Articles

There is a slide I like to show at the beginning of the architecture courses I teach that provides an overview of the last hundred years or so in design and technology. In the left column, a car from the beginning of the 20th Century (a Ford Model T) is poised over a contemporary car (a Tesla). The middle column contains a similar juxtaposition, showing a WWI-era biplane and a modern-day stealth fighter (an F-117A). In the right column, Walter Gropius’s 1926 Bauhaus Dessau building is seen next to an up-to-date urban mixed-use building. The punch line, of course, is that the two buildings—separated by roughly 100 years—look basically the same, whereas the cars and planes separated by the same timespan seem worlds apart. What is the reason for this?

There are a plethora of benefits associated with urban green spaces, namely pollution control, temperature regulation, and biodiversity--all of which ultimately add to the quality of life of city dwellers. Like other urban common areas used for sports and recreational activities, green spaces have a direct impact on the health and well being of the residents who use them.

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Power Station of Art (PSA) has announced the curatorial team and theme for the 13th Shanghai Biennale, proposed by its Chief Curator, the architect and writer Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation).

A lightweight material par excellence, zinc is a non-ferrous metal that provides an effective solution for coating buildings exposed to adverse weather conditions, while simultaneously delivering a creative response to the requirements of a project.

When in contact with humidity during the summer, zinc panels generate a self-protecting layer that isolates heat from indoor spaces. Rain and snow slide easily over its surfaces, and its modular panels can wrap curved shapes or be perforated according to the architectural design, and combined in facades and/or ceilings through different shades, brightness, and colors.

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Throughout history, people from all walks of life with little in common have found ways to unite in neighborhood parks and filled stadiums to put those differences aside for the sake of the sports they love. Sports, and sports fandom, is a source of global unity, and perhaps fewer events in the world can generate such a wide range of emotions quite like a live match.

While first developed as a practical power source during the 1950s, solar systems were too expensive for mainstream use until the 1970s. Starting from their early use to power Cold War era military satellites, silicon photovoltaic solar cells achieved their first commercial success in places where electricity was not available, such as lighthouses and off-shore oil rigs. 

The total amount of water on our planet has, theoretically, stayed the same since earth's formation. It's possible that the glass of water you drank earlier contains particles that once ran down the Ganges River, passed through the digestive system of a dinosaur, or even cooled a nuclear reactor. Of course, before it quenched your thirst, this water evaporated and fell as rain millions of times. Water can be polluted or misused, but never created or destroyed. According to a UNESCO study, it is estimated that the Earth contains about 1386 million cubic kilometers of water. However, 97.5% of this amount is saline water and only 2.5% is fresh water. Of this fresh water, most (68.7%) takes the form of permanent ice and snow in Antarctica, the Arctic, and in mountainous regions. Another 29.9% exists as groundwater. Ultimately, only 0.26% of the total amount of fresh water on Earth is available in lakes, reservoirs, and watersheds, where it is easily accessible for the world's economic and vital needs. With the population steadily increasing, especially in urban areas, several countries have already had severe problems with providing the necessary amount of drinking water to their populations.

The Covid-19 pandemic has transformed the way we live our lives. Significant and long-lasting repercussions will be felt across society and industry, many of which are sure to influence the way we approach the design of our buildings and cities. Over the past few weeks, the Urban Design team at Foster + Partners has been exploring how recent and fast moving developments in urban planning – instigated and encouraged by the current crisis – will affect and shape the future of London and others worldwide.

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How does architecture contribute to the current climate crisis? 

We invited our readers to weigh in on this issue and were overwhelmed by the number of responses that we got. After reading through and compiling the replies from industry professionals, architectural students, and architecture aficionados, we were struck by a common theme: there are few resources when it comes to researching how materials and products used in construction are sourced and produced. 

My decision to study architecture was a naive one, made after having taken several vocational tests I found on Google. When I found out it was one of the toughest courses in Brazilian public universities, I thought about giving up. But I was already hooked by the history of architecture and its social role.

However, nothing is perfect. Architecture and Urban Planning is one of the most elite courses in the most renowned Brazilian universities, something that is reflected outside of the classroom as well. The architects went on to serve the rich, casting aside the needs of the cities and the poor.

In densely-populated cities, where construction projects tend to require party walls, the close proximity of other buildings complicate even further the process of creating spaces that incorporate elements like natural light and cross-ventilation. But this of course is not the only challenge: the ever-changing and multiplying nature of cities has given rise to atypical lots--properties that have been created by subdividing large swathes of urban land. In general, the reduced dimensions force developers to look for ways to maximize the limited space available to them. 

Did you know that World Migratory Bird Day is celebrated in the second week of May?

Every year around this date, festivals, educational events, exhibitions, and excursions are organized to celebrate and raise awareness about the conservation of migratory birds. These species have seen their habitats transformed during the last few decades in part because of human action: designers and real estate agents have built and nurtured an urban imaginary dominated by glass structures as a symbol of power and progress. Before proceeding with the conquest of the sky, it is worth considering some materials that are more friendly to the species with which we cohabitate.

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In an era of great marketing efforts, in which architectural ideas increasingly seem to focus on hyper-realistic representation in an attempt to convince clients (or the jury in the case of architectural competitions) that the upcoming construction will achieve just as much quality as the visual fantasy, renderings become highly important in a project's presentation.

Because of this, every year there are new updates, as well as the launching of new software specialized in renderings, tools capable of achieving such impressive results that may lead to images being mistaken for photographs, thus blending the unreal with the notion of ultra-reality.