How to visualize architectural concepts in SketchUp using D5 Lite for faster design exploration.

As walls and slabs, furniture may delimit and define a space. However, opposite to constructive elements, which distinguish the rooms in a more permanent way, furniture may create useful boundaries between one space and another in an easily adaptable way.

To disseminate the history of Argentina's socially-grounded popular architecture, Moderna Buenos Aires - CPAU presents the documentary “Movimiento Nac&Pop”, a film that compiles testimonies from various Argentine architects—including Jorge Moscato, Alfredo Garay, Rodolfo Sorondo, Jorge Hampton, Emilio Rivoira, Roberto Frangella, and Mario Sabugo—who formed the collective known as Nac&Pop. This professional group emerged during the final years of the military dictatorship, fueled by democratic fervor, and was responsible for, among other achievements, driving the transformation of Palermo Viejo and designing the master plan for Puerto Madero.

Grimshaw and Little Diversified Architectural Consulting (Little) have been selected to design a new Arts Complex for Santa Monica College (SMC) in California. Aiming to create an iconic landmark building along Pico Boulevard, the complex will be made to celebrate the college's Art Department as part of the broader Santa Monica community.

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Between August and November of this year, Venice will host the 17th edition of the world's most prestigious architecture event, La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Lebanese architect and professor Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. This is also the first time Cape Verde is participating in the event, represented by architect Patrícia Anahory and visual artist César Schofield Cardoso.

In the middle of February, we were invited to visit Ljubljana and attend the Matchmaking Conference organized by Future Architecture Platform -- an organization, coordinated by Ljubljana's Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), that provides young talents with the opportunity to share their ideas -- practical or conceptual -- and meet fellow emerging architects. The three-day event gathered 25 teams from all over the world to present their projects and discuss potential collaborations.

We always appreciate the people behind great initiatives in architecture, and try to never miss the chance to share their profiles and thoughts with our readers. Future Architecture Platform is no exception -- the Leader of the great team of architects, curators, publishers, and educators, Director of MAO and architecture critic, Matevž Čelik told us about the ideas driving the Platform, challenges that emerging architects face these days, and the future of architectural education and profession.

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Henry N. Cobb, FAIA, Founding Partner of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects, has passed away at 93, in his home in Manhattan, as confirmed by Ian Bader, a partner at their architecture firm, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.

PAU or Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, a multi-disciplinary design and planning firm founded by Vishaan Chakrabarti, created a revitalization plan for Sunnyside Yard in western Queens, New York. Envisioning a more equitable and sustainable future, the 180-acre human-centered carbon-neutral master plan reflects the community’s needs.

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Venice Biennale 2020, curated by Hashim Sarkis, has been postponed and will be held from August 29th through November 29th, as announced on the event's official website.

Known primarily for his residential projects, Paraná-born architect Guilherme Torres, founder of the São Paulo-based Studio Guilherme Torres, spoke with us about his design approach, creative process, and the decisions involving active client participation.

'Cities for Play' is a project whose main objective is to inspire architects and urban planners to create stimulating, respectful, and accessible cities for children.

Natalia Krysiak, its creator, is an Australian architect who believes that children's needs should be placed at the center of urban design to ensure resilient and sustainable communities. In 2017, she produced 'Cities for Play,' studying examples of cities that are concerned with providing environments that are capable of promoting the health and well-being – physical and emotional – of children through a focus on play and "active mobility” in public spaces.

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Today, the availability of information and data has vastly expanded our ability to analyze, interpret, and understand life in our cities. In urban planning, some of the most valuable and highly sought-after data for analyzing urban mobility dynamics comes from the use of the SUBE system (the Unified Electronic Ticket System, used in Argentina to pay for public transit). By gathering this information, millions of digital footprints can be aggregated and visualized, allowing us to interpret and anticipate citizen transit behavior. This, in turn, helps us understand urban trends based on the time of day and the day of the week.

In today's world, where the urban footprint is expanding rapidly and construction costs severely impact the planet, alternative solutions have emerged that return to essential principles. During the 2020 Academic Housing Forum at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, key issues surrounding the critical housing situation in a developing country like Colombia were presented.

Pritzker Prize 2020 Laureates, Irish architects Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara are known for their powerful yet delicate approaches. In this exclusive video for ArchDaily, Martha Thorne, executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and Dean of IE School of Architecture and Design, shares some of the reasons why Grafton Architects has won the Pritzker Prize 2020.

Since 2008, the National Chamber of the Iron and Steel Industry CANACERO has joined forces with the Latin American Steel Association ALACERO through initiatives such as the ALACERO Steel Design Competition for Architecture Students and the CANACERO National Steel Award for Architecture Students, aiming to encourage the use of steel in construction among architecture students in Latin America.

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I met with Juan Alberto Andrade and Cuqui Rodríguez from the JAG Studio in Ecuador during their conference for the sixth edition of EARQ (PUCE-SI). The young couple dedicate themselves to documenting and writing about Ecuadorian architecture. By covering the now famous works of Al Borde, Daniel Moreno Flores, Natura Futura, Rama Estudio, among others, the couple have become the unofficial emissaries of their country.

We sat down with the couple for World Photography Day where they shared, not only their start in and work in photography, but the role of photography in contemporary architecture. 

The British Council has announced that curators Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler will represent the UK at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2020. Selected from a shortlist of nine proposals, the winning project entitled “The Garden of Privatised Delights”, explores the creeping epidemic of privatized public spaces across cities in the UK.

John Ronan (b. 1963, Grand Rapids, Michigan) is known for his sensual atmospheric buildings that tend to unfold layer by layer their spatial complexity, as one moves through them. His focus is on the use of materiality in ways that reinvent architecture. Ronan holds a Master of Architecture degree with distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (1991) and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Michigan (1985). He has been teaching architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology since 1992. John Ronan Architects was established in Chicago in 1999, the year Ronan won the Townhouse Revisited Competition sponsored by the Graham Foundation. In 2006, the firm was featured in the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices and the Young Chicago exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2007, the architect was selected to build the prestigious Poetry Foundation in Chicago, out of a pool of 50 international contenders. His monograph Explorations: The Architecture of John Ronan was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010. In 2016, the firm was named one of seven international finalists for the Obama Presidential Library. The following interview is a condensed version of our conversation at the architect’s studio in Chicago.

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Videos

“When you read Love in the Time of Cholera you come to realize the magic realism of South America.” Yvonne Farrell, Shelley McNamara and I were in a corner of the Barbican Centre’s sprawling, shallow atrium talking about the subject of their most recent accolade, the Royal Institute of British Architects inaugural International Prize, awarded that previous evening. That same night the two Irish architects, who founded their practice in Dublin in the 1970s, also delivered a lecture on the Universidad de Ingeniería and Tecnologia (UTEC)—their “modern-day Machu Picchu” in Lima—to a packed audience in London’s Portland Place.

A new building in Antarctica breaks ground at the Rothera Research Station. Designed by Hugh Broughton Architects, the project commissioned by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), aims to facilitate the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS) ongoing climate-related research.

The Hungarian Pavilion at the 2020 Venice Biennale will feature the work of twelve design studios that will reconsider twelve iconic modernist buildings in Budapest. For the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the pavilion's curator Dániel Kovács wants to explore the value and heritage of architectural modernism to reconcile past and future architecture.

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Architectural rendering and visualization have become crucial tools in the art of communication. From client presentations to internal design reviews, showing your 3D models in lifelike, beautiful environments can convey both practical information about the project’s development, as well as the feeling and experience of a space.

Space Saloon and Designers on Holiday have announced DeSaturated, a week-long interdisciplinary community-in-residence design festival in California's Cuyama Valley. Following the success of the first two iterations, LANDING and FIELDWORKS, the team is returning to California once more. The community-in-residence program will bring together designers, artists and researchers to address issues of water scarcity.

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With residential developments offering ever-smaller housing units, the challenge for architects and interior designers to develop compact and multifunctional solutions for interior projects increases. From this perspective, it is increasingly common for professionals to focus on their clipboards in creating new solutions for joinery and multifunctional furniture that allow the space to transform completely in a few seconds, such as strategic cabinets and bookcases to supply the lack of storage space; sliding furniture on rails or pulleys; cabinets that turn into beds through vertical rotation; drawers in stairways, etc.

This year, architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, has been granted to Grafton Architects' Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Dublin, Ireland. The 2020 Laureates, who are both educators and architects, are known for their powerful yet delicate approaches. Their contextual and modern interventions are very attentive to history, demonstrating high levels of sensitivity and craftsmanship.