At the end of the 19th century, skateboarding emerged in the United States. Officially patented in 1936, the sport has already faced several prejudices, but like the social and urban dynamics of which it is a part, it has lasted to demonstrate that its experience goes far beyond conservative views and brought a new way of experiencing the city by trying movements of our own bodies in light of the urban or architectural design.
At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, affluent Parisians flocked to second homes on France’s Atlantic coast as a nationwide lockdown came down on the country. In June 2020, as the lockdown was eased in England, residents headed to seaside towns like Bournemouth to soak in sunny weather. The former scenario reflects the widening gap between France’s wealthy and the poor, whilst the latter is a reflection of the democratizing power of public-access beaches.
In both situations, what is sought out is the ecological calmness usually found on beaches. Globally, however, there’s an unsettling phenomenon, where intertwined with climate change and policy decisions, beaches are increasingly becoming private, inaccessible spaces.
Façades don't always have to be opaque. Whereas in the past the only options were heavy and raw–such as stone and brick–in recent years façades have adopted an increasingly lighter appearance, with innovative materials becoming the protagonists. These give the building a different look, delicate and transparent, while still maintaining privacy and thermal comfort. Examples of these include polycarbonate, translucent sheets, perforated tiles, glass and even metal chain links, which was the chosen material for a building in Montpellier, France.
Reminiscing on his childhood, Peter Zumthor once said: “Memories like these contain the deepest architectural experience that I know. They are the reservoirs of the architectural atmospheres and images that I explore in my work as an architect.” These words allude to a fundamental concept behind kid friendly-design: everything we encounter in the first years of our lives, including architecture, can have a great impact on our future perspective of the world. When spaces are designed according to children’s specific needs, they stimulate their physical and mental well-being, as well as boosting autonomy, self-esteem and socialization skills. Therefore, architects have the responsibility to ensure that kids live, play and learn in environments that contribute to their long-term healthy development.
The terms critical regionalism, popularized by theorist Kenneth Frampton, proposed an architecture that embraced global influences, albeit firmly rooted in its context. That is, an approach defined by climate, topography and tectonics as a form of resistance to the placidity of modern architecture and the ornamentation of postmodernism. Bringing familiar elements to a particular location can allow the building to be better accepted and incorporated into the local context. This was the case of the New Maitland Hospital, which incorporated a large brick panel next to the main façade, as a reference to the community's traditional symbols.
In theory, urban planning is a process of elaborating solutions that aim both to improve or requalify an existing urban area, as well as to create a new urbanization in a given region. As a discipline and as a method of action, urban planning deals with the processes of production, structuring and appropriation of urban space. In this sense, its main objective is to point out what measures should be taken to improve the quality of life of the inhabitants, including matters such as transport, security, access opportunities and even interaction with the natural environment.
If you’re reading this right now, or have read an article on ArchDaily, it’s because you were in a place that enabled you to connect to the internet. Think about a time when you found yourself in a dead zone, where the internet was lagging and you were unable to connect your computer to WiFi to finish an assignment or even without the ability to connect your phone to quickly Google something. You likely dashed to the nearest coffee shop, or place where WiFi was more reliable, just to have the feeling of being online again. The internet, in an ideal world, is equally open to all providing access to knowledge and the ability to easily connect with others. But what happens when you don’t have internet? How is your life impacted if you’re on the wrong side of the digital divide and live in an area without broadband access?
Vienna in Austria has topped the rankings of The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) 2022 Global Liveability Index, gaining back its previous position from 2019 and 2018, mostly for its stability and good infrastructure, supported by good healthcare and plenty of opportunities for culture and entertainment. Western European and Canadian cities dominated the top positions with Copenhagen, Denmark in second place and Zurich, Switzerland, and Calgary, Canada in third place. Adding 33 new cities to the survey, one-third of which are in China, bringing the total up to 172 cities, the classification excluded this year the city of Kyiv, due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Classified across 5 categories, stability, healthcare, education, culture and the environment, and infrastructure, the index was largely driven by the covid-19 pandemic. While covid-19 restrictions have eased in big parts of the world, liveability rankings started resembling “those seen before the pandemic”, however, the global average score remained below the pre-pandemic time. Although covid-19 has receded, a new threat to liveability emerged when Russia invaded Ukraine this year.
Architecture has always played a key role in exhibitions. Museums, exhibitions, and expositions are not only cultural offerings, but are defined by space, by an exhibition itinerary that is able to surprise and fascinate the visitor who is drawn inside an active and inspiring experience.
For an exhibition, architecture is as fundamental as works of art, collections, and artifacts and their contents. The “Architecture for Exhibition” course has been created on these premises: its aim is to train professional designers who are able to materialize diverse artistic and museum experiences, enhancing the ever-changing story behind each cultural proposal. The students will acquire new skills in exhibition design and will move into a very prestigious environment – culture – which nowadays registers an increasing demand by the most critical and exclusive customers.
Manga is an umbrella term for a wide variety of comic books and graphic novels originally produced and published in Japan, and unlike western comic books that we may be more familiar with seeing printed in full color, are primarily published in black and white. Manga is the Japanese word for comics published in Japan, with the word itself comprising of two kanji characters: man (漫) meaning 'whimsical' and ga (画) meaning 'pictures'.
Not to be confused with the popular Japanese medium of anime, manga is print media whilst anime stands as visual media that is either hand-drawn or computer-produced, combining graphic art, characterization, cinematography, and other forms of creative and individualistic techniques. It is most notable that a lot of anime is developed as a result of a successful franchise that began as mere manga novels, but what continually unites the medium of manga and anime is the use of diverse art styles throughout various narratives that have been constructed for us consumers to follow.
Do you know what urban farms are? Have you ever thought about growing your own food at home in your garden or in specialized freezers? Transporting food for consumption in cities is one of the major environmental (and financial) pollution problems in the world today.
Predominantly associated with places of worship, stained glass has been used by artisans across the globe for thousands of years in an array of art ventures and installations. Intensifying architecture with vivid color, the process of stained glass refers to a particular action in which glass has been colored via metallic oxides during its manufacture, using different additives in order to create a range of hues and tones.
In terms of architectural enhancement, stained glass is often pieced together in order to produce depictions of decorative art, allowing light to filter and penetrate a particular structure or building. As a component it is both decorative and a variety of window, allowing a substantial and sufficient amount of light into a space, for atmospheric and beneficial effect.
This week’s curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights educational facilities submitted by the ArchDaily community. From a contextual Earth school in Senegal, to a borderless, collaborative school in Vietnam, this round up of unbuilt projects showcases how architects infused nature with architecture, offering students the chance to engage with the landscape and learn more about their surroundings from their academic institutes. The article also features projects from Lebanon, Switzerland, Armenia, Ukraine, and Greece.
Clearly, graphic designers are not architects, but collaborative projects between these two fields of knowledge, which intersect in their details, can work well.
Creative industry as a sector has evolved, and many people are now in new fields. If you're collaborating, you can move quickly and we've covered that here. The trend is to be collaborative, and very different from 25 years ago, when you should be a graphic designer alone doing layout and paper weights or an architect isolated in an office running autocad.
Today, reusing and adapting existing spatial resources is regarded around the world as an important contribution to sustainable development, and new challenges are thus also emerging at the margins of classic building tasks due to the changing assessments regarding whether to preserve or demolish. Xu Tiantian’s projects in the quarries of Jinyun combine aspects of landscape planning, interior design, artistic installations, and social planning with an economic revitalization of the rural area. In this way, a ruined and exploited landscape becomes a sign of departure with which a new sustainable coexistence can be linked to a narrative about the history of the location.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
There are extraordinary connections between the natural world and the capacity for creativity in human beings. In his book Last Child in the Woods, journalist and author Richard Louv observes: “Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses. Given a chance, a child will bring the confusion of the world to the woods, wash it in a creek, turn it over to see what lives on the unseen side of that confusion.” He concludes that in nature, “a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.” The architect Frank Harmon likewise wrote touchingly about the outdoors, woods, and water as perfect settings for cultivating a thirst for learning and discovery: “Children raised by creeks are never bored. Creek children don’t know about learning by rote, neither are they conditioned to working nine to five. Berries are their first discoveries, and birds’ nests, and watching the stars come out. Later they discover books. To creek children, learning is discovery, not instruction.”
.jpg?1656583509 "The Creeper – COAF Smart Campus Armavir by TarberAK Architectural Studio; TL Bureau. Image Courtesy of TarberAK Architectural Studio; TL Bureau")
