Produce personalized presentation boards that distill complex concepts into simple visual representations with a few helpful tools and effects.

In residential architecture, there have always been central, indispensable spaces and peripheral spaces more easy to ignore. When designing a home, the task of the architect is essentially to configure, connect, and integrate different functions in the most efficient way possible, necessarily prioritizing some spaces over others. And although today many are designing in ways that are increasingly fluid and indeterminate, we could say that the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen are the fundamental nucleus of every house, facilitating rest, food preparation, and personal hygiene. Then meeting spaces and other service areas appear, and with them lobbies, corridors, and stairs to connect them. Each space guides new functions, allowing its inhabitants to perform them in an easier and more comfortable way.

However, fewer square meters in the bathroom could mean more space for the living room. Or, eliminating some seemingly expendable spaces could give more room for more important needs. In an overpopulated world with increasingly dense cities, what functions have we been discarding to give more space to the essentials? Here, we analyze the case of the laundry room, which is often reduced and integrated into other areas of the house to give space for other functions.

“BEFORE/AFTER” documents the drastic changes, both physical and psychological, which took place during the renovation of Beijing’s Fangjia Hutong in the months between April and September 2017. In 2019, OPEN Architecture was invited to participate in “Unknown City: China Contemporary Architecture and Image Exhibition”, the opening exhibition of the Pingshan Art Museum, with their work “BEFORE/AFTER”.

Videos

+ 32

Rojkind Arquitectos has revealed a "mourning claim" memorial proposal for coronavirus victims. The design project led by Michel Rojkind, Arturo Ortíz Struck, and Diego Díaz Lezama has initially envisioned the memorial both in New York City's Times Square and Mexico City's Zocalo.

"We are claiming the act of mourning. We can at least take care of that, of building symbols where we can place the testimony of our life and the lives of others," stated the authors.

For the first Future Architecture Room, Lisbon Architecture Triennale will feature its home, the Palácio Sinel de Cordes, where the groundwork for the festival takes places, where shows and events are hosted, and where friends are welcomed.

Viewers are invited to hear stories about the building's spaces; of varying episodes and incidents that took place in the many rooms of the Palace. Past and present experiences – epic, dramatic, happy and uncanny – will unfold in this series of short films, creating a multi-dimensions exploration of a truly remarkable building.

The Estonian Centre for Architecture has announced “Edible. Or, the Architecture of Metabolism” as the topic for the next Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2022 (TAB 2022), while the selected head curators are architects Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou in collaboration with co-curator Ivan Sergejev.

The new Garage Screen cinema designed by SNKH Architects was just unveiled in Moscow. The winning project of the second Garage museum of contemporary art competition for the design of a pop-up summer cinema “resembles an inverted Bedouin tent”. Selected out of 136 submissions from Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia, the intervention is not instantly recognizable as a cinema, reinventing the usual design.

+ 1

OMA / Shohei Shigematsu has revealed images of the new iconic Tiffany & Co. Fifth Avenue Flagship Store. In progress and scheduled for the spring of 2022, the intervention “reimagines the retail experience while preserving the historic identity of the original building”.

Architecture and research firm rat[LAB] Studio and Shilpa Architects have designed a new temple in Koppur that reinterprets India's vernacular through parametric design. Called the Shirdi Sai Baba Temple, the project is located on the outskirts of Chennai on an 11 acre site at the epicenter of a 338 acre masterplan. The design features an 11 sided polygon (hendecagon), articulated as a three-dimensional polyhedron.

+ 19

In the dome of the Pantheon in Rome, several construction techniques were used to allow such a bold construction to stand. One concerns the composition of the concrete (in this case, non-reinforced concrete) with different densities throughout the structure. Closer to the top, lighter stones were used in the mixture, reducing the dome's weight retaining the solidity of the base. Another technique was the inclusion of “coffers”, which are nothing more than subtractions in the concrete, reducing the weight of the dome while maintaining a cross section sufficiently robust to support its own weight. Built almost 1,900 years ago, this building still surprises us with the genius of the solutions. Using a quantity of materials just high enough to fulfill its primary function, and creating intelligent structures as a result, is just one of the lessons that this building provides.

Skateboarding is its own urban experience. As interactive public spaces and tactile surfaces, skate parks have slowly begun to shape the way we think about urban design. Beyond the boundary of parks themselves, skaters look at the architecture of the built environment outside of its intended purpose, and in turn, are rethinking how we gather, move around, and reimagine the future of urban life.

+ 7

New Generations is a European platform that analyses the most innovative emerging practices at the European level, providing a new space for the exchange of knowledge and confrontation, theory, and production. Since 2013, New Generations has involved more than 300 practices in a diverse program of cultural activities, such as festivals, exhibitions, open calls, video-interviews, workshops, and experimental formats.

You have only to look at Miguel De Guzmán and Rocío Romero's portfolio to know that the duo have succeeded in capturing a wide array of panoramas and sharing the ideas attached to them. Through their Madrid and New York based photography and film studio, Imagen Subliminal, document the latest happenings in the world of architecture in an effort to give their audience a taste of the energy and creativity that drives it.

We sat down with the duo in honor World Photography Day, where they shared how their work has changed through the years and photography's contemporary and future role in architecture.  

+ 34

In Yucatan, architects are reviving an ancient Mayan stucco technique for contemporary buildings, merging modern architecture with regional history and culture. The technique is called “chukum,” a term derived from the colloquial name for the Havardia albicans tree native to Mexico. Made with chukum tree bark, the material has several defining qualities that separate it from traditional stucco, including impermeable properties and a natural earthy color. Though chukum initially fell out of use following Spanish conquest of the Maya civilization, it was rediscovered and reemployed by Salvador Reyes Rios of the architecture firm Reyes Rios + Larrain Arquitectos in the late 1990’s, initiating a resurgence of use in the area.

Van Alen and the New York City Council have announced the winners for the “Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge” international competition. The winning design in the Professional category is Brooklyn Bridge Forest by a multidisciplinary team including Pilot Projects Design Collective, Cities4Forests, Wildlife Conservation Society, Grimshaw, and Silman; while the winning design in the Young Adult category is Do Look Down by Shannon Hui, Kwans Kim, and Yujin Kim; Hong Kong, Bay Area, CA, and New York.

+ 3

The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) has launched Destination Architect, a new educational STEAM resource for aspiring architects. The campaign is designed to raise awareness of the architect’s role and how to earn an architecture license through a video-based format. The resource also highlights data-driven tips to help shorten the path to licensure.

In the world of architectural design and construction, Revit BIM has become key software that helps simplify building design and analysis processes. As a collaborative work methodology for project generation and management, it enables architects and engineers to design with modeling elements and parametric drawings by using smart 3D objects.

The Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Niguel, California—better known to locals as the “Ziggurat” for obvious reasons—is reportedly at risk of demolition. The six-story, one-million-square-foot government services building is on the chopping block as the U.S. Public Buildings Reform Board, responsible for unloading federal facilities, will likely sell the structure as early as next year.

Ever since Hashim Sarkis introduced How Will We Live Together? as the theme of Venice Biennale 2020 (now 2021), the central question has become more relevant than ever.

Robotic automation has been widely adopted by the manufacturing industry for decades. Most automotive vehicles, consumer electrical appliances, and even domestic robots were made and assembled by “armies” of robots with minimal human supervision. Robotic automation brings higher production efficiency, a safer working environment, lower costs and superior quality. After years of development and deployment, the process now requires minimal human involvement.