This article originally appeared in The Genetics of Design and was then republished by Common Edge.

Since 2015, Ragusa, Sicily has hosted FestiWall, an international art festival devoted to enhancing the public realm and improving citizen engagement with the modern section of an old city. The image above shows two views of a residential tower before and after FestiWall. Which one grabs your eye?

We’ll guess you’re drawn to the one with the art at right. Running the image through biometric software predicts you’ll immediately focus on the man in the mural.

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As a part of the XV Taller Social Latinoamericano architectural conference that took place in Puno, Peru, we visited the Iruito Tupi zone in Huancané province alongside Francisco Mariscal, Director of the Puno Cultural Center. For the conference, Mariscal gave a presentation on the history of putucos, pre-Columbian houses made with a mixture of earth and grass.

History has the habit of repeating itself; using the same script, just with different names, figures, and places. Some 10,000 years ago, the Altiplano and the Titicaca lake basin, wedged between modern day Peru and Bolivia, became home to hunters and gatherers who subsisted on the herds of llamas and vicuñas as well as the bounty of birds and fish.

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Just over four months after the first confirmed case of coronavirus in Brazil, and about three and a half months after the initial quarantine decrees, many cities still maintain restrictive measures to promote social isolation. Despite the recent easing of restrictions adopted by some states and municipalities, disruptions to the daily routines of architects and students persist, and the popularity of remote activities, such as online courses, has grown over the past few months.

While many architecture firms face reduced demand and stalled construction sites, students have seen their classes suspended or moved online. With more free time—whether due to shorter commutes or reduced workloads—students and architects have turned to online courses to sharpen or expand their skills in tools, software, and theoretical concepts.

Originally published as "Caminando hacia la descolonización urbano-arquitectónica" in the third edition of Revista CLEA—an annual publication of the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Estudiantes de Arquitectura (CLEA)—this article presents an introduction to the decolonization of spaces as a political, social, and methodological critique of the territorial, urban, and architectural praxis that has become established in our cities.

There’s a new kid on the block making noise in Brooklyn’s thriving Bushwick neighborhood. At 7-stories tall, 500 units, and occupying 489,000 square feet of real estate, The Rheingold is one of the most expansive multi-family developments in Brooklyn to date.

The Terra Preta Cidade collective is a space created from the desire of five Black women living in Salvador, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Belo Horizonte to bypass geographical distance in order to promote and celebrate coming together. Emmily Leandro, Gabriela Gaia, Luciana Mayrink, Malu de Barros, and Natalia Alves give shape and voice to this exercise of creating a shared virtual territory—which is as much a political statement as an aesthetic one—through the podcast Des-embranquecendo a Cidade, which reaches its fourth episode with the theme: "Boiling Territory — Permanent Steadfastness."

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The state of New Mexico is located in the western region of the United States, bordering Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas (in the US) and Chihuahua (in Mexico). It has the highest percentage of Spanish-speaking population in the United States. As part of Aridoamerica, its landscape is predominantly shaped by cacti and desert species.

What would all the built environments be without its users? This question may make it easier to understand that not only do architecture and urbanism sustain themselves as physical spaces, but they also gain meaning mainly through the human and non-human movements and bonds, that - together with the architectural or spontaneous traces that make up the urban landscape - provoke the sensations that each individual feels in a unique way.

This article is part of "Eastern Bloc Architecture: 50 Buildings that Defined an Era", a collaborative series by The Calvert Journal and ArchDaily highlighting iconic architecture that had shaped the Eastern world. Every week both publications will be releasing a listing rounding up five Eastern Bloc projects of certain typology. Read on for your weekly dose: Scientific Superstructures.

Using the new Light Mix in V-Ray 5, artists and designers can visualize ideas even faster and more effectively. Now, from just one single render, you have the power to create as many images as you can imagine, at a speed that simply wasn’t possible with earlier versions. 

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There’s always an ongoing debate on whether some designs are stolen or “modified” to become original. Most people assume that if we post pictures of our designs online, we would be giving away our work and other designers and architects will eventually steal them. But should we really hide our designs from the public? Are plans and sections so sacred and innovative to the extent that architects are applying copyrights to them?

Kevin Hui and Andrew Maynard of Youtube’s Archimarathon chat about copying designs, how students and architects can learn from existing designs, and whether plagiarism exists in the field of architecture.

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La serie titulada Agua, minería y éxodo forma parte de una investigación visual llevada adelante por el fotógrafo Marcos Zegers que explora las tensiones culturales y las alteraciones territoriales derivadas de las actividades mineras y extractivas en el desierto de Atacama.

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On June 17, Mexico's Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) issued a landmark ruling ordering the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) to generate disaggregated statistical data on populations in informal or precarious settlements across the country. This resolution brings to the forefront the discussion on the role that judges can and should play when making decisions that directly impact urban planning, land management, our cities, and our housing.

This article is a part of a collaboration with coolhuntermx.com. It was originally published under the title "Luis Barragán and José Clemente Orozco,The House They Built Together ", written and photograped by David Lozano Díaz in collaboration with Lorena Darquea.

There's a lot of discussion surrounding Casa Orozco as to who the real creator is —Luis Barragán or José Clemente Orozco. And even though we know that one of them was responsible for the architecture, the answer still remains unclear. Orozco returned to Mexico in 1934, by invitation from the Mexico City government, after a seven year stint in New York. Once he arrived, he was commissioned to paint a mural inside the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Afterwards, he received commissions from the Jalisco Government to paint a series of murals for three public buildings in Guadalajara.

Sharing your shelf is, in a way, sharing yourself. Every element —from the titles you choose to the way you organize them— says something about your personality and your interests. 

Having access to a bathroom is, above all, a factor of dignity. As basic as this fact may seem, the WHO (World Health Organization) estimates that 2 billion people worldwide do not have access to basic sanitation facilities, such as bathrooms or latrines. Such inadequate sanitation causes 432,000 deaths annually, mainly from diarrhea, in addition to being an aggravating factor for several neglected tropical diseases including intestinal worms, schistosomiasis, and trachoma. In 2010, the UN (United Nations) labeled sanitation a basic right, alongside access to drinking water.

Projects for public buildings and infrastructure must always ensure the best possible forms of access and connection with the surrounding streets, particularly regarding access routes for pedestrians. However, some architects have managed to overcome the pragmatic aspect of this connection between architecture and the streets, when designing projects that have a strong duty to provide public space, by using this bond as the core of the design concept.

With most of the world living in cities and growing villages, people tend to spend the majority of their time indoors. When not at home, we are working, learning, or even engaging in fun activities in enclosed, built settings. All in all, 90% of our time is occupied inside. It is therefore essential to ensure a comfortable, productive, and healthy indoor environmental quality by following well-regulated parameters and design practices that consider temperature, lighting, noise pollution, proper ventilation, and the quality of the air we breathe. The latter is especially important, since contrary to what we might think, air pollution is much higher indoors than outdoor.

Architects don’t make buildings. Architects make drawings of buildings. But of course, someone has to make the building. The construction industry is one of the largest economic sectors and we all interact with the built environment on a daily basis, but the actual work of getting a building from drawing to structure has barely evolved over the decades. While the rest of the world has moved into Industry 4.0, the construction sector has not kept pace. Architecture has begun to embrace some digitalization. After all, not many of us work with mylar on drafting tables anymore. So with the architecture industry’s everlasting link to the construction industry, will the latter pick up some new technological tricks by association? And when it does, how will that change the role of the architect?

Feeling free and safe in the city. How many times have we felt fully free when walking through our neighbourhood, when returning home, when sitting in the park? Some urban spaces give us more autonomy than others. Some areas seem more comfortable and calm. But, to keep that calm, to what extent do we express ourselves and to what extent do we hold back? What safeguards do we take to feel as good as possible when inhabiting our environment?

In May, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs announced that it would cancel its high-profile Quayside project because of “unprecedented economic uncertainty.” The statement marked the end of a three-year initiative to create a living, urban “testbed for emerging technologies, materials, and processes.”

Reversing the traditional order of city planning, Sidewalk Labs imagined building a new urban district on Toronto’s waterfront from the internet up, with sensors and other data collection infrastructure embedded in the fabric of a large city block. The ambitious development—with an area of 2.65 million square feet, including 1.78 million square feet of residential space—was to be built entirely from mass timber; indeed, the extensive use of modular cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glue-laminated timber (glulam) was a chief selling point of the design (by Heatherwick Studio and Snøhetta, using a kit-of-parts developed by Michael Green Architecture).

Vertical gardens, green walls, or living walls are different terms used for the same solution: the vertical arrangement of various plant species to enjoy the benefits of vegetation within a smaller footprint. In other words, the vertical application of plants maximizes horizontal usable area, a distinct advantage especially in places with limited ground space for planting.

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Unlike various construction systems and materials, the landscape is not something that can be specified, or even drawn, in the architectural design of an apartment. However, landscapes are still shaped by the building's design decisions, both from an internal and external perspective—that is, in relation to their surroundings. Facade orientation and window size, for instance, are among the ways the views from an apartment are defined, while the scale and height of the building directly impact the context in which it is situated.

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Architects in general are people who like to talk about how much they influence communities through their designs, and they are actually correct in saying that. After all, spaces together with various social factors influence how each individual feels when occupying the city or a building. But do these projects respond to all users in the same way? We propose to question the way architecture deals with the LGBTQIA+ community through an open call on our social media channels, bringing in our readers' testimonies on how they experience these spaces, and how is it possible to represent the LGBTQIA+ community in the architectural field.