Where does originality and independent thinking come from? The answer is prosaically straight forward – from an inquiring individual, and an experimental environment wouldn’t hurt to stimulate it. Rem Koolhaas is credited with fostering such an environment, both through building his practice, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), a 300-architect network of seven global offices, and teaching at Harvard’s GSD, as well as lecturing all over the world. Koolhaas now has eight partners. One of the eight, since 2008, is Shohei Shigematsu who heads OMA New York since 2006. The studio originally numbered just a handful of people and over the years has grown into a large practice of 75 architects with a focus on projects in North America.

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Videos

Architects' general ignorance about the needs and requirements of people with special needs is worrisome. Beyond complying with mandatory regulations (different in each country), the quality of life for different-abled people depends on specific and daily factors that go beyond a railing or a ramp, and are often left in the hands of professionals who have never dealt with such issues.

This Ables, a project developed by IKEA and the non-profit organizations Milbat and Access Israel, provides an excellent resource for how to create an equitable design in the smallest and simplest of details. From door handles that are can be opened with a forearm to a couch lift that enables users to sit down and get up easily, these 13 products are available to the general public on ThisAbles.com. Some products can even be 3D-printed independently.

See the video below for more details of the project.

Now in the midst of its annual awards program, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the 12 projects shortlisted for recognition in its East Midlands district. RIBA has also recently announced its shortlists for new projects in its London, East, North East, and South West districts.

Emre Arolat has a long and distinguished career in architecture, marked by honors such as the Aga Khan Award for architecture and appointments such as the co-curatorship of the 2012 Istanbul Design Biennial. As both a practicing architect and an educator (he teaches at the Yale School of Architecture), Arolat spends a great deal of time traveling around the world. In this guest essay, Arolat shares his experience on the road, illuminating a personal creative process. - AD Editorial Team 

To anyone enrolled in an architecture school, final year projects tend to be the perfect time to go all in. Whether you go for 3D visualizations or build remarkable models, your final presentation is the chance to display every conceptual and technical skill acquired throughout the years.

For his B.A. Final project, architect Mohammad Pirdavari of Ati-Naghsh Hamraz Consultants, presented his modernist stadium proposal in a series of freehand Airbrush drawings. His intricate graphics helped accentuate the stadiums’ raw material and detailed relationship between the main exposed structure, and the smaller covered one.

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This article was originally published in Autodesk's Redshift publication as "How Building Modular Homes can Help Fill the Affordable Housing Gap."

“Modular” isn’t a construction product; it’s a construction process. This is according to Tom Hardiman, executive director of the Modular Building Institute (MBI), whose members include more than 350 companies involved in the manufacturing and distribution of modular buildings, including multifamily homes.

The Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has announced that Norway's Mjøstårnet tower is, at 85.4 meters, officially the world's tallest timber building. Beyond the unique distinction, the tower is also Norway's tallest mixed-use structure and third tallest building.

There are few things that fascinate us more than the sea. Its contemplation arouses a sense of peace, while its colors, textures, movements and amplitude provide a scientifically proven effect of relaxation in our nervous system. Above all, it makes us realize how small we are in the universe. It is not by chance that a house facing the sea is a dream of consumption for many, let alone with a pool right in front of it. Infinity pools play with this feeling of infinite sea and sky. Through a well-elaborated set of levels and plans, they create an optical illusion that leaves everyone speechless, making pool water appear as if merged with the horizon, overflowing at one or more edges. But before you plan your photo on Instagram with a glass of sparkling wine in your hand, let's take a look at how these pools are built.

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Back in 2008, ArchDaily embarked on a challenging mission: to provide inspiration, knowledge, and tools to the architects tasked with designing cities. In an effort to further align our strategy with these challenges, we recently introduced monthly themes in order to dig deeper into topics we find relevant in today’s architectural discourse. From architects who don't design to reframing climate change as a global issue, we are celebrating our 11th birthday by asking 11 editors and curators to choose ArchDaily's most inspiring articles.

As part of the RIBA annual Regional Awards programme, 23 architectural works and one masterplan have been shortlisted for the RIBA East awards. These projects cover a range of types, from homes to schools to follies, and represent some of the finest work produced in Britain in the last year.

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After spending countless hours in front of AutoCAD working on a project, you’re bound to have your own set of favorite commands to standardize a few steps. We also bet that you don’t have them all memorized or often forget them. To help you remember, we've made a list of 50 commands that can help you speed up your work game, discover new shortcuts, or come in use as a handy tool for when you forget what the command you need is called.

The following listing was developed and corroborated by our team for the 2013, 2014 and 2015 versions of AutoCAD in English. We also prepared a series of GIFs to visualize some of the trickier ones.

When you’ve finished reading, we would love to know what your favorite commands are (including those that we didn’t include). We will use your input to help us update the article!

11 years ago, ArchDaily set out on a mission: to provide inspiration, knowledge, and tools to the architects tasked with designing for the 3 billion people that will move into cities in the next 40 years. A bold vision for a rapidly changing world.

Since then, the way we consume architecture has changed. Projects on the other side of the world no longer feel quite so far away, and inspiration can come from any project, at any scale, anywhere. The mission we set out with so many years ago has captured the passion of architects and architecture lovers worldwide: nearly half a million people visiting our sites daily in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese. 

We are especially proud of our global reach. With more than 40,000 new articles and 4300 projects added to our site in the last year alone, we are committed to providing the most relevant resources to our readers to better their knowledge and appreciation for the field we all love. We are proud and excited to reach readers in every corner of the world, and we savor the opportunity to continue sharing the inspiration, knowledge, and tools needed to design a positive urbanizing world.

Nowadays, new technologies for the treatment of glass provide new ways to use this material in architecture. Applied indoors, specifically in retail stores, glass in its different textures, colors, finishes and levels of transparency can allow the unobstructed view of certain products, hide more private areas without blocking the passage of light, and attract the attention of customers as focal points, among many other uses.

Review below a selection of applications in commercial projects.

This article was originally published on CommonEdge as "Rob Walker on the Mistakes of Brad Pitt's Make it Right."

I will start with a confession: I was part of the fawning media swarm that lauded and applauded the accomplishments of Make It Right, Brad Pitt’s bold attempt to rebuild a portion of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. The project was, it seemed once, one of the few post-Katrina success stories coming out of that flood-ravaged community.

ArchDaily turns 11! To commemorate the occasion, we want to share with you the 11 projects most visited by our readers during this incredible journey. From the indisputable and timeless classics from of designers like Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, to the pioneering works of architects such as Zaha Hadid and OMA, passing through the delicate work of Gabinete de Arquitectura, these 11 examples teach us valuable lessons about architecture, most importantly: how to design for specific requirements without losing the creativity and beauty of architectural design.

On behalf of ArchDaily, we want to thank you for sharing with us the best architecture in the world, helping us to inspire professionals from all over the world to build better cities.

Sir Terry Farrell to speak about his long and varied career in architecture. Farrell, who is known for his exuberantly postmodern works in Britain, tells of how he became interested in architecture, the role architects will play in our rapidly urbanizing world, and speaking openly about our cities. 

YACademy launches the second edition of Architecture for Landscape, a high-level training course offering 8 scholarships and internships in internationally-renowned architectural firms.

101 hours of lessons, a 32-hour workshop and internships/lectures held by internationally-renowned architectural firms like Stefano Boeri Architetti, Snøhetta, Hhf Architects, Rodrigo Duque Motta, Jean Nouvel Design, Rintala Eggerston, and Jensen & Skodvin.

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This renovation project by Peter Ebner and friends ZT GmbH is about the history of a place and changing tastes and times. It is about not needing a large scale to radically improve the space around. It is about the beauty and character of the city with its reflected sparkling life, gloomy evening sky, raindrops and lights of passing cars. It is about people who are mostly in a hurry, but who still sometimes stop for a few seconds to take note of a special, glittering room.

"Isn't it fascinating how this simple act of drawing a line on a map can transform the way we see and experience the world?" asks Ronald Rael in his December 2018 TED Talk. "And those lines on a map can create scars in the landscape and scars in our memories."

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Yona Friedman is a French architect and urban planner with more than 92 years of experience that has led him to participate in numerous events, including the Venice Biennial and the Shanghai Biennial. One of his most important works was published in 1958, entitled L'Architecture Mobile, which exposed one of his most ambitious projects named: "La Ville Spatiale", a utopia that recycled mega-structures of existing cities to provide citizens with the chance to live with complete flexibility in their decisions.

This article serves as a brief introduction to a way of thinking that I assume to be foreign and new to most of the readers. It is based on some observations I’ve made during the past 5 years as part of my PhD research into the comparison between two traditions of architectural representation, between China and Europe, under guidance of prof. Li Xiaodong at Tsinghua University in Beijing. With that in mind this article has no pretension, nor the proper length, to fully convey the complexity of the representations of architectural space in drawings from China, but should be seen as a first try to communicate some of these ideas to a wider audience.

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Architecture, in all its forms, has the innate ability to trigger our emotions and alter our perceptions. Consequently, a lot of light is currently being shed on the relation between architecture, landscape, and health.

In the 2018 edition of the Blank Space Fairytales Competition, Katie Flaxman from Studio 31 Landscape Architects, wrote a story of a father, Horace, an architect suffering from late-stage dementia and his offspring, Rowan. The fiction describes Horace’s journey in different healthcare institutions and how his presence in a building and landscape properly designed for well-being, improved his psychological and physical health.

Here are some excerpts from Flaxman's fictional story, illustrated by architectural artist Sam Wilson.

This article is an updated version of its original post on March 15th, 2016.
"In the ongoing debate about women in the architecture profession, you rarely hear an argument for why equal representation is important; it's generally assumed to be an unquestionable moral imperative. However, in this article originally published on the Huffington Post as "Why Women's Leadership Is Essential for Architects," Lance Hosey argues that, regardless of your position on equality as a moral imperative, better representation of women in architecture could benefit everyone in the profession—in very tangible ways.

Today, on International Women's Day (March 8) we want to share again the American Institute of Architects (AIA) publication "Diversity in the Profession of Architecture," its first diversity report in a decade. The release follows the creation in December 2015 of the AIA's "Equity in Architecture Commission," a panel of twenty architects, educators, and diversity experts to investigate diversity and inclusion in the profession. The new report documents a survey of over 7,300 professional architects and students, including men and women, 79% of them whites and 21% people of color.

When applying for an architecture job, you need to make sure you have the perfect portfolio. While a clever and attractive business card might help you initially get a firm's attention, and a well-considered résumé or CV might help you prove your value, in most cases it will be your portfolio that makes or breaks your application. It's your portfolio that practices will use to measure your design sensibilities against the office's own style and to judge whether you match up to the talents claimed in your résumé.

After launching a call for our readers to send us their own portfolios so that we could share the best design ideas with the ArchDaily community, this selection below shows the best of the nearly 200 submissions we received, which were judged not on the quality of the architectural design they showed (though much of it was excellent) but instead the design quality of the portfolio itself. In making the selection, we were looking for attractive graphics, a clear presentation of the work itself, the formulation of a visual identity which permeated both the architectural designs and the portfolio design, and of course that elusive and much-prized attribute: "creativity."