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3D Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

New Orleans Architecture City Guide: 18 Sites to Empower New Generations

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Home to architectural styles spanning almost three hundred years, the is no city like New Orleans. The meld of French, Spanish, and Caribbean architectural influences, in conjunction with the demands of the hot and humid climate, has impacted the urban fabric as much as the culture itself. Located along the Mississippi River and close to the Gulf of Mexico coast, the construction of ports, NOLA’s trading history, and forceful natural phenomena like Hurricane Katrina in 2005 illustrate how water has shaped the city.

Following Hurricane Katrina, Orleans adapted its values to respond to the changing needs of its recovering community. Although reconstruction is not only architectural responsibility, New Orleans public architecture has contributed to revitalizing and reinhabiting the city after the disaster. Museums, parks, and churches, each of these places connects people to each other in ways that define and support community.

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7 Stories About NFTs Entering the Realm of Architecture

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© JOURNEE

Over the past year, NFTs have entered the realm of architecture, prompting conversations over the role of the profession in the future digital economy. From the design of digital real-estate to exhibitions and architecture events exploring its value for the practice and established architecture firms embracing the new medium, NFTs have been embraced by the profession as the promise of a new form of creative production. Discover a round-up of architecture's experiments with NFTs so far, together with a series of Archdaily articles shedding light on the topic.

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Why Every 3D Designer / Architect Can Benefit From the Creator Economy in the Metaverse

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Nike recently acquired RTFKT, a design studio that was founded in Jan 2020, and is known for its virtual “metaverse-ready sneakers and collectibles”. Metaverse land purchases are making headlines with multi-million dollar price tags. We’ve also seen mainstream adoption for NFT art this year and the sales are expected to surge to $17.7 billion by the end of 2021.

Beneath the hype and frenzy, we can spot a fundamental shift that unlocks a new creator economy. It provides the creators with direct access to the market, builds ongoing relationships with fans, and unites strangers in self-governed communities. In this article, we will discuss why every 3D designer/architect should embrace the Web 3.0 movement to adopt a new business logic and benefit from the creator economy in the metaverse?

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A 3D-Printed Majlis and Suspended Cliff Platforms: 10 Unbuilt Projects Submitted to ArchDaily

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This week’s curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights cultural structures submitted by the ArchDaily Community. From pavilions to installations, this article explores the topic of cultural urban interventions and presents approaches submitted to us from all over the world.

Featuring a pavilion nestled in the sand dunes of the Persian desert, an afrofuturistic, interactive art installation proposed for the upcoming Burning Man event, and a new take on summer cinemas in Russia, this roundup explores how architects reimagined traditional gathering places and created urban interventions in all scales. The round up also includes a collection of structures in the United Arab Emirates, United Sates of America, France, and the United Kingdom, each responding to different contexts and topographies.

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100 Best Wood Architecture Projects in the US

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Considered one of the noblest building materials - and also a favorite of many global architects - wood delivers aesthetic, structural, and practical value in the most versatile of ways. Through different techniques, such as crafted or prefabricated wood, wooden construction remains relevant not only in the history but also in the forefront of architecture and design (thanks to new technologies that have expanded its possibilities).

From temporary pavilions to single-family homes and multi-story, large-scale institutions, wood has shown its value at the same level as many other structural materials such as steel, brick, or even concrete. This is especially prominent in the United States, where renowned architects are using new techniques to advance the solutions that this material can provide. Also, new regulations are allowing architects to further explore the diversity and possibilities of building with wood.

With the help of ThinkWood, we’ve gathered 100 examples of the best wood structures in the United States.

AD Classics: Salk Institute / Louis Kahn

This article was originally published on August 27, 2017. To read the stories behind other celebrated architecture projects, visit our AD Classics section.

In 1959, Jonas Salk, the man who had discovered the vaccine for polio, approached Louis I. Kahn with a project. The city of San Diego, California had gifted him with a picturesque site in La Jolla along the Pacific coast, where Salk intended to found and build a biological research center. Salk, whose vaccine had already had a profound impact on the prevention of the disease, was adamant that the design for this new facility should explore the implications of the sciences for humanity. He also had a broader, if no less profound, directive for his chosen architect: to “create a facility worthy of a visit by Picasso.” The result was the Salk Institute, a facility lauded for both its functionality and its striking aesthetics – and the manner in which each supports the other.[1,2]

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In World's First 3-D Printed Home Community, Houses will be Built in a Day for $4000

Editor's Note: This story was originally published 27 March 2018. It was recently announced that ICON, the construction company leading the project, has successfully raised $9 million in seed funding for the project. A new video of the project is included below. 

Tech gets a bad rap for serving developed economies in the interest of money-making. It often takes a few cycles for the technologies that are truly helpful to reach the developing world, hence the unfortunate, slow-draining term called the “trickle effect.”

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AD Classics: New Museum / SANAA

This article was originally published on July 22, 2016. To read the stories behind other celebrated architecture projects, visit our AD Classics section.

The New Museum is the product of a daring vision to establish a radical, politicized center for contemporary art in New York City. With the aim of distinguishing itself from the city’s existing art institutions through a focus on emerging artists, the museum’s name embodies its pioneering spirit. Over the two decades following its foundation in 1977, it gained a strong reputation for its bold artistic program, and eventually outgrew its inconspicuous home in a SoHo loft. Keen to establish a visual presence and to reach a wider audience, in 2003 the Japanese architectural firm SANAA was commissioned to design a dedicated home for the museum. The resulting structure, a stack of rectilinear boxes which tower over the Bowery, would be the first and, thus far, the only purpose-built contemporary art museum in New York City.[1]

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The 25 Largest Sports Stadiums in the World

In 776 BC, the Olympic Games of antiquity were hosted at the Olympia stadium in Peloponnese, Greece, an arena widely believed to be the world’s oldest stadium. The elongated U-shaped track and stand had a capacity of up to 45,000 people.

Almost 3000 years later, and the typology of the sports stadium continues to act as a gathering place for tens of thousands of eager spectators. As populations, and indeed revenue generated from sporting events continues to increase around the world, the design of sports stadiums is destined to follow suit.

NASA Endorses AI SpaceFactory's Vision for 3D Printed Huts on Mars

AI SpaceFactory has released details of their proposed cylindrical huts for the Planet Mars, designed as part of the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge organized by NASA. Project MARSHA (Mars HAbitat) was endorsed by NASA with a top prize of almost $21,000, one of five designs selected from a field of seventeen.

The competition asked participants to design an effective habitat for a crew of four astronauts to be located on the Red Planet, using construction techniques enabled by 3D printing. The submitted schemes were then ranked based on their innovation, architectural layout, and level of detail in BIM modeling.

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World's First 3D-Printed Concrete Housing Project to be Built in Eindhoven

The Dutch city of Eindhoven is to host the world’s first commercial housing project based on 3D-concrete printing, with the first of five planned houses due to start construction this year. The units were developed by a collaborative team including local firm Houben & Van Mierlo Architecten, and the Eindhoven University of Technology. The pods will be purchased and let out by a real estate company upon completion.

The first house will be a single-floor, three-room house measuring 1000 square feet (95 square meters), to be followed by four multi-story units. The irregular shape of the buildings is based on “erratic blocks in the green landscape,” made possible due to the flexibility of form permitted by 3D-printing.

How To Create An Architecture Portfolio in Virtual Reality

A portfolio is the standard way for architects to show their work  and their style, process and brand. Over the last decade, portfolios have evolved from paper to digital, primarily because it is more time and cost efficient to maintain a digital portfolio and keep it up-to-date.

Within the realm of digital portfolios, choices can range between an app, a PDF, to a web-hosted portfolio. Architects usually choose to use JPEGs as the main element of the portfolio and may add text or other digital media like video or audio.

However, with the increasing use of new technologies like Virtual Reality to present architectural work - there is a strong case for creating and maintaining an immersive VR portfolio of your work to differentiate your brand in front of your audience and embrace newer technologies.

The World's First Freeform 3D-Printed House Enters Development Phase

WATG Urban's first prize design for The Freeform Home Design Challenge in 2016 is now moving one step closer to becoming a reality. Since winning the competition, WATG's Chicago office has been developing the winning design, dubbed Curve Appeal, alongside Branch Technology. Curve Appeal is now undergoing the "wall section testing, research and development phase" with an anticipated goal of breaking ground later this year. This revolutionary project could change the way we construct complex, freeform structures.

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5 Video Works Selected to Exhibit at the 2018 U.S. Venice Biennale Pavilion

The curators of the U.S. Pavilion exhibition at the 2018 Venice Biennale have revealed five film and video works that will be featured within their Dimensions of Citizenship exhibition at next year’s Venice Biennale.

Entitled “Transit Screening Lounge,” the collection of videos will explore narrative, speculative and impressionistic perspectives on the spatial conditions of citizenship.

Studio Gang, Diller Scofidio + Renfro Among Exhibitors Selected for US Pavilion at 2018 Venice Biennale

The curatorial team for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale have announced the seven designers who will create the pavilion’s main exhibitions. Consisting of architects, landscape architects, artists and designers, the group will produce responses to the theme of Dimensions of Citizenship, exploring “the meaning of citizenship as a cluster of rights and responsibilities at the intersection of legal, political, economic, and societal affiliations.”

The seven exhibitors include:

Curators and Theme Announced for US Pavilion at 2018 Venice Biennale

The U.S. State Department has announced the individuals and institutions that will serve as curators and commissioners of the United States Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Selecting through an open competition and recommendations from the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, the exhibition will be led by co-commissioners The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the University of Chicago and curators Niall Atkinson, Associate Professor of Architectural History at the University of Chicago; Ann Lui, Assistant Professor at SAIC and co-founder of Chicago-based architecture practice Future Firm; and Mimi Zeiger, a critic, editor, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles.

Under the theme of Dimensions of Citizenship, the exhibition will explore “the meaning of citizenship as a cluster of rights and responsibilities at the intersection of legal, political, economic, and societal affiliations.”

AD Classics: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library / SOM

Cloistered by a protective shell of stone, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is one of the world’s foremost collections of rare manuscripts. Opened in 1963, the library is renowned for its translucent marble façade and the world-renowned glass book tower sheltered within – a dramatic arrangement resulting from the particular requirements of a repository for literary artifacts. This unique design, very much in the Modernist lineage but in contrast to the revivalist styles of the rest of Yale’s campus, has only become appreciated thanks to the passage of time; the same bold choices which are now celebrated were once seen as a cause for contempt and outrage.

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