Patrick is ArchDaily's News Editor. Prior to this position, he was an editorial intern for ArchDaily while working full time as an assistant for a watercolor artist. Patrick holds a B. Arch degree from Penn State University and has spent time studying under architect Paolo Soleri. He is currently based in New York City.
Housing blocks come in all different shapes, sizes and layouts. So searching for the precedent that matches every category you desire can sometimes be a tedious process of clicking in and out of an unorganized list. Enter the Collective Housing Atlas, an online library of housing projects that is organized into categories.
Though it was once an essential element of all classical structures, the frieze has largely been left behind by architects looking for contemporary façade systems. But at the recently-opened addition to the Kunstmuseum Basel, designed by Swiss architects Christ & Gantenbein in collaboration with design group iart, the frieze returns with an eye-catching, technological twist, as hidden pixels within the facade light up to display moving images and text to those below.
In terms of memorialization, being selected to represent your country as the face of a banknote is one of the highest honors you can achieve. Even if electronic transfer seems to be the way of the future, cash remains the reliable standard for exchange of goods and services, so being pasted to the front of a bill guarantees people will see your face on a near-daily basis, ensuring your legacy carries on.
In some countries, the names of the faces even become slang terms for the bills themselves. While “counting Le Corbusiers” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, a select few architects have still been lucky enough to have been featured on such banknotes in recent history. Read on to find out who the 15 architects immortalized in currency are and what they’re worth.
Shoehorned into the narrow space behind Mario Botta’s 1995 building, the Snøhetta-designed new wing of the SFMOMA was forced to go where few museums have gone before: up. Rising 10 stories into the San Francisco skyline, the new building nearly triples the amount of existing gallery space and adds a new entrance into what is now one of the world’s largest buildings dedicated to modern art. As the museum is set to reopen to the public May 14th, the critics' takes are rolling in. Did the restrictive site inspire a unique design solution or limit the creative possibilities of the project? Read on to find out.
When ArchDaily published “Live on the Edge with OPA’s Casa Brutale” in July of last year, we expected it to be popular on our site, but few anticipated exactly how much attention the project would receive—enough to secure a position in the top 10 most read articles on the site in 2015. But what happened next was perhaps more astounding. By the end of the week, the project had been picked up by the gamut of non-architecture news outlets ranging from Slate to Yahoo to CNET to CNBC. For a few short days, it became difficult to traverse the wild expanses of the internet without a sighting of the project’s lead image, typically accompanied by a hyperbolic headline along the lines of “This Beautiful, Terrifying House is Literally Inside a Cliff.”
But despite the enormous traction, with seemingly impossible features like a clifftop, glass-bottomed swimming pool, the project still seemed to be destined for "paper architecture" status. Yet fast forward to today and the house has (incredibly) found a willing client, and is about to break ground on construction. How did this happen, and what takes architecture from viral sensation to real-life construction project?
Design group prescription., in conjunction with Arup, have developed a sophisticated sundial based off of solar path data that takes the form of a flowering fan. The geometry is optimized using the specific solar data from any world location, giving the sundial a completely unique form based on where it is constructed, and is materialized in a strong, flexible plastic through a 3D printing process.
The love affair between architecture and film has been well documented. From huge breathtaking sets to small spaces for intimate conversations, the architecture in a film often plays as strong a role as any character in translating the director’s vision to his/her audience. In constructing the environments of their narratives, the great filmmakers could even be considered architects in their own right—that's the claim presented in this video from the British Film Institute, which looks at the work of celebrated director Jean-Luc Godard and how the architecture in his films transforms to suit their tone. In pictures such as À bout de souffle (1960), Le Mépris (1963) and Week End (1967), Godard uses streetscapes to convey optimism or pessimism, uses walls to emphasize the emotional distance between lovers, and even includes a cameo from the particularly photogenic Villa Malaparte. Watch the video to learn more about the techniques used to achieve these moods.
The majority of our built environment is designed for people who hear, with little regard for how the hearing-impaired navigate a space. But what would a space look like if it were designed for the deaf? This video from Vox and Curbed focuses on Gallaudet University, the world’s only liberal arts institution for the deaf, and the ways the campus is tailored to the needs of its students. By analyzing what they refer to as “Deaf Space,” the university has been able to pinpoint techniques that not only make communication and wayfinding simpler for the deaf, but to produce spaces that function more effectively and comfortably for everyone. For more on the university and how its members are impacting the architecture world, read the full article over at Curbed here.
UPDATE: The videos are no longer available on YouTube. :(
Over the past 20 years, many of the most renowned European cultural institutions - including ARTE France, Les Films d’Ici, the Louvre, the Ministry of Culture and Communication Department of Architecture and Heritage, Centre Pompidou, City of Architecture and Heritage, Musée d'Orsay and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe - have come together to produce more than 50 architecture documentaries devoted to the most significant achievements of architecture, its beginnings, and the latest creations of the great architects of today. Now, these videos are accessible to the public via the YouTube Channel ACB (Art and Culture Bureau).
Each documentary is approximately 26 minutes long, and focuses on the genesis and impact of a single building that has played a role in the evolution of architecture. Narration is in English, and many of the videos of newer buildings feature interviews with the architects themselves. Check out some of the videos below, or find the entire list here.
Discovered by archaeologists in civilizations as old as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, fritted glass is hardly a new technology. Yet thanks to its energy-saving abilities and the smooth, gradient aesthetic it produces, fritted glass has seen a rebirth in contemporary architecture.
Frit itself is a ceramic component that can be laid out into an assortment of patterns, most typically consisting of dots or lines. These patterns can then be silk-screened onto annealed glass using frit paint. Then, the glass is fired in a tempering furnace, which strengthens and improves the safety of the glass under thermal stress. The resulting product is glass of determined transparency that, when used in building facades, can reduce solar heat gain and even make buildings more visible and less deadly for birds.
The Curry Stone Foundation has announced The Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers (SPARC) as the winner of the 2016 Curry Stone Design Prize Vision Award. For over 30 years, SPARC has supported, represented and implemented improvements for Indian citizens living in slum communities throughout the country. Through its alliance with the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and Mahila Milan (Women Together), SPARC is now active in over 70 cities throughout India, lobbying for physical, social and legal advancement, as well as facilitating the construction of housing for more than 8,500 families and community toilets for over 500,000 seats in slums with no existing facilities.
“SPARC with the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan are driving change by using the knowledge and capacity of the urban poor,” said Emiliano Gandolfi, the Director of the Curry Stone Design Prize. “With their work they designed the social framework that enables underrepresented populations to have a voice in the decision processes that determine their quality of life.”
Today is World Water Day, established by the UN in 1993 to focus attention on global usage of freshwater and promote conservation of freshwater sources. To celebrate, check out this infographic created by The Water Filter Men. The infographic highlights everyday practices to conserve water and gives examples of architectural projects that have made water conservation a key imperative, including William McDonough's NASA Sustainability Base, 2011 ArchDaily Building of the Year winner Bilbao Arena by ACXT, and Renzo Piano's California Academy of Sciences, among others. Read on to see the infographic in full.
The most revolutionary material in architecture may be one we’re already quite familiar with: glue. In a recent article for New Scientist’s New Urbanist column, futurist Geoff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG argues that the typical building’s structural system may soon see an overhaul. Instead of steel held together with bolts and welds, petroleum-based composite materials and carbon fiber panels fixed in place with glue could serve as both a building’s structure and skin.
It is said that the best design solutions are often found when a project comes with a very strict set of parameters. So it makes sense that architectural games, with their coded restrictions and rigid rulesets, tend to draw out a particular kind of creative problem solving. Recently, games like SimCity and Cities: Skylines have inspired designers to experiment with constructing virtual cities without the fear of causing real-life consequences. In turn, these creations have inspired new perspectives on real-world designs.
The newest entrant to the world of architectural gaming is Block’hood, a neighborhood-building simulator that challenges the user to create a functioning community out of 1x1x1 blocks of various program. The interface features bold, stirring graphics from an axonometric view and effects that cycle between day and night. Block’hood taps into the simple desire to play with blocks, and then ups the ante by making the blocks’ existence vulnerable to the environmental conditions you create.
Home to vast geographic features like the Gobi Desert, Mongolia is not a country associated with its urban environment. But after economic reforms following the withdrawal of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the discovery of vast reserves of coal, gold and copper, a large portion of Mongolia’s historically nomadic society has recently begun to settle down, particularly in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, where nearly half of the country’s 3 million residents now live.
Unfortunately, the infrastructure of the city hasn’t yet had a chance to catch up to these rapid growth patterns, resulting in sprawling slum-like settlements consisting mainly of traditional felt tents - known as gers - encircling the city. Civic buildings throughout these neighborhoods are rare, and even travelling within the city is difficult due to the lack of official maps.
After 12 long years and a series of construction headaches, Santiago Calatrava’s $4 billion World Trade Center Transportation Hub has finally opened to the public. Once widely regarded as a symbol of hope for post-9/11 New York, the project’s ballooning budget and security-related revisions gradually soured the opinions of the public and top design minds including Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman, and provoked a multitude of mocking nicknames ranging from “Calatrasaurus” to “squat hedgehog” to “kitsch dinosaur.” All the while, Calatrava urged critics to reserve their opinion until the project’s opening. Now that day has arrived - did Calatrava receive the vindication he was insistent would come? Read on for the critics’ takes.
The PERI Foundation have announced the winners of their 10-day “Space for Future Education” workshop in Dagestan, Russia. Organized in conjunction with the Moscow School of Architecture, the workshop selected 30 young architects under 30 from a pool of over 100 applicants from around the globe to develop concepts for a new PERI facility, the Perimeter Center for Culture and Education, in historic Makhachkala overlooking the Caspian Sea.
With help from mentors including Yaroslav Kovalchuk, a teacher from the Moscow School of Architecture; Hiroki Matsuura of MASA Architects; and Narine Tyutcheva and Peter Popov from Russia’s Rozhdestvenka Architectural Studio, 8 teams of 3 to 4 architects developed plans for the new building, containing offices, classrooms, conference rooms, coworking space, an innovation lab and a cafe. Read on for a look at each of the 8 projects.
As part of the current "sharing economy" revolution, coworking facilities have transformed the creative marketplace. Since 2005, when the first coworking space was founded in San Francisco, the popularity of working in a shared environment has taken off. Today, hundreds of coworking facilities exist in cities of varying sizes across the world, supporting small businesses ranging from app developers to furniture makers to recording studios. But how have they grown so quickly? It’s all in the community. WeWork, which owns a number of coworking spaces worldwide, sums it up as “a place you join as an individual, ‘me,’ but where you become part of a greater ‘we.'”
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