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

Japan-based Moriyuki Ochiai Architects have designed a cluster of tea rooms located in a rural area known as Bisei, in the Okayama Prefecture. This town is known as both the place where green tea was introduced to Japan and as a "sanctuary for stargazing", which inspired the firm's design to create a strong connection between the tea rooms and the surrounding scenery.

As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage we present Public Without Rhetoric the proposal for the Portuguese Pavilion. Below, curators Nuno Brandão Costa and Sérgio Mah describe their contribution in their own words.

Public Without Rhetoric is the project selected to represent Portugal at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The curators Nuno Brandão Costa and Sérgio Mah propose a tour of the “Public Building” of Portuguese origin through 12 works created at a time when Western Europe is confronted with its limits and possibilities and as architecture manifests its nonconformist nature in reinforcing its role in political and social intervention.

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Conversatorio FA is a project born out of the desire to create a space for reflection on contemporary thought, aiming to foster a dialogue enriched by diverse perspectives within these very spaces. It seeks to reclaim various spaces and generate new questions and inquiries through critical and pluralistic thinking in open university areas, fostering democratic dialogue on topics chosen based on student interests.

The structure of Conversatorio FA seeks to bring external guests closer to the community, establishing connections and raising new questions about the future of the profession. Past guests have included renowned figures such as Alberto Pérez Gómez, Néstor García Canclini, and, most recently, Carlos Amorales. As part of its eighth edition, an event was held focusing on gender perspective in architecture. It featured Argentine architect Inés Moisset, coordinator of the project "Un día, una arquitecta," and Zaida Muxí, author of several publications on gender perspectives and co-director of the Master's Laboratory of 21st Century Housing at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

International master planning and architecture specialists, Benoy won the bid for Shanghai's 367,000 square meters Yuqiao Science Innovation Centre. This technological hub will work towards Shanghai's goal to be a world-class city by 2040.

Videos

This project emerged during the summer of 2015, when CHOPEkE Collective, together with Paúl Pérez, a seminarian and active member of the group, visited the community of Santa Luisa de Marillac, located in the central periphery of Ciudad Juárez. At the time, members of the community had an "unworthy" space -as they called it- for their meetings and spiritual activities.

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IND Architects has plans to transform the symbolic Shcherbinka water tower in Moscow, Russia into a revitalized area for residents to socialize. Since the water tower has been only slightly altered over time with the overall form and silhouette remaining the same, the design team has decided to create a place that will both aim to recall old memories and create new ones.

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Videos

Andrés Arochi directed a video that portrays dancing bodies experiencing the space of the Luis Barragán House and Studio, a site in Mexico City famous for the introspective quality of its gardens and the characteristic mysticism of the Mexican architect. Regarding the video Dancing through the Architecture of Luis Barragán, Arochi comments:

When we started recording, the magic began to happen. Light burst through the window and the dancers' bodies began to flow in an unexpected way.

Not many architects will come across the challenge of building in outer space, but who knows what the future will hold... asteroid mining and space photobioreactors? In a recent article, Metropolis Magazine looks into the design of the International Space Station, examining how our conventional rules of architecture become obsolete in zero gravity. Walls, ceilings, and floors can be interchangeable, and "form follows function" is taken to the extreme.

2018 marks 20 years since construction first began on the International Space Station. The satellite is made up of 34 separate pieces, each of which was either delivered by space shuttle or self-propelled into space. With absolutely no room for error, the 13-year construction of the space station was perhaps one of the big success stories of the millennium, seeing 230 astronauts, cosmonauts and space-tourists visit over the past two decades.

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The well-known saying “all roads lead to Rome” seems to be true--at least, that’s what Moovel Lab, a team from Stuttgart dedicated to urban mobility research, points out. Titled "Roads to Rome," the project has mapped out over-land routes across Europe that converge to the city.

From a grid of 26,503,452 square kilometers covering all of Europe, the researchers defined 486,713 starting points that were superimposed on the continent's street map. Then an algorithm was developed for the project that calculated the shortest route between each of the points and the Italian capital. 

The tragedy of the fire and collapse of the Wilton Paes de Almeida building in downtown São Paulo prompts this statement from the Council of Architecture and Urbanism of Brazil on the social and urban challenges affecting not only the state capital but most of the country's major cities.

At the core of this tragedy is the social drama of the victims' families and the thousands of people living in other occupied buildings under precarious conditions across major Brazilian urban centers. The loss of a modernist building of cultural value adds another layer of loss.      

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