This guide covers a workflow that moves from project parameters to generated floor plans, 3D perspective views, exterior design exploration, and site context visualization, using AI tools in place of preliminary CAD and rendering work.

Planned to be built in one of the most exquisite spots of Alanya, Turkey, the Vertical Villa Project is a complex geometric composition of glass, concrete, and landscape, with a great scenery of the green mountain range and distant coastline.

The architecture team developed the project based on an analysis of the social interaction and atmosphere found in the city of Alanya. The team combined different individual units, and applied the sloped roof system found in the city's typical residential architecture. 

+ 15

+ 19

As part of the cultural program of Jardín 17 –a space designed by Luis Barragán as an extension of his House-Studio that for 20 years has hosted various universities from around the world to present major design and architecture exhibitions–, Japanese architect Go Hasegawa presents 'Flying Carpet,' a pavilion suspended in a corridor amidst the vegetation originally planted by Luis Barragán and later intervened by Mexican architect Alberto Kalach.

As part of the cultural programming of Jardín 17—a space designed by Luis Barragán as an extension of his house-studio that has hosted various academic programs from around the world for the past 20 years—Japanese architect Go Hasegawa has designed the installation Flying Carpet: a pavilion suspended in the middle of Barragán's garden.

The new edition of the Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (XI BIAU) poses a different challenge. This time, along the shores of the peaceful Paraguay River, the Ricardo Brugada neighborhood, known as La Chacarita—one of the oldest in Asunción's historic center—takes center stage.

Together with the residents—who also exhibited the biennial's award-winning projects in their own private homes—national curators led 13 working groups to develop proposals for the improvement and transformation of a sector historically overlooked by the city, often associated with crime and unemployment. Some of these initiatives have already been put into practice.

The Second Hebei International Urban Planning and Design Competition – Xingdong New Area Urban Design International Master Competition organized by Urban Environment Design (UED) Magazine has announced its list of winners for this year's edition, with “City of the Future” as its theme.

Award-winning architecture firms took part of the competition, reflecting on Xingtai's transformative urbanism, and interpreting its ongoing development based on social, economic, demographic, ecological, and cultural factors.

+ 8

Bauhaus, among many other design movements and disciplines, has had great influence on contemporary architecture. Many claim that the school is in fact a pillar in modern-day architecture and design with its rationality, simplicity, and efficiency. However, behind Bauhaus’ smooth surfaces, a life of violence, occultism, sexuality, and pharmacology was taking place.

In a recent article on Metropolis Magazine, Princeton University School of Architecture professor and architectural historian Beatriz Colomina explains how Bauhaus was a “cauldron of perversions”, suppressing transgressive ideas and pedagogies.

Over the last year, 6,900 million m2 have been built for office spaces (an increase of 12% compared to the previous year), according to a study by Avison Young that investigates the real estate market of offices in North America, Europe and Asia.

Blind walls, or facades without openings, are rarely the primary design concept in homes, but rather the result of a need for privacy in certain spaces, especially when the setback from neighboring buildings is minimal or nonexistent. However, blind walls can take center stage in a building's overall composition—whether through the contrast between solids and voids, the enhancement of the wall in other ways (such as the application of paint, texture, vertical gardens, etc.), or, finally, by positioning the blind wall on the front facade. This creates a "role reversal" between the side facades, usually resigned to a lack of openings, and the front and/or rear facades, which normally feature them.

A desperate child screams in the middle of Dom José Gaspar Square in downtown São Paulo, pleading for them not to hurt her mother. She cries as she watches her being forcibly dragged by municipal agents from the cart where she sold fruit daily to the square's patrons. Her mother cries as well, trying to explain to the agents that the fruit and the cart were all she had to support her daughter. Moved, onlookers watch the scene and try to reason with the subdistrict officials, but they keep confiscating the goods—after all, “orders are orders.” 

But what is the “order” that governs public spaces? 

Architecture and design influence not merely the aesthetics of buildings and other physical surroundings, but also the way individuals perceive and go about performing everyday activities. Contemporary architecture considers and shapes the behavior of people, whether at home, at work or during leisure activities. In this regard, contemporary architecture increasingly incorporates diverse materials with different and unique qualities in order to create surroundings that facilitate the intended and naturally occurring behavior of visitors and everyday users. Architects thus create spaces that enable people to perform daily tasks and a range of everyday social activities. However, architects also play a vital role in securing the future maintenance of newly designed buildings in order to ensure the continued existence of these physical spaces.

+ 5

Architects are increasingly incorporating translucent materials into their facade designs to help control interior light levels, as options like polycarbonate and U-glass, for example, allow only a percentage of natural light to penetrate the building. At nightfall, however, these materials yield an entirely different, striking effect: when illuminated from within, the buildings transform into true lanterns in the urban landscape.

From domestic rooms to public infrastructure, the library is an architectural typology that must address various specific requirements tied to its core responsibilities: preserving books and publications, and providing spaces for reading, study, and research. Regardless of scale, libraries must efficiently manage natural light and ventilation, since they often combine leisure and work activities that require distinct qualities of environmental comfort.

Halloween. A day plagued by ghost, ghouls, and goblins. Historically, on All Hallows' Evening, many believed that spirits could return to the earthly world. On this frightful occasion, we’re highlighting phantoms from the beyond that have entered the architectural realm. Below, 13 hellish projects and their supernatural counterparts. Scroll down if you dare. 

+ 10

+ 14

Cats just don’t care. They don’t care if you bought them gourmet food. They don’t care if you got them customized furniture or luxury cardboard boxes, and they definitely don’t care if they are barging into an architectural photo shoot (although, we do think it’s their way of being the center of attention).

Don't believe us? Here's a collection of photographs collected from our projects database where cats are clearly not trying to steal the spotlight.

How to build light and modular facades with a rustic and monolithic appearance?

Composed of cement, cellulose, and mineral materials, fiber cement allows us to clad walls in a light, non-combustible, and rain-resistant way, generating facades with different textures, colors, and tones. Its panels are easily manageable and perforable, and can configure ventilated facades when installed with a certain separation between the rear wall. Check out 9 projects below that have cleverly used fiber cement as the primary material in facades.

The artifacts found on public streets in most Latin American cities—wherever they are permitted—vary in function and use. These range from mobile street-vending carts and temporary stages to containers for collecting discarded waste, ready to be given a new life by others. 

Ruta 4 Taller together with Coonvite created this workshop format to reflect on the artisanal artifacts or contraptions (cacharros) placed in public space, aiming to foster new encounters through trans-architecture.

Signs all over the city, on trains and subways. The words "Souto Moura" require no further explanation in a city with two world-renowned architects. It is the opening night of his exhibition "Souto de Moura: Memory, Projects, Works" at Casa da Arquitectura on October 18, 2019, and the two greatest leading figures of the so-called Porto School are there, side by side. Álvaro Siza, alongside other guests of honor, walks through all forty projects in the exhibition, listening to Eduardo Souto de Moura's concise, humble, and almost simple explanations of each one. They are Portugal's two Pritzker laureates, who also happen to live and work in the same buildings, in addition to having collaborated on several projects. Eduardo does not hide his pride in Siza's presence at his solo exhibition. Nor does he hesitate to acknowledge the master's influence on his career. Yet Souto de Moura's architecture is unique; it has a life of its own. And everyone there knows it.

The use of light and shadow in architecture can have several nuances. The traditional Japanese culture stands out for working with spaces of dim light, kind of dull. On the other hand, modern architecture and minimalism work along with illuminating spaces through the use of white spaces and reflection of light as a recurring resource.

Even so, black, dark spaces and minimalism also converse in the same language that provides new possibilities for lighting design and use of new materials. We now present you a selection of the best contemporary interior spaces that use black as the protagonist element, generating introspective but dramatic environments at the same time.

Located in a prime location in the city of Taipei, the invaluable large open space at the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB) is historically significant as it used to be home to the Industrial Research Institute of the Taiwanese Governor-General’s Office and also the Air Force Command Headquarters under the Ministry of National Defense. Since the Ministry of Culture took over its operations in 2018, C-LAB has become a place for art and cultural experimentation, with various participatory events and actions initiated and reflections and imaginations for contemporary urban space and lifestyle projected.

By 2050, the world’s population is expected to have exceeded 10 billion people, making overcrowded cities one of the most pressing issues of the present. Data analysis, machine learning, transportation developments, and the rapid development of new social technologies are increasingly changing the needs of people and communities, which will have a direct impact on the issue of overcrowding and on our built environment more largely.

A wave of service providers and clinics is using catchy branding and interior design to attract patients frustrated with old-guard medical facilities. But is further commodification of health care the answer?

A few years ago I signed up for Oscar health insurance. Cofounded in 2012 by Joshua Kushner and headquartered in New York City, it was the health-care plan most of my similarly freelance friends used. Plus, if you lived in Brooklyn, as I did at the time, you could easily visit its Oscar Center, a primary-care space in a warehouse loft that also boasted the offices of literary magazines. I went in for a checkup, feeling slightly nervous as with any doctor appointment, but was surprised when I opened the door onto a spacious, minimalist, wood-floored, primary-colored office installed with glass walls and snake plants. There was even a yoga room adorned with the decal “Let the Healing Begin.”

Founded in 1995 by architects Kazuyo Sejima (born 29 October 1956) and Ryue Nishizawa (born 7 February 1966), SANAA is world-renowned for its white, light buildings grounded in the architects’ Japanese cultural origins. Despite the white exteriors, their architecture is far from modernist; the constant incorporation of ambiguity and doubt in SANAA’s buildings is refreshing and playful, taking the reflective properties of glass and brightness of white to a new level.

+ 7

The following story takes place during the twenty-seventh edition of the Latin American Encounter of Architecture Students (ELEA) in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, where nearly 800 students from Latin America gathered for a collective experience of participation, integration, and learning. Among other activities was the construction of two wooden structures in two distinct locations: the "Lake Pavilion" in the backyard of the Virgen de Fátima school—separated from a private school by a polluted creek—and "The Cloud" in an unmaintained public square in the Don Bosco neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.

+ 28

With increasingly smaller homes and apartments, there has been a growing impulse to integrate plant species into interior spaces. But what kind of plants should be used for an environment lacking in abundant natural light? In this article, you will find some suggestions for species recommended for shaded or semi-shaded environments, an especially important distinction when we talk about interior spaces that receive little sunlight.