This article was originally published on Common Edge.
There are extraordinary connections between the natural world and the capacity for creativity in human beings. In his book Last Child in the Woods, journalist and author Richard Louv observes: “Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses. Given a chance, a child will bring the confusion of the world to the woods, wash it in a creek, turn it over to see what lives on the unseen side of that confusion.” He concludes that in nature, “a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.” The architect Frank Harmon likewise wrote touchingly about the outdoors, woods, and water as perfect settings for cultivating a thirst for learning and discovery: “Children raised by creeks are never bored. Creek children don’t know about learning by rote, neither are they conditioned to working nine to five. Berries are their first discoveries, and birds’ nests, and watching the stars come out. Later they discover books. To creek children, learning is discovery, not instruction.”
Despite being the smallest rooms of houses, bathrooms have always been one of the most challenging and critical to design, which often left them fairly simplified. The past few years, however, saw these spaces undergo significant change; what was once only limited to functionality, ease of maintenance, and privacy, is now being given a strong character with pops of color, classic fixtures, and patterned surfaces. Similarly for public bathrooms, where "functionality" and "ease of maintenance" are now complimented with aesthetics, technology, and high quality finishing. In this interior focus, we explore the three main bathroom typologies used in residential projects, and look at how architects have employed them through 12 examples.
Cross-laminated timber (CLT) has been dubbed the concrete of the future. As a highly resilient form of engineered wood made by gluing layers of solid-sawn lumber together, CLT is reshaping how we understand architecture and design today. As a material with a high degree of flexibility, CLT has to undergo great deformations to break and collapse, unlike concrete. In turn, it's a material chosen for its warmth and natural properties.
Just as the colors of an abstract painting or photograph can produce a certain mood, so can the colors of a building or room profoundly influence how the people using it feel. Physiologically, study after study has shown that blue light slows the production of melatonin, keeping people more alert or awake even at night. Psychologically, people associate certain colors with certain feelings due to cultural symbols and lived experiences – for example, they might perceive the color red as menacing or frightening because of its connection to blood.
Altogether, the way a room is colored can have complex effects on how its users feel, while a façade can be perceived in dramatically different ways depending on how it is colored. Below, we summarize the emotional associations of every color, assessing their differing effects as each is used in architectural space.
Residential architecture is one of the most popular categories among our readers. In 2021 we published more than 3,800 projects, featuring houses from different regions of the world and offering a variety of solutions, materials, contexts, environments, scales, and typologies. Providing a broad source of inspiration for those seeking references for their own residential project.
Kiribati has a population of around 110,000 people and its economy is centered on fishing and agriculture. Comprised of 33 islands in the Central Pacific, its highest point is only 81 meters above sea level, which makes it potentially the first country that could disappear completely due to global warming and the consequent rise in sea levels. The climate crisis has been a hotly debated topic in recent years and terms such as carbon footprint, greenhouse effect, atmospheric aerosols, and many others, are already staples in our vocabulary. Another widely spoken term is “net zero”, or net zero emission, used as a goal for buildings in different industries and countries. Basically, it means that the energy balance is zero.
Yuval Noah Harari points out that, around 300 thousand years ago, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and ancestors of Homo sapiens already used fire daily. According to the author of the international bestseller “Sapiens,” fire created the first significant gap between man and other animals. "By domesticating fire, humans gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force." Some scholars even believe that there is a direct relationship between the advent of the habit of cooking food (possibly due to the domestication of fire) and the shortening of the intestinal tract and growth of the human brain, which allowed human beings to develop and create everything we now have.
