The first wooden housing modules of Juf Nienke, a new circular prefabricated timber housing project by SeARCH, RAU, and DS landscape architects, has been installed in Amsterdam. The project will feature 61 rental homes made entirely of wood, and will sit at the entrance of Centrumeiland, a newly raised piece of land on Lake IJmeer that features 1500 housing units. It is set to be one of the most sustainable apartment buildings in the Netherlands, incorporating an innovative cross-laminated timber construction and utilizing recycled materials.
Pink Floyd's song “Another brick in the wall” criticizes an alienating and demotivating educational system. People, or children, are portrayed as bricks due to their homogeneity, whether in the way of living or thinking in a society that is not very fond of opposition. Bricks work very well in this comparison, having changed very little throughout history and around the world in their rectangular shapes. But that's not true of their colors. Although we tend to think of red when we talk about bricks, there are infinite possibilities of shades, depending on the composition and manufacturing process of the pieces.
Although the use of arches in architecture dates back to the 2nd millennium B.C., it was the Romans who solidified them as both an engineering element and a symbol of military victories, which we now see excessively as memorial arches. Shortly after, different civilizations and cultures adopted the arch for their own purposes, bridging together structural necessity and aesthetics. In this article, we look at how arches evolved from significant structural elements to captivating decorative details.
Last year’s granting of the Mies van der Rohe Award to a social housing refurbishment project brought into the spotlight a topic of interest for many European cities: the moral and physical rehabilitation of post-war housing blocks.
Because, for all the inspirational works across the world, we would be lost without the photographers dedicated to sharing this inspiration with us. Here we present to you the 50 most influential architectural photographs of the year.
Offices and cultural buildings both offer the perfect opportunity to design the atrium of your dreams. These central spaces, designed to allow serendipitous meetings of users or to help with orientation in the building, are spacious and offer a lot of design freedom. Imposing scales, sculptural stairs, eccentric materials, and indoor vegetation are just some of the resources used to give life to these spaces. To help you with your design ideas, below we have gathered a selection of 15 notable atriums and their section drawings.
