Reports indicate BIG will design the Washington Redskins new stadium. Details have yet to be released, however according to Sports Business Daily the practice's head of communications, Daria Pahhota confirmed BIG is working on an NFL stadium. The Redskins currently play at the 80,000-seat FedEx Field in Maryland; it is said that they are considering moving back to Washington DC or relocating to Virginia.
In November, the Architectural Review concluded its search for this year's most promising young designers, awarding a total of 15 projects in its annual Emerging Architecture Awards. Selected by a jury comprising David Adjaye, Peter Cook and Odile Decq alongside AR Editor Christine Murray, these 15 projects included just one firm from China: WAA (We Architect Anonymous), whose Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) was commended by the judges. In this article, former associate member of Archigram Colin Fournier reviews the awarded building, showing an appreciation of WAA's work equal to - or perhaps even greater than - the award's jury.
This contemporary art museum is not what it seems. It appears, at first, to be a fairly familiar manifestation of the contemporary architectural discourse, and indeed the striking fluidity of its lines and its impressive mastery of parametrically-enabled tectonics as well as GRC technology put it on a par with recent buildings by Zaha Hadid or MAD, but this first impression is somewhat deceptive: the building is, in fact, refreshingly unique and a radical point of departure from the dominant design ideology of our times, a significant rupture from the orthodoxy. And a very promising one.
A new construction worker has been lending high-efficiency help to job sites, laying bricks at almost three times the speed of a human worker. SAM (short for Semi-Automated Mason) is a robotic bricklayer that handles the repetitive tasks of basic brick laying, MIT Technology Review reports. While SAM handles picking up bricks, applying mortar and placing them at designated locations, its human partner handles worksite setup, laying bricks in specific areas (e.g. corners) and improving the aesthetic quality of the masonry.
Collaborating with Man Made Land, Knippers Helbig and Mafeu Architektur Consulting, COBE Berlin has received 1st prize in an international competition to design Berlin’s “Urbane Mitte am Gleisdreieck,” a master plan located at the gateway to Gleisdreieck Park in Berlin, Germany.
Ian Martin is an Emmy award-winning comedy writer who has been part of the architectural writing establishment since, it feels, time immemorial (which, in this case, is 1990). His satirical column in the British weekly Architects' Journal provides a spread that every reader looks forward to and now, after accumulating over a quarter of a century's writing, is crowdfunding to compile a compendium entitled Epic Space.
"All we need now are a new generation of Martian architects to design buildings made of Martian concrete that will be suitable structures for humans to live and work in," concludes the MIT Technology Review in their report on a new type of concrete designed for use on Mars.
Developed by scientists led by Lin Wan at Northwestern University, this "Martian concrete" is just one of many scientific developments that will be required for the increasingly popular goal of sending humans to, and eventually colonizing, the Red Planet (apparently the un-colonized Moon is already old hat - just ask Matt Damon).
When comparing 44 major cities, Arcadis' 2016 International Construction Costs Index has found New York to be the world's most expensive city to build in. London came in as a close second, reporting cost of building prices (on average) 20 percent higher than Paris. In contrast, Taipei was labeled as the "cheapest" city for construction. According to the study, "strong currencies and significant resource constraints" were a result in higher prices. Read on for the complete lists of most expensive, and least expensive, cities for construction.
