For the fifth time, we are giving our readers the responsibility of recognizing and awarding the projects that have made the greatest impact on the profession through the ArchDaily Brasil Building of the Year 2021 Award. By voting, you become part of an unbiased network of jurors recognizing the most relevant projects of the past year.
Over the next three weeks, the collective intelligence of our readers will filter through hundreds of projects from Portuguese-speaking countries – Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Macau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe – published in 2020, selecting the best built works in the Portuguese-speaking world.
From hundreds of works published in 2020, readers will choose their favorites, with the 15 most-voted projects moving on to the second stage of the Award.
Photo by A. Duarte, via VisualHunt.com / CC BY-SA. ImageCerrado, the third most biodiverse flora biome in the country
With nearly fifty thousand plant species—over half of which are endemic, meaning they only occur naturally here—Brazilian flora is among the most diverse and richest in the world. This data is featured in the country's largest and most comprehensive virtual botanical library, Flora do Brasil 2020, developed by the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden.
Kubuswoningen, designed by Piet Blom in Rotterdam, Netherlands (1984). Photo by Nicole Baster, via Unsplash
With one of the best higher education systems in the world, the Netherlands offers annual scholarships for Brazilians through the Orange Tulip Scholarships program. Applications for the 2021/2022 academic year are now open for undergraduate, postgraduate, or MBA students.
More than 20 Dutch universities participate in the program, offering scholarship options for courses in the fields of Arts, Biological Sciences, Health, Exact Sciences, Technology, and Humanities, including some focused on architecture and urban planning – all taught in English.
The University Council of the São Paulo State University (Unesp) has decided to award the title of Doctor Honoris Causa to Adélia Borges, a curator, journalist, and critic active in the field of design. The initiative for awarding the degree came from the Department of Design at the Faculty of Architecture, Arts and Communication (FAAC) on the Bauru campus. In its justification, the Council stated that the title was awarded “for her work as a critic and curator with a significant contribution to the research, dissemination, and promotion of Brazilian Design on both the national and international stages, demonstrating deep knowledge of the field and a broad socio-political and cultural vision.” The official ceremony will take place on March 8, 2021, International Women's Day, at 2:30 PM, and will be broadcast on the TV Unesp YouTube channel.
The 8th edition of the Arquiteturas Film Festival, taking place from June 1 to 6 in Lisbon, explores the theme “Bodies Out of Space” through an exploration of the social construction of space, connected by a thread running through its own narratives of domination. These are also narratives of identity, which is often stripped away or forced to represent our bodies.
Each year, the festival is dedicated to presenting documentaries, fiction, animation, and experimental films relevant to promoting contemporary Portuguese architecture both nationally and internationally. The 2021 edition is no different, structured around three distinct pillars: the official selection, the competition program, and the guest country program.
The septic tank developed by the Municipality of Uberlândia is a compelling alternative for repurposing waste materials while also addressing basic sanitation challenges common in many Brazilian cities.
The Municipal Department of Water and Sewage (DMAE) is the agency responsible for designing the system and manufacturing the sustainable septic tanks distributed in the city. To share this knowledge more widely, however, they created a step-by-step manual so the design can be replicated anywhere.
"The image provided by Brutalism, an architecture of sensual extremes, is often an extraordinary and unfamiliar experience for the city explorer. There can be something aggressive and a bold vocabulary (...) in the expressive palette that displays the truth of its materials and a disdain for the frivolous." This is how Simon Phipps [1] describes the fascination that Brutalist works still hold for us today. Yet, what does it mean to think about this architecture in 2021?
Gathering innovative, sustainable architectural designs for social housing that enable a reduction in energy consumption is the objective of the National Competition of Architectural Ideas for Energy Efficiency in Social Housing, launched this Monday (15) by the German governmental cooperation agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. Applications are open until April 26.
One hundred and twenty civil society organizations (NGOs, institutes, foundations, collectives, and social movements) advocating for the right to the city sent an open letter to the Mayor of São Paulo, Bruno Covas, demanding that the Strategic Master Plan (PDE) review process be conducted by the Municipal Government in a way that guarantees full public participation, respecting the principles of democracy, popular sovereignty, and transparency, even amid the pandemic.
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Flávio Villaça. Image courtesy of PGAU-Cidade UFSC
With a foundational career as a professor at FAUUSP, serving for 15 years at the São Paulo Municipal Planning Department and as an urban planning consultant for municipal, state, and federal agencies, Flávio Villaça will be remembered for his professional integrity and as one of Brazil's most prominent urban theorists. His intellectual work shaped generations of architects and urban planners, fostering a critical perspective on Brazilian cities—their development, inequalities, segregation, and potential.
A Danish company named KiteX has developed a wind turbine for those seeking an “off-the-grid” lifestyle. Collapsible and portable, the turbine can be carried in a car to generate power even in remote locations.
Constructed with fiberglass rods, the turbine weighs only 10 kg and is easily transportable. When needed, users simply unpack, assemble, anchor it to the ground (using a set of high-strength nylon tension straps), and begin capturing wind energy. The company estimates that 15 minutes is enough for one person to set up all the components.
The 27th World Congress of Architects is hosting, from April 19 to 22, the UIA2021RIO Open Week on Diversity and Mixture. The event will feature three debates and the Weekly Live Session – where specialists will delve deeper into the main issues raised in the discussions and answer questions from the public.
The 6th edition of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, taking place in 2022, is themed Terra. Carrying different meanings depending on the scale and the observer, Terra expresses territory, the city, the landscape, the place where we belong, or a continent seen from the sea. It can be a habitable planet or matter for cultivation. It can be in excess or lacking, and it can be an obstacle or an element in building communities. Driven by a sense of urgency, the Triennale 2022 calls for reflection on all these dimensions, which are closely related to architecture.
Icon, an American construction robotics startup, was founded with the promise of building emergency housing using 3D printers. A model home was built in Austin, Texas, in 2018. Two years later in the same city, the company began delivering a series of homes for the unhoused.
A recovering heroin addict, Tim Shea was previously homeless, with his last home being a van. The 70-year-old American was the first to receive the keys to a printed home in September 2020.
Arquigrafias. Guido Guidi and Álvaro Siza is the exhibition marking the public reopening of Casa da Arquitectura after the lockdown. Curated by Paula Pinto and Joaquim Moreno, the exhibition of photographs by Italian photographer Guido Guidi of the work of architect Álvaro Siza is on display at the Casa Gallery from April 17 to October 3, 2021.
The curators selected eight projects located in Lisbon, Porto, and Matosinhos, represented through 97 images captured by Guido Guidi's lens. Arquigrafias thus offers a “dialogue between the photographic work of Guido Guidi (Cesena, 1941) and the architectural work of Álvaro Siza (Matosinhos, 1933), constituting a unique encounter between two singular figures in their respective fields.”
Applications are now open for the National Wood Architecture Award, PNAM’21. Submissions for this prestigious Portuguese architecture award are open until June 30, 2021. Held biennially, PNAM aims to encourage and promote Portuguese forest reserves through innovation, enhancement, circularity, and the promotion and use of wood and wood-derived products in buildings.
The Center for Studies and Research in Indigenous Technologies, Tecnoíndia—founded by UFMT professor José Afonso Botura Portocarrero, an architect with a PhD from the School of Architecture and Urbanism at USP, and retired UFMT anthropologist Maria Fátima Roberto Machado, who holds a PhD from the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro—is releasing a new book that compiles articles produced over 20 years of research and teaching on Indigenous technologies and architecture in Mato Grosso.
Far beyond mere repositories for books, libraries are spaces that, through the preservation of culture and knowledge, transform into places for gathering and exchange. Much like a book, they provide fertile ground for cultivating new ideas. To mark World Book Day, we present a selection of recently built libraries from around the world.
Photo: Governo do Estado de São Paulo, via VisualHunt.com
The Ipiranga Museum, located in São Paulo's south zone, has launched a virtual tour that allows users to follow the progress of the restoration and expansion of the building and its immediate surroundings. The digital tour features 360-degree camera footage captured across various spaces of the building and construction site, providing an overview of the renovation's progress.
France is investing in initiatives to combat climate change, including shifting to more sustainable modes of transport. Owners of older cars can now receive a government subsidy of up to 2,500 euros to trade in their vehicles for electric bicycles.
“For the first time, it is recognized that the solution is not to make cars greener, but simply to reduce their number,” noted Olivier Schneider of the French Federation of Bicycle Users.
Few public figures were more deeply Brazilian than the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi. Arriving in Brazil shortly after World War II, she grew so attached to Brazilian culture that she became one of its main interpreters, capable of an understanding of local traditions that was both rigorous and comprehensive.
Architecture critic and essayist Francesco Perrotta-Bosch examines the trajectory of this brilliant artist in light of the following question: how was a foreigner able to see so much of a country that was not her own, to the point of translating it for Brazilians themselves?
Applications are open until June 30 for the 4th Tomie Ohtake Institute Leroy Merlin Design Award, aimed at college students and recent graduates from all fields. The award seeks to recognize proposals that highlight and conceptualize the relationship between design and other disciplines, such as communication, architecture, biology, engineering, fashion, technology, economics, physics, education, mathematics, and chemistry, among others. The theme of this fourth edition is the verb to welcome.
Methods of shading facades and preventing direct solar radiation from entering a building's interior have been present since ancient architecture. However, modern architecture popularized the use of the brise-soleil, one of the most widespread passive climate control devices, which shades spaces while allowing for cross-ventilation when necessary.
