Building Materials: The Latest Architecture and News

The Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers is an annual portfolio competition for early-career practitioners in North America. Established in 1981, the competition is entered around a yearly theme. This year, the 2024 Young Architects + Designers Committee proposed the theme “Dirty,” prompting designers to “look beyond their presentations of professionalism, respectability, and expertise” and reject the sanitized ways of working.

The original work of the six winners of the 2024 League Prize for Young Architects + Designers is now on view in an online exhibition. The installations created for this occasion showcase the wide variety of responses and interpretations of the overarching theme. The projects presented online and in some instances also locally on-site, challenge traditional architectural practices and offer an immersive introduction to the works of the winners. In addition to the installations, a diverse program of lectures has been scheduled to develop the theme further.

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On May 4, 2024, cultural center Grace Farms opened a new long-term exhibition that aims to shed light on the inner workings of the building industry, offering insights into the methods of producing and distributing building materials, as well as the pervasive practices of forced labor happening in the materials supply chain worldwide. The exhibition also presents the work of “Design for Freedom,” a collaborative global movement launched in 2020 at Grace Farms. The initiative aims to change architecture by raising awareness of these issues and helping disrupt forced labor in the construction industry. Titled “With Every Fiber,” the exhibit is free to visit both at its physical location in New Canaan, Connecticut, and online as a virtual exhibition.

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This article was originally published on Common Edge.

By the time I was 17 years old, I had moved 11 times. Because of my own experience relocating from one place to another, I’ve spent the better part of the last several decades focused on making sure that everyone has a place to call home, that everyone enjoys the human right to housing. But it was not until my time at Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit focused on community development and affordable housing, that I realized the methods and materials we employ to realize that human right matter. 

The exhibition “Warsaw 1945-1949: Rising from Rubble” took place this year at the Museum of Warsaw, exploring the postwar reconstruction and rebuilding process that took place after the war. After the Second World War, Warsaw’s entire urban fabric, architecture, and social and economic status had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Curated by Adam Przywara, the exhibition “offered a new perspective on the myth of the postwar reconstruction of the Polish capital city and one of the most interesting pages in its history.”

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From the top floor of the Hilton Hotel at Tucherpark in Munich, you could see the skyline of the city dotted with construction cranes, a reflection of its current state of development. With this backdrop of old meets new, this year’s edition of the Architecture Matters conference started its program under the title “Second City: The New in the Old.” While the title could have been fitting for a preservation conference, Architecture Matters actually brought together a diverse group of architects, urbanists, engineers, city planners, government officials, developers and technologists to discuss forward looking ideas for the built environment. Reduce, reuse, recycle, and the circular construction dominated the discussion across different scales, from city planning to new materials, and tech startups.

Materiality is a determining factor in shaping the character and experience of a building. Playing with the aesthetic and tactile qualities of materials, the design process encompasses their analysis, selection, and arrangement to create purposeful and sensory-rich spaces. Alongside textures and patterns, exploring materiality also involves the study of color possibilities. The versatile role of color in architectural materials extends beyond mere aesthetics, as it can broaden design opportunities and influence emotional responses, functionality, cultural relevance, and environmental performance. 

Even though each material has its distinctive inherent color, the addition of artificial or natural pigments can modify them in favor of the project’s identity. Delving into the debate on maintaining raw aesthetics or changing a material’s natural hues, we showcase various projects to study the differences between using natural versus artificial pigmentation of glass, concrete, brick, stone and wood.

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There are many building materials that have experienced minimal changes since their initial inception in the field of architecture. However, this does not imply that they are outdated, but rather that their qualities and simplicity make them highly versatile materials also demonstrate the resilience and durability of materials that withstand the test of time. An example of this is brick, a timeless material that has been able to adapt over the years, serving functions such as walls, cladding, and flooring, among others. Under this premise, Louis Khan referred to the expressive possibilities of brick, stating, "Even a brick wants to be something. It aspires."

Thanks to the progress of new technologies applied to materials, disruptive proposals have arisen that converge in new construction systems. On many occasions, these new technologies are combined with materials considered "traditional," generating new concepts in which materials such as brick find new applications and possibilities. One of these new concepts is Flexbrick, a ceramic textile with an industrialized system that combines flexible sheets to wrap architectural spaces. This opens up new possibilities for applications at the forefront of the parametric architecture revolution, using a flexible, adaptable, and sustainable material.

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The European Cultural Centre (ECC), a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering cultural exchanges on an international scale, showcased its sixth edition of the Time Space Existence architecture exhibition alongside this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. The 2023 installment was centered on the theme of sustainability in its various forms, encompassing subjects related to migration, digital building technologies and material research, future urban developments, and housing, bringing together architects, designers, artists, academics, and photographers from 52 different countries.

Through diverse mediums and perspectives, participants have explored the philosophical concepts of Time, Space, and Existence. With a total of 217 projects on display, the exhibition is held at Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora, and the Marinaressa Gardens in Venice, throughout the six-month duration of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, running from May 20th to November 26th, 2023. Focusing also on emerging young architects, designers, and researchers, the 2023 edition of the exhibition is a proactive endeavor to reimagine alternative lifestyles and reconceptualize architecture within the contemporary landscape.

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Almost two decades ago, in the downtown corridor of Columbus, Ohio, the century-old landmarked Lazarus Building underwent an extensive renovation to save the department store and restore it to its former glory. Sixty million dollars went into its restoration and transformation into a retail and office complex. During the construction, workers recycled nearly 5,000 pounds of steel, 2,000 pounds of concrete, and significant amounts of carpeting, ceiling tiles, and various wood- keeping 22,000 pounds of debris out of Ohio’s landfills. They also saved more than $25 million dollars by implementing this rigorous recycling process.