+ 36

The barn, closely related in nature to silos and sheds, is an essential building typology in rural and agricultural landscapes. Featuring highly simple and functional design solutions, barns serve specifically as storage spaces for large volumes of livestock feed and are commonly characterized by high ceilings, generous spans, and relative spatial flexibility, protecting hay and grain from the sun, rain, moisture, and animals.

+ 36

Similar in nature to silos and granaries, the barn is an essential building typology within agricultural storage processes. Their designs are typically simple and functional. Serving specifically as facilities to store large volumes of raw materials, they are characterized by high ceilings, wide spans, and relative flexibility. These structures protect agricultural products—such as cereals, fruits, grains, straw, and hay—from the sun, rain, moisture, and pests.

Videos

The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) is launching a new online course via the edX platform, focusing on the design possibilities of underground architecture in our cities. The course provides the fundamental skills necessary for conceptualizing underground architectural projects.

Joining instructors Richard Nguyen, Ignacio Ferrer Rizzo, and Juan Fernández Andrino is architect Dominique Perrault, who founded SubLab in 2013—a platform at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne dedicated to researching the subterranean layers of our cities.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) has announced Jingru (Cyan) Cheng as the recipient of the 2023 Wheelwright Prize, a study grant created to support globally-minded research and investigative approaches to contemporary architecture. The winning research project, titled “Tracing Sand: Phantom Territories, Bodies Adrift,” delves into the multifaceted impacts of sand mining and reclamation, understood from cultural, economic, and ecological perspectives. The unassuming material has become an indispensable element for our built environment and human communities, serving as a vital component in the production of glass, concrete, asphalt roads, and artificial land. Yet the process of dredging underwater systems and sand mining leads to the disruption of habitats in a process that simultaneously shapes one habitat while devastating another.

+ 15

+ 11

+ 17

+ 21

+ 26

+ 13

+ 17

+ 20

On the banks of the river Seine, just east of the Île de la Cité and downtown Paris, stand the four glittering towers of the National Library of France. Bent around the outskirts of a public esplanade, these towers are Dominique Perrault’s modern take on the age-old Parisian tradition of monumental public architecture. The project is both volume and void, enclosure and exposure, a juxtaposition of contrasting ideas that is as reverent of its place in a thousand-year-old legacy as it is deliberately self-critical.

+ 30