From playful indoor pools to tranquil exterior fountains to soaring waterfalls and grand lakes of enormous proportions, architecture throughout the centuries has engaged with water in endlessly innovative ways. Sometimes serving aesthetic purposes, but just as often acting as centers of activity or promoting sustainability, water features can take countless different forms and serve multiple different purposes. Below, we synthesize a series of water features espoused by innovative contemporary architectural projects, ranging from single-family residential homes to vast commercial complexes.
Designing well, creating beautiful buildings as well as boosting revenue and making your firm profitable rank highly among the goals of architects around the world today. What are the most effective tools architects need to achieve those goals? At a recent Technology and Architecture panel, successful architects discussed answers to that very question. When you watch this panel discussion, recorded live at the prestigious Pritzker Military Museum and Library, you will hear inspiring approaches to design, coordination and project management - rooted in BIM and enabled by the design flexibility found in ARCHICAD.
Being up to date with new technologies, understanding the best solutions for each project, and knowing the products present in the market and those that will be used in the future. We have observed that these themes arouse great interest in the architects, students, and architecture lovers who visit our site every day. In 2019, ArchDaily began to focus more on materials, covering products, construction techniques, and raw materials in general. The year is coming to an end, so we have compiled the most viewed articles on these topics, trying to understand what they imply for the present and where they will take us in the coming years.
There has been a lot of talk about how automation will affect the way we do architecture, and what our role will be when technologies reach our own desks and work tables. In recent years, while we have seen how robotics and advanced technology are gaining ground in construction and manufacturing, new tools are emerging that promise to automate the design process itself. These would allow us to quickly and easily configure living spaces and their dimensions in the initial stages of a project, using simulations and artificial intelligence.
Will this automation be the future of architectural design? We talked with Jesper Wallgren, architect and founder of Finch 3D, to better understand this tool and its possible scope.
Automation is rapidly becoming a normalized part of many people’s daily lives and careers, a trend which has by no means evaded the construction industry. While this increasingly pervasive technology is often considered a symptom of the contemporary 21st century, however, one automated construction technology may have a history stretching as far back as the 1960s. This technology, the bricklaying robot, has transformed dramatically since its limited realization over 50 years ago, splintering into newer, more technologically advanced variations today.
https://www.archdaily.com/928440/the-evolution-of-bricklaying-robots-changing-the-rules-of-traditional-constructionLilly Cao
Materials, products, and construction systems are constantly evolving and following new technologies, discoveries, and market trends. Today, within the framework of our Monthly Topic “Innovation” we wonder: what products or materials could we use so that our projects make relevant contributions to the way we are inhabiting our planet?
Videos
Gerbert Rappaport. Director. Image from the movie Cherry Town (Cheryomushki) 1963.
Flying Panels - How Concrete Panels Changed the World is a new ArkDes exhibition designed by Note Design Studio and curated by Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola - authors of the Monolith Controversies exhibition, the winner of the Silver Lion award at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014.
It brings together a series models and material as posters, paintings, films, toys, cartoons and opera sets are gathered to reflect on how concrete panels influenced culture for the construction of a new society.
Sustainability in architecture is an issue that may bring to light too general proposals and there are a lot of possibilities concerning the application of their concepts in design process. Sustainable strategies are essential so that the project development reconcile the economic and ecologic pillars and, above all, consider the well-being impact for those who are going to use the built space. Thinking about this, we have gathered four projects of different typologies that applied innovative methods in the conception of the buildings that stand out for their sustainable practices. Read on for the projects:
Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a term used to identify the manufacturing processes performed by 3D printing through layer-by-layer construction. In addition to avoiding the generation of waste through the use of precise geometries and exact quantities of material, these controlled processes can be much faster than traditional ones, since they don't require tools or other instruments.
Additive Manufacturing is done based on a digital model. The process begins with a CAD design or three-dimensional scan and then translates that shape into an object divided into sections, allowing it to be printed. Its use has extended from industrial design to the replica of archaeological objects to the manufacture of artificial human organs and tissues, among many others.
Home automation, from voice-controlled virtual assistants to app-controlled thermostats, has quickly and unexpectedly ushered the future into our own homes. As technology continues to progress, the way we interact with our environment will likely only grow more and more futuristic – even spaces as personal as our home bathrooms. While the prospect of such a highly digitized personal life may be daunting to some, others see this trend’s potential for improving not just comfort, but health and safety as well. Below, we outline some of the technologies that we hope to see in the bathrooms of the future.
https://www.archdaily.com/926022/what-will-bathrooms-look-like-in-the-futureLilly Cao
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.
The Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD), the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) and the Institute for Textile and Fiber Technologies (ITFT) at the University of Stuttgart have launched the ITECH Research Demonstrator 2018-19. The project aims to investigate large-scale compliant architecture.
reSITE 2019 REGENERATE, a game-changing event on cities' regeneration
reSITE’s game-changing event brings together a global community of 50 thought leaders, architects, urbanists, and the most innovative minds to share state-of-the-art trends in sustainable architecture as well as urban planning and living. REGENERATE is a call to action offering solutions to the pressing questions arising from climate change, redevelopment, and young generation’s demands and changing values.
Matter Design Studio has partnered with CEMEX Global R&D to challenge the relationship between the mass of materials and the physical effort of contemporary construction practices, exploring the movement and assembly of heavy objects on a real scale, manufactured using advanced computing. The objective of Walking Assembly is to eliminate the crane from the constructive equation, transferring the effort from people to objects, freeing them to play with the mass.
Although James Blish’s “Cities in Flight” was not the first attempt to combine architecture and anti-gravity technology, it was in this book series that we can see it prevailing on an urban scale. Throughout its evolution, architecture has crawled out of caves, settled on grounds, climbed on pilotis, floated on water, stood high, and even danced. Now many argue that it is high time for it to move forward and assume some of its multi-directional and forthcoming probabilities.
Until recently, the architecture world largely viewed plastic polymers as inferior building materials, handy for wipe-clean kitchen surfaces, but not practical in full-scale building applications. But with technological innovations driving material capabilities forward, polymers are now being taken seriously as a legitimate part of the architect’s pallet. One of the most widely-used of these materials is a fluorine-based plastic known as ETFE (Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene). Brought into the public consciousness thanks to its use on the facade of PTW Architects' Water Cube for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, architects are now realizing the film’s capabilities to express a new aesthetic and replace costlier transparent and translucent materials. Its most recent and spectacular public appearance was on the 120-foot telescopic shell of The Shed, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group in New York City.
Cardboard tubes are so commonplace that we may no longer even notice them. Yet they are everywhere: in a roll of toilet paper, in the packaging of the college diploma, in fireworks, and in the tissue and paper industries. And now, more and more, they can be found in unusual places, such as on the walls of houses and buildings. The material is part of modern life and is being produced for a multitude of industrial applications and consumer products. The vast majority are used as structural cores in winding operations. Immediately after manufacturing, paper, film or textiles are rolled directly onto cardboard tubes resulting in a stable roll that is easily stored and transported.