Projections for the urban world have been updated. In May, the United Nations released a new edition of the World Urbanization Prospects, a report that takes an in-depth look at the planet's urban centers, concluding that 68% of the world's population will live in cities by 2050. This estimate is 2% higher than the previous study published in 2014, which is part of the series produced by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).
Architect Rafael Pina, from the ARKRIT Collective, presents an article comparing two prestigious German automotive brands and their effort to project, also through architecture, an image of modernity and power. These museums belong to a lineage of spectacular architecture, seeking to inspire admiration and surprise through showmanship across various dimensions: formal, technological, and financial.
The American Planning Association (APA) recently announced that Sasaki’s 2006 Vision Plan for Beijing's 798 Art District has been honored with the organization's highest accolade, the Pierre L’Enfant International Planning Excellence Award. Today, the 798 Art District in Beijing is a thriving, mixed-use district that welcomes over three million visitors annually, earning a reputation as the city's third most popular destination after the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. The district's success has set a benchmark for the adaptive reuse of historic buildings and is internationally recognized as a model for industrial regeneration.
As ride-hailing services like Uber continue to gain popularity and draw attention for their impact on traffic congestion and other urban ills, cities around the world, from Washington, D.C., to São Paulo, are moving toward the inevitable next step: targeted fees.
This comes as no surprise. Recent research shows that these services are contributing to declining public transit ridership and an increase in private vehicles on the streets. However, new taxes and fees should do more than just raise revenue. They have the potential to make cities more livable and transport more sustainable. If ride-hailing services are taxed, this revenue must be allocated carefully, in ways that improve urban mobility as a whole.
Adolf Loos, Joaquín Vaquero Palacios, Fernando Moreno Barberá, Norman Foster, and the bicentennial of the Museo del Prado are just some of the key names and milestones set to take over Spanish museums in 2018.
Here are 10 highly recommended architecture exhibitions for the new year that offer a rich and compelling cultural lineup. They span Spanish and international architects, iconic buildings from Spain's architectural history, and the profound impact of emerging technologies—such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality—on the field of architecture.
Joaquim Manoel Guedes Sobrinho was a Brazilian architect and urbanist who graduated in 1954 from the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP)—as part of the institution's third graduating class—and was a leading figure of the so-called “Paulista School.” A prominent aspect of his professional practice was his partnership with his wife, Liliana Marsicano, with whom he established a lasting collaboration on a series of projects until 1974.
Nearly a year after an earthquake struck Mexico City and several Mexican states on September 19, 2017, we are beginning to see the fruits of the many efforts that arose in response to the slow—and at times nonexistent—government reaction, with citizens taking it upon themselves to organize and help. Various associations, foundations, and collectives joined the cause, and the architectural community was no exception.
This gave rise to ReConstruir México, driven by the determination to put architectural expertise at the service of those most in need, assisting in the reconstruction and conservation of affected heritage by providing technical support and advice, as well as designing and proposing solutions. However, goodwill alone was not enough; a multidisciplinary, integrating entity was needed to channel these efforts into physical housing for the victims. PienZa Sostenible stepped into this role, coordinating the process as a non-profit organization. As a platform for study, analysis, critique, engagement, and implementation addressing Mexico's current situation, PienZa Sostenible promotes outreach and drives projects aimed at improving quality of life, social development, economic growth, and environmental sustainability in line with the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
We invited fifteen architectural photographers to share their playlists with us, now available on ArchDaily Brasil's Spotify.
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If you want fast rendering, optimize the size of staging assets, textures, and light sources. Learn your rendering software inside out and construct your scenes based on actual resource needs. There is no point in using the largest, most detailed, or highest-resolution assets for every single case; doing so will only leave you frustrated with your computer and software, struggling to navigate the viewport while constantly wishing for the latest processor, graphics card, more RAM, and more money to upgrade your rig—entirely unnecessarily.
Whenever possible, choose a GPU-based renderer, such as Thea Render for SketchUp, which is used in the examples in this article.
Here are several tips to make your rendering workflow faster and more efficient:
Gentrification is not only a timely topic, but a widespread concern. Today, it might make more sense to speak of touristification, or perhaps the phenomenon itself has evolved. Nevertheless, the term gentrification can broadly encompass all these concepts related to the displacement of a neighborhood's "original" inhabitants, who are replaced by residents with higher purchasing power or by vacation rentals.
This is an issue that interests people from all walks of life, not just professionals in urban planning or architecture. It draws the attention of citizens who, like myself, set out to find explanations or try to gather clues about what the future may hold under this trend.
From my perspective as an engineer—but above all as a Madrid resident—I decided to research the data published by the City Council on the city's commercial premises to see if it was possible to draw any conclusions on the matter. The purpose of this study was purely exploratory, conducted without any external commission. I had no preconceived hypothesis or goal beyond identifying certain neighborhoods as gentrified; the analysis simply grew from there, keeping all possibilities open.
Not long ago, we read in one of the winning texts of the National Criticism Competition: “In Chimbote, a city that grew turning its back on its bay, shaped by the pursuit of an economically productive life, there is not much to do, not much to enjoy. And this is not only due to the lack of venues for cultural or recreational activities, but because in the street itself, in the public space, there is not much to encounter. It seems difficult for this situation to change when it comes to building the city (…) in a city that became boring, useful only for a precarious economic production, where the street is merely a transit space, of coming and going without much emotion (…). Hopefully, boredom will not rob us of the ability to imagine new ways of growth for our city.” A harsh and challenging critique of the city's future trajectory.
Today, this project emerges as a response, showcasing alternative ways of seeing, living, and growing for this warm city on Peru's northern coast. It is a way to rediscover a vibrant, colorful Chimbote, and we are thrilled to present and highlight it here: the flip side, the actions taken in response to criticism, or precisely what critical thinking can achieve. Beyond being a breath of fresh air, it serves as a replicable model of small yet significant initiatives that can be carried out in cities across the country, beyond Lima.
The chapter The Limits of Objects addresses the theme of Walls of Air at the scale of architectural and urban interventions, in an attempt to measure the capacity of recent Brazilian production to mediate conflicting relationships between the public and private realms.
In contrast to the cartographic approach, which maps the multiple types of barriers that shape the Brazilian territory, this section presents architectural objects that encourage transcending the walls present in our cities. The selected proposals share the motivation of investigating new ways to deal with the limits, divisions, and ruptures of urban fabrics. At the same time, they bring to light the pressing need to use design as a means to transform conditions of exclusion into opportunities to bring people together.
Over the course of five days, 36 third-year students from the UDD Architecture Program in Concepción, Chile, traveled to San Juan, Chiloé, to design and build a lookout for the local community. The main objective of this academic initiative was to connect students with physical materiality, marking the beginning of their professional degree cycle. The project is part of "Experiencia Detonante II" (Triggering Experience II), one of three hands-on experiences students undergo during their studies to engage directly with territory, materiality, and the discipline. Specifically, the Concepción campus, through its Escuela SurSur, fosters this connection to materiality by engaging with remote locations that preserve traditional local crafts.
The Chilean firm TALLER25 has launched the first edition of the des_VINCULADOS workshop in Santiago. This project-based academic initiative addresses an emerging theme in Chilean practice: middle-class architecture. To this end, students were assigned a specific design intervention—extension, renovation, or new construction—and a budget estimated by the original clients: five middle-class families living in Santiago's inner ring and periphery.
"Currently, projects built for the vast majority of the country's population tend to be the result of architectural practice treated as a mere commercial service, rather than an opportunity to contribute to the discipline, improve the users' quality of life, or build a more equitable context," explain Fabiola González, Yair Estay, and Jessica Torres, the organizers of the workshop, which is part of the Encargos Comunes academic research project.
In partnership with the Department of Architecture of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Chile, and with ArchDaily as a media partner, the first edition of the workshop involved 43 students from across Santiago. They developed the following proposals after a series of sessions that included a panel discussion and five thematic sessions: practice, regulations, budget and construction, and market.
Almost two years ago, South America was hit by a public health crisis that affected hundreds of thousands of women. In Brazil, more than 2,600 children were born with microcephaly—a congenital condition in which the skull is smaller than normal—and other complications resulting from the Zika virus infection. Brazilians quickly became accustomed to the unfamiliar name of the disease, which rapidly spread through the northeastern region of the country and crossed borders into Colombia and Venezuela. However, as the disease became an international concern, it also became clear that it was a much greater problem for some groups than for others.
A few days ago, the “la Caixa” Banking Foundation presented the design for CaixaForum Valencia, a project led by Enric Ruiz-Geli and his studio Cloud 9. The foundation's ninth cultural venue in Spain will be located inside the Ágora in the City of Arts and Sciences, designed by Santiago Calatrava.
CaixaForum Valencia will have an area of 6,500 square meters, housing two exhibition halls, a 300-seat auditorium, two multipurpose classrooms, a bar-restaurant, a bookstore, and a family and educational space called CaixaForum Familia, as well as reception areas, offices, storage, and technical zones.
On this occasion, we present the proposal by MIAS Architects, a firm led by Josep Miàs and one of the nine offices invited by the foundation to participate in the competition. “The new CaixaForum [must] actively engage with the Ágora building, establishing a relationship that is not only volumetric but also perceptual,” the architects explain.
Most architects tend to begin explaining their projects by pointing to the entrance. "You enter here," they usually say. As if nothing had happened or existed before entering. As if the user's life, or that of the building itself, began at that very threshold which many assume separates the exterior from the interior. A strange conception of time.
Enric Miralles made an interesting observation regarding this: it is not about entering, but about accessing—something that will also be marginalized later. We must assume that in architecture, accessing means "to enter a place or pass into it," as the dictionary explains. Yet we also find other, more compelling interpretations, such as "to gain access to a superior situation, condition, or degree; to attain it," which imbue the act of accessing with meaning and time.
Organized by INTBAU and the Rafael Manzano Prize for New Traditional Architecture, the most recent edition of the Summer School of Traditional Architecture focused its work on the Baztan Valley (Navarre, Spain). The program studied traditional construction, architecture, and urban planning to produce a manual for conservation and new traditional construction in the area. In addition, hand drawing and building surveys were the primary activities carried out by the participating students.
Although the scope of work extended to the entire Baztan Valley, the bulk of the study was carried out in Amaiur, the town that hosted the group during those two weeks. Articulated around the branch of the Camino de Santiago that passes through it, the town's urban layout is structured almost as a linear development. Along this axis, the richness, diversity, and versatility of its architectural tradition unfold, presenting a showcase of solutions from different eras that have adapted to multiple trends and functions without ever losing their essence. Accordingly, the study examined the architecture of the town center in its entirety, from fine details to the broader urban structure.
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Documenting the urban landscape is a task photographers have undertaken almost since the birth of photography in the second half of the nineteenth century. Inexhaustible, the city continues to serve as raw material for photography, which, in turn, offers an image of the city that is simultaneously identical to and distinct from what is felt when experiencing the urban space.
Mauro Restiffe is perhaps one of the photographers who most deeply experiences the city and its residual spaces—an aspect that becomes immediately apparent upon viewing the selection of photographs chosen for the exhibition São Paulo, Out of Reach, on display at the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, curated by Thyago Nogueira. Bringing together photos that record moments of urban transformation and decay in places such as Cracolândia, Bom Retiro, Luz, Itaquera, and Ipiranga, among other neighborhoods, Restiffe composes a fragmented image of São Paulo between 2012 and 2014. Yet—partly due to his technique and, above all, his gaze—it also represents other eras of this metropolis.
In 1988, upon the death of Luis Barragán, a process began to manage the assets he bequeathed to a group of architects based in Guadalajara, Jalisco. This led to the creation of the Fundación de Arquitectura Tapatía Luis Barragán, established to safeguard a portion of his real estate, his library, and certain personal belongings. Consequently, the foundation secured the necessary funding to acquire the Luis Barragán House and Studio, preserving it as the house-museum it is today.
We spoke with architect Salvador Macías, co-founder of Estudio Macías Peredo, who now directs this venue, which aims to provide a public space for reflection and the dissemination of architecture.
The lessons that can be drawn from visiting or studying a work of architecture are both many and varied. Whether we focus on programming, construction details, material solutions, relationship to context, siting, or any other aspect, these considerations yield clear concepts that can later be applied to our own projects.
With this in mind, and recognizing that there are multiple ways to approach an architectural problem, we have compiled a list of design strategies that define specific spatial qualities in classics of Chilean residential architecture, grouping together some of the most remarkable design moves from each case.
For optimal and wider propagation of TV and radio frequencies, antennas must be positioned in strategic and, above all, elevated locations. When the local topography is unfavorable, the construction of broadcasting towers and masts becomes essential. Yet, beyond serving a crucial function, these structures stand as visual landmarks, offering an extraordinary opportunity to transform urban infrastructure into pieces of unique aesthetic value. Renowned architects and their teams have designed radio and television towers that marry rigorous structural engineering with the plastic inventiveness of their chosen design solutions. We have selected a brief collection of television and radio transmission towers. See them below:
Walking through São Paulo without seeing cars and trucks brings me an almost surreal happiness, imagining for a moment that the city actually worked, that Jane Jacobs's dream has come true. Simultaneously, another aesthetic sentiment inevitably emerges—a feeling of the "end of the world." This second impulse materializes as a constructive thought that has nothing to do with moral fatalism, let alone tragedy. It is simply the end of a world that the Industrial Revolution, alongside liberal capitalism, has "schooled" us to accept for two centuries. This was the world of infinite natural "resources," of the dream of endless energy abundance, and of voracious consumption desires. Dreams that were not even ours.
Revit templates are the starting point for working in Revit, as they contain the basic elements and settings required to work on any project type. Consequently, each architecture firm creates different templates for its various projects.
Whether you are just starting to work in Revit or looking to supplement your existing templates, we present two templates containing everything you need to successfully begin in the BIM world, available in 2017 and 2018 versions.
