A pivot door is a swinging door that rotates on a vertical axis; a spindle. It is different from regular hinged doors, where the hinges are attached to the side of the door and the adjacent wall. Even though the pivot door is as old as centuries are long, it is still unknown to many people. However, a recent resurgence in its use has put it front and center as an attractive option for architects, designers and homeowners.
UN-Habitat’s “Inclusive Communities, Thriving Cities” Programme invites professional and emerging artists worldwide to participate in a digital art competition on the theme “My Urban Vision”. The participants are invited to use their creativity to inspire change, leveraging their voices and vision for an inclusive and sustainable urban future.
Participation is free of charge and the submission deadline is 31 July 2024.
Under the theme of ‘My Urban Vision’, the competition invites artists to submit digitally created artwork that reflect their vision for an inclusive and sustainable urban future.
The participant must choose one of the categories for the competition:
Companies, designers, architects and agencies worldwide are invited to submit their products and projects for the German Design Awards 2025. Organized by the German Design Council, the Awards set international standards for original design developments and competitiveness on the global market, whether through digitalization or AI. The platform honors only projects that are pioneering in the German and international design landscape with positive developments in circular design, making success visible, while also opening up a valuable network, international reach and additional market opportunities for the award winners.
What? Yet another women's revolt?’ Shopping in Luleå. @Chiara Becattini
In a famous essay about the relationship between feminism and architecture, Mary McLeod noted how Foucault, in articulating the concept of heterotopia ‘seems to have expressed an unconscious disdain for aspects of everyday life such as the home, the public park and the department store, which were instead provinces in which women found not only oppression, but also a degree of comfort, security, autonomy and even freedom.’ The backdrop for this exhibition is a work by the English architect naturalized Swedish Ralph Erskine, called Shopping, which opened in September 1955 in Luleå, a town on the edge of the Arctic Circle where most of the population of Norrbotten is concentrated. With its hard-to-reach location, this building received little attention from architectural critics, who were only interested in it as something it was not: the first shopping mall in history. In spite of its name, the building is in fact rather like a passage, a shopping mall with no underground parking and no car access, located in the very center of the city. The importance of the building did not escape to Mai Zetterling - the first female director to win an award for directing at the Venice Film Festival after the war with the short film War Game (1962) - who set the decisive sequences of Flickorna (The Girls, 1968), a milestone in the promotion of a culture of equality and gender diversity (from which the title line of the exhibition is taken). By juxtaposing the projection of this film transposition of Aristophanes' Lysistrata with the transfigurations of promotional and documentary images conserved in the archives that in various ways give an account of the commercial gallery's past, the exhibition intends to make explicit the contestation to the stereotyped image of the “Swedish woman” that asserted itself on the international scene, and more specifically in Italian cinema, from the end of the 1950s onwards. In order to gain a physical and bodily awareness of how much Shopping's architecture has been and still continues to be a field of confrontation and redefinition of gender identity, those who visit the exhibition will have the concrete possibility of tracing its complex inner atrium and directly comparing it with figurines, caricatures (macchietta) and human representations of the time, giving life to the performance of a real ‘animated view’.
Challenge History whispers through the weathered stones of monuments, each one a testament to a bygone era. But what if these grand structures, once bustling centers of power or worship, could find a new purpose in the modern world? The "Reimagining History: AI Competition" challenges you to do just that. Participants are invited to embark on a journey of creative exploration, selecting a historical monument – a majestic castle, a sprawling palace, or a serene temple – and envisioning a new, relevant use for it in the 21st century. The task lies not just in finding a function, but in seamlessly integrating it with the existing architectural style and historical significance of the monument. Can you breathe new life into these architectural giants, ensuring they not only stand as testaments to the past but also thrive as vibrant spaces in our present? Utilize the power of AI rendering to showcase your vision, and together, let's reimagine the future of historical preservation.
Personalization of architectural and design elements has become an important global trend in the creation ofexceptional and individualized spaces. These days, anything that can be personalized is fair game, with both clients and architects eager to stand out and create designs that are a true reflection of their personal tastes and lifestyles. In the realm of porcelain tiles, personalization is a key way to infuse design with personality, which the brand Kaolin has been focusing on through its Customization Program.
Join us for a summer workshop on earth building! We will construct a rammed earth pavilion and explore ways to use natural materials in architecture. Special attention will be given to hemp as a building material. No prior knowledge is required! The workshop will take place at the Center for Earth Building in Dobrava pri Škocjanu 23.
Bamboo U is an education enterprise that has grown out of the center of the world’s bamboo-building movement in Bali, Indonesia. Together with the renowned design firm IBUKU and just two minutes from the all-bamboo campus at Green School Bali, we have been pioneering bamboo architecture for over 10 years. We share our extensive knowledge on bamboo design and sustainable architecture through immersive courses.
Our upcoming in-person course will give participants the unique opportunity to work on the construction of a playground, the winning project from our recent design competition. Join us to meet the pioneers, visionaries, designers, and builders who have transformed bamboo into the most desired natural material.
‘Invisible’ introduces the works of Axi:Ome—a design practice led by Heather Woofter and Sung Ho Kim formerly in St. Louis and now in Cleveland—through a collection of essays and projects that map the firm's trajectory across seven years, from 2015 to 2023. The book covers 24 built, unbuilt, and conceptual projects located in different cultures and landscapes around the world that engage with multiple programs and scales. Essays by Nader Tehrani, Eric Mumford, Alan Balfour, Jennifer Yoos, Jessie Reiser and Nanako Umemoto with Julian Harake, and Michelle L. Hauk each contribute insight into Axi:Ome’s critical frameworks and help define a discourse of complexities in contemporary practice arising from academia. The book documents the invisible ethos that underlies the construction of architectural projects in an intricate world, challenging practitioners to rethink and reexamine how they position their own work in the architectural spectrum. ‘Invisible’ maps and chronicles an architectural practice as it engages with the pedagogical visions of the profession.
As Barcelona gears up to be the World Capital of Architecture in 2026, it is calling on young architects under 35 to reimagine 10 permanent blind walls, one in each district, and transform them into new facades that will leave a legacy in the city. ThisInternational Ideas Competition for Young Architectsaims to improve the quality of public spacethrough transformation and revitalization. Organized by the Barcelona City Council and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, made jointly with UNESCOand the International Union of Architects (UIA), it seeks architectural proposals that give meaning to walls that are currently anonymous and without any prominence, exposed in public space in a permanent provisional state.
In the past ten years across the globe, temperatures have broken records of heat consecutively bringing one heat wave after the other. The effects of these heatwaves have been felt particularly strongly in the Gulf region which was already known to hold extremely high temperatures in the summer months.
The people of Bahrain would traditionally move to the desert areas of the south during the winter months and back to coastal areas or closer to inland water sources during the hot summer months, this extended to various occupations as well, with agricultural workers, craftspeople, and traders frequently relocating to
On the heels of gmp’s successful exhibition of adaptive-reuse works that ran parallel to the Venice Biennale of Architecture in Italy last May, the firm debuts its first ever U.S. show in early October at the German cultural center Goethe-Institut USA in New York City. Called UMBAU.Nonstop Transformation — the word umbau translates variously as rebuilding, renovation and conversion — the exhibit will present eight to 10 very different works that all significantly transform their existing buildings and urban settings:
Margolese National Design for Living award winner Jane Wolff is delivering a special public lecture at Melbourne School of Design on her work framing public conversations about how to manage complex and contested landscapes that are subject to change.
Feature Cover - Boundless Joy - Designing Playgrounds for Every Child
"Creating Inclusive Playgrounds for Every Child": Design a universally accessible playground that caters to children with all types of disabilities. The challenge is to create not just a play area but a vibrant space that ensures safety, inclusivity, and endless fun for children with diverse needs.
