Romullo Baratto is an architect and urban planner, PhD candidate in Architecture and Cinema at FAU-USP. Since 2019, he has been the Managing Editor of ArchDaily Brasil, and he also works as an architectural photographer. In 2017, he was a member of the curatorial team for the 11th São Paulo Architecture Biennial. Follow him on Instagram: @romullobf.
Art, in general, is made to be seen or experienced by another, an interlocutor, who, in turn, establishes various relationships with the art work. However, this is not the case of the Bataan Chapel, built by the Swiss artist Not Vital in the Philippines.
Ravaged by constant winds, the art work rises on a hill in rural Bagac, a town of just under 30,000 inhabitants located about 50 kilometers west of Manilla. The remote location of the building makes access difficult and the journey becomes a sort of pilgrimage — part of its grace lies precisely in its inaccessibility.
Following up on their series of urban block flashcards, Spanish publisher a+t architecture publishers recently launched a new deck of cards featuring architecture that "promote[s] the compact city and the desirable dwelling." Titled 50 Housing Floor Plans, this new version contains examples of recent collective living projects, featuring buildings constructed between 2000 and 20017.
To avoid hyperrealistic renderings we have witnessed the emergence of other options for architectural representation which seduce the viewer, not for their overwhelming resemblance to reality but rather the opposite, its resemblance to everyday life's textures presented through unpretentious drawings inspired by collage, watercolor, and painting. Digital collage and other similar representation tools have gained more popularity when discussing how architecture can be communicated.
Is there an aspect, a recurring mark, that reveals a difference in the way that male and female architecture photographers see the world? This is, perhaps, one of those rhetorical questions often used as an argument to shed light on works produced by women and for which there is no precise answer.
The Urbano Monte World map reconstructed by Stanford University. Image via David Raumsey Map Collection, Stanford University
Stanford University experts digitally assembled what is considered the largest world map produced in the 16th-century. The representation of the world of 1587 by the Milanese cartographer Urbano Monte was divided into 60 pages and published in atlas form, but with clear instructions on how to reassemble it.
David Rumsey, director of the university's historical map collection, acquired the map from a historian in 2017. The publication has only one other handwritten copy in the world and has never been assembled in map form.
Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. Public domain photography available at Visualhunt
There are different methods for estimating how green a city is. We can count the parks, add up all green areas, quantify only the forested areas, specify the number of trees planted, and more recently, according to this new, we can now analyze inhabitants perspective. A team of researchers led by Newsha Ghaeli, at MIT's Senseable City Lab has developed a method to find out how green an urban space is from the perspective of pedestrians.
Images taken from Google Street View are processed by an algorithm that estimates the percentage of each image that corresponds to trees and other types of vegetation. "It is important to understand the number of trees and treetops that cover the streets, as this is what we perceive in cities," Ghaeli said.
Check out below the top 10 greenest cities according to the algorithm.
The SDG Academy online education platform recently launched a series of free online courses on topics ranging from sustainable development and urbanization to climate change and the use of natural resources. According to the description on its website, SDG Academy "creates and curates free, top-level courses on sustainable development for students around the world."
This week, the Portuguese center for architecture Casa da Arquitectura (House of Architecture) celebrates the opening of its new premises in Matosinhos, Porto. In order to mark the occasion, the architecture museum has planned three days full of activities from the 17th to the 19th of November, with guided tours, performance, talks, music and films.
Within the new gallery spaces, Casa da Arquitectura will hold two exhibitions open to the public, including their inaugural exhibition Poder Arquitectura. Organised by the architects Jorge Carvalho, Pedro Bandeira and Ricardo Carvalho, the exhibition will be open until March 2018, with several talks and debates by national and international figures that have been involved in the exhibition scheduled to take place during this time.
The Cooper Hewitt Museum, also known as the Smithsonian Design Museum, has completed a digitization of its expansive collection dedicated to the field of design that spans thirty centuries and more than 220,000 objects. Now, the collection has been made available on its online page.
Mid-century modern visionaries, Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi are exhibited together at the Palm Springs Art Museum for an unprecedented show of models, drawings, design objects, and photographs, opened this fall and will remain on exhibit through January 7, 2018.
French-Brazilian office Triptyque has released plans for a mixed-used, all-wooden highrise. Located on a 1,025-square-meter site in São Paulo, the 13-story building will contain a total of 4,700 square meters of space dedicated to coworking, coliving, and a restaurant.
During an interview with Portuguese newspaper Diário de Notícias, Pritzker Prize laureate Eduardo Souto de Moura spoke to Ana Sousa Dias about his path through the Fine Arts School, his work alongside Noé Diniz and Álvaro Siza, and his consolidated international career – which he says has given him projects, but not pleasure.
"If I have to do 30 projects, there are three that give me joy and 27 that don't. I'm tired of it. It doesn't annoy me arguing when the assumption is intelligible, but when only time and money matters, it can get ugly. Respecting elections and economically have big profits," said Souto de Moura.
With more than five centuries of recorded history and many more years of pre-colonial traditions and customs, Brazil is listed in UNESCO's World Heritage List with 13 historical sites.
The website Viagem Turismo compiled a list with images and detailed information about each of the 13 sites. The list ranges from the Serra da Capivara National Park, "full of rocky caves covered with rock paintings" made more than 25 thousand years ago, to the modern capital of Brazil, Brasília, founded in 1960.
Last Saturday, after months of anticipation, the SESC 24 de Maio in downtown São Paulo was inaugurated, making it the newest unit of the franchise.
Designed by Paulo Mendes da Rocha in partnership with MMBB office, the project intervenes an old department store, transforming the interior spaces from the existing structure and creating a new central structure that supports a pool on the rooftop.
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Screenshot of Wings of Desire, by Wim Wenders
The overlap between cinema and architecture is a topic that has already been debated and even addressed in several articles published in ArchDaily. It is difficult to imagine a film that is not related in any way to the architecture, either through the construction of scenarios, the locations, or even the compositions within each plane and sequence - that make use of light, shadow, varied scales, and characters.
In many films, architecture and the city play a much more decisive role than the mere backdrop or stage for the narrative, acting as crucial elements or even characters. Next, we selected five films in which landscape and urban spaces are essential for the construction of the plot.
A collaboration between the British Library and Microsoft, titled Turning the Pages 2.0, made 570 pages of Leonardo da Vinci's' Codex Arundel available for free online. Now anyone can navigate the writings of one of the most inventive minds of the Renaissance. In the hundreds of digitized pages are ideas for airplanes, helicopters, parachutes, submarines and automobiles, centuries before they were developed and brought to the world.
During his lifetime, part of his ideas and reflections were recorded in his notebooks. Some of these manuscripts have been lost over the centuries, and those that remain have become rare objects accessed only by a select group of collectors and historians - until now.
On July 15, the city of Paris announced the opening of three natural swimming pools that receive their water supply from the Seine River, located in the La Villette Basin in the 19th arrondissement of the city. Spanning a total of 1,600 square meters, the new attraction is divided into a children's area, with depths of up to 40cm; an area of medium depth of 1,2m; and a larger pool, with depths of about two meters.
The swimming pools are part of the "Swimming in Paris" project, presented for the first time by the City Council of The French Capital in June 2015, with the goal of "encouraging the practice of swimming for Parisians and Tourists." According to an official statement from the city government, the project aims to allow, by 2020, the "modernization of water parks and the creation of new swimming pools and areas for bathing."
Developed in 2008, "ARCHIPORN" is a world architecture guide by architects Marcio Novaes Coelho Jr and Silvio Sguizzardi created with the aim of identifying, gathering and sharing information about architectural works around the world by renowned professionals to emerging talents in the field.
The online guide is composed of a world map punctuated by the works, which are divided by historical periods ranging from before the industrial revolution to the present decade. The map also highlights architecture-oriented institutions including the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal and the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam as well as bookstores such as Livraria Vilanova Artigas and William Stout Architectural Books (San Francisco, USA).
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