In the 1920s, work was completed on the Cité Frugès housing complex in Pessac, France. The project, meant to house Pessac's industrial workers, would be one of seventeen Le Corbusier works on UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites.

The spirit of the women who participate in the movements fighting for housing in Brazil is as hard as lime and wood. As a majority in land occupations, they vigorously coordinate organizational and political practices of settlement and popular housing construction. It is no wonder that many of the occupations of the MST (Landless Rural Workers' Movement) or the MTST (Homeless Workers' Movement) carry the names of women such as Dandara, a quilombo leader from the colonial period.

At ThinkLab, our passion lies at the intersection of specification and design, where we use research to improve communications between designers and manufacturers. Today, that research is helping companies within the interiors industry make critical business decisions as we face economic uncertainty. Here, we share some recent data and insights from our Industry Impact Survey—an ongoing research initiative that we invite you to participate in.

GIS analyst and Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs has shared an impressive collection of maps that bring together all the drainage basins of the world in vibrant colors. Titled Grasshopper Geography, the maps showcase the rivers and watercourses of the world, featuring the basins of selected regions, countries and continents.

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Following up on their series of urban block flashcards, Spanish publisher a+t architecture publishers launched in 2018 a new deck of cards featuring collective living floor plans as part of one of their series of cards about urban density, Density. As a courtesy to ArchDaily, the publishing house shared some of these expanded cards, both typical floor plans, and each unit, where you can see the designs and privacy parameters and openings to the outside of each project.

New Generations is a European platform that analyses the most innovative emerging practices at the European level, providing a new space for the exchange of knowledge and confrontation, theory, and production. Since 2013, New Generations has involved more than 300 practices in a diverse program of cultural activities, such as festivals, exhibitions, open calls, video-interviews, workshops, and experimental formats.

New Generations has launched a fresh new media platform, offering a unique space where emerging architects can meet, exchange ideas, get inspired, and collaborate. Recent projects, job opportunities, insights, news, and profiles will be published every day. The section ‘profiles’ provides a space to those who would like to join the network of emerging practices, and present themselves to the wide community of studios involved in the cultural agenda developed by New Generations.

Archdaily and New Generations join forces! Every two weeks Archdaily publishes a selection of studio profiles chosen from the platform of New Generations.

Nearly four months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, the number of coronavirus cases in the world continues to grow. Although some countries, where the virus transmission rate has declined, are reopening businesses and returning to normal, the impacts of the pandemic are continuing to influence people's daily lives, affecting not only the population's health but also their jobs, habits and the economy. Such changes may still endure and may have an impact on the future of architecture and construction, given the prospect of a crisis in the sector.

It is difficult to find someone who has never dreamed of building or having a tree house to call their own. The idea of a refuge, a space fully integrated with nature and with a privileged view, pleases almost all ages. There are examples of tree houses of all scales and complexities, from small elevated platforms to highly complex structures, including electrical and hydraulic installations. Some sites specializing in the topic (yes, that exists!), offer valuable tips for building these dreams. In general, they subscribe to the motto: "Choose your tree, make your project, but be ready to adapt it!"

“Architecture for Landscape” was created on these premises: it aims to train designers to meet the diverse needs of transforming territories. The course encourages an attentive and productive dialogue with the surrounding landscape to respond to the needs of clients' unique contexts. Via a thorough analysis of the natural world, light and geomorphological terrain features, the designers will become increasingly able to reconnect human design to the natural environment. In becoming inspired by the landscape, they can design outstanding, sustainable and impressive architecture.

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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Videos

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.