Servidor Local is a connection point, a forum where dialogue takes place; it is, in essence, a sanctuary for ideas, diversity, and exchange. As a platform, it drives cultural, art, and design projects that champion narratives with a social impact, aiming to benefit the immediate environment and spread along the paths of its visitors.
"I'm an architect... now what?" must be one of the most common questions for any recent graduate holding an architecture degree. Over the years, many will find jobs in different industries that do not necessarily involve working in an office designing and building buildings.
Light serves an essential purpose in architecture: to help us see. Whether it be through natural or artificial methods, rooms must be illuminated accordingly so occupants can safely inhabit them and fulfill their daily functions. When the right system is selected, light can also contribute to energy efficiency and sustainability within the building as a whole. However, apart from its evident functional and environmental value, lighting design can vastly impact the visual comfort and aesthetic tone of interiors by drawing attention to textures, enhancing colors and defining volumes. Therefore, of the many pieces involved in interior design, lighting is certainly one that can enhance or destroy a space and even affect users’ well-being, which is why it should be considered a crucial design element by itself.
Following the Seoul Metropolitan Government's announcement of reviving and expanding the city's Olympic Jamsil Sports–MICE Complex, Heatherwick Studio has proposed a dynamic multi-leveled pier that promotes notions of "community spirit, activity, equality, play, and togetherness". Titled The Leaf, the project will feature plant-covered platforms built on the Han River, and will offer visitors recreational and cultural spaces across a floating platform.
African nations are fighting climate change with an 8,000 kilometer long Great Green Wall meant to combat the desertification of the Sahel region, home to over 100 million people. Spanning the entire width of the African continent, the movement aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon and create 10 million jobs in rural Africa by 2030. Stretching from Senegal in the West to Djibouti in the East, the project is the joint effort of 21 African nations that strive to restore the once lush region and protect the livelihoods of local communities.
In the early 1920s, a time when women could not even work without their husband's authorization, Carmen Portinho started an engineering course at the Polytechnic School of the University of Brazil. At the vanguard of the profession, as one of the first three women to graduate as engineers in Brazil, she was opening up a field in a space dominated entirely by men.
At its heart, extreme-minimalism is a rebellion against consumerism, it’s a cathartic process of learning to live without. But it’s also a decorative style in its own right – a clean world for a clean mind.
Aiming to find an environmentally friendly use for approximately 164 tons of organic waste generated monthly in its food courts, Shopping Eldorado in São Paulo has invested in the Telhado Verde (Green Roof) composting project since 2012. The initiative transforms food waste into organic compost, recycling more than 30% of the waste generated by the establishment.
Cities face much criticism with how they handle their car population, but have you ever thought about how much land use is dedicated to surface parking lots? In fact, it may be one of the most prominent features of the postwar city in the United States. Housing, community facilities, highway infrastructure, often garner much attention, but the amount of land dedicated just to park cars is astounding.
The fourth season of the podcast Causa Común—a co-production between Fundación Lepe and Fundación Aldea for the OH! Stgo festival, held in mid-January in Santiago, Chile—explores the past, present, and future of the capital, alongside the role of its inhabitants in prioritizing the common good and collaborative ways of making, inhabiting, and imagining our shared home.
Directed and coordinated by Francisca Cordero, Soledad Díaz de la Fuente, Magdalena Novoa, and Trinidad Piriz, the six-episode season examines the everyday stories, communities, monuments, and public spaces we inhabit from new perspectives. Featured topics range from the multiple identities of a public square, female leadership in housing projects, and the construction of urban memory, to island hills as socio-environmental opportunities, Mapuche urban dwelling, and the GAM building as an exponent of architecture and social change.
Two decades ago, at the "International Congress on Construction in Architecture and its Teaching" held in Barcelona, Helio Piñón spoke of attention to materiality and construction as a fundamental condition of conceiving architecture. Today, in 2022, Equipo 01 Architecture & Design—composed of Jesús San Vicente and Franca Colmenarez—reverses this statement by presenting the National Paradores Pavilion at the FITUR 2022 International Tourism Fair.
The internationally renowned art collective _marina_morón (comprising Dr. Jesús Marina, PhD in History, and architect Dr. Elena Morón, PhD) inaugurated their latest work at the Pabellón de Mixtos of La Ciudadela in the city of Pamplona.
The exhibition is sponsored by the Basque-Navarrese Association of Architects and the Pamplona City Council, and will remain open to the public until March 15, 2022.
Roofs often play important roles in a project's identity. In addition to the aesthetic aspect, they play a fundamental role in protecting and closing the building. Of the existing types of coverage, pitched roofs are the most common in homes and buildings all around the world, therefore, it is necessary to ensure that they are within the parameters set out in the technical standards.
The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) released a short educational film meant to teach young students aged 13 to 16 about the relationship between climate change and the built environment, exploring notions of sustainable design. The film introduces concepts such as embodied carbon, brownfield, green infrastructure, sustainable mobility and explains ideas such as adaptive reuse, retrofit, and the use of local materials. The scope of this learning resource is to empower young people to think creatively about how to address the climate crisis through design, helping raise a generation well versed in sustainability principles.
André Ricard and Daniel Giralt-Miracle, the member responsible for ADI/FAD, proposed the island of Ibiza as the venue for the ICSID Biennial Congress in 1971. That's how the story began. At that time, the so-called "Urquinaona Open Design Group" already existed in Barcelona. From the group, and with Carlos Ferrater at the head, they offered their help to the organization of the congress. They refused, as everything seemed to have already been organised. Together with Fernando Bendito, Ferrater asks about accommodation for the students. They still had nothing. They get the opportunity they were waiting for. Thousands of invitations are sent out to students all over the world. The number of replies was greater than the number of registered students.
The Colombia Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai is thought of as an artefact with the ability to tell the past, present and future stories of the country's culture through its music. Supported by its geography and its cities, the pavilion designed by Pacheco Estudio de Arquitectura intersperses dense vegetation with water, representing the great biodiversity of its plant and animal world, and is composed of a reticular structure in three dimensions symbolising the urban centres that are constantly growing.
By proposing a route from the vegetable and aquatic floor to the open ceiling, the artefact is quickly identifiable from a distance and seeks to remain in the memory of those who visit it as a fresh, open space that reveals itself to all and finds itself in constant development.
The built environment we inhabit can be hostile, both on an individual architectural scale and in a wider urban context. Homeless people, for instance, are dissuaded from resting on public benches by the menacing presence of spikes and other forms of exclusionary design. From a global lens, we see the impact that borders have amidst anti-immigration hostility, imposingly exemplified by the Melilla border fence on the Morocco-Spain border. This “hostility” can be found in a large number of settlements around the world, settlements that have been formed as a result of organic migration or settlements predicated on control – like company towns.
The growing consumer demand for transparency—especially around sustainability and environmental practices—has implications for industries from apparel to healthcare products. Mars Inc. recently released a cocoa sourcing map to tackle deforestation and increase accountability, and the Fashion Transparency Index pushes apparel companies to be more forthcoming about their social and environmental efforts.
Now it’s time for the building industry, characterized by a lack of information around the materials and practices used in construction and throughout a building’s lifecycle, to catch up. The cost of inaction is too high to ignore. That’s because buildings account for 39 percent of total global carbon emissions. Traditionally, most carbon reduction efforts in the building sector focus on operational carbon—a building’s everyday energy use, which accounts for roughly 28 percent of emissions. The remaining 11 percent comes from what is often ignored: embodied carbon.
Considering focal points, biomes, and resting spaces, creating rhythm alongside architecture, and facilitating the maintenance and enjoyment of spaces are just some of the challenges of landscape design. Today, rather than serving merely as an element of spatial composition, the relationship between landscape architecture and the built environment is increasingly valued as we understand how the presence of nature benefits the health and comfort of humans and other species. Consequently, thinking about and designing the landscape has become an increasingly complex and valued endeavor.
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CHINAS CHINAS is a research project conducted by FLORA. It maps a trajectory through the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, based on a typological analysis of Chinese supermarkets. Its objective is to recognize and explore the modes of appropriation and domestic micro-scales that occur within them, demonstrating that urban architecture is shaped by everyday banalities. Ultimately, architecture takes on meaning when living conditions are defined by the people themselves. Inhabiting—beyond mere functionality—is precisely about this.
Cinema is an excellent tool for stimulating discussions and reflections on the spaces we inhabit, deeply engaging with architecture and urbanism through sets and locations. Films can address current issues within these fields of study and integrate them into their narratives, opening pathways for new debates.
The 2018 feature film Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg, raises a series of questions about urbanism, social relations, contemporary cities, environmental conflicts, and how new technologies can interfere with an individual's relationship with public spaces. This article explores how these factors manifest in our daily lives and shape new concepts of the city.
More and more people are concentrating in major urban centers. While cities are full of people and possibilities, this is far from making them welcoming environments. Loneliness and anxiety are common in the fast-paced life of the "concrete jungle," and nature may hold the key to alleviating these feelings.
Numerous studies have been published showing how contact with nature positively affects our health. Listening to birds chirping, getting your hands in the dirt, or spending time in contact with greenery—all of this benefits our physical and mental well-being. Now, researchers have shown that green spaces also help alleviate feelings of loneliness.
Digital spaces and fabrication technology have become as prominent as ever within the current state of our post-pandemic society, becoming increasingly more accessible and enabling quick and spontaneous acts of iteration and evolution. These technologies have resulted in the ability to mass-produce non-standard, highly differentiated building components within the same facility as their standardized counterpart, transforming how buildings and their respective components are conceived, designed, and represented, and how they are manufactured, assembled, and produced.
The beauty of digital fabrication is its ability to blend aspects of mass and artisanal production to the point where costs nearly disappear. Technology’s capacity to fabricate so simply and almost seamlessly raise the issues for its potential to significantly alter our current perception of architecture, thus producing the question: has the influence of mass production in architecture resulted in a loss of intentional design?
The design for what was then called the Ministry of Education and Public Health was developed during 1936 by a team comprising architects Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso Reidy, Jorge Moreira, Carlos Leão, and Ernani Vasconcelos, under the coordination of Lucio Costa. At the request of the then-Minister Gustavo Capanema and with guidance from Le Corbusier, the team of young Brazilian modernists was tasked with giving a national identity to the building that would become one of the greatest icons of Brazilian architecture, in direct opposition to the dominant aesthetic of the time. The decision not to commission the original design, which had won the public competition held for this purpose, is just one part of this incredible story.
.jpg?1643423986 "Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier, 1929. Image © Flickr User: End User")
.jpg?1643425181 "Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier, 1929. Image © Flickr User: End User")
_V%C3%ADctor_Pati%C3%B1o_George.jpg?1643424298 "Villa Stein, Le Corbusier, 1927. Image © Víctor Patiño George")
