Articles

“I am not an architect,” he says with a sparkle in his eyes, “I am merely a person seeking out their destiny.” To the late pioneer of Indian modernism, Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi, architecture was a practice of self-discovery. The veteran’s stellar works of poetic functionality resulted from a humanist philosophy bearing the influence of modernist principles, Mahatma Gandhi, and Indian spiritual texts. Doshi believed that architecture was synonymous with life - a vehicle for constant celebration; a medium for heightened experiences. His greatest contribution to the architecture community was his powerful words of wisdom that echo the timelessness of his structures.

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In a new series entitled "Opening Up", Dutch manufacturer of pivot door hinges FritsJurgens embarks on a series of video stories that explore the world’s most captivating pivot door projects. Every last Monday of the month, FritsJurgens releases a new episode in which architects, door manufacturers, and pivot door owners talk about their pivot door projects.

Espace Oscar Niemeyer is a cultural center designed by Oscar Niemeyer in the port city of Le Havre, France. The project’s location is inside the urban reconstruction area conceived by the rationalist architect Auguste Perret after the destruction of the city’s downtown area in World War II.

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Somewhere between 1914 and 1915, Le Corbusier designed the Maison Dom-Ino, a groundbreaking modular structure that replaced the heavy load-bearing walls with reinforced concrete columns and slabs. The open floor plan with minimal thin elements, coupled with large glass facades, would ensure healthy natural daylight for the interior spaces as well as desirable architectural transparency that could blur the boundaries between interior and exterior —at least metaphorically.

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The 9th edition of the Urbanism\Architecture Bi-City Biennale (UABB) of Shenzhen and Hong Kong opened on December 10, 2022. Curated by Lu Andong, Prince Gong, and Aric Chen, the exhibition features hundreds of artists, designers, and architects from fifteen countries. The exhibition will last for three months.

The Biennale's theme, "Urban Cosmologies," encompasses both spatial symbiosis and the temporal rhythms of life. It is a source of ancient Chinese wisdom as well as a cosmology that looks to the future. The "Cosmology of the City" is a field of symbiosis, a part of the "community of life between man and nature".

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The rationality of orthogonal shapes dominates architecture, despite grand gestures that have sought to oppose themselves throughout history. In large-scale production, the right angles, repetition and modularity of the block or grid of pillars help in the efficiency of construction, despite reproducing the same spatial solutions. Unlike buildings, interior architecture can propose alternatives to break this rationality, whether from partitions or decorative objects.

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Las Vegas, sometimes known as Sin City, is perhaps the most famous desert metropolis where people gamble, and indulge in entertainment, and other vices. Each year, the city is visited by hundreds of millions of tourists who come to see its flashing lights and round-the-clock nightlife. Las Vegas has garnered so much attention that even Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown sought to study its urbanism, concluding with their theories on duck and decorated shed buildings in the early 1970s. But 50 years later, Vegas is still a city that constantly reinvents its architectural identity.

As populations continue to migrate from rural to urban areas, space is at a premium. Many settlements are becoming ever-more congested – with adequate, affordable housing in short supply and transport systems struggling to serve their respective residents. But as much the conversation about urbanization is about people, it is sometimes also about the animals that come with those people – urban livestock that play a key role at providing sustenance on an individual level, in addition to becoming an avenue for communal trade.

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The city of Curitiba, located in the state of Paraná, has been recognized internationally as a leading benchmark for Brazilian urban planning, primarily due to the success of its public transit model. Within this context, tracing the path that led the capital of Paraná to achieve such acclaim is a compelling exercise. Addressing the process of diffusion of ideas, this essay highlights Curitiba's shifting positions in the history of urban planning: at times an importer of ideas, at others an exporter.

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COP27, held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, concluded with a historic breakthrough to help vulnerable countries cope with the loss and damage resulting from climate change. However, negotiations also disappointed many stakeholders by failing to include any significant new measures to reduce emissions, which is essential to keeping global temperature rise below 1.5°C. Regarding adaptation, despite some positive signs, progress also fell short of expectations.

The threat of climate change is looming before us. Sea level rise concerns over 410 million people at risk of losing their livelihoods. Coastal cities are choked with high-rise buildings and traffic-laden roads, consuming land insufficiently. Synthesizing these problems, architects across the world have proposed a potential answer - floating cities. A future of living on water seems like a radical shift from how people live, work, and play. Vernacular precedents prove otherwise, offering inspiration for what our cities could morph into. As world leaders discuss courses of action to tackle climate change at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt, ArchDaily dives into the concept of radical water-based settlements.

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Imagine that you have scheduled a visit to an important building for the history of architecture, a reference work for all enthusiasts. Probably you would equip yourself with a camera or a good cell phone, take a pencil, notebook and even a measuring tape to record all its aspects.

However, this is not the only way to “visit” a building of historical importance nowadays or, at least, that is what some researchers are trying to show. The metaverse is being explored for its role in architecture and culture preservation, embracing different generations.

In recent years, the term “co-creation,” a buzzword in the business and management sector, has made its way into the architecture and urban planning discourse. The term is used to define a large concept that describes working intentionally with others to create something jointly. But architecture is already the result of a collaboration between multiple actors, architects, clients, investors, developers, and local administration, to name a few. Can the term still apply to this field, can it bring forth new forms of knowledge, and does it differ from the concept of participatory design?

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Today, January 27, marks the 113th birthday of Félix Candela—of Spanish and Mexican nationality—who is one of the most globally recognized architects of the 20th century. His career was defined by his exploration of reinforced concrete through experiments that resulted in his famous cascarones (concrete shells): key structural and design elements that support many of his works, such as the Cosmic Rays Pavilion at UNAM, Mexico City (1951); the Palmira Chapel in Cuernavaca (1958); the Los Manantiales Restaurant, Xochimilco (1958); and the Palacio de los Deportes for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.

Simultaneously gripping, disconcerting, and chaotic, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki is an exhilarating cinematic ride. The 1973 drama — the first full-length film by the Senegalese director — is the fantastical narration of a young couple in Dakar, eager to escape the Senegalese capital for the allure of Paris. It’s a character-driven film in many ways, primarily centered on the couple’s adventures, but it is also a subtle visual examination of the urbanism of post-independence Dakar, where the city and its architecture are essential fixtures in a surreal storyline.

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In the past, in a less densely populated urban context, houses and buildings were built with a direct connection to the street, with no need for walls and front fences. Over time, the urban fabric was transformed, and the division between public and private spaces became increasingly evident and — under the argument of public safety — necessary. Although this division occurs in different ways in Brazilian cities, in general, walls, fences and railings are used on the facades, creating a transitional space between the building and the street, transforming the relationship between them.

A home is one of the most significant architectural typologies that we experience throughout our lives. Largely serving as a significant private space, a home represents safety, ownership, and a sense of respite away from the rest of the world. It’s also historically been a place of routine, where we both begin and end our day, following the same patterns through different rooms of a home that we utilize. We can expect to sleep in our bedrooms, relax in a living room, cook in a kitchen, and eat in a dining room. 

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

About 50 years ago, the renowned architect, educator, and author Charles Moore was hired by Frederick and Dorothy Rudolph to design a vacation house on Captiva Island, Florida, and about a decade later, in the late 1970s, they hired him again to design their permanent residence in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Moore was often called the father of Postmodernism and was a prolific proponent through such books as The Place of Houses. With the exception of his small houses, however, I was never a big fan of his work. But I still have a tattered copy of that book, because when I read it, it was the first time that someone had articulated the process of designing a house, including a programmatic checklist to follow.