This article was originally published by The Architect's Newspaper as "Ai Weiwei’s fences take on borders and belonging in NYC exhibit."

In Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, a new exhibition by Ai Weiwei presented by the Public Art Fund, the artist and activist takes on the security fence as a medium for urban intervention, with New York City as his canvas. Some of the works might be easy to miss, like the chain link fences suspended over a gap between two buildings on East 7th Street, just steps from Ai’s old basement apartment. But others, like the monumental Gilded Cage at Doris Freedman Plaza in Central Park, or Arch, nested under the Washington Square arch, are unmistakable and grandiose.

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How do we determine the actual height of a building? Where do we place the dimension line? The history of measuring skyscrapers dates back to 1885, way before AutoCAD or Revit dimensions, when the Home Insurance Building in Chicago was among the first to boast of being the world's tallest building, but the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH)—or the Joint Committee on Tall Buildings, as it was originally called—wasn’t formed until 1969. Recognized by many as the foremost authority on tall buildings, the CTBUH is often cited in determining the world’s (or country’s or city’s) tallest building. However, the CTBUH is not the only organization with a stake in measuring buildings; the global building information database Emporis is also a major player. Between them, these two organizations provide 10 different ways to determine a skyscraper's height, which we have summarized below.

Although the Louvre pyramid, often recognized as his masterwork, created a luminous icon for presenting culture, IM Pei’s early museums were characterized by the harsh shadows of brutalism. Project by project, the Chinese-American master developed a sophisticated, open architectural language. Pei’s holistic approach for welcoming museum visitors comprises powerful symbols which utilize sunlight to its fullest during the daytime, while employing the magical glow of illumination in the evening.

Whereas most assessments of the Louvre have praised the achievements of the luminous pyramid as seen above the ground, the actual design challenge laid underground, in offering visitors a successful underground space. Later, Pei transferred his language to multiple other museum projects, where light was always a key factor in defining museum experiences. In a year of celebratory events such as “Rethinking Pei: A Centenary Symposium,” which begins tomorrow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, an examination of Pei’s use of light in museums can contribute an important cultural emphasis.

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Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, both partners at OMA, have been tapped to design the recently-announced expansion of the New Museum in New York. OMA will design a new building adjacent to SANAA's tiered-box museum. The project is expected to break ground in 2019 and will give the New Museum an additional 50,000 square feet (4,650 square meters) for "galleries, improved public circulation and flexible space for the institution’s continued exploration of new platforms and programs." This will be Koolhaas' first public building in New York. According to the New York Times, the New Museum—the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art—has already raised 50 percent of the cost.

This article was originally published on The Architect's Guide as "How To Ace Your Web (Skype) Architecture Job Interview."

Love it or hate it, online job interviews are becoming more and more common. Especially given how the architecture job search process is no longer limited to your immediate area.

I worked abroad for many years and I have experienced applying from both the U.S. and Europe. I learned a few tips and tricks along the way that should be helpful if you are faced with this interview type.

Bjarke Ingels Group's (BIG) LEGO House, which opened to the public earlier this month in Billund, Denmark, has already entered the canon of the iconic. By reframing the "toy scale of the classic LEGO brick" to the architectural scale, a vibrant collection of exhibition spaces and public squares "embody the culture and values at the heart of all LEGO experiences." In other words, it's playful, bright, and almost exclusively rectilinear!

Photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu has turned his lens to the new LEGO House, providing insight into a building which delights and surprises in equal measure.

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In this video, Spirit of Space visits Exhibit Columbus to see Wiikiaami, a parametrically designed structure by studio:indigenous. Beginning in 2016, Exhibit Columbus is an annual event which invites people to travel to the small, but architecturally fascinating Midwestern town of Columbus, Indiana. Free and open to the public through November 26th, Exhibit Columbus displays 18 unique, site-responsive architectural installations.

Every year, 3 million Muslim pilgrims from over 120 different countries travel to Makkah (commonly transliterated as Mecca), Saudi Arabia, to perform Hajj (pilgrimage) in the Islamic month of Zilhaj. Due to the ever-increasing number of visitors each year, overcrowding has led to deadly accidents and stampedes in the past; to ensure crowd safety and better circulation, the Makkah Development Authority (MDA) engaged Otis, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of people-moving products, and successfully oversaw the redesigning of the Jamarat Bridge.

Watch the video above for a summary of the architectural design of the Jamarat Bridge, or read on to see a 7-minute mini-documentary about the structure's development.

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This article was originally published by Common Edge as "A Top Building Researcher Asks: Why is Architecture Afraid of Science?"

Recently we’ve written a fair amount about the state of architectural research. The general consensus appears to be that it lacks rigor and, even more importantly, is not grounded in good science. Steven J Orfield has some strong opinions about architectural research. He’s been conducting it—for architecture and design firms, as well as Fortune 500 companies—at his Minneapolis-based Orfield Laboratories for more than three decades now. Late last week I talked to him about why architects are afraid of science, how he would introduce it into the schools, and his work in the field of universal design.

More than a thousand meters above sea level on the slopes of the Alborz mountain range in Gilan, northern Iran, a remarkable village dating back to 1006 AD bustles with life. The unique ochre-brown structures of Masuleh follow the slope of the mountain that the village nestles on—or rather, grows from—giving the village its most unusual quality: the roofs of many of the houses connect directly to, or even form a part of, the street serving the houses above.

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This article was originally published on the blog of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the largest platform for contemporary architecture in North America. The 2017 Biennial, entitled Make New History, will be free and open to the public between September 16, 2017 and January 6, 2018.

The Tribune Tower has stood at the heart of Chicago’s cultural heritage for almost a hundred years. Like the spire of a secular cathedral, it still symbolizes the rise of the “city of big shoulders” and its defining role in the American Century. But the building is more than a Chicago icon. The story of its origin has proved to be one of the most enduringly influential narratives in 20th Century architecture, key to understanding the skylines of cities all over the world.

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This article was originally published by Autodesk's Redshift publication as "Architectural Upcycling Builds Earth’s Better Future Out of Trash."

Contemporary designers are recycling waste materials into useable and well-crafted objects, and it’s easy to get the impression that this burgeoning realm of fabrication is destined only for the craft fair. A quick survey of Blaine Brownell’s new guide Transmaterial Next: A Catalog of Materials That Redefine Our Future turns up a half-dozen Etsy-ready art and furniture curios. There’s jewelry made from coffee grounds, bowls made from plastic bags, and a chair made from artichoke thistle fibers (the “Artichair”).

But these items don’t demonstrate the necessary capacity for heavy lifting and mass-market applicability for an age of climate change and dwindling resources. To grasp the kind of architectural upcycling that can divert trash from landfills and carbon from the atmosphere on a mass scale, it pays to step out of the design gallery and into the laboratory, where architects are inventing a new breed of modular building materials.

Nathan Yau collected US Census data between 1950 and 2015 to create a set of visualizations that demonstrate how the diversity of the workforce has evolved. "Naturally, men and women now work many of the same jobs, but many jobs are mostly men or mostly women," explains Yau. So how does the architecture profession fit into this narrative?

What do a lot of recent architecture college grads have in common besides their degree? Student loans and disillusionment (see point 1 in Megan Fowler’s 11 Things You Learn at Your First “Real” Architecture Job to understand what we mean by "disillusionment"). But with the emergence of the digital age and “side-hustle economy,” millennials are learning how to monetize their passions, and now 1 in 4 Americans are making money digitally. Side-hustling has become so popular that there is even a school for it. The difference between a side-hustle and a second job is that side-hustles aren’t just about giving yourself a raise. Your side-hustle is something you truly love to do, and would probably do anyway, but now you get to share it with the world and make a little extra cash in the process. So what side-hustle is right for you? Here is a list of side-hustles which suit the skillset of architects and designers.

Buying “the perfect computer” comes with equal parts indecision and excitement—we put in hours of research, weigh brands, compare specs, read product reviews, and ask around for advice and suggestions. For the uninitiated, it often means wading through lots of technical jargon. i7? Intel? SSD? Quad-core? For others, it may mean being spoilt for choice and finding it difficult to shortlist options. Architect, writer, and entrepreneur Eric Reinholdt’s latest video on his YouTube channel 30X40 Design Workshop tackles the tricky subject of choosing the right computer for architecture, breaking the topic down into 6 simple steps.

Videos

Soon you will be able to satisfy your wanderlust free from altitude sickness; on Wednesday October 4th, the Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam will see the world premiere of the documentary Cholet: The Work of Freddy Mamani. From director Isaac Niemand comes the story of Bolivia's unlikely architectural phenomenon, and one of ArchDaily’s 2015 leaders in architectural design and conceptualization.

The fourth house in Arts & Architecture’s Case Study program departed from the trend with a noticeably more introverted design. Intended for a modestly sized urban lot, rather than the dramatic and expansive canyon or forest locations of so many other Case Study homes, it couldn’t borrow drama from the landscape, nor would the residents welcome curious glances from their close neighbors—so the house looks entirely inward.

Rapson called his design the “Greenbelt House” for the glass-covered atrium that divides the living and sleeping areas. In his original drawings and model, as in Archilogic’s 3D model shown here, this strip is shown filled with plant beds in a striking geometric pattern. However, Rapson imagined that it could be put to many uses, according to the residents’ tastes: a croquet court or even a swimming pool could find their place here. This “brings the outdoors indoors” rather more literally than, for instance, Richard Neutra’s expansive, open-door designs.

This article was originally published by Common Edge as "Can the Wired City Also Be the Equitable One?"

A city is smart when it makes better decisions, and there are only two types of decision: strategic and tactical. Strategic decisions determine the right thing to do. Tactical decisions choose the right way to do it. SMART technology is not smart technology if it causes us as citizens to confuse strategy with tactics. In other words, there are many decisions about the operation of a city that we may delegate happily to technology. But there are questions of governance, of determining our fate, of deciding what is the right thing to do as populace, that if we delegate—we abdicate. “To govern is to choose,” John F. Kennedy once said.

If I were to have believed the many consultants and emissaries of large technology companies that came to see me when I was the Chief Urban Designer of New York City, the SMART city they promised me was a place where the traffic lights always turned green and the elevator doors always awaited our arrival. They promised a city that would anticipate our needs at every turn, given tantalizing form in the recent present of our connected personal devices and the apps that seem to know us better than we know ourselves. Now, with the advent of the internet of things on the near horizon, we are set to make SMART cities a reality. Imagine the awesome power of an entire city synchronized to our taste and movement!