Alterity is essential to human development. If deprived of a variety of stimuli, the brain is unable to develop, losing plasticity and deteriorating like an atrophied muscle. This reasoning is widely accepted when it comes to social relations or cognitive and physical activities. But what about the stimuli promoted by the built environment?
Public art is an innate cultural privilege for New Yorkers. Top-notch art can be found across the city’s boroughs everywhere from parks, squares, alleys, and rooftops—sometimes to the jaded disdain of passerby. While permanent staples, such as Robert Indiana’s Love on 6th Avenue or George Segal’s Gay Liberation at the Stonewall National Monument are ingrained in the urban texture, others are more ephemeral. Public art has the power to swiftly take over Instagram feeds but also has a history of sparking polarizing interpretations at town hall hearings.
For a long time in Mexico and around the world, the architecture of pioneering Modernist architects like Luis Barragán and Juan O'Gorman, among many others, has been presented as sacred and untouchable to ensure its preservation over time.
Few architectural typologies are as timeless as bakeries. A practice spanning thousands of years, the art of baking has diverse roots. Today, bakeries combine areas to gather, socialize, shop, and work. While industrialization and commercialization transformed the art of baking and baked goods, bakeries remain important community spaces for gathering and defining neighborhood identity.
The state of Florida, in the United States, is bordered to the south, east, and west by the Atlantic Ocean, with a coastline of over two thousand kilometers in length, and is characterized by extensive areas of lakes, rivers, and ponds. Land booms during the early and mid-20th century resulted in the development of new communities and the expansion of low-density suburbia across many parts of the state, which frequently incorporated the abundant water resources, sometimes failing in their efforts.
TEIA re(p)resents the city of São Paulo through a comic book narrative. The characters were developed as protagonists based on an empirical selection of twelve neighborhoods key to the city's history, whose residents served as the foundation for the character archetypes in the script. The graphic novel format provided the ideal medium to develop a language that allows for spatial thinking about the urban context and the observation of human relationships within this created and illustrated universe, highlighting its role as a communicative medium. Beyond experiencing and understanding the neighborhoods, the project aimed to explore the notion of belonging. The in situ experience in the neighborhoods and spontaneous conversations with residents—who served as references for the protagonists—allowed the narrative to reflect on the difference between being (of a place) and existing (in a place) in Brazil's most populous and diverse metropolis.
Quebec Wood Export Bureau is adding another tool to your arsenal: a free BIM plugin on Revit. With the help of its wood-producing members, the nonprofit group has stepped into the free software world to put a growing suite of structural wood system components at architects’ fingertips.
As we look back at the architecture projects we have published in 2020, as part of our yearly review, we were able to distinguish many recurring elements and solutions in terms of materials, programs, and functions.
Since the architecture industry moves slightly slower than others, we found that many things in the construction and design that have been building up these past years have come out making strong statements this 2020. We believe, therefore, that trends in the architecture world could be defined not only by what has been recurrent and popular but also, what has proven to be relevant and substantial.
Chicago architecture is empty without Chicago architectural journalism. From the 1880s launch of the black-and-white publication Inland Architect, which covered the rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire, to a 1985 critique of the James R. Thompson Center by Paul Gapp in the Chicago Tribune titled “Masterpiece or Ego Trip?” which set the course for the public reception of the building, coverage, and criticism of architecture in local newspapers and architecture publications has provided a critical link to how Chicago maintains its reputation as a city of extraordinary architecture. Architectural criticism and journalism have and continue to help Chicago understand how we arrived at this built environment and what the future holds.
While many projects consciously avoid adopting a definitive functional layout—intentionally leaning toward the indefinability of spaces—in many others, a clear division of uses and programmatic synthesis serve as key tools to organize, prioritize, and optimize spatial flow.
The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.
A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.
This week David and Marina are joined by architect Stanley Saitowitz to discuss his design philosophy, office, upbringing in South Africa, and education and how he ended up in San Francisco, why the practice of architecture is much more challenging today, how architecture relates to cities, and more. Enjoy!
The year 2020 brought with it a whirlwind of challenges, calling many aspects of daily life into question. Marked by the pandemic, we all had to reinvent ourselves in some way to weather this unprecedented moment. It was no different for the city. COVID-19, like other infectious diseases (the Black Death, the Spanish flu, etc.), laid bare the relationship between its spread and urbanization. This is an easy analysis to make when data shows that the spread of the virus has been far greater in large urban centers.
In this regard, the health crisis has sparked discussions about the urbanization model to which our cities are subjected—a model of dispersed sprawl that prioritizes automobile mobility. Wilson Ribeiro dos Santos, a professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at PUC-Campinas, in an article co-authored with Sidney Piocchi Bernardini and Gabriela Celani, states that this urbanization model—where commerce and services are concentrated in the city center, while strictly residential areas and gated communities are located on the periphery—ended up accelerating the spread of the virus. This is because people from all parts of the city must travel daily to the same central area to work, study, visit the doctor, shop, and so on.
With a century of history, the Confitería del Molino, designed by architect Francisco Gianotti—who was born in Italy in 1881 and arrived in Argentina in 1909—is one of the heritage landmarks of Argentine architecture. After remaining closed for more than 20 years, in July 2018, the National Congress took possession of the property and began restoration efforts. In Argentina in particular, where neglect or disinterest has led to the loss of a vast number of heritage works, projects of this nature invite us to reflect on the role of architecture in building a city's collective memory.
In the dense urban fabric of India’s Mumbai, Studio Symbiosis upgraded the ID Origins Headquarters into a new visual marker of the city, using organic strokes to merge old and new into one revitalized project. The HQ has been under construction since October 2019 and is a historic landmark for the company, as it was where the owners first initiated their business in the 1980s. The 18,750 sqm project was awarded the WA World Architecture Community Awards for its unique design approach.
The following article is a contribution from architecture students at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Manizales campus. Juliana García Valencia, Alejandro Jaramillo Alzate, and Manuel Felipe Rincón Medina share their experience developing 'Casa Urbana de Montaña 1950 - 1970', the two-volume project that won first place in the research, theory, and criticism category of the IV Colombian Biennial of Architecture Students.
Ever wondered (or forgotten) the difference between open plans and free plans? In this video, architectural designer and professor Stewart Hicks breaks down what makes Open Plans a unique form of ‘open concept.’ It is part of a series that explores terms from real estate using contemporary, historical, and theoretical examples from architecture. In this case, the spatial strategies of Mies van der Rohe are explained, beginning with his early unbuilt houses, through the Barcelona Pavilion, to the Farnsworth House. Each one features a particular, but evolving, use of walls, columns, and roof planes that add up to what we call ‘Open Plans.’ Other videos in the series are dedicated to things like Free or Organic Plans and can help anyone sharpen their understanding of architectural concepts.
As long as cities have been around, there’s been one pressing question central to their future: “What makes urban areas desirable?” Over half of the world’s inhabitants live in cities and that number is projected to climb over the next decade with more than 5 billion people inhabiting urban cores globally. To prepare for this demand, cities are finding ways to be more desirable, draw in talent, and entice both big and small businesses, all while finding more ways to create equitable living opportunities for all.
Promoting homeownership as an investment strategy is a risky proposition. No financial advisor would recommend taking on debt to put such a large portion of your savings into a single financial asset, whatever it may be, as it represents a major concentration of risk.
Worse still, this risk is not random: it falls most heavily on low-income buyers, who receive worse financing terms and whose neighborhoods are systematically more likely to have lower or even declining home values, leading to devastating consequences for the racial wealth gap.
Launched by the Goethe Institut, Habiter Dakar (Living in Dakar) is a virtual exhibition tackling Housing in the Senegalese capital. The study was led by Nzinga Mboup and Caroline Geffriaud, both Architects based in Dakar. They noticed that the current housing offer in the city was particularly far off the needs of its inhabitants, whether on the cultural, societal or environmental level.
The architects analyzed the progression through which the Senegalese capital's Urban Landscape and Housing development had passed, starting from the traditional compound living type to today’s international housing models which seem to be disconnected from the daily reality of most of the city’s inhabitants. The study is concentrated on Housing which is an essential part of the formation and evolution of Dakar and suggests important theoretical and concrete reflections for the future development of the African metropolis.
Currently, specialized technical skills in the use of BIM methodology are in high demand, especially in the field of architecture. Even during the pandemic, job offers in this area have remained relatively stable, especially due to the flexibility of this methodology and the possibility of working collaboratively from remote locations. However, when looking for a new job, those interested in BIM should consider several questions: What am I specialized in? What areas are in highest demand? What type of professional BIM role is the most common?
Educational architecture is crucial for creating spaces that, not only nurture and mold the minds of the future generations, but also provide spaces for the wider public to come and share knowledge and ideas.
Cities are changing in many ways—some, fortunately, for the better. More Brazilians have come to see the bicycle as the best choice for urban mobility, and 67% of people would swap their cars or motorcycles for cleaner transit alternatives. While public perception of air quality is discouraging, awareness of climate change has grown, and 92% of people want electric buses in their cities.
The reBENT project, developed by the Research Group 9 of the March 2019-20 Program of the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), explores the interactive relationship between augmented reality (AR) and manual construction processes using PVC pipes –highly resistant and cheap– as a base research material. In addition to taking advantage of its active bending properties to interact with AR, this material provides a fast and affordable system for the creation of complex concrete structures made by weaving together a series of bent PVC pipes and reinforcing bars, which are then used as formwork for glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC).
So far, the exploration of this hybrid approach –neither purely analog nor purely automated– has led to the design of prototypes, architectural elements, and habitable structures. In addition, the team developed an augmented reality platform for Microsoft Hololens in order to guide the construction and customization process through holograms.
ArchDaily is continuing a six-year-long tradition of celebrating the best architecture drawings of the year. The 2020 edition highlights a carefully-curated collection of architectural drawings and visualizations with a wide variety of techniques and representations, all orientated towards a common goal of sharing ideas, visions, and designs.
