Construye Solar 2019 will exhibit eight sustainable social housing units in Santiago, designed and built by universities from across Chile. The initiative, according to the organizers, aims to "spark innovation in social housing construction, addressing the inherent challenges of pursuing sustainable innovation on a limited budget."
The digital revolution coupled with the unforeseen environmental, economical and social challenges our world face today, urge architecture to shake much of the traditions and basis upon which it operated for the last decades, if not centuries.
A century on, the compelling idea that Modern architecture emerged like some blindingly white, crystalline and disruptive phoenix from the darkness, death and destruction of the First World War is, perhaps, a familiar one. And, yet, the charcoal sketches and chiaroscuro montages Mies van der Rohe made during and after the epochal competition for the Berlin Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper of 1921-22 retain the power to catch the eye, provoke and disturb in our own era of overwhelming imagery much of it produced by and with computer programs.
What is so very remarkable about these century-old visionary drawings is that they portray a future building type - verging on the ethereal and more or less impossible to realize at the time - in the earthiest of drawing materials. It had been a stroke of genius to use charcoal to evoke an architecture of lightness rising from the embers of the trenches that would revolutionize the way we shaped tall buildings and with them our city streets. Such is the power of drawing by hand.
Begin by imagining a composition of mostly vertical elements. Between them, ovoid shapes float, intertwined. Condensing this (in)formal schizophrenia, there is a translucent cubic envelope sliced horizontally into six equal parts. An iconic Cartesian coordinate system contaminated by amorphous bubbles.
By now, you’ve likely heard about real-time rendering for architectural visualization and how it’s changing the way designs are presented. With real-time rendering, you can edit your design and see the changes updated instantly, at full quality, and you can produce animations and panoramas in minutes instead of days. Real-time rendering also opens the door to immersive experiences like 360° videos and virtual reality.
Through his campus work, Sert left an incredible built legacy on the Boston area. But his buildings have taken some getting used to.
In hindsight, it seems a bit odd that a Catalan architect with a penchant for concrete buildings and jaunty accents of color—he liked to say, “It’s good to see a parrot against an elephant”—ever held sway over Brahmin Boston and nearby Cambridge. It was midcentury, and he was Josep Lluís Sert, Barcelona-born, a great devotee of Le Corbusier, and dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) from 1953 to 1969.
The Latvian city of Riga, the largest between the three Baltic states, is undergoing a cultural and urban renaissance. The city's pedestrian-only Old Town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with several museums, cultural centers, and restaurants, attracting thousands of new visitors every year.
London-based architecture firm AI Studio have received planning approval for the development of a mixed-use tower in the Latvian capital, featuring retail stores, offices, restaurants, and public spaces.
Have you already crossed the street out of fear today? As a woman, what is your greatest fear when walking down the street? How would you feel safer? With the goal of reflecting on how we can plan more egalitarian cities for everyone, the firm amb ateliê, in partnership with architects Fernanda Linero and Beatriz Teixeira, launched this initiative across various neighborhoods in Curitiba. The project ci.da.de; substantivo feminino (city; feminine noun) is part of the 3rd Biennial Architecture Exhibition for Curitiba.
As California makes strides in sustainability, the Von Braun Space Station is taking rather large steps for humankind. Exploring the great unknown does not have to mean abandoning our planet — it can mean just the opposite. In fact, this space station could be our most monumental step toward a sustainable future.
Ruins are defined as structures, architectural remains, or constructions that have been partially or completely lost due to various factors (such as natural disasters, war, depopulation, abandonment, and lack of maintenance). They manifest as the material and tangible presence of a past era, representing the historical paradigm in which they were conceived and built. Their appeal lies in their ability to freeze a temporal plane different from current reality within the present, serving as a condensation of the ideals, interests, aspirations, questions, and challenges of a specific era. With this in mind, we present below a selection of 10 archaeological sites and ruins you can visit in Argentina.
The various practices of mankind over the past decades have taken a huge toll on the environment. People of all nationalities, interests, and career backgrounds have been trying to find means to heal the wounded landscapes and shed light on the environmental crisis.
Directed by BAFTA-nominated film director Richard John Seymour and produced by Norwegian design firm 3RW arkitekter, Landscape Healing is a cinematic documentary that follows the journey of a diverse group of people who have been setting a paradigm for humanity's greatest challenge: the rewilding of our planet back to a sustainable level.
What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at the Biennial to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies – and Artificial Intelligence in particular – might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, the Politecnico di Torino and SCUT.
Nowadays materials are requested to play a more engaging role in the digital society.
They can be customized down to their molecular properties and this capacity has an enormous impact on related fields of science, but they also need to be interpreted in their meaning thanks to our ‘semantic capital’, as Luciano Floridi said.
We cannot reduce materials to their property and performances as, as humans, we use them to interpret the world, they are our continuously changing material culture to find an equilibrium between nature and built environment.
The environment affects behavior, just as behavior affects the environment. This is one of the core propositions of environmental psychology, a field that studies the interrelationship between human behavior and the surrounding environment, whether built or natural. If the environment has the power to influence our choices and habits, then it is possible to design it to encourage more sustainable choices. And complete streets offer a way to do just that.
The public has often condemned urban renewal, but for the Pennsylvanian city of Pittsburgh, its revival earned a status of "renaissance". In their latest volume of Imagining the Modern: Architecture and Urbanism of Pittsburgh Renaissance, editors Chris Grimley, Michael Kubo, and Rami el Samahy explore the reasons behind the city's congratulatory rebirth.
This reportage was originally published in issue 207 of Revista El Malpensante (Colombia), with Spanish translation by Andrés Hoyos.
Once subjugated by illegal armed groups and devastated by the largest urban military operation in Colombia's history, the Las Independencias neighborhood, located in Medellín's Comuna 13, is today an open-air graffiti gallery. Access and transit through the area are facilitated by an outdoor escalator system—the only one of its kind in the world installed in an informal settlement.
The debate over materiality and how it shapes the spaces housing our entire social dimension lies at the core of architectural discourse. Although architects define a concept, a *parti*, and adhere to a program that can even influence urban life, ultimately it is everyday life and each individual's cultural repertoire that dictate how a place is experienced. The understanding that there are multiple layers in society capable of building invisible walls—which dissolve architectural poetics and unfold into other issues crucial to understanding the system in which we are embedded—is one of the reflections proposed by Nova República, a project created by anthropologist Hélio Menezes and the architects of Cape Town-based Wolff Architects for the São Paulo International Architecture Biennial.
Presented at the recent edition of the Feria del Diseño 2019 in Medellín, Iku Hábitat is a modular architectural construction system developed in Colombia that aims to streamline construction processes using designed and prefabricated components assembled with screws.
Accessibility and mobility. When perceived through the architectural lens, these terms often evoke a range capped by two extremes. On the one end, the flexibility of circulation systems; the universality of egress networks; and the technicalities of minimums and maximums. On the other end, a project’s capacity to support broad ranges of socioeconomic narratives; its malleability in the face of rapid fluctuations of program and function; and its reactivity in maintaining a productive role amidst the ebbs and flows of societal dynamics.
Facades are the interface between the interior and exterior of a building. They are the most striking and visible parts of a building, they protect it from external agents and are one of the main contributors to creating comfortable environments since it is where thermal gains and losses occur. Just like our skin, an extremely versatile organ of our body, it should be natural for it to be the part of the building which bears technology capable of becoming adaptable to the environmental conditions of the place where it is located.
Customization, within the context of interior architectural design, is a resurfacing topic among cross-disciplined design firms focused on interior architecture. Since the reemergence of the Localism trend, individuals and organizations increasingly seek one-of-a-kind experiences, objects, and spaces that can help deepen their connections to their communities.
This article was originally published on May 23, 2019.
‘Appearance Stripped Bare’ is the exhibition that opened on May 19 at the Museo Jumex. It establishes a parallel fold right in the middle of the twentieth century, bringing face-to-face some of the most representative works of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons—key figures in global contemporary art—to address concepts of objects, commodities, and the artist's relationship with society.
The Midnight Charette is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by architectural designers David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features a variety of creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions. A wide array of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes provide useful tips for designers, while others are project reviews, interviews, or explorations of everyday life and design. The Midnight Charette is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.
On this episode of The Midnight Charette podcast, hosts David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet are joined by Andrew Kovacs - Architect and Founder Office Kovacs and Curator of Archive of Affinities - to discuss the philosophy behind his work, the lack of opportunities young progressive architects have in the United States, designing Colossal Cacti for Coachella, the positives of Postmodernism, using Archive of Affinities as a design resource, and more! Call the hotline to leave feedback and questions by voicemail at 213-222-6950.
Campo Baeza asserted that “Light is the most beautiful, richest, and most luxurious material used by architects. The only problem is that it is given to us for free, is within everyone's reach, and is not valued enough” [1]. Today, many architects agree on the importance of lighting when creating architectural spaces, reflecting on its quality, quantity, nuance, and directionality. Despite this, when determining the characteristics of their building enclosures, many choose to work with materials that ensure a high degree of privacy, either by incorporating opaque elements or envelopes that screen views and diffuse contact with public outdoor spaces.
In certain cases where solar conditions permit, modern technological developments allow for the incorporation of translucent enclosure systems that ensure the entry of abundant, controlled natural light throughout the day without sacrificing privacy. These self-supporting treated glass panel systems offer the possibility of generating completely glazed, continuous, homogeneous, unobstructed, and translucent surfaces while simultaneously screening views into the spaces. Below, we present 6 projects located in Argentina that exemplify different ways of working with these systems.
In Bogotá, a third of all households live in gated communities. This phenomenon is a misguided application of the model idealized by post-war American suburbs, which projected an idyllic, safe, happy, and perfect life—a life where mobility prioritizes motorized vehicles, utilizing simple, replicable, and, of course, highly profitable construction models.
Ciudad Isla is an exhibition by architects and professors at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Ramón Bermúdez and Sebastián Serna, in collaboration with the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP) at ETH Zurich, which brings this issue to light. It presents a collective research project on gated housing complexes and their relationship with public space in the city of Bogotá.
