Sou Fujimoto’s House of Hungarian Music, a contemporary cultural landmark dedicated to music in Budapest's City Park has officially opened its doors to the public. Considered as one of the most anticipated buildings of the year, the project is nestled within the park's trees, and is designed as an extension of its natural setting through uninterrupted glass volumes and a perforated roof structure. The museum offers a unique artistic experience combining landscape, architecture, and exhibition design, all dedicated to the creation of music and sound.
Helsinki seeks to transform the Makasiiniranta area into an extension of its pedestrian city centre through a competition that will reshape a significant part of its maritime façade. The two-phase competition has shortlisted nine international groups whose proposals were made available for public feedback under anonymity. As most of the former industrial areas of the city have been redeveloped, Makasiinirantais is the last part of the old harbour waiting to undergo transformation and the most significant one, as it is considered a nationally valuable environment.
One of the most famous series of numbers in history, the Fibonacci sequence was published by Leonardo of Pisa in 1202 in the "Liber Abaci", the "Book of Calculus". The famous sequence of numbers became known as the "secret code of nature" and can be seen in the natural world in several cases. But, after all, how does this sequence relate to architecture?
Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong. Image Courtesy of 'City of Darkness Revisited’
Cities are growing, and they are growing upwards. This is far from just being a contemporary phenomenon of course – for more than a century, high-rises have been an integral part of urban settlements worldwide. This growing of cities encompasses a complex web of processes – advancements in transport links, urbanisation, and migration to mention a few. This growth of cities, however, is all too often linked with governmental failure to adequately support all facets of the urban population. Informal settlements are then born – people carving out spaces for themselves to live amidst a lack of state support.
Boating on The Lake in the northern reaches of Central Park. Image Courtesy of Harry Gillen on Unsplash
As temperatures rise across the globe with no sign of slowing down, the parks of the future will be subjected to droughts, flooding, punishing heat, and more abundant snowfall as warmer air is capable of holding more moisture than colder air. (It’s often said the world of the future will be wetter and wilder for that exact reason.)
So how can urban parks harden themselves for the coming decades? The Central Park Conservancy, the Yale School of the Environment, and the Natural Areas Conservancy have teamed up to turn New York City’s most iconic park into a hub for studying climate change adaptation and potential mitigation strategies. The Central Park Climate Lab was announced on January 12 by the conservancy, and the insights gleaned from the program will expand to other parks across New York city and eventually, other parks across the country.
In a building industry where topics such as quality and sustainability are high on the agenda amongst the leading players, the contract team at BoConcept London is gaining traction.
In Brazil, urban problems associated with urban growth and poverty, driven particularly by the informality of land occupation and the precariousness of infrastructure and urban services, have proved to be an insurmountable challenge for public authorities.
Despite past efforts, low-income housing access has largely been achieved through self-built housing and the relaxed enforcement of land subdivision, use, and occupation regulations.
Transparent media allow light to pass through without dispersing it. Translucent materials, on the other hand, allow light to pass through in an irregular manner; because a portion of the light disperses, they prevent us from seeing through them with total clarity. Translucent surfaces act as veils, revealing without exposing, and literally blurring the boundary between interior and exterior. This effect is widely utilized in architectural design. From the signature facades of Steven Holl to the Moreira Salles Institute (IMS) in São Paulo, as well as many other examples in global architecture, this translucency can be achieved through specialty glass, acrylics, or other plastics. However, polycarbonate is a material that inherently delivers this effect, and it can be used in countless applications, from walls to skylights, and across highly diverse programs.
The Northern Hemisphere is known for its harsh winters, with sub-zero temperatures that stand in stark contrast to the Brazilian summer, often keeping people indoors and making them feel a bit down.
A Brazilian project aims to help counter this by bringing a "second sun" to Winnipeg. Selected in an international public competition, the "Sunset" installation, designed by São Paulo-based architecture firm Democratic Architects, seeks to revitalize the Canadian city during its coldest months, when average temperatures drop to minus 39 degrees.
Taiwan proposes that architecture can transform a place, and to represent this idea, the work of Sheng-Yuan Huang and his practice, Fieldoffice, were chosen for the Taiwan Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia in 2018, entitled Living with Sky, Water, and Mountain: Making Places in Yilan. Sheng-Yuan and Fieldoffice demonstrated that the notion of making places is more than building a physical space, but is equally about establishing a linkage between people, as well as people and their environment.
Alessandro Martinelli explores Sheng-Yuan and his colleagues at Fieldoffice as the avant-garde of a new architectural movement in his book, The City Beyond Architecture, which seeks to produce a new form of collective living through the lens of design and culture, touching on what the design culture of the majority of future urbanization could become. In the following, we will discuss Shen-Yuang's impact on Taiwanese architecture as he spearheaded the call to integrate and imagine public spaces that inhabited the capacity to structure a particular landscape to provide both social spaces and a sense of identity to its occupants.
Women's subway car in São Paulo. Image: Fábio Rodrigues Pozzebom/Agência Brasil
“Our cities are patriarchies written in stone, brick, glass, and concrete.” The words of British feminist geographer Jane Darke lay bare an undeniable fact: urban development across the globe has always been the work of men. In executive roles, “the majority makes choices ranging from economic policy to housing planning, from the location of schools to bus seats, without realizing how these decisions affect women, let alone worrying about it,” says Canadian Leslie Kern, a geographer with a PhD in women’s studies from York University.
The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.
A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.
This week David and Marina are joined by Jimenez Lai, Founder of Bureau Spectacular to discuss civic and infrastructural spaces in cities; collage architecture; what makes a living room, a living room?; his current project, “Citizens With No Places”; his book “Citizen of No Place”; living and studying at Taliesin West; and suburban developments.
With the aim of getting to know the architects, projects, and stories behind landmark Portuguese architecture, Sara Nunes, from the architectural film production company Building Pictures, launched the podcastNo País dos Arquitectos, where she speaks with leading figures in contemporary Portuguese architecture.
This article by Lucía de Molina Benavides and Elisa Valero Ramos was originally published under the title "La vivienda colaborativa en la era digital como proceso sostenible" [1] in issue 31 of Dearq journal on September 1, 2021 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq31.2021.03).
The article explores how the digital era has revolutionized the lives of millions of people. Today, technological development is visibly affecting the social sustainability of cities through issues such as exclusion, individualism, and gentrification. Conversely, when applied transversally, this technology can foster inclusion, diversity, and a sense of community. This article addresses collaborative housing, understood as a participatory process that extends beyond the design and construction phases into the management and use of spaces, enhancing social sustainability through digital technologies.
https://www.archdaily.com/1128300/collaborative-housing-in-the-digital-age-as-a-sustainable-processLucía de Molina Benavides y Elisa Valero Ramos
For the third time since its founding in 2002, Colombia will host the Latin American Social Workshop for Architecture Students under the name 'Tejiendo Paisajes: TSL Manizales 2022'—the first edition of the event since the onset of the pandemic.
Videos
The Digital Twin . Image via Shutterstock/Videoflow
The emergence of the Digital Twin phenomenon has heralded a great change in terms of urban planning. It essentially presents the city as dynamic, in virtual form. Ensuring every element from the historic fabric, new construction, and public transit is accounted for in one three-dimensional model. Not only does it present key elements in terms of the landscape, but it also encompasses often overlooked conditions such as the presence of light throughout the day, shadows, and the presence of vegetation and trees. All of which contribute to a better preliminary process of site analysis.
Architecture and fashion seem like unlikely bedfellows. However, in more ways than one, they are cut from the same cloth. Ancient nomadic tribes lived in shelters made of cloth and animal furs, the very same materials used for clothes. So, clothes and buildings were made from the same craftspeople. Over time, as our constructions filled the basic needs for protecting the human body, these pursuits were elevated into distinct artforms. Today, designers like Virgil Abloh, formally trained as an architect, stitch the two pursuits back together with shows that reference designs by Mies van der Rohe, or jackets filled with puffy 3D buildings. Fashion retail environments also bring space and clothes together, often in thoughtful and interesting ways. This video looks at the history of architecture and fashion and visits a fashion retail store in Chicago called Notre, designed by Norman Kelley.
When we think of an architecture firm, what typically comes to mind is the design and development of projects of varying complexity and scale, traditionally associated with lived space—whether designed for residential, commercial, or institutional purposes, among many other activities that characterize our urban lifestyle. Consequently, encountering a portfolio that simultaneously features residences, nautical equipment, public transit systems, and small appliances—such as ceiling fans, air purifiers, and citrus juicers—can elicit a certain surprise.
This week's curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights conceptual works, competition entries and projects in different stages of development submitted by the ArchDaily community. From a village made of 3D-printed cacao waste for a chocolate manufacturer in Ecuador, the transformation of a shopping centre in Ontario into a sustainable and walkable neighbourhood, to the refurbishment and redevelopment of Brutalist estates in London, the following projects illustrate a wide array of design approaches shaping the built environment.
This week's selection of unbuilt projects highlights worldwide interventions addressing a range of highly-relevant topics, such as circular construction, the adoption of sustainable materials, biodiversity, urban redevelopment of obsolete infrastructure or adaptive reuse and the reconsideration of the existing building stock.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Museum of Architecture (MoA) have launched a competition to find three exceptional designs to create three treehouses across RBG Kew's UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of a larger ‘Treehouses at Kew’ Exhibition.
‘Treehouses at Kew’ will be Kew’s main exhibition running from April to October 2023, and provide one of the most unmissable visitor experiences of the 2023 London cultural calendar.
Following California's Covid-19 health regulations in early 2020, Metro, the Los Angeles public transit agency stopped collecting fares on its busses as a safety precaution measure. However, the company's decision turned into the United States' biggest free-transit experiment, as ridership never dipped below 50 percent, even with the stay-at-home orders enforced by the government. Following 22 months of the decision and around 281 million fare-free transits, the company has decided to restart collecting fares, but is planning on using the information gathered throughout these two years to implement future improvements and introduce other free or reduced-fare programs in the city.
Founded by the architect and professor Angelo Bucci, spbr arquitetos works in different scales of construction of buildings with a distinct and particular language in its works. Its projects are the result of an intense exercise in architectural thinking, combined with the use of drawing as a tool for dialogue between architects and clients.
The "Casa de los Milagros" (House of Miracles), located in the cloudy forest on the outskirts of Xalapa, Veracruz and designed by Mexican architect Danilo Veras Godoy, is a space conceived with organic forms, earth, unexpectedly shaped openings and mosaic glass in different shades. It was designed to meet the needs of Rosalinda Ulloa, a single mother who would live there with her two young children. It was built in stages, starting in 1995, and was completed in 2002, with some changes being made between then and 2006.
There is so much more to know about architects and their projects when you begin to learn the stories behind their work. When you know where and how they draw their inspiration from and how an idea becomes a reality that you can touch, feel and experience, you get a better idea of why the project ended up the way it did.
Together with photographer Marc Goodwin, as part of his project Atlas of Architectural Atmospheres this time in the city of Berlin, we had the opportunity to meet with German architect Christoph Hesse, of Christoph Hesse Architects, based in Korbach and Berlin, and we spoke about all these things that make up his idea of architecture and his work. Meeting a creator on their own workspace is also an added value; we went through different projects while looking at the physical models and the narrative of his work became a beautiful story about a place, a countryside town in Germany, its people, and their lives, and a sustainable future in nature.
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