Carlo Ratti has been announced as Chief Curator for the 2019 Shenzhen Bi-City Biennial of Urbanism/Architecture. He will join Academic Curators Politecnico di Torino and South China University to critically explore the impact of artificial intelligence on communities and urban space.

The team will investigate “how our relationship with the city might change when buildings become able to respond to our presence.” Ratti’s expertise in the area of future technology and artificial intelligence is reflected in his role within the MIT Senseable City Lab, whose experiments propagate future scenarios for the built environment.

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Haysom Ward Miller's Lochside House in the West Highlands has been named RIBA House of the Year 2018. The annual accolade is given by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) to the UK’s best new architect-designed house. Lochside House was revealed as the winner in the final episode of a special Channel 4 series Grand Designs: House of the Year. The award-winning project was designed as a modest, sustainable home for a ceramic artist on the edge of a Scottish lake.

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Videos

We all have that childhood memory of drawing a little house with a door and a window, a gabled roof, and a tree. But what sets architects apart from the rest of the population is that we continue to draw this after childhood, usually with a bit more technique. And just as our residential designs were becoming more complex and complete, the design of our trees needed to improve a bit as well (that broccoli-like shape would not please customers and teachers alike.) Although generally, trees are not the main focus of drawings, they play an important role in the composition of sketches, mainly to represent the scale, intended shading, or some intention of landscaping.

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The 6th International LafargeHolcim Forum for Sustainable Construction will be hosted by the American University in Cairo from April 4 to 6, 2019. The LafargeHolcim Forum is dedicated to the topic of “Re-materializing Construction.” Keynote speeches, workshops and site visits will focus on strategies to reduce consumption throughout the material cycle from extraction to processing, transport, installation, maintenance, and removal.

The Forum pursues the question of how the building and construction industry can adapt to be leaner: with a smaller ecological footprint and not driven by the pretense of infinitely available raw materials. Hence, the Forum seeks to suggest radical solutions in the use of building materials.

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Planning can, on occasion, feel Sisyphean. Emerging technologies, shifting economies, and changing governments can all enact dramatic and unpredictable change in short order. So what’s the use of planning for the future, let alone planning for a future nearly half a century away?

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Following an extensive day of presentations, panels, critiques, and talks The World Architecture Festival (WAF) has announced the Day 1 category winners in their 2018 programming. Winners are recognized in over 35 categories over the first two days of the conference, which culminates with the announcement of the World Building of the Year 2018 on the third and final day of the conference.

While still early days, the world’s largest architectural award program, the WAF Awards is poised for its biggest year yet, with a total of 535 shortlisted projects from 57 countries across the world.