With an on-going digital and physical evolution, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennialtook a new approach. “Rather than focusing on the presentation of final results in a compressed period of time and space”, the global circumstances created the opportunity to present new projects on a longer period of time and in expanded spaces, offering not an exhibition but “a digital and research program with a series of permanent interventions in the city.”
ZHA and L&O have unveiled a new design for the Student Residence Development at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, one of the leading research institutions in Asia and around the world. Created after an urgent demand for new residential facilities and halls within the campus, the project is scheduled for completion in 2023.
Architecture, engineering, and planning firm HGA has unveiled the design for the John Adams Middle School Performing Arts Center in Santa Monica, California. The project is made to be a dynamic arts environment and incubator for students to explore and develop their artistic voices. As a gateway to the campus, the project will establish a strong visual identity for the school while engaging Santa Monica College and the city.
Botanic Garden in Beijing / URBANUS. Courtesy of Wang Hui
One of the most rewarding aspects of working with architecture publications is the possibility of meeting and becoming closer to the experts that are effectively transforming the discipline, either with built projects, research, experiments, theories, or even with works in other fields. In this sense, interviews perform a special role among all the different types of content published every day by ArchDaily, as we can get a closer insight into what some of the most distinguished and promising people have to say about the present and the future of architecture and cities.
With more than two hundred interviews published in our platforms, in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese, conducted in various formats – video recordings, transcripts, interviews by e-mail, video calls, or even podcasts –, it's safe to say that 2020 was a year of intensive learning during which we have become, paradoxically, closer than ever before to an inspiring group of architecture professionals.
Sinaloa is a state located in the northwestern part of Mexico bordered by the states of Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, Nayarit, and by the Gulf of California to the west. It consists of over 58200 km² of territory and is the agricultural hub of Mexico.
Composed of microcell panels, polycarbonate offers various solutions for the use of natural lighting in architectural enclosures. Whether applied to facades, interior spaces or roofs, the benefits of polycarbonate, such as lightness, clean lines, colored panels, and light effects, offer a wide range of design freedom. Microcell panel technology reduces the need for artificial light and favors uniformity in the diffusion of natural light, achieving energy efficient facades and the illusion of spaciousness in interior spaces. Below, we've selected 10 projects that have used polycarbonate as a wrapping material.
Architecture and urban design practice SeARCH has unveiled a design for a new timber housing project on Amsterdam's Haveneiland, IJburg. The team is working with care institution Amstelring, sustainability specialist DGMR and healthcare real estate investor Apollo Zorgvastgoedfonds on the sustainable development. The energy-neutral residential building, entitled Eyckstaete, will be the first timber residential building to offer sustainable housing for the elderly on IJburg.
With the exception of some areas, within the three principal regions of Peru--coastal, mountain, and rainforest--the climate is characterized as tropical or subtropical and the differences in summer and winter temperatures is minimal, rarely reaching beyond 15 °C and 27 °C. This mild climate has thinned the line between exterior and interior spaces, a fact evident in the region's architecture.
The Pacific Northwest is synonymous with rainy mountains, expansive coastlines and dense forests. Known for its majestic landscapes, the region has innate connections to the waterfront. Over time, these channels were referred to as the Salish Sea. Encompassing the Strait of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound, the intricate network of bays and inlets is bounded by British Columbia and Washington. Dotted with a number of major port cities, including Bellingham, Vancouver, and Seattle, the Salish Sea has also been home to many indigenous peoples.
During the first half of the 2nd century AD, one of the most important buildings in the history of Western architecture was erected in Rome: the Pantheon. Its main and most impressive feature is its coffered concrete dome, which ends in a perfectly round central opening. This oculus kicked off a series of later projects that noted the value of circular openings, which were replicated as glazed skylights and as compositional elements on facades. This eventually evolved, for example, towards the detailed and colorful rose windows of the Gothic basilicas. In all its configurations, the oculus (eye in Latin) holds a symbolism that goes beyond the traditional window: its luminous projection gracefully marks the passage of time, solemnly highlighting an architectural space.
Courtesy of MIT’s Senseable City Lab and the city of Laval
The city of Laval, Québec’s 3rd largest city, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Senseable City Lab (SCL) have released six preliminary concepts exploring the “park of the future”. Investigating new experiences, the publication entitled “Senseable City Guide to Laval” is part of an on-going work “to develop a human-centered, innovative and resilient downtown area” located in the Carré Laval, a former quarry to be transformed into a mixed-use innovation district.
COSA Colboc Sachet architectures has designed a "decarbonated cement and wood" public art school in Poitiers, France. Made for École Européenne Supérieure de l'Image - EESI, the design features a range of spaces for collaboration, making and digital training. The art school features an airy, light-filled interior, as well as a series of outdoor spaces and common areas that open to the district of Couronneries.
China: The Curtain Sales Office / Larry Wen and Yibo Wang - Aoe. Image Courtesy of A' Design Award
The A’ Design Award is an international award whose aim is to provide designers, architects, and innovators from all 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, including over 100 award categories and having honored over 12,000 designers with an award over its 11-year lifetime.
But as we prepare for a challenging 2021 I want to share our reflections on these intense moments, which are not just a consequence of the pandemic, but also of the diverse and much needed social and cultural changes that have been unfolding during the last years. As a young and diverse Internet company, with a conscious and globally distributed team, we have been working during the last years to embrace change, as we think it is one of the attitudes that can prepare us for a world that is changing fast, on the intersection of two of the industries that are shaping society today: Internet and the built environment. To be ready for change is not easy, as we need to constantly challenge ourselves and our egos, and do things in new ways, in new contexts. But as 2020 demanded, we were ready.
Overall Winner- Shadow Housing- Jeffrey Liu and Haylie Chan. Image Courtesy of Arch Out Loud
A home is one of the most significant architectural typologies that we experience throughout our lives. Largely serving as a significant private space, a home represents safety, ownership, and a sense of respite away from the rest of the world. It’s also historically been a place of routine, where we both begin and end our day, following the same patterns through different rooms of a home that we utilize. We can expect to sleep in our bedrooms, relax in a living room, cook in a kitchen, and eat in a dining room.
Every December talking heads (or screens) trumpet “Everything Has Changed”. But this year it is true. Imminent inoculations may bring back human contact, but the Coronavirus Year has changed us.
I think 2020 ended the 20th Century in architecture. Architecture never leads in pivotal periods. Modernism was birthed by a Western World leaving monarchies and diving into the Industrial Revolution: it caused neither.
Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Albers, Klee, and Breuer are all names that bring to mind the exceptional artistic talent of the Bauhaus school. But an exceptional yet lesser-known aspect of the Bauhaus is that the early 20th-century experimental German art school was one of the first educational institutions that would openly accept qualified women into the program.
Once entered into the program, women were not exactly treated as equals to their male peers, but in 1919 the acceptance of these passionate women was the beginning of a wave of modern female artisans who made significant, yet not as recognized contributions to the Bauhaus movement. An introduction to seven of these women can be found below:
The author or editor of over twenty books, Michael Sorkin was a renowned architect, urbanist, and writer. Principal and founder of Michael Sorkin Studios and president of the non-profit research group Terreform, a nonprofit urban research and advocacy center, Sorkin was especially famous for his writings for the Village Voice and the Nation. The Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York who passed away earlier this year due to complications resulting from COVID-19 wrote the forward for Miró Rivera’s MonographMiró Rivera Architects: Building a New Arcadia.
Landscape architecture practice Studio-MLA has been selected to design the new Community Park as part of the Fair Park Master Plan in Dallas, Texas. Replacing over one thousand parking spaces, the project will feature an 11-acre park with free programming for children, adults, and seniors. The team was chosen by Fair Park First, Spectra, and Biederman Redevelopment Ventures, and the new park will be the first project to come out of the Master Plan Update.
The shortlist for the design of a 111-acres observatory urban park covering the Calan Hill in Santiago, Chile, has been officially released by a jury of experts.
Organized by the Municipality of Las Condes in collaboration with the University of Chile and the Cerros Isla Foundation, the competition seeks to choose the best architecture and landscape proposal for the design of a new urban natural park in Santiago: the Cerro Calan Observatory Urban Park (Parque Observatorio Cerro Calán)
This article was originally published on Common Edge as "Presenting Architecture as Progressive, but Practicing Through Exclusion."
For a profession that likes to congratulate itself about how well-meaning it is, and sees itself as liberal, diverse, open, and progressive, British architecture has a serious problem with diversity of pretty much every kind. It is dominated by people from well-off backgrounds. It trains a lot of brilliant female architects but doesn’t pay them as much as men, and loses many of them after 30 when they are not supported in balancing work and family life. Its ethnic makeup is very, very white, considering that it’s 2020. A supposed beacon of success is the acceptance of the LGBTQ community within the field, but as with women and those from and religious and ethnic minorities, stories of unprofessional comments, inappropriate jokes, and insidious forms of jovially “innocent” othering and the diminution of identity-specific concerns abound.
Housing is a ubiquitous typology ripe for experimentation. Exploring form, view, materials and hierarchies, residential projects center on daily life and retreat. Designed to bring people together and provide space for isolation, homes can be open and inviting, secluded and private, or both at the same time. For unbuilt housing projects, these concepts are designed to rethink traditional forms and spatial layouts in the context of local climates and landscape conditions.
This week’s curated selection of the Best Unbuilt Architecture focuses on homes and residential projects located around the world. Drawn from an array of firms and local contexts, they represent proposals submitted by our readers. They showcase both single family and multi-unit homes, from a series of villas for three friends overlooking the Caspian Sea, to a Cambodian countryside retreat and a pine cabin in the Jezzine village of south Lebanon.
In order to create vibrant public spaces, people need to have a constant presence in these locations, whether they are on their own or in groups. In fact, they need to linger in these places and establish social interactions. To do so, one major element has to be incorporated into the urban setting: the bench.
This seating feature, simple or high tech, insures firstly the comfort of the passersby and animates the area consequently, through the addition of the missing human aspect. Sometimes, this is all it takes to revive a space that became a dull passage. The most basic urban design component can take many forms and can be created from different materials, always generating a statement and serving its purpose.
.jpg?1609931383)
.jpg?1609924103 "theOtherForest. Image © Kayhan Kaygusuz")
.jpg?1606770388)
.jpg?1609838112)
