This guide covers a workflow that moves from project parameters to generated floor plans, 3D perspective views, exterior design exploration, and site context visualization, using AI tools in place of preliminary CAD and rendering work.

+ 16

When discussing bioclimatic architecture, the focus is primarily on practices that reduce energy consumption and the environmental impact of buildings, both during construction—for example, by using materials with a low carbon footprint or incorporating responsible processes tailored to the site—and during their lifespan. This approach results in passive architecture designed to minimize long-term energy use. This is achieved—either by supplementing mechanical ventilation, heating, and cooling systems with passive methods, or by relying entirely on alternative systems—by adapting the design, geometry, and orientation to the topography, climate, natural vegetation, solar radiation, and prevailing winds of the site.

Videos

We’ve all commented on a building’s character before. An apartment might have it because of some special oak trim, or a building might not fit with the ‘character’ of its neighborhood. In this video, architectural designer and professor Stewart Hicks takes a close look at the meaning and origins of this elusive concept. Why do we use this word for both people and for buildings? Characters also occur in fiction, does that help explain how buildings tell stories? From the Enlightenment architects Ledoux, Boullée, and Lequeu, to the Beetlejuice house, to contemporary practices exploring what it might mean for a building to have a face or a posture, we get to the bottom of why architects might consider architectural character to be a good idea.

Understanding what drives economic, social, and educational disparities between communities is one of urbanism’s most critical and highly-discussed topics. It’s an increasingly complex issue, with many factors at play- one of them being the design and location of desirable urban green spaces. While sometimes they are a tool that helps to bolster underserved communities in terms of health and economic benefits, safety, and climate resistance, other times they can actually drive out the residents that they are created to serve. Now, the challenge lies in how to design these recreational sites to create better futures for all.

Certification of sustainable buildings has become a prominent trend in architecture over the last couple of years and while most people can agree on the importance of sustainability in building, how to achieve it leaves copious room for discussion.

This article was originally published on Common Edge

In a Common Edge article, I briefly discussed a concept that I call the “Triple Bottom Lie,” which posits that more people, plus more consumption by each person, plus an economic system completely dependent on the aforementioned items, can just keep working forever, without consequences. Historically, the United States has accepted the economic shibboleth of endless growth because it reduced class conflict; a rising tide (supposedly) lifted all boats, rafts and yachts included. We are, however, approaching the limits of growth, from both a resource standpoint (we’re running out of raw materials) and a technological standpoint (our inventions are progressively less revolutionary).

Lighting brand ZERO presents HOOP: a luminaire designed by fellow-Swedish design group Front. An elliptical globe of light sits within a system of wire loops – its technology hidden to give it a magical feel. Watch the video to find out more...

Extreme weather and conditions call for contextual architectural approaches. From sandy deserts to cold, icy climates, how we build is intimately tied to location. Drawing from diverse project sites around the world, architects and designers create proposals that construct and organize new ways to live, work and play. These unbuilt projects rethink traditional forms while addressing a wide range of landscape conditions.

This week’s curated selection of the Best Unbuilt Architecture focuses on diverse typologies in hot and cold climates around the world. Drawn from an array of firms and local contexts, they represent proposals submitted by the ArchDaily Community. They explore everything from generative design through a desert shelter in Siwa and a cave dwelling in China to a coastal development in Spain and a series of igloo habitats for penguins in Antarctica.

+ 45

The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced us all to adapt quickly to new ways of living: new ways of working, communicating, buying groceries, and so much more. That adaptability is the key to navigating our changing world. Modular and flexible building systems can help us adapt our physical spaces to the new realities of social distancing or even to the need for rapidly deploying field hospitals.

Urban infrastructures provide comfort to inhabitants and mitigate the risks of disasters such as flooding. Underground systems specifically conceal urban infrastructures from public view and are configured as real mazes under the streets. The distribution of drinking water, urban drainage, sewage, and even electrical wiring and fiber optics in some cases, pass under our feet without us noticing. To this end, the industry developed precast concrete parts for about 100 years that provided construction speed, adequate resistance to force, and durability against time. Concrete pipes with circular sections, in many diverse diameters, are perhaps the most used conduits and are ubiquitous around the world. But there are also those who use these apparently functional elements in creative architectural contexts as well.

+ 23

Some administrative decisions affect populations to varying degrees. The signing of the agreement between the Colombian government—and guarantor countries—and the FARC-EP was one of the most anticipated events for over 40 million Colombians and multiple generations affected by the internal armed conflict. Yet, the path was not easy, and deep polarization surrounded an agreement that would bring an undeniable benefit to everyone, regardless of political affiliation: peace.

+ 6

Architect Erich Coufal (1926–2021) traveled from his native Vienna, Austria, to Guadalajara, Mexico, at just 24 years of age, ultimately remaining in the city for the rest of his life. Here, he left a fundamental legacy for Modern architecture in Guadalajara and Mexico. An immigrant who adopted the city as his own, he often said he was born twice: first in Vienna in 1926, and second in Guadalajara in 1950.

Desplans and KooZA/rch have revealed the three final winners of the #mycityscape competition. Inviting young creatives to this conversation, the open call questions the definition of the city, by asking “What establishes the identity of a city? What distinguishes one urban environment from the other? And What defines our relationship to the built landscape we inhabit?”

Trying to find the tools to map the city of the 21^st century, the competition encouraged young creatives to record the essence of their cityscape into one image. After selecting 12 shortlisted entries, the contest solicited a wider audience to decide the final winning designs, by voting for their favorites on social media. Following the release of the results, Christele Harrouk from ArchDaily had the chance to talk about the #mycityscape competition with both Desplans and KooZA/rch, discussing the theme and the whole process. Discover in this article the exchange as well as the final winning designs.

Traveling to Colombia, as a Brazilian, felt like recognizing a sister country. Over the course of a month, as a participant in the Field Stations workshop, I recorded personal perspectives of my impressions of the places visited. The theme is the river landscape, and the records carry the fragility and subjectivity of a logbook. The desire to share them is driven by the desire to express this sense of identification, showing how I saw similarities between us—problems, complexities, and beauties—as well as the clear recognition that we would be stronger together. It envisions the idea of eliminating the invisible borders that separate us and uniting peoples divided by colonizers. 

+ 21

Alterity is essential to human development. If deprived of a variety of stimuli, the brain is unable to develop, losing plasticity and deteriorating like an atrophied muscle. This reasoning is widely accepted when it comes to social relations or cognitive and physical activities. But what about the stimuli promoted by the built environment?

Public art is an innate cultural privilege for New Yorkers. Top-notch art can be found across the city’s boroughs everywhere from parks, squares, alleys, and rooftops—sometimes to the jaded disdain of passerby. While permanent staples, such as Robert Indiana’s Love on 6th Avenue or George Segal’s Gay Liberation at the Stonewall National Monument are ingrained in the urban texture, others are more ephemeral. Public art has the power to swiftly take over Instagram feeds but also has a history of sparking polarizing interpretations at town hall hearings.

+ 9

For a long time in Mexico and around the world, the architecture of pioneering Modernist architects like Luis Barragán and Juan O'Gorman, among many others, has been presented as sacred and untouchable to ensure its preservation over time.

Few architectural typologies are as timeless as bakeries. A practice spanning thousands of years, the art of baking has diverse roots. Today, bakeries combine areas to gather, socialize, shop, and work. While industrialization and commercialization transformed the art of baking and baked goods, bakeries remain important community spaces for gathering and defining neighborhood identity.

+ 10

+ 3

The state of Florida, in the United States, is bordered to the south, east, and west by the Atlantic Ocean, with a coastline of over two thousand kilometers in length, and is characterized by extensive areas of lakes, rivers, and ponds. Land booms during the early and mid-20th century resulted in the development of new communities and the expansion of low-density suburbia across many parts of the state, which frequently incorporated the abundant water resources, sometimes failing in their efforts.

Videos

Quebec Wood Export Bureau is adding another tool to your arsenal: a free BIM plugin on Revit. With the help of its wood-producing members, the nonprofit group has stepped into the free software world to put a growing suite of structural wood system components at architects’ fingertips.

As we look back at the architecture projects we have published in 2020, as part of our yearly review, we were able to distinguish many recurring elements and solutions in terms of materials, programs, and functions.

Since the architecture industry moves slightly slower than others, we found that many things in the construction and design that have been building up these past years have come out making strong statements this 2020. We believe, therefore, that trends in the architecture world could be defined not only by what has been recurrent and popular but also, what has proven to be relevant and substantial.

+ 44

Chicago architecture is empty without Chicago architectural journalism. From the 1880s launch of the black-and-white publication Inland Architect, which covered the rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire, to a 1985 critique of the James R. Thompson Center by Paul Gapp in the Chicago Tribune titled “Masterpiece or Ego Trip?” which set the course for the public reception of the building, coverage, and criticism of architecture in local newspapers and architecture publications has provided a critical link to how Chicago maintains its reputation as a city of extraordinary architecture. Architectural criticism and journalism have and continue to help Chicago understand how we arrived at this built environment and what the future holds.

+ 16

While many projects consciously avoid adopting a definitive functional layout—intentionally leaning toward the indefinability of spaces—in many others, a clear division of uses and programmatic synthesis serve as key tools to organize, prioritize, and optimize spatial flow.

Videos

The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.

A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.

This week David and Marina are joined by architect Stanley Saitowitz to discuss his design philosophy, office, upbringing in South Africa, and education and how he ended up in San Francisco, why the practice of architecture is much more challenging today, how architecture relates to cities, and more. Enjoy!

The year 2020 brought with it a whirlwind of challenges, calling many aspects of daily life into question. Marked by the pandemic, we all had to reinvent ourselves in some way to weather this unprecedented moment. It was no different for the city. COVID-19, like other infectious diseases (the Black Death, the Spanish flu, etc.), laid bare the relationship between its spread and urbanization. This is an easy analysis to make when data shows that the spread of the virus has been far greater in large urban centers.

In this regard, the health crisis has sparked discussions about the urbanization model to which our cities are subjected—a model of dispersed sprawl that prioritizes automobile mobility. Wilson Ribeiro dos Santos, a professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at PUC-Campinas, in an article co-authored with Sidney Piocchi Bernardini and Gabriela Celani, states that this urbanization model—where commerce and services are concentrated in the city center, while strictly residential areas and gated communities are located on the periphery—ended up accelerating the spread of the virus. This is because people from all parts of the city must travel daily to the same central area to work, study, visit the doctor, shop, and so on.