The best buildings always start with a background, materials, and a plan. With a little help, now shots can too. In their new book, The Architecture of the Shot, author Paul Knorr and architectural planner Melissa Wood teamed up to create 75 blueprints detailing the creation of "the perfect shot from the bottom up." With historical backgrounds, detailed materials lists, and precise plans, anyone with an architectural eye will feel right at home constructing the “perfect” mixtures.
View a few of the blueprint recipes, after the break.
This article was written by Barbara Campbell-Lange, Head of Teaching at the AA School of Architecture in London, on her experience working at the school.
To be taught in a Georgian home, in rooms with fireplaces and moulded ceilings, in the centre of London, is exceptional. High ceilinged drawing rooms over-looking Bedford Square are connected to an idiosyncratic mews at the back via a network of un-designed bridge-pieces. This allows, through juxtapositions and awkwardnesses, glimpses and serendipitous meetings between students, staff and visitors that might otherwise not occur. It is the very nature and imperfection of this architecture that creates the School Community. Rubbing up against each other, against difference, against history, is essential to the formation of ideas: impossible people and situations are essential to creativity. Great thinkers and makers have walked these stairs, others will follow.
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Held annually since 1998, Arquine’s International Architecture Competition seeks to explore issues of importance and relevance to society, creating a space for dialogue between both national and international architects.
For the 18th edition of its international competition, Arquine has launched an open competition to design a Pavilion for MEXTRÓPOLI, an annual International Architecture and Latin American City festival. The installation will be located in Mexico City’s historic center, and should be a public space where key themes relating to the city can be discussed. The pavilion should also have a flexible design, as it ultimately will be repurposed as an information center for a part of the city that needs it.
More information about the competition after the break.
In an era when both environmental comfort and sustainability are key concerns in architecture, the tendency to cover buildings entirely in glass is among the most criticized and controversial traits of contemporary architecture, as all-glass buildings often guzzle energy thanks to their demanding cooling and heating requirements. Over the years, a number of fixes for this problem have been attempted, including smart glass solutions that allow users to modify the transparency of the window. The problem with this solution, however, is that smart glass is unable to block infrared (heat) transmission without ruining the very thing that makes glass attractive in the first place: its transparency to visible light.
That conundrum may soon be a thing of the past, though. As reported by Phys.org, a team of researchers at the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a new smart window technology that allows users to selectively control the transmission of light and heat to suit their requirements.
Terreform ONE: Hackerspace + Bio Design - This lecture will discuss Terreform ONE, a non-profit design group that promotes smart design in cities. Through intensive projects, the group aims to illuminate the environmental possibilities of New York City and inspire solutions in similar areas globally. The group develops solutions for local sustainability in energy, transportation, infrastructure, buildings, waste treatment, food, and water. These solutions are derived from the interface of design, computation and synthetic biology.
Cloisters at University of Glasgow (courtesy of People Make Glasgow)
At its 2017 Annual International Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, SAH will offer a total of 36 paper sessions. The Society invites its members, including graduate students and independent scholars, representatives of SAH chapters, and partner organizations, to chair a session at the conference. As SAH membership is required to chair or present research at the Annual International Conference, non-members who wish to chair a session will be required to join SAH at the time of submitting a session proposal.
Poster: 'Flower of Life' International Student Competition for Garden Design
Imagine future cities full of gardens with flower carpets, full of playing children, humming bees and fluttering butterflies. Gardens that help to create a healthy environment, cool cities, collect rainwater and are adapted to the local climate.
Architecture students and designers are called to define the home of the future under the theme ‘Living Tomorrow’. This is an idea-based challenge and seeks for conceptually sound proposals. The site can be of any size or form but limited to the Zimbabwean future context.
In collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Cal Poly LA Metro Program in Architecture and Urban Design, Caroline Bos, co-founder and Principal Urban Planner of UNStudio (www.unstudio.com), will speak about recent architectural, infrastructural and masterplan projects carried out by UNStudio. She will also introduce UNStudio’s Urban Unit and the approach to knowledge sharing recently adopted by the practice to enable the development, application and dissemination of practice related research.
An architecture lecture series society at the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture and the Built Environment in Aberdeen, Scotland. The society, 57°10, has been running for 27 years and invites guest lecturers to the school to talk about the ideas and projects explored by their practices. The society prides itself in being student led; providing lectures that will in turn inspire our future architects, perhaps on topics out-with the discourse of the school.
Stanley Tigerman will discuss his 2015 New Titanic along with the opening of a special exhibit that includes a selection of past and recent work featuring the 1978 “Titanic” photomontage.
Monuments are deliberate gestures—objects or structures created to commemorate an event, person or era. Their meaning is usually imposed, and they often serve as focal points for aspirational civic and political attributes like valor and sacrifice, or to underscore a foundational political narrative. But their meaning can transform, changing over time as the relevance of their symbolism ebbs and flows due to social and political shifts. Like monuments, architecture and photography are also inflected with a grace of intention, and both have the ability to commemorate or represent a nation, event, time or place. The act of photographing monuments and buildings transforms them, sometimes revealing some of the original qualities and more closely evoking the response that they were originally intended to have. And photographs have an inherent memorial quality. This group exhibition examines the work of international artists, some of whose work addresses actual monuments, some whom look at architecture and its relationship to memory and how its importance and symbolism can shift over time, and others approach the idea of the future monument.
'Next year sees the opening of Habitat III, the environmental congress held every twenty years by the United Nations. For this event, a manifesto is being prepared about the design of cities. It aims to replace the guidance given by Le Corbusier and others nearly a century ago, in document they called "The Charter of Athens." The new Charter of Athens addresses issues emerging in the 21st Century about environmental crises, the uses of technology and big data, and the challenge of social inclusion. The lecture serves as an introduction to this modest proposal.'
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Georgy G. Nissky En route, 1958-1964 The Institute of Russian Realist Art
Institute of Russian Realist Art in participation with the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, the “Academia Arco” International Fund, The Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism of the Italian Republic, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Italian Embassy in Moscow, the Ingosstrakh insurance company, Promsvyazbank and Lomonosov Moscow State University present the exhibition Russia on the Road. 1920 – 1990, which is dedicated to theme of transport, one of the most important themes for the artists of XX century.
