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How to Design Semi-Permanent Structures

Natural disasters continue to leave thousands of people homeless every year, forcing them to seek refuge without any alternatives. On many occasions, cities cannot cope with refugees, limiting their resources. In addition to this, the difficulties to sustain refugees in a dignified way, becomes increasingly complex, leading to the collapse of conventional strategies.

It is at this moment when innovation and creativity play an important role in construction practices, ultimately creating a quicker and more efficient construction model that can be replicated after natural disasters.

Undoubtedly, there are some principles that should be taken into account when designing a semi-permanent structure. Thus, we have gathered some tips and examples that you may find useful. 

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Herzog & de Meuron's M+ Museum Tops Out in Hong Kong

Herzog & de Meuron's M+ Museum of visual culture has topped out in Hong Kong ahead of its scheduled opening in 2020. Focusing on 20th and 21st century art, design, architecture and moving image, M+ will be the centerpiece of the West Kowloon Cultural District, and a key venue in creating interdisciplinary exchange between the visual arts and the performing arts in Asia.

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The Top Creative Cities and Countries of 2018 According to Airbnb

As 2018 draws to a close, accommodation website Airbnb has dived into their data to reveal the most creative cities and countries from the year. Based on the percentage of hosts who are in the creative industries, the list builds on a previous survey by Airbnb which found that one in 10 Airbnb hosts and one in three Experience hosts identify as members of the creative community.

Read on below for the list of top creative countries and cities according to the new Airbnb study. For architects already planning a New Year’s getaway, check out an article we published of ten projects previously featured by ArchDaily, now available for booking through Airbnb.

Rem Koolhaas: Live Lecture Stream from the World Architecture Festival

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas will give the final keynote lecture today at the World Architecture Festival. ArchDaily will be streaming this keynote from our Facebook page.

Carla Juaçaba Studio Wins the AR Emerging Architecture Awards 2018

Brazil-based Carla Juaçaba Studio has been announced as the winner of the AR’s Emerging Architecture Awards 2018 in Amsterdam. The firm will receive a £10,000 prize in recognition of exemplary projects such as their chapel for the Pavilion of the Holy See at the 2018 Venice Biennale, and the Casa Santa Teresa in Rio de Janiero.

The practice was chosen from a shortlist of 14 by a judging panel featuring Spanish architect Ángela García de Paredes of Paredes Pedrosa, finalists of the inaugural 1999 AR Emerging Architecture awards; Indian architect Gurjit Singh Matharoo commended in the 2009 edition; and Ronald Rietveld of Dutch practice RAAAF, winners in 2013.

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Revolutionary Nature: the Architecture of Hiroshi Sambuichi

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Naoshima Hall. Image © Sambuichi Architects

Our world revolves. Not just literally, as it does around the sun, but in nature’s every aspect. Seasons cycle into each other (though more erratically each year), waves trace and retrace the beaches with the shifting tide, flowers open, close, and turn to follow the path of the sun. Even we are governed by these circular natural systems. Maintenance of our circadian rhythms, a human connection to light, is so essential to our health that it is a required element in many contemporary building codes. 

Why do Beautiful Things Make us Happy - And Why Does Modernism Make us Sad?

A recent exhibition at the MAK Vienna - Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, is showcasing the works of Sagmeister & Walsh, a NYC-based design firm investigating what makes beauty so appealing.

Titled "Beauty," the exhibition explores the notion that beauty operates as an independent function, and that in itself, it can be the primary motive for architecture: form is a function. In collaboration with the YouTube channel and design studio Kurzgesagt (In A Nutshell), this video released along with the exhibition explains why beautiful things make us happy.

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Rethinking Le Corbusier's Manifesto: 6 Explorations That Break Away From Modernist Ideals

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The Society of the Spectacle / Guy Debord

“A model by Corbusier is the only image that brings to my mind the idea of immediate suicide.” - Ivan Chtcheglov

Despite their pranks and dirty politics, the Situationists may have been right after all. The death of architecture students will not be a result of excessive studio work, but will rather occur from the sermonizing repetition of modernist ideals that continue to be taught. In Le Corbusier's manifesto, Vers une Architecture (Toward An Architecture), he advocates for the adoption of modern architecture as the solution to 20th-century global crises, in a way that now seems rather limiting. 

If the discipline doesn't move past the black-and-white photographs of the Barcelona Pavilion or the reductionist designs of the Bauhaus, students will continue to produce what may now be incorrectly associated with the “right architecture.” In order to break away from these stereotypes of what architecture should be, here are six explorations of building, curating and writing that resist these notions:

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The World Architecture Festival Announces Day Two Winners

The 2018 World Architecture Festival has announced the second-day winners of this year’s edition, featuring works from such diverse firms as SeARCH, Sordo Madaleno, NextOffice, and Grimshaw.

The second day’s judging categories spanned a wide area, from future masterplanning visions to completed religious structures. The festival, held this year in Amsterdam, will culminate Friday 30 November with the World Building of the Year and Future Project of the Year Awards. These awards, selected from the festival’s list of category winners, will be selected by the festival’s “super jury”: Nathalie de Vries, Frederick Cooper Llosa, Lesley Lokko,Li Xiaodong, and Manuelle Gautrand. 

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Aires Mateus Reveals Design for the Toulouse Fine Art Museum

Portuguese architectural practice Aires Mateus have designed a new addition and entrance to the Museum of Augustins in Toulouse, France. Bringing together the museum and the Convent of Augustins, the proposal was made to clearly open to the city. The design aims to respect the spatial values of the convent and museum while standing out from its context and historical reference.

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IKEA and Tom Dixon Collaborate to Design Products for Urban Farming

IKEA and Tom Dixon have collaborated to investigate the future of urban farming, “making homes the new farmland.” In an upcoming entry to the Chelsea Flower Show, the UK’s most popular landscape event, the team will share their first ideas on how “affordable, forward-thinking solutions can be used to grow plants and vegetables at home and beyond.”

The ethos behind the collaboration is to celebrate food as a crucial part of everyday life, and inspiring a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle. Identifying the potential savings in transport miles, water usage, and food waste, the team will use IKEA’s democratic design principles to “develop affordable, sustainable food farming and consumption within our homes and urban communities.”

WAF Day 2 Streaming: Live Lectures from David Adjaye, Francine Houben and Nathalie de Vries

Make sure to tune in to our Facebook live streams of today’s selection of lectures. We’ll also be streaming the winners at 19:15 CET. To see the previous day’s streams, click here.

World Architecture Festival Unveils WAFX 2018 Prize Winners

The World Architecture Festival (WAF) has announced the ten winners of the WAFX prizes, awarded to “future projects that identify key ecological and societal challenges which architects are actively seeking to address over the next ten years.”

This year, participants tackled issues such as climate change, water waste, and aging populations, with winning proposals including river parks in Colombia, a transformed coal plant in the United States, and solar panel fields in the Netherlands.

We’ve rounded up the winners below, along with further information about the upcoming 2018 World Architecture Festival taking place in Amsterdam this November. Tickets for the festival are available online now, with a 20% discount available for ArchDaily readers who enter the code ARCHDAILY20 at checkout. Our site will also have news coverage and live-streams of festival events.

Carlo Ratti to Curate Biennial for the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Cities

Carlo Ratti has been announced as Chief Curator for the 2019 Shenzhen Bi-City Biennial of Urbanism/Architecture. He will join Academic Curators Politecnico di Torino and South China University to critically explore the impact of artificial intelligence on communities and urban space.

The team will investigate “how our relationship with the city might change when buildings become able to respond to our presence.” Ratti’s expertise in the area of future technology and artificial intelligence is reflected in his role within the MIT Senseable City Lab, whose experiments propagate future scenarios for the built environment.

Haysom Ward Miller's Lochside House Named RIBA House of the Year 2018

Haysom Ward Miller's Lochside House in the West Highlands has been named RIBA House of the Year 2018. The annual accolade is given by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) to the UK’s best new architect-designed house. Lochside House was revealed as the winner in the final episode of a special Channel 4 series Grand Designs: House of the Year. The award-winning project was designed as a modest, sustainable home for a ceramic artist on the edge of a Scottish lake.

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Tips For Drawing Trees in Architectural Renderings

We all have that childhood memory of drawing a little house with a door and a window, a gabled roof, and a tree. But what sets architects apart from the rest of the population is that we continue to draw this after childhood, usually with a bit more technique. And just as our residential designs were becoming more complex and complete, the design of our trees needed to improve a bit as well (that broccoli-like shape would not please customers and teachers alike.) Although generally, trees are not the main focus of drawings, they play an important role in the composition of sketches, mainly to represent the scale, intended shading, or some intention of landscaping.

Expert Conference on “Re-Materializing Construction”

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Roundtables prime the LafargeHolcim Forum and devise a clear agenda. The 3rd LafargeHolcim Roundtable was hosted by Werner Sobek (pictured center) at the Institute for Lightweight Structures & Conceptual Design at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Roundtable participants included Marilyne Andersen, Marc Angélil, Alejandro Aravena, Xuemei Bai, Philippe Block, Harry Gugger, Guillaume Habert, Dirk Hebel, Anna Heringer, Vivian Loftness, Karen Scrivener, and Werner Sobek. © LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction

The 6th International LafargeHolcim Forum for Sustainable Construction will be hosted by the American University in Cairo from April 4 to 6, 2019. The LafargeHolcim Forum is dedicated to the topic of “Re-materializing Construction.” Keynote speeches, workshops and site visits will focus on strategies to reduce consumption throughout the material cycle from extraction to processing, transport, installation, maintenance, and removal.

The Forum pursues the question of how the building and construction industry can adapt to be leaner: with a smaller ecological footprint and not driven by the pretense of infinitely available raw materials. Hence, the Forum seeks to suggest radical solutions in the use of building materials.

What Will Urban Planning be in 2052?

Planning can, on occasion, feel Sisyphean. Emerging technologies, shifting economies, and changing governments can all enact dramatic and unpredictable change in short order. So what’s the use of planning for the future, let alone planning for a future nearly half a century away?

The 2018 World Architecture Festival Announces the Day One Winners

Following an extensive day of presentations, panels, critiques, and talks The World Architecture Festival (WAF) has announced the Day 1 category winners in their 2018 programming. Winners are recognized in over 35 categories over the first two days of the conference, which culminates with the announcement of the World Building of the Year 2018 on the third and final day of the conference.

While still early days, the world’s largest architectural award program, the WAF Awards is poised for its biggest year yet, with a total of 535 shortlisted projects from 57 countries across the world.

BIG, Gensler, and Field Operations Reveal Design for Oakland Athletics Baseball Stadium

Bjarke Ingels Group, James Corner Field Operations, and Gensler have released new renderings of the new Oakland Athletics baseball stadium and surrounding development. The new stadium will replace the Oakland A’s existing 51-year-old Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, which the A’s share with the Oakland Raiders football team. The mega-ballpark includes a waterfront “jewel box” stadium at Howard Terminal and would turn the current Coliseum site into a tech and housing hub.

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A First Look at the US Pavilion for Expo 2020 Dubai, Designed by Fentress

The design of the USA Pavilion for the Expo 2020 Dubai has been revealed, designed by Curtis W. Fentress and Fentress Architects. Destined to represent more than 325million Americans, the pavilion seeks to “provide a unique platform for [the United States] to come together to showcase the very best of [their] cultural and commercial achievements.”

The pavilion is to be circular in form, with “slants fashioned to project a sensation of movement, making the viewer feel like the building itself is in motion.” The pavilion’s interior will showcase American innovation and technology, including the premiere of the Virgin Hyperloop One ride experience.

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Intricate Illustrations of Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities'

Lima-based architect Karina Puente has created a new series in her personal project: to illustrate each and every "invisible" city from Italo Calvino's 1972 novel. Her collection, which ArchDaily published in 2016, and again in 2017, consists of mixed media collages, drawn mainly using ink on paper, brings together a sequence of imagined places – each referencing a city imagined in the book.

Invisible Cities, which imagines fictional conversations between the (real-life) Venetian explorer Marco Polo and the aged Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, has been instrumental in framing approaches to urban discourse and the form of the city. According to Puente, "each illustration has a conceptual process, some of which take more time than others." Usually "I research, think, and ideate over each city for three weeks before making sketches." The final drawings and cut-outs take around a week to produce.

Puente’s work is set to go on display in the San Miguel de Allende, Mexico on the 2nd February 2019. You can learn more about the project from Puente’s official website here.

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Live From WAF: Reinier de Graaf, Jeanne Gang, Li Xiaodong, Peter Cook

We are pleased to partner with the World Architecture Festival to bring you live streaming of each day's keynote addresses. On Wednesday, tune in for lectures from Peter Cook, Li Xioadong and an impressive group of speakers. Follow us on Instagram at @archdaily to see more updates from our team on the ground.

15 Colombian Projects Pushing the Brick Envelope

The greats of twentieth-century Colombian architecture were regarded for their genuine interest in brick. To this day, many of Colombia's iconic neighborhoods are filled with brick buildings. 

Below, a selection of stunning Colombian brick projects —available in this My ArchDaily public folder as well.

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