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The Midnight Charette is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by architectural designers David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features a variety of creative professionals in unscripted and long-format conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and more personal discussions. Honesty and humor are used to cover a wide array of subjects: some episodes provide useful tips for designers, while others are project reviews, interviews, or simply explorations of everyday life and design. The Midnight Charette is available for free on iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, and all other podcast directories.
On this episode of The Midnight Charette podcast, hosts David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet discuss the factors to consider when choosing an undergraduate architecture school. The two cover everything from program curricula to group dynamics, accreditation, faculty leadership, school reputation, student work and portfolios, course diversity, 5th year, job opportunities after graduating and more. The Midnight Charette also recently interviewed several educators and academic leaders on architecture education and their own work.
The European Space Agency has teamed up with a group of architecture students to speculate on the future design of sustainable lunar habitats. From the ESA’s astronaut center in Cologne, Germany, the organization challenged the students to draw on extreme environments in remote places, and speculate on sourcing and producing materials on the Moon to build a sustainable habitat.
Giving consideration to sunlight, temperature, and terrain, the design team developed a system of inflatable modules that can land at the base of a small crater on the South Polar Region of the Moon, where they will gradually fill the cavity with lunar soil until the modules are effectively buried.
Instagram has made a sizable impact on architecture, from allowing designers to showcase their work, to influencing the very design of buildings themselves. As we have shown in the past, there are hundreds of architecture feeds worth a follow for designers at any stage of their career. However, for fresh students of architecture, the vast labyrinth of suggestions, stories, and tags can be overwhelming, distracting, and almost irrelevant.
To address this, we have compiled a list of 50 Instagram feeds that, although applicable for all designers, are particularly aimed at offering inspiration, support, and references for students finding their feet in the architecture world. Give them a follow to stay up-to-date with the latest creations from fellow students, young architects, university studios, and more.
The ninth Hello Wood International Summer University and Festival has taken place at Hello Wood’s campus in the Hungarian countryside. As part of the week-long Cabin Fever program, students from 65 universities around the world were given the opportunity to build seven contemporary timber cabins in a nomadic, lush countryside, mentored by international architects.
As a result of the week-long effort, the rural area was transformed into a cutting-edge working village featuring cabins on wheels, cabins on stilts, and multi-story homes. The festival is dedicated to the Tiny House Movement, which “makes cabins which give urban dwellers the chance to get away from it all for a while.”
The Architects' Journal’s 2018 student survey has revealed troublesome, though perhaps not surprising, trends within the profession. The results of the survey, drawn from nearly 500 students in the UK, suggest that the economically fortunate are more likely to succeed within a culture that promotes unsociable and unhealthy working hours.
The numbers paint a bleak picture of the architecture student lifestyle in the UK, where, including tuition fees, students are now forking out an average of £24,000 per year. 44% of respondents identified this as the largest problem for them and their peers.
So as the traditional route into the profession becomes “increasingly out of reach for many,” is it time for schools and offices to reevaluate their methods in order to maintain a diverse, accessible architecture?
Group Project, a student group from MIT, is helping GrowingChange, a non-profit that works with previously incarcerated youth, to transform an old North Carolina prison into an agricultural community center. GrowingChange looks to take advantage of the small, decommissioned prisons scattered throughout the state's landscape. They see these sites as "places where communities can work together to provide clinical support, education, and vocational training as a means to divert youth from the criminal justice" system.
Read on for more about how prison flipping intends to "counter a legacy of incarceration."
Every year in August, a temporary metropolis is erected in Black Rock City, Nevada. This is Burning Man, an annual event of art and architecture that attracts some 70,000 participants. The people who come to Burning Man come from all walks of life. What is incredible is that they come together to construct an ephemeral city that lasts for 7 days. These people assume the role of architects and construction workers and use the desert to build all sorts of shelters in a fast, sustainable way. The desert is so remote, and everything built in Black Rock City is packed and taken home at the end of the event, and some of the art is burned on site. This poses a unique architectural challenge. The people who have come to build these structures have to plan them way in advance to accommodate all the challenges of working in the desert, but the result is worth it - a striking, unique city, democratically built, set against a desert landscape, and for only one week.
We had the chance to interview Kim Cook at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin. Kim Cook is Director of Art and Civic Engagement at Burning Man. Kim Cook and her team are tasked with increasing the impact of Burning Man’s arts and civic initiatives. As part of her role, Kim engages with artists and community leaders to increase opportunities for funding, collaboration and learning.
MADWORKSHOP Fellows Jeremy Carman and Jayson Champlain have designed a unique approach to emergency post-disaster shelters. The 2017 Fellows of the MADWORKSHOP Foundation created "Shelter Squared" as a response to "the current scarcity of design-oriented solutions to emergencies."
Overall, the design utilizes cost-effective, recyclable materials to provide a meaningful alternative to the current standard of post-disaster shelters, described the architects.
For students of architecture, few things are as thrilling as seeing one of their designs physically built. For a group of Polish and Norwegian-based students, this dream has become a reality.
Having won the 120 Hours student competition in 2017, the Warsaw University of Technology team behind the “In ‘n’ Out Village” winning proposal has combined with students at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design to realize the design, constructing 19 pavilions in a Chinese schoolyard.
The issue of how we educate our architects of the future is a divisive one. With the capabilities of our technology advancing rapidly, new mediums of Virtual Reality, robotics, and artificial intelligence are all changing the architectural profession at a fundamental level. This creates the question of whether architectural pedagogy is keeping up with the times and educating students to be ready for both professional practice and an uncertain future.
In his opinion piece for Common Edge, ‘Architectural Education is Changing: Let’s Hope the Profession Can Keep Up’, Phil Bernstein articulates his belief that architectural education today is indeed teaching students the necessary skills, but rather than focusing on simply teaching them to become competent workers, it is teaching them skills to design for the future.
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Are newly graduated Architects "employable" people according to the requirements of the current market? And are these the right requirements?
The architectural model: a tool, a sculptural artifact, a prized possession, and yet in the digital age of BIM and Virtual Reality, perhaps becoming an enigma, a relic for settling dust. And yet, we are still making them. If you imagine that famous photo of earth from space, of every model ever made in a single image, it raises the question - where are they all? Where does the architectural model go to die?
As most architecture students and practicing architects find out, all-nighters are (ironically) the stuff of nightmares. They're a last resort when the project is due and you have run out times you can say "I’ll do that tomorrow." All-nighters should be avoided at all costs as they can have many negative effects on your mind such as decreased concentration and reduced long-term memory. Even your body can suffer too; pushing yourself to the limit as you fight tiredness and work as much as physically possible will weaken your immune system and can cause circulatory problems from sitting down for 20 or so hours straight.
In a previous article, we have discussed the many ways in which you can avoid pulling an all-nighter so you don’t have to be as sleep deprived. But sometimes things just don't go to plan, and you may feel that working through the night is the only option. Read on for tips and tricks that should make your all-nighter slightly more bearable (if that's at all possible).
All-nighters: the bane of all architecture students. The new academic year brings in an influx of fresh, enthusiastic architecture students alongside slightly more hardened veterans of the degree, and students of all experience levels are reminded of the unfortunate tendency for work to stretch through the night. It's an easy habit to slip into for both students and even those working in practice; however many times we may tell ourselves at the end of a project that we will be more organized next time, the work always piles up and it seems like the only option – but it’s not!
With architecture holding the title for the degree that works the longest hours, it is important to maintain a healthy work-life balance throughout. If you feel that you are falling into the trap of staying up until 6am every day then this article should prevent any further sleep deprivation. With advice taken from several architecture students with years of experience dodging the twilight hour, this list will guide you on your way to enough sleep and decent grades.
Quirky, innovative and visceral, Get High without Drugs was awarded first place in the fabrication category at this year’s International FAB FEST* in London.
Mollusk-like and mysterious from the outside, the form of the pavilion emerges from the combination of a zonohedron and a dome. Seventy-two hexagonal surfaces were formulated into fold-able nets that could then be digitally fabricated from flat-sheets and assembled into load-bearing modules. A puzzle-like routine drove the assembly of the modules into the pavilion’s dome-like form.
