The Australian Institute of Architects has announced the Creative Directors for the Australia Pavilion at the upcoming 19th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia in 2025. Selected to lead this project, Dr. Michael Mossman, Emily McDaniel, and Jack Gillmer will present "HOME", a pavilion dedicated to Australia's natural environment and Indigenous knowledge systems.
With expanding urban populations and evolving consumption patterns, cities are faced with challenges pertaining to waste management. Traditional approaches centered on collection and disposal currently seem inadequate in the face of serious environmental concerns and resource scarcity. Waste management has become a focused topic to address, being introduced as a key strategy towards circular economies. The Zero Waste concept hopes to transform the way cities manage urban waste and build supportive cultures around it.
The Belgian Pavilion for Expo 2025 Osaka, designed by the winning consortium of Carré 7, Beyond Limits, One Designs, Pirnay, and Poly-Tech, embraces the Expo's overarching theme, "Designing the Society of the Future, Imagining Our Life of Tomorrow." With a focus on "Saving Lives," the pavilion' explores the universal significance of water and its vital role in creating and sustaining life. By highlighting water's interconnectedness with all living beings through the metaphor of cells, the pavilion aims to reflect humanity's relationship with the environment and the importance of preserving it for future generations.
Following a competition, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), in collaboration with JLand Group Sdn Bhd (JLG), have been chosen to design Discovery City in Johor, Malaysia. The disctrict is expected to be to be a visionary 582-acre mixed-use precinct within the expansive Ibrahim Technoloplis in Johor. As ZHA’s inaugural project in Malaysia, Discovery City aims to boast a blend of innovative design and sustainability, blending with the region’s landscapes.
The Kingdom of the Netherlands's pavilion, presented at the Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan, features the theme, "Common Ground: Creating a New Dawn Together," emphasizing the Netherlands' dedication to fostering mutual understanding to address global challenges. Designed by RAU Architects, the pavilion's circular design features a prominent illuminated sphere at its center, symbolizing a new era of unlimited clean energy, akin to a "man-made sun" signaling a future powered by sustainable resources.
Evolving urban conditions call for an evolving builtscape, and retrofits have been a key mechanism to allow buildings to adapt and respond to new needs. Amidst global environmental concerns, climate retrofits have become a popular strategy to upgrade buildings based on improved operational efficiency. Global decarbonization plans have even called for city-wide retrofits, such as in the case of London, to meet civic goals. While such upgrades significantly reduce energy consumption, they often come with a hidden cost - embodied carbon in retrofit materials and the potential for future waste.
Today, interconnected and fast-paced lifestyles, future mobility trends and constant material innovation puts pressure on a slow-moving building industry. How can architecture keep up with this trend? Following dynamic and nomadic lifestyles, architects must explore new structural systems that should be able to reach multiple locations, as well as be adaptable and reusable in the future. By applying revolutionary technology for circular, scalable components and carbon-negative buildings, UrbanBeta –a spatial innovation studio designing strategies, building concepts, predictive tools and platforms for creating transformative spaces– has developed BetaPort, a robotic construction system powered by artificial intelligence and automation.
Based on the principles of a circular economy, Urban Beta and BetaPort create a sustainable construction plan, ready to grow and change over time. The studio conceives sustainable on-demand architecture systems for flexible buildings based on a kit of parts.
Architecture and Design Festival Concéntrico celebrates its 10th anniversary from 25 April to 1 May 2024 with an edition that aims to reflect on the impact of the annual festival upon the city of Logroño, Spain, as well as to consider how the city continues to evolve. Through installations, exhibitions, lectures, performances, workshops, and activities, Concéntrico proposes a reflection of the urban environment, welcoming architects and designers to intervene and challenge it while opening conversations about pressing matters.
While the official theme of the festival focused on the future of cities, the invited architects and designers took this suggestion further. Several overarching themes and subjects emerged during this year’s event, from the incorporation of concepts of time, an unusual element to be tacked through temporary installations, to the desire to engage more honestly with a wider public, to listen to their needs and create platforms where diverse perspectives can take center stage.
For a long time, the construction industry has followed a linear process - extract raw materials, build structures, demolish them, and then dispose of the garbage in landfills. This approach has serious negative effects on the environment and society and is inherently unsustainable. Reconsidering traditional methods and workflows requires support from all stakeholders and a sense of urgency proclaimed by authorities. In the United States, city organizations have begun to implement new policies to keep construction waste out of landfills and support circular practices. Several cities like Seattle and Pittsburgh, have started implementing deconstruction ordinances that require older buildings to be carefully deconstructed rather than demolished. How might their key provisions influence circular practices in the country?
Qatar Museums has released renderings showcasing the future Lusail Museum, designed by Swiss architecture office Herzog & de Meuron. The museum will house one of the largest collections of Orientalist art, exploring the movement of people and ideas across the globe and over the centuries. The new institution also strives to provide opportunities for high-level study for scholars, academics, policymakers, and curators. Consequently, the building is conceived as “a vertically layered souk, or miniature city contained within a single building,” aiming to encourage conversations, debates, and meditation on global issues.
Henning Larsen has revealed the designs for Europe’s largest timber logistics center. Located in Lelystad, on the Dutch island of Flevopolder, the center is a testament to the future of timber structures. Serving as Bestseller’s new 155,000 sqm Logistics Center, the design is committed to reduced emissions, fair working conditions, and following circular design principles in order to minimize waste.
Following an international competition, AMDL CIRCLE has been selected to create the pavilion which will represent the spirit and vision of the Nordic Countries at the Expo Osaka in 2025. Their proposal takes a sustainable and circular approach, as the structure is purposely designed for disassembly and reuse. Technically developed and engineered by Rimond and conceived by AMDL CIRCLE, the pavilion aims to showcase the Nordic people’s respect and connection with the environment while offering ample space for the display of technological innovations.
The built environment is responsible for approximately 42% of annual global CO2 emissions. During a building's lifespan, half of these emissions come from its construction and demolition. To decarbonize architecture and control global emissions, it is important to rethink and reduce the upfront or embodied carbon impacts of demolitions, as well as implement sustainable construction strategies for buildings. Demolitions typically involve dismantling, razing, destroying, or wrecking buildings and structural parts, leading to unsustainable levels of carbon emissions, material depletion, waste, and pollution. These hasty methods of ending the life cycle of a building have negative impacts on the environment, material components, and recycling strategies. Therefore, there is a clear need to re-think the way in which we approach the end of a building or infrastructure project's life towards a more sustainable system of deconstruction.
Working within the restrictions of a limited carbon footprint can be one of the hardest – but also most rewarding – parts of a modern architect’s role. Whether to suit a large multinational corporation’s sustainability report, to achieve LEED status or similar for a commercial developer, or to build an eco-home for a climate-conscious private client – or even one who just wants to spend less on energy, it’s imperative to keep up-to-date with the latest carbon-neutral and low-carbon building practices and materials.
Whether looking at a project’s structural beginnings, its high-grade finishes, or thinking more holistically about its entire lifetime, there are huge gains to be made with sustainable substitutes and alternatives to traditional materials and techniques.
In parallel to this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, The European Cultural Centre (ECC) presented the sixth edition of its extensive architecture exhibition titled Time Space Existence. The 2023 iteration of the group show draws attention to expressions of sustainability in its numerous forms, ranging from a focus on the environment and urban landscape to the unfolding conversations on innovation, reuse, community, and inclusion. A total of 217 projects by established participants like Snøhetta or MADWORKSHOP and emerging players such as Urban Radicals or ACTA are currently on show through the 26th of November, 2023, at Venice's Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora, and Marinaressa Gardens.
In response to climate change, the installations on show investigate new technologies and construction methods that reduce energy consumption through circular design and develop innovative, organic, and recycled building materials. Participants also address social justice by presenting living solutions envisioned for displaced communities and minorities, while others examine the tensions between the built urban environment and the nature surrounding it to identify opportunities for coexistence.
Timber is a natural, renewable material, easy to fabricate, and with low-carbon emissions. As a construction material, however, when put under enough directional force along its grain, sawn timber is structurally unstable, so deemed unsuitable under higher loads. In comparison, the manufacture of cross-laminated timber (CLT) involves simply gluing multiple layers of timber together at right angles. By crossing the direction of the grains, CLT achieves a far higher level of structural rigidity along both axes. CLT boards start with a minimum of three layers but can be strengthened further with the addition of more. Simply put, due to the complex physics involved in the perpendicular lamination, the strength of CLT board is similar to that of reinforced concrete, and has proven performance under seismic forces.
So what’s new? Wood’s been around for long enough now, and we’ve been using it as a building material for centuries. Surely this isn’t the first time someone’s realized it gets stronger the more you use it? Well… as you’d expect, the changing popularity of cross-laminated timber in construction does coincide with a greater understanding and focus on environmental causes, but the relationship hasn’t always been positive.
As part of the Circlewood consortium, OMA’s David Gianotten and Michel den Otter have developed a modular system to build schools that can adapt and transform throughout their lifecycle. The system was selected by the City of Amsterdam to be employed to build multiple schools in the coming ten years, as part of the Innovation Partnership School Buildings program. The citywide initiative aims to build nine to thirty “high-quality, flexible, and sustainable” schools as a way to contribute to the city’s goal of becoming fully circular by 2050.
Choosing the appropriate working elements –such as furniture, lighting, flooring, and other equipment– is key for creating an optimal workplace environment. With a positive impact on productivity, as well as the comfort and well-being of team members, designing workplace elements that integrate sustainable, wellness and aesthetic qualities implies a deep understanding of the interactions between these three areas. Minimizing the environmental impact and prioritizing well-being throughout the design process, while also considering the resulting aesthetics, Boss Design’s Sia Task Chair defines a new standard for workplace design.
