35C (-31F) using swing saws, chisels, and ice picks.

Having begun as an annual tradition in 1985, the festival has gained accolades such as the Guinness Record for the world’s largest snow sculpture (250 meters long and 8.5 meters high). The 2019 festival sees more than 100 landmarks, and ice sculptures by artists from 12 countries.

The Harbin Festival will be open for one month, closing on February 5th. Below, we have rounded up our favorite images of the festival so far, demonstrating that red hot architecture can be cold as ice.

The A’ Design Award is an international award whose aim is to provide designers, architects, and innovators from all architecture and design fields with a competitive platform to showcase their work and products to a global audience. Among the design world's many awards, the A' Design Award stands out for its exceptional scale and breadth; in 2015, over 1,000 different designs received awards, with all fields of design recognized by the award's 100 different categories.

The World Design Rankings (WDR) are sponsored by the A' Design Award and Competition, the world's leading international design accolade. The WDR ranks all the countries based on the number of designers that have been granted with the A' Design Award between the years 2010 and 2018. Highly competitive and influential, WDR is to design what the Olympics are to sports. It aims to provide additional data and insights to economists and journalists regarding the state-of-art in the design industry. The ultimate aim of the world design rankings is to contribute to global design culture through advocating and highlighting good design. The rankings aim to provide a snapshot of the state-of-art and design potentials of countries worldwide by highlighting their creative strengths and available opportunities.

The United States tops the list with 584 awards, followed by China (554), and Japan (215). Take a look at our favorite architectural projects below.

The submission period for the A' Design Award closes on February 28th. You can register here. After the winners are announced on April 15th, a selection of architecture-related winners will be featured in a post on ArchDaily.

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In 2016, Ecole des Ponts ParisTech has established an advanced masters program with a focus on digital fabrication and robotics. Currently recruiting for its fourth installment, the Design by Data Advanced Masters Program appeals to architects, engineers, and tech-oriented designers. Since its launch in 2016, the program’s director Francesco Cingolani has sought to shape the relationship between architecture and technology by creating a cross-disciplinary culture between the two.

As previously mentioned on Archdaily, students study the main components of the program - computational design, digital culture and design, and additive manufacturing and robotic fabrication - throughout the 12-month program to fulfill Design by Data’s main objectives while working with peers in a dynamic learning environment. While providing each participant with both technical skills and an aesthetic eye, the program ensures students will also gain critical knowledge of current innovative trends and ongoing research. By exposing them to technology through hands-on use of tools of digital fabrication, the program will teach students to approach design through a process-oriented lens.

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