Brick has positioned itself as one of the materials that characterise and identify Argentinean and Latin American architectural culture. The diversity and versatility of masonry in our region have given rise to great heterogeneity in its uses and applications: structural walls, partitions, enclosures, screens, envelopes, skins, roofs, vaults, domes and floors allow us to visualise the great adaptability of this material in order to adapt to the particular requirements of each project.
While many of the homes built during the Modern Movement—as design experiments on new ways of living—fostered the early emergence of "programmatic hybrids" by typically linking the residences of artists, painters, or architects with their workspaces (one need only recall, for instance, the atelier Le Corbusier designed for painter Amédée Ozenfant in 1922), today, new work models and hyperconnectivity have further driven the development of a new typology where workspaces are integrated into residential architecture. Architects, writers, photographers, designers, and painters increasingly choose to integrate their studios and workshops into their homes, merging living and working into a single whole.
Generally, termoarcilla blocks are ceramic bricks made from clay and secondary aggregates (typically expanded polystyrene beads or other granular materials). These secondary aggregates play a key role in manufacturing: during firing (at temperatures exceeding 900 °C), they undergo a gasification process that creates pores in the material, reducing the block's density and making it lightweight (hence why in some countries they are commonly called lightweight clay blocks). This porous structure enhances the block's thermal and acoustic insulation performance, offering significant advantages over similar materials.
The Apollo 11 Mission, departed Earth on July 16, 1969, and touched down on the moon 4 days later. This moment marked a milestone for humanity and, to this day, makes us reflect on how technological progress is bringing us ever closer to life beyond planet Earth.
With the help of 3D printers, highly developed and fully automated constructive technology, we have compiled a selection of 15 architectural projects that demonstrate that life on the moon and beyond is closer than we've ever imagined.
When it comes to housing typologies, the term duplex –lends itself to multiple interpretations, often leading to ambiguous applications and uses. The definition of the concept depends primarily on the country or region in which it is used, generally allowing for two main interpretations. First, a duplex can refer to a two-story housing unit with levels connected by an internal staircase. This definition usually applies to apartments and residences in countries like Spain or Canada, which are typically found in urban centers. Alternatively, a duplex can describe a specific type of project where two homes are joined side-by-side, each having its own individual entrance but sharing a central wall. Generally, the design of these houses is defined by an intentional axial symmetry, functioning as twin homes with the same features and floor plan layout. This type of duplex housing is particularly common in Argentina, Bolivia, the United Kingdom, Australia, and parts of the United States.
Tools developed for woodworking, along with new production, milling, and treatment techniques, have gradually yielded highly diverse, high-quality products in various sizes, strengths, tones, shapes, and colors. These advancements have allowed wood, as a resource, to meet a wide range of construction needs, serving as structural support, building envelopes, cladding, or furniture in a vast number of architectural projects.
Peruvian architectural firm leonmarcial arquitectos has been invited to take part of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale with an installation at the Arsenale as part of the "As New Households” exhibition space. Titled Interwoven, the installation encourages the action of sharing and celebrates the exchange between homes and their environments through architecture.
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The automation of architectural design and rendering has been further accelerated by digital production tools. Tools such as 3D printers, assembly robots, and laser cutters, have all but perfected the design and construction process and have proven essential in optimizing resources, improving precision, and increasing control of the process.
In woodworking, the most frequently used digital production tools are milling machines or CNC (computer numerical control) routers. These tools facilitate the rendering of 2D vectoral drawings and 3D models, codifying them into instructions for the machine to follow and execute. Through this process, which starts with digital archives (typically created using design software widely known as AutoCad), milling machines and CNC routers can rapidly and precisely cut wood, producing ready to assemble pieces.
Capturing aerial photographs allows raising awareness of a project feature usually complex to capture using traditional methods. Based on the technological opportunities offered by small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly called drones, architecture photographers have begun to explore new ways of capturing a project in order to expose design decisions such as implantation, dialogue with the environment, or the relationship with nearby buildings.
Whether applied as cladding to steel or timber frame structures or to structures built by traditional means, sheet metal offers an array of advantages as a building material, thanks to its low cost, ease of maintenance, and versatility.
Can architecture foster better relationships between people, creating an equalized and respectful use of space? Can tools be designed that strengthen the bonds between humans and objects? BAAG (Buenos Aires Arquitectura Grupal) studio explores the architectural elements that mediate between people and objects, the natural and artificial, public and private, individual and collective, and humans and other living things.
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How does systemic thinking and generative design contribute to new forms of convivence? Can they become tools to connect tradition and identity in a modern way? Can they help to design customizable architectural strategies that offer locally accessible solutions? Can they contribute to the creation of dignified spatial experiences that can be replicated on a mass scale?
The results of the National Preliminary Project Competition "New Provincial Administrative Center in the City of Rawson" have been announced. Organized by the Association of Architects of the Province of Chubut (CACH), promoted by the provincial Ministry of Infrastructure, Energy, and Planning, and sponsored by the Argentine Federation of Architects' Organizations (FADEA), the call invited architects nationwide to design urban and architectural proposals for the development of public office infrastructure (institutional buildings for the various provincial government agencies) to revitalize the former Zoo site, an urban vacancy in Rawson with high development potential.
“Playground: Artifacts for Interaction”, by curator Felipe Ferrer, aims to transform the fences surrounding Peru's public spaces into tools for social integration. The project proposes removing the gates enclosing public spaces throughout Lima and Peru's other urban centers, inviting residents to freely enter and interact with the spaces. By removing these "security" mechanisms, which really serve as tools of segregation, and installing benches, playgrounds, and soccer fields, the project aims to divert all the energy, time, and resources put into installing fences and channel it into bringing new life to these public spaces.
As Francis D. K. Ching explains in his book Architectural Graphics, unlike the traditional, two-dimensional orthographic drawings used to represent layouts, sections, and floorplans, which only allow a project to be glimpsed through a series of fragmented images, axonometries, or axonometric projections, offer unique, simultaneous three-dimensional views of a project with all the depth and spatiality of tried and true technical illustrations.
Supra Order is an ongoing research project focused on studying the operational and performative possibilities of order. The project is presented as a collection of floor plans in the form of an accumulative archive that intensifies and reclaims the existence of a common, timeless, and universal architectural language. Curated by Iñaki Harosteguy, Supra Order uses comparison as a critical mechanism to relate, link, and establish connections between diverse architectural projects that operate through neutral and radical architectural supports based on isotropic grids. In a way, the methodological tools surveyed and exhibited by Supra Order form a kind of manifesto that seeks to recover disciplinary autonomy as a fundamental reference for contemporary practice.
On the 35th anniversary of the reconstruction of the German Pavilion in Barcelona, the Fundació Mies van der Rohe presents the publication "La expresión del peso" ("The Expression of Weight") by Luis Martínez Santa-María, a book that explores his own work "I don’t want to change the world. I only want to express it" and gathers several examples showing how architecture and art have wonderful ways of poetically subverting the relentless reality of the weight bearing down on them.
In his book “The New Brutalism in Architecture: Ethical or Aesthetic?,” Reyner Banham establishes what he deems the semantic roots of the term 'Brutalism,' explaining that it comes from one of the " indisputable turning points in architecture, the construction of Le Corbusier's concrete masterpiece, la Unité d'habitation de Marseille. It was Corbusier's own word for raw or rough-cast concrete, "Béton brut," that made Brutalism a mainstay in architectural jargon and, in many ways, the term, as well as the architecture it described, flourished." In the book, Banham highlights the historical milestone marked by Corbusier's Unite d' Habitation and the socio-political context that shaped it. In steel-starved post-World War II Europe, exposed concrete became the go-to building material within the burgeoning Brutalist movement, which quickly defined itself by its bare-bone, rugged surfaces and dramatic, geometric shapes.
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