In the heyday of high modernism, architects such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe extolled the aesthetic value of whiteness, which they viewed as connoting purity and simplicity. Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, for example, paired the stripped-down whiteness of its structural skeleton with expansive floor-to-ceiling windows, using the enveloping natural light to further elevate the already heavenly aspirations of the space. Today, some contemporary architects and designers have evolved the sublime aesthetics of white high modern architecture by using translucent fabric partitions, complementing the purity of the white walls with the fabrics’ ethereal play of light and shadow. Below, we discuss different design strategies for working with white fabrics in this way, and include two examples of projects that have used translucent fabrics in soothing but innovative ways.
https://www.archdaily.com/957021/white-atmospheres-how-to-create-calm-spaces-with-fabric-partitionsLilly Cao
Add cabbage leaves, orange peels, onions, bananas and a few slices of pumpkin to get... cement. That's right, researchers from the University of Tokyo in Japan have developed a technique through which it is possible to produce cement from food waste. Besides being used in construction, the innovative initiative is edible as well. You can make boiled cement into a delicious meal by adjusting flavors, adding seasonings, and breaking it into pieces.
Designing the interior of an apartment when you have very little space to work with is certainly a challenge. We all know that a home should be as comfortable as possible for its inhabitants, but when we have only a few square meters to work with and the essential functions of the home to distribute, finding an efficient layout is not easy. Following our popular selection of houses under 100 square meters, we've gone one better: a selection of 30 floor plans between 20 and 50 square meters to inspire you in your own spatially-challenged designs.
Furniture is essential to enhancing the quality of residential interiors. The choice of colors, textures, and materials applied to each design is crucial to a successful spatial composition. Whether through a curated selection of furniture or a standalone piece that takes center stage, each item helps shape the spaces and the circulation flow of a project.
Architecture has the power to emotionally engage with its occupants. Tactfully crafted spatial moments extend architecture into experience design - a growing need in the experience economy. Through sensorial and intellectual stimulation, spaces can deeply connect with their occupants to result in memorable instances. The orchestration of an experience requires not only an understanding of spatial principles but also how the service of the space is designed.
Some professionals have struggled with using Revit for developing interior projects from start to finish, partly due to thescarcity of modern 3D objects to meet the needs of an architecture project in BIM. As a result, the search for quality objects for Revit required time, patience and a lot of creativity.
Realizing this need among professionals, Blocks developed a free plug-in for Revit, which has a library of furniture, lighting and decor. Every week, users have access to new editable families, with the biggest trends in the architecture and interiors market.
https://www.archdaily.com/994865/blocks-plug-in-for-interior-design-in-revitSponsored Post
Los Angeles is a city of dreams. Known across the United States and the world, L.A. embodies both freedom and experimentation, defined as much by its freeways as its diversity. It is also a city of houses. Single-family homes cover almost half of Los Angeles, and as the city continues to evolve, architects have explored new ideas on modernity and daily life through the single-family typology.
Around 10 million people live in L.A. County, and Los Angeles itself has become one of the world's most ethnically diverse cities. The built environment reflects the nature of its residents, home to some of the most iconic residential and cultural architecture in the world. Los Angeles has its own dose of Lautner, Schindler, Wright, and Neutra. It's a city that has long embodied multiplicity and progressive forms, from the Eames House and Gehry's Residence to the iconic Stahl House. Through the lens of photographer Julius Shulman, many homes came to represent not only new residential styles but also the postwar culture of Southern California.
Summer, school holidays, and the desire to swim in the sea. A visit to the Brazilian coast at this time of year is a great idea for a variety of reasons. Thinking about its vast diversity, we selected some hotels arranged in different states that, in their projects, bring different ways of dialoguing with the context but also give comfort and leisure to their guests.
The bedroom is one of the most intimate spaces in a home. It is where we rest and escape our daily routines to recharge. Many view the bedroom as a sanctuary, a sacred space of intimacy and care. Beyond a comfortable bed, the room can be styled with elements that foster rest, leisure, and retreat.
While comfort is highly subjective, general design principles can help guide your decisions to create the best possible bedroom layout. Beyond large windows with breathtaking views, you can transform a bedroom simply by changing the layout and the type of bed, adding decorative or functional objects, or even incorporating other zones, such as a home office or a TV area. Below, we explore some ideas on how to transform and style your bedroom.
The search for outdoor spaces in dense city dwellings has become for some a necessity and for others a requirement to be fulfilled. In short, it is one of the most sought-after commissions that architects around the world receive on a daily basis. Beyond the fact that this phenomenon has been accentuated during the Covid-19 pandemic, since their origins, these expansion spaces have been conceived not only to increase the use of natural lighting and ventilation but also to promote the indoor-outdoor relationship, giving the possibility to accommodate various uses and functions even when square meters are scarce or when the connection with nature is glimpsed far over the horizon.
2022 has been the year of AI image generators. Over the past few years, these machine learning systems have been tweaked and refined, undergoing multiple iterations to find their present popularity with the everyday internet user. These image generators—DALL-E and Midjourney arguably the most prominent—generate imagery from a variety of text prompts, for instance allowing people to create conceptual renditions of architectures of the future, present, and past. But as we exist in a digital landscape filled with human biases—navigating these image generators requires careful reflection.
Cities are filled with waste materials and the need to reuse existing resources has become key in fighting the increase in waste production. More than a third of all the waste generated in the EU comes from construction and demolition, containing different materials such as glass, concrete, bricks and ceramics. But how to manage this staggering amount of waste production from construction? According to the Spanish Law on Waste and Contaminating Soils, concrete and ceramic waste with no considerable processing can both be reused in construction . By combining reused material waste with technology, architectural design can create innovative solutions that contribute to minimizing environmental impact.
Urban mobility as a social right. Figure produced by the author
The exclusion of women from the production of space is palpable, reflecting a landscape of insecurity and vulnerability. In this context, urban mobility as we know it reproduces the gender, racial, and class inequalities of our society. Whether through walkability or public transit, the fact remains that current transit patterns do not align with the needs of women—especially those who identify as Black or Brown and have lower incomes. Therefore, we aim to focus specifically on how concepts of intersectionality operate within urban mobility as a social right for all.
The construction of urban highways continues to expand worldwide. In Latin America, major projects are underway in Santiago (Américo Vespucio Oriente), Lima (Línea Amarilla), Quito (Solución Vial Guayasamín), São Paulo (Rodoanel Mário Covas), and Mexico City (Segundo Piso a Cuernavaca), to name just a few.
In Colombia, the national government announced a new program to improve access to urban areas during the 18th Congress of the Colombian Chamber of Infrastructure. In the words of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, “Our goal is also to transform access to cities. It is of little use to save time on intercity trips if that time is then lost within urban areas.”
The connection between interior and exterior is one of the most desired qualities in architectural projects. Such feature appears in several architectural narratives, and it is achieved with distinction. It appears in unusual places such as bathrooms or kitchens, but it gains greater magnitude in living and meeting spaces.
Most architects can relate to the feeling of being plunged into a deep devotion toward architecture. What starts out as a dream career becomes a nightmare for many. After a rigorous education, the experience of a tumultuous career journey can dishearten professionals. Twitter threads and LinkedIn posts have widely debated topics of long work hours and disparate pay, with not many solutions. Architects are constantly at war between profession and passion, a juxtaposition of love and despair. Perhaps, at the root of these problems is the colloquial definition of the noun ‘architect’.
Barco gallery is located in downtown Santiago, right next to Santa Lucía Hill. It occupies an apartment in the homonymous building designed by Sergio Larraín, celebrating a pioneering work of Chilean modern architecture. It is a curatorial practice dedicated to the debate, research, and development of critical and innovative ideas concerning the discipline through exhibition cycles. Its most recent exhibitions include 1972: Cities for Downtown Santiago, You Will Only Have Stones and Additive Manufacturing Shelf.
In partnership with the Embassy of Brazil in Chile, they organized a tribute to the leading figure of Brazilian modern architecture: Lina Bo Bardi. The exhibition "Sirena" by artist Jessica Briceño, curated by Matías Allende Contador and Anton zu Knyphausen, places Bo Bardi's disciplinary work at the center of reflection through an immersive installation that brings together five pieces abstracting her most recurring motifs.
IBA Timber Prototype House / ICD University of Stuttgart. Image Courtesy of ICD University of Stuttgart
While the traditional image of the cabin is one of a rustic wooden home located far away from any trace of society, architects have been experimenting with these conventions alongside newer material and technological considerations to push the boundaries of the ‘cabin’ today. Whether it is by reimagining the aesthetics of the cabin, utilizing advanced fabrication techniques to modernize the rustic, or even reconfiguring the log cabin for the city setting, architects and designers have utterly transformed traditional cabin architecture for a more contemporary existence. Below, we consider 10 innovative cabins that achieve this transformation through experiments with different materials and construction technologies. While each explore different strategies and functions, many share similarities in their use of prefabrication systems, their dedication to sustainability, and their close attention to and optimization of specific material properties.
Courtesy of Shaw Contract, Photos by Marc Tan (Studio Periphery), Owen Raggett and Alex Soh
Focused on bringing spaces back to life, Avalon Collective takes a pre-existing building and transforms it into a contemporary hotel that relates to the locality and origin of Orchard Road, while capturing its modern retail context. Through a consistent design language and spirit that incorporates history and regeneration, the new Hilton Singapore Orchard has been selected among the five winners of the 2022 Best of Globe Winner.
Villa Malaparte in Contempt. Image: movie screenshot
There are many ways to get to know a place. Ask a group of people who know Venice; chances are good that everyone has some mental image of the city and its canals. Once again, ask how many have already visited the Venetian capital. Few or no one may have done so. While traveling is a complete way to experience a place, it's not the only way - images of cities, areas and buildings are everywhere, from advertising to the arts, from Instagram to cinema, and they leave deep impressions on our memory and imagination.
Once a 6-lane thoroughfare, Washington Boulevard underwent an initial "quick-build" transformation in 2019, adding painted protected bike lanes, curb extensions, pedestrian refuge islands, and boarding islands allowing for in-lane bus boarding/alighting. The physical protection for cyclists was upgraded further in 2022. Image Courtesy of Street Plans
Covid has been particularly hard on cities: downtown business districts are still struggling due to the shift to remote work; some cities have seen population declines; and crime has spiked virtually everywhere. In addition, the pandemic pushed more people into cars, setting back the safe streets movement. After years of progress, cities like New York City saw big increases in pedestrian deaths. This is a nationwide problem—with one notable exception: Jersey City recently announced that no one died on its city streets in 2022, meeting its Vision Zero plan for the city. The milestone was the result of years of work by the city and its collaborator, Street Plans, a planning firm founded by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia. Lydon, a DPZ alum and co-author of the 2015 book Tactical Urbanism (currently being updated), began working with Jersey City on a whole raft of initiatives six years ago. I spoke with Lydon last week and asked him, specifically, how the city and he did it.
This article by Nicolás Santiago Diaz Bejarano was originally published in the 16th issue of revista rita under the title "Architecture for Objects: Toward a Post-Human Architecture: Density and Compression in the National Library of Chile." The following text offers a reflection on the relationship between a closed building under tension—a national library—and an open component that defines it: its storage stacks.
https://www.archdaily.com/1136431/architecture-for-objects-density-and-compression-in-the-national-library-of-chileNicolás Santiago Diaz Bejarano
Master plans, or large-scale urban planning projects, are one of the main tools for shaping and structuring land use and development to ensure that the built environment is coherent and functional. The interventions vary in scope and approach. While some projects are extending the buildable area by creating floating neighborhoods off the coast of Florida, others are reusing the existing spaces and heritage to reimagine the future of their communities.
