The COVID-19 pandemic has shown yet again how designers are needed to reimagine emergency shelters. With an estimated 900 million people around the world to remain at home because of the virus, there are also a number of hospitals without the necessary beds to treat infected patients. At the same time, the need for emergency shelters is tied to many types of crisis, not just this virus or a pandemic.
Dear Architects,
As we all #slowdown to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, I want to share with you how we as a global company have faced this situation, and what we are doing (together with you!) to keep us, the architecture community, informed and connected. It is our responsibility.
The growing global coronavirus pandemic will leave profound marks on society. Perhaps not so much due to fatalities, but certainly in the way people relate to each other and to public spaces. In an attempt to reduce the rate of transmission of the disease, governments and authorities around the world have instructed people to stay at home, in the safety and hygiene of their domestic environment, and to avoid any unnecessary contact with other spaces, objects, and people.
Over the last three months, Coronavirus has spread to more than 100 countries and claimed more than 3,800 lives (as of 8th March 2020). It has also plunged many global industries into a paralysis, from canceled flights and mass quarantines to disruptions in supply chains and financial markets. Setting aside the serious health implications of the outbreak, the coronavirus epidemic has, in an unorthodox way, amplified a debate over the future of work. With millions of people around the world working from home as a result of the outbreak, whether through quarantine or as a company precaution, the question is being asked by outlets around the world: are we seeing the beginning of the end of the traditional office typology?
Entering the Guggenheim Museum, visitors find themselves surrounded by a feast of vivid colors and mismatched fonts. Passing the gigantic green tractor at the entrance, they move across the ground floor, littered with stickers, like a lunchbox, or a lid of a laptop. A thick pillar that pierces the internal atrium has become a garish advertising column. A bale of hay, a drone, and some other object (impossible to identify) levitate high overhead. A cardboard cutout of Joseph Stalin on robot wheels moves down the ramp, scaring off visitors. Big reflective letters say: “Countryside, The Future”.
Architect Rem Koolhaas, the founder of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and Samir Bantal, director of OMA’s internal think-tank AMO, created this utterly confusing environment to exhibit years of research on the space beyond the boundaries of the 21st-century city.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion dictates that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In urbanism, this concept is evident in how the unprecedented growth of the built environment causes a reaction in rural landscapes. By 2050, the number of people living in cities will have increased by 2.5 billion, representing two-thirds of the global population. This mass flow of people from rural to urban areas gives rise to an equally dramatic flow of natural resources. As can be seen in studies such as Tom Hegen’s The Quarry Series, whose imagery accompanies this article, the extraction of these minerals represents yet another physical manifestation of rapid, linear urbanism.
Madrid architect Alberto Campo Baeza was born in 1946 in Valladolid, Spain and grew up in Cádiz. He graduated from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 1971 and earned his PhD there in 1982. Campo Baeza has been teaching architecture at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid, ETSAM for more than 40 years. He sees architecture as building ideas and expressing them in the most essential and clear ways, consistently relying on such basic elements as firmly grounded rectangular platforms, thick solid walls with deep cavities and frameless cutouts, and flat thin planes propped up by delicate posts. Colors, complex curves, and diversity of materials are largely avoided to accentuate primary relationships between elementary prisms and to exalt magic out of sunlight. Campo Baeza’s architecture is about transparency and precision, as well as asserting such fundamentals as ground planes, straight lines, and precise corners. He has built relatively few projects and, for the most part, on a small scale. Yet, his legacy is remarkably complete, consistent, profound, memorable, and inspirational.
Occupying a substantial chunk of South America's central western landmass, Peru is a treasure trove of both landscapes and natural resources. Within its three regions--coastal, mountain, and rain forest--there is little variation in summer and winter temperatures and, except for its high mountain areas, its climate stays between tropical and subtropical. Thanks to the lack of weather extremes, outdoor activities--and the spaces in which to do them--are a principal factor in designing homes and other buildings. Pergolas and other semi-coverings make it possible to create or expand shaded areas, allowing you to enjoy the outdoors in the comfort of your home.
Labor gives rise to design. As the aggregate of physical and mental effort used in the creation of goods and services, labor is tied to both what we create and our process. In a field shaped by production, architecture and design depend on labor from a broad range of professionals. But as workers increasingly put in longer hours and traditional measures of security change, questions of labor practices have arisen amid broader conditions of contemporary work culture.
Imagine that you are in a cubicle located in the middle of the office floor plate. Your office has a glazed front, but you are looking into another open office. You have no real window or view to the outside, so you can't tell if it's raining outside or sunny. If you are lucky, and you do have a window, it's fixed, and you are looking into an office in the neighbouring building that is five metres away.
The fluorescent lighting that you sit under for eight hours has thrown out your body's natural circadian rhythm. The ventilation is alright, but you start to feel droopy at around 3pm because the carbon dioxide levels in your shoebox have risen. It might even feel a bit stuffy, regardless of the door being open or closed. As you don't have an operable window, you have been breathing in recycled air all day. When you get outside and take a breath, you will instantly notice that the air outside is fresh.
Now multiply that by five days a week, 48 weeks a year. Maybe you will get a pot plant in a few weeks.
For decades, scientists have been warning us about global warming, and the consequences of human actions on the planet in the form of environmental disasters. The construction sector is today one of the major contributors to global warming and the climate crisis. According to data of the United Nations (UN), currently, 36% of the global energy is dedicated to buildings and 8% of all pollutant emissions are caused by the production of concrete alone.
Other than curating amazing architecture, ArchDaily is well-known for producing exclusive content and cutting-edge editorial pieces. Sought-after, these articles are produced by a highly experienced team of editors, scattered around the world, generating writings in 4 languages.
Moreover, our platform has pushed its educative status, furthermore this year, in order to function as a comprehensive tool for Architecture. 2019 has given us an abundance of materials to explore, and our editors have tackled with different possibilities, from highlighting technical information, material guidelines, theoretical and conceptual approaches to investigating the digital realm, cities, and traveling. Read on to discover a curated selection from our readers’ most notable articles for 2019.
Bauhaus: a school, a design discipline, and a movement that has been influencing generations of architects and designers for 100 years.
The school was a lot more than modernist designs and primary colors, it was a movement with a political, social, and cultural impact, led by some of the most notable figures in the field. Since its inauguration in 1919, the school has defined its own style through the intersection of architecture, art, industrial design, typography, graphic design, and interior design. When the school was forced to close its doors in the face of political pressure, its professors and students dispersed, spreading its teachings across the world.
With a mission to provide tools and inspiration to improve the quality of life in our built environment, ArchDaily curators constantly track and share with our audience the best "built projects" in the world. In order to celebrate these achievements and thank our readers for actively participating in our community, we selected the 50 best architectural works published during 2019.
Walls cannot talk. At least, not yet. This is not to say they can’t lie. As ArchDaily recently reported, a growing urban trend is emerging where the entirety of a historic building is demolished apart from the exterior façade, and a new building constructed behind it. This procedure has a name; Facadism. While the act of building a new structure behind a historic façade may seem altruistic at best, or trivial at worst, Facadism offers an insight into the money-centric political and market forces shaping our cities.
Public Spaces are an issue all over the world — approaches to designing them differentiate across countries, while successful examples always involve heavy research and working closely with communities. At ArchDaily, we always try to explore different opinions on common issues, hoping that our input will add to the clarity of architecture debates. Read on for our best articles on the topic.
In December 2019, the Chinese city of Shenzhen will host the world’s only Biennale focused exclusively on the topics of urbanism and urbanization. The 2019 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture will explore new phenomena brought about by the digital revolution, and the ability of citizens to become involved in shaping cities. The Biennale curator, Carlo Ratti, exemplifies this intersection between natural and artificial, championing the power of new technologies to transform how we live and design through his work at Carlo Ratti Associati and the MIT Senseable City Lab. In the “Eyes of the City” section of the Biennale, he is joined by MVRDV, and its co-founder Winy Maas, in shaping an experience that invites visitors and observers to question how technologies such as facial recognition can be integrated into urban life.
Automation is rapidly becoming a normalized part of many people’s daily lives and careers, a trend which has by no means evaded the construction industry. While this increasingly pervasive technology is often considered a symptom of the contemporary 21st century, however, one automated construction technology may have a history stretching as far back as the 1960s. This technology, the bricklaying robot, has transformed dramatically since its limited realization over 50 years ago, splintering into newer, more technologically advanced variations today.
