A collection of illuminating essays exploring what theory makes of architecture and what architecture makes of theory in philosophical and materialized contexts.
For those considering a career in environmental design –as an architect, landscape architect, urban designer, or city planner–, an immersive summer program in architecture and sustainable design might be the way to go before making a more long term commitment. Intensive summer programs are a great way to explore a career interest in architecture and environmental design. The College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley offers a variety of immersive summer courses, emphasizing hands-on studio design and teaching a multitude of relevant foundational design skills. By attending these programs, students gain professional clarity, competency, an increased network of peers and experts, and an empowering experience.
New construction as an exception? “Waste” as a new building material? Affordable housing vs. climate protection? How do we design a building’s whole lifecycle? How do we calculate grey energy honestly? What is zero-carbon concrete? Which insights are new, and how can we tap past knowledge to develop solutions for the future? How do we shape this complex change process together? “Second City. On the New in the Old” is the theme of Architecture Matters 2023, where we will explore this topic at different levels: materials, buildings, society.
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House in Restelo / Pedro Domingos Arquitectos. Image Courtesy of FritsJurgens
The third and final part of "Stories of Lisbon's Light" focuses on a robust and daringly contrasting family home between the seven rolling hills of ‘the city of light’, Lisbon. Discover how architect Pedro Domingos designed a home where daylight and the river Tagus play the leading roles. With the residence facing the south, radical architectural choices had to be made to allow the light to flow through the entire residence.
People’s tolerance for sound in the workplace is different at different times. Curating acoustics requires a hybrid approach, combining areas for focused work and comfortable conditions for meeting. Image Courtesy of Haworth
Is it the award-worthy barista skills at the third-floor coffee bar that make your days in the office bearable? Or is it being able to ring-fence a desk and height-adjusted chair and call them your own while the rest of the world hot desks? Perhaps it is knowing that the warming of your hands and toes is at someone else’s expense or that in this space you are you and not mum, dad, daughter, or husband. Or you might put it simply down to the camaraderie of the team and the common sense of purpose. One thing that is not in question, however, is that since the recent shake-up of our working practices, it matters now more than ever that productivity and wellbeing are in balance in the office, and contentment and comfort are key to both.
Installation for 2023 Venice Biennale. 3DM Architecture
3DM Architecture is proud to announce our presence at The Laboratory of the Future at the 2023 Venice Biennale. The TIME, SPACE, EXISTENCE exhibition will feature an installation inspired by the culture and history of Malta, which seeks to transcend said architecture to an international context.
The Republic of Kosovo is taking part for the fifth time in the International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia from 20 May to 26 November 2023 with a project by architects Poliksen Qorri-Dragaj and Hamdi Qorri entitled “rks2 | transcendent locality”.
Small Infrastructures Opening, March 30, 2023. Credit: Sidell Pakravan Architects
In March 2021, the Biden Administration released the American Jobs Plan, earmarking $213B for “quality” and “affordable” housing, yet the bill lacks specificity on how houses are to be built. Here housing’s problem is split into two: a social one of accessibility and equity, and a material one of wood, metal, and rocks. Architects can play a unique role in bridging abstract policy ambitions to real construction as these connections are made every day in practice.
CityLabs India is glad to announce Kathmandu Valley Cities- Water, Architecture and The Historic Urbanity–a four-day intensive on-field workshop between 01-04 June in and around Patan Durbar Square, Kathmandu valley, Nepal.
The book examines the contemporary Asian city through the prism of urban design in assimilating new and established drivers of growth. This includes intensified forms of residential development, specialized commercial centers and technology parks, that drive the momentum of the contemporary city, while acting to restructure and reshape forms of capital investment. New spatial patterns are facilitated by tranches of urban expansion, redevelopment, regeneration and suburbanization that have emerged as by-products of both formal and informal development processes. The book also examines the Asian city language embodied in the local morphology—the essential values of the street, block, temple precinct and monument, and how these can be incorporated as drivers of new urban identities that relate to the changing culture and configuration of city neighborhoods. All of these continue to impose different levels of impact on the creation of livable cities and the quality of life for their inhabitants. In this way urban design can look to the future while respecting the past.
Traditional thought fused with modern science when Hiroshima’s nuclear annihilation on August 6, 1945, proved the interdependence of space and time. Since the war, Japanese architects have probed the relativity of spacetime through critical debates, pivotal theories, and consequential buildings. The Hypospace of Japanese Architecture pushes past clichés of an exotic Japan to confront the modernity of an island nation whose habit of importing foreign ideas is less about assimilation than transformation, less a process of indigenization than one of cultural invention. The realization that buildings are dynamic events—phenomena of space-in-time, not inert objects outside time—continues to inform Japanese architecture and suggests how we can rethink the history, theory, and practice of architecture more generally.
This book is a dedication to the work and sure process of Affiniti Architects. Their architectural design process is critical to achieving a high level of design quality, which legacy homes require. Affiniti Architects spotlight the key elements that mold the overall image of legacy architecture for generations. From analyzing site plans to capturing the essence of indoor-outdoor living, the firm showcases the fluidity of design that they’ve accomplished through the years.
#XFORMAS of Doing Architecture (#XFORMAS de Hacer Arquitectura) seems to be as diverse and flexible as the project about which it is written, a project designed under self-imposed rules based on personal questions from its creators, Nicolás Valencia, Fabiola González, and Yair Estay.
They consciously connect their interests biographically with those of their generation, namely: the discrediting of the so-called ‘Starchitect’ figure; the emergence of the American continent together with a new idea of situated practice; the lack of reference to architects who do not design buildings; and the sense that architecture as a degree course defines destiny more according to who the student is as a person than the paths the course itself enables, causing a clash between study and practice. These interests, influenced by the social/cultural changes at the beginning of this century, the political crises, and the declining global economy, have led to critical reflections about the profession. The two parts of this publication, distributed in two separate but complementary books, describe the multiple possibilities of #XFORMAS, its derivatives, and the questions facing the discipline.
