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Kiruna Forever, an exhibition at ArkDes, traces the town's relocation due to geological instability.

“Kiruna is on the move,” says Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, curator of the new exhibition Kiruna Forever. Kiruna, a 125-year-old Swedish town that sprouted around the iron mine of the same name, started an official relocation process in 2018 after decades of discussion with the state-owned mining company LKAB. Today, as the expansion of the mine destabilizes the ground surrounding it, nearby buildings are being demolished or loaded onto flatbed trucks and moved to the new city center nearly two miles east.

Emergencies include a variety of contemporary scenarios ranging from natural disasters to extreme poverty or isolation due to social and political conflicts. In all cases, the disruption of normality and the requirement of basic needs for maintaining a decent quality of life become the basis for finding quick and efficient alternatives to respond to this type of urgency.

New York City is the pinnacle hybrid between the vibrant and granular neighborhoods that Jane Jacobs once envisioned and the sweeping urban innovations of Robert Moses. However, its diverse population has experienced hardship over the last twenty years, forcing the city into a recursive wave of self-reflection to reevaluate the urban strategies, design trends, and global transportation methods that it had grown so accustomed to. After the September 11th and Hurricane Sandy tragedies, the delicate balance between promoting a sense of individual culture and the strength in unity that New Yorkers are so often known for served as the lifeblood for revitalization. New York City has consistently handled adversity, by always rethinking, redesigning, and rebuilding this city for a better future.

As an aftermath of natural disasters, viruses and wars, in society, we often require emergency architecture. In this round-up, we explore how emergency architecture can accommodate educational needs and how it can bring together a community that has suffered social and economic hardship. 

Emergency architecture can occur under a variety of circumstances and through the recent COVID-19 pandemic we have started to get a glimpse of the urgency for certain types of architecture across the world. What we sometimes take for granted in regards to socialising — a sense of community and access to quality education — some countries go without for large periods of time due to natural disasters, viruses and war. 

Floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, war, economic and social conflicts, pandemics. The number of refugees in the world is setting records year after year. Immediate and temporary solutions, produced in batches in response to crises, mark the difference between doing what is possible and doing what should be done, always doing a lot with what's at hand. But how temporary is emergency architecture? Is it more permanent than we think?

We want to offer our readers the possibility to openly express their opinions and experience on the matter. If we were aware of the difficulty of coping with major losses, that result in the temporary becoming "permanent", would it change the way we design emergency architecture? Would we demand a higher quality emergency architecture? Would we propose other types of solutions?

We invite our readers to fill out the following form and share their ideas on this topic -- the opinions will be collected and processed by our team to form a future article.

The world of architecture and construction has observed, with increasing attention, technological innovations involving wood. Although it is a material that has been widely used for thousands of years, recent research involving industrial manufacturing and machining technologies has provided even greater quality control and an increased diversity of uses, causing it to be described by many as the material of the future. To this end, common myths including wood's lack of resistance to fire and the implausibility of using it to structure tall buildings have been debunked.

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Brick is one of the most widely used materials in Colombia, making the architectural designs in its capital city, Bogotá, stand out worldwide. Due to the excellent quality of the clay found in some regions of the country, brick is used in all aspects of construction, from adobe floor slabs to exterior facades.

A characteristic feature of the classes of YACademy - the school of architecture founded by YAC in 2018 - is offering students interesting, hands-on workshops. In the school's curriculum, a key focus is the relational dynamics between natural and artificial, between anthropic intervention and landscape pre-existence. These themes prompted YACademy to create a High-Level Training Course in Architecture for Landscape: a program made up of lectures by renowned professionals, followed by internships in some of the most well-regarded firms in the world.

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Lukáš Likavčan takes us on a rich and satisfying philosophical journey. From Agamben's apparatus, through Hegel's positive religion (in contemporary robes), on to its materialization in Graeber's fetishes, the author reads the smart objects that are at the basis of the smart city paradigm as fetishes of sorts. In this perspective, it is necessary to redefine the autonomy of humans through an act of reverse prostheticization: what position should humans occupy in the technosphere? And what kind of relationships are emerging, or are being consolidated, between us (humans) and them (objects)? By accepting a collective vision of intelligence as a product of human and non-human data, it is possible to move away from the notion of fetish, towards an anti-narcissistic condition that sees humans as one of the entities having agency in a universe that has moved far beyond the phenomenological.  

For the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," (21 December 2019-8 March 2020) ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies might impact architecture and urban life. The contribution below is part of a series of scientific essays selected through the “Eyes of the City” call for papers, launched in preparation of the exhibitions: international scholars were asked to send their reflection in reaction to the statement by the curators Carlo Ratti Associati, Politecnico di Torino and SCUT, which you can read here.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) supports that even if vaccines are found, COVID-19 may never go away. ‘Post-virus’ recovery mechanisms suddenly become out-of-place and obsolete. If we wait for the coronavirus crisis to be over to tackle climate change, then many of us may be swimming in deep waters. Coordinated and immediate actions, coupled with planetary-scale cooperation, to tackle both crises in parallel is now needed. For cities, this means adopting mechanisms that enable both economic recovery and sustainable transitions.

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It is a rare occasion for a historic neighborhood to have new buildings. Never the less, this is exactly what happened along the elegant and ornate structures of Frederiksberg Allé in Copenhagen. The historical avenue was inspired by Parisian architecture and features many buildings notable for their intricate architectural detail. 

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As the number of smaller and more compact apartments grows, architects and interior designers are challenged to create multifunctional solutions and systems capable of optimizing spaces, in a way that every inch seems to make a difference. As a result, it is increasingly common for professionals to focus on designing creative furniture solutions that allow the space to transform completely in a few seconds.

ArchDaily has already published numerous articles on how to design for compact spaces, from closets and shelves to plan solutions for small apartments. We have now put together a collection of interesting projects in which the beds seem to camouflage themselves among the furniture and architectural elements, thanks to smart systems which, by using hinges and sliding tracks, allow them to be concealed in a matter of seconds, saving space and allowing versatility.

ArchDaily has created a list of best articles, news and projects that address everything you need to know about bamboo.

For more than a century, architects have been addressing the world as a project through speculative designs in an attempt to imagine the future and reframe global issues. Globalisation, the ever-increasing interconnectedness demands action on a worldwide scale and invites a reflection on the profession's responsibilities. The latter is precisely what the book The World as an Architectural Project achieves, through a compilation of world-scale speculative projects of the past century, making a compelling case for the agency of architecture.

There are strange elements of connection within this phenomenon of social distancing: not only is the whole world experiencing it simultaneously, but we also seem to share a global momentum of awareness that something unique is taking place, which demands to be documented and gradually understood.

Moved by that impulse and under the guidance of professor Erieta Attali, 16 students from The Cooper Union, explored, through photography, their everyday life now ruled by isolation and social distancing. And they did so, not from a single city, but from 10 different places, as they returned to their home countries amidst the crisis.

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Moving away from its early exclusive focus on natural disasters, resilient architecture and design tackles the much tougher challenge of helping ecosystems regenerate.

Thirty years ago, as a high school student at the Cranbrook boarding school in suburban Detroit, I wrote a research-based investigative report on the environmental crisis for the student newspaper. I had been encouraged to do so by a faculty adviser, David Watson, who lived a double life as a radical environmentalist writing under the pseudonym George Bradford for the anarchist tabloid Fifth Estate. His diatribe How Deep Is Deep Ecology? questioned a recurring bit of cant from the radical environmental movement: Leaders of groups like Earth First! frequently disparaged the value of human life in favor of protecting nature.

Overall, when designing exhibition spaces, certain aspects contribute to an effective display of the pieces: diffuse lighting, spatial distribution, and high ceilings are some of them. The combination of these features with rooms that are able to transform themselves (using elements that can be perforated, repainted, and adapted according to each exhibition), is common in many art galleries, expressing the dialogue between art and architecture.

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IE School of Architecture and Design students in the Master in Strategic Design of Spaces are challenged to be future-forward thinkers from the outset. In today’s world, where urban spaces are quickly evolving and city developments must address increasingly complex requirements, overcoming these challenges requires innovative, unconventional approaches.

As far as written records report, “prehistory” dates back between 35,000 BCE and 3000 BCE in the Middle East (2000 BCE in Western Europe). Ancient builders had a profound understanding of human responses to environmental conditions and physical needs. Initially, families and tribes lived together in skin-covered huts and bone structures. Thousands of years later, human settlements evolved into fortified mud-brick walls surrounding rectangular volumes with pierced openings for ventilation and sunlight. 

During the upcoming months, we will be publishing short articles on the history of architecture and how it evolved to set the fundamentals of architecture we know today. This week, we are going back to some of the earliest civilizations known to mankind: Megaliths, Mesopotamia, and Ancient Egypt.