Naturally, a higher population density prevents the formation of ghost towns and vacant shops, which can become hotbeds for crime. However, these positive views on dense living environments often rest on optimistic assumptions about urbanism, such as minimal friction among individuals, easily maintained hygiene and a natural formation of diversity.
Ephemeral architectures, characterized by their temporary and flexible nature, have emerged as powerful tools for revitalizing urban spaces and fostering architectural creativity. These transient installations transform public areas, engaging communities, and prompting reflections on the potential futures of our cities. By temporarily transforming environments, ephemeral architectures encourage both architects and the public to reimagine the possibilities of urban living. This dynamic interplay, between the temporary and the permanent, challenges traditional architectural practices and opens up new avenues for sustainable and inclusive urban development.
According to the United Nations, indigenous people are "place-based" ethnic cultures that have not migrated from their initial homeland. In today's world, with human-caused climate change driving extreme weather events and a growing demand for authenticity and cultural diversity, architects are increasingly turning to indigenous knowledge systems not only as sources of inspiration but as viable solutions to adapt and respond to local and global challenges. As traditional custodians of the land, Indigenous communities possess a profound understanding of their ecosystems, locally available materials, cultural norms, and social constraints. This knowledge holds insights valuable for shaping contemporary architecture, helping it adapt to both the people and their environments.
Vernacular and indigenous practices are emerging as a foundation for architectural reimagining, informing spatial lays, the choice of materials, and building techniques while also allowing for the integration of innovation and contemporary expression. This careful blend of tradition and modernity can have a significant impact in terms of sustainability, as architects who adopt the indigenous approach to harnessing available resources can not only create structures rooted in their context but also minimize the ecological impact of the construction. Additionally, collaborating directly with Indigenous communities leads to projects that prioritize community participation, cultural sensitivity, and sustainable development.
Evolving theories in urban design seek to reframe how cities are built and experienced. As theory and practice grows more empathetic towards the needs of its diverse stakeholders, queer urban design brings a broad and holistic shift to understanding identity and community in publicly inhabited spaces. The approach challenges traditional - often rigid - methods of city planning by applying principles of queer theory to reflect fluidity and interconnectedness. On occasion of Pride Month 2024, ArchDaily investigates the building blocks of "queer urban design" to influence city planning practices to be more inclusive.
Limited resources are becoming an increasingly common challenge in architecture. Today, regardless of the region, projects are affected by the availability of resources, which are now compounded by environmental considerations. This situation, far from being restrictive, prompts us to explore new possibilities in how we conceive the built environment. In this context, it is crucial to understand that resources are not only limited to the economy but also include technological, material, and spatial aspects. Thus, we can enhance our creativity and efficiency by broadening our considerations when approaching architectural design and its challenges, doing more with less.
At the community level, the challenge becomes even more significant when we consider that our projects must not only be designed to overcome these "constraints," but also to positively impact their communities. Therefore, contemporary projects must present different strategies to overcome limited resources and materials depending on the context, always aiming to achieve a positive impact and become powerful and ingenious proposals while democratizing access to architecture.
https://www.archdaily.com/1016682/community-growth-through-architecture-maximizing-limited-resources-for-positive-impactEnrique Tovar
The idea of a community or public playground is about creating an accessible recreational space for all. However, in many cases, initiating a playground project might fail due to insufficient funds or regulations/restrictions. The first challenge is largely to set the project in motion and, most importantly, get the community’s positive reception and, if possible, its involvement, thus ensuring the project's success and sustainability.
In Greater Boston's city of Malden, Massachusetts, an inter-generational community of thirty households hired an architecture firm and collectively designed their cohousing community. Responding to the cohousing community's request for collective living in an urban setting, French2D designed a typology-challenging building with individual residential units connected by a framework of shared spaces. The result is a 48,700 sqft unique and colorful type of multi-family housing. It is one of a growing number of cohousing projects in the United States.
The role of a school is to prepare children for life. But with life-changing faster than ever, schools need to change just as quickly. Recent additions to school curriculums reflect the complexities of modern life, with environmental crises, societal injustices, and the dangers of social media now major parts of the syllabus.
Although it’s often said that long-term change begins at ground-level, change is never easy, wherever it starts. For example, a curriculum that responds to environmental issues is said to cause growing instances of eco-anxiety in children, one of a number of causes of another crisis, in children’s mental health.
As has become customary in recent years, on the first Monday of October, we celebrate both World Architecture Day and World Habitat Day, serving as a reminder to the global community of its collective responsibility for the well-being of the built environment. This edition, like its predecessors, sheds light on the realm of architecture and the challenges faced by our cities, introducing new themes, contemplating the state of our urban areas, and proposing constructive strategies.
Since urban economies have encountered significant difficulties this year, the UN's World Habitat Day focuses on "Resilient Urban Economies: cities as drivers of growth and recovery." Launching Urban October, this event seeks to bring together diverse urban stakeholders to deliberate on policies to help cities recover after the dual economic impacts caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and conflicts worldwide. Aligned with this concept, World Architecture Day, created by the UIA in 1985, has chosen to concentrate on "Architecture for Resilient Communities," emphasizing the role and duty of architecture in fostering thriving community existence while initiating a global dialogue regarding the interconnectedness of urban and rural regions within every nation.
Adjaye Associates, in collaboration with Holst Architecture, the prime architect of record, have unveiled the first renderings for the new East County Library in Portland, Oregon, a new facility that will provide a diverse range of services and programming. The design of the 95,000-square-foot building is informed through extensive community engagement and feedback. Several local organizations aid these efforts by organizing public community events, focus groups, teen outreach, and surveys. As the project is currently in the schematic design phase, the images presented are early drafts, likely to change to reflect the input received.
In recent years, the term “co-creation,” a buzzword in the business and management sector, has made its way into the architecture and urban planning discourse. The termis used to define a large concept that describes working intentionally with others to create something jointly. But architecture is already the result of a collaboration between multiple actors, architects, clients, investors, developers, and local administration, to name a few. Can the term still apply to this field, can it bring forth new forms of knowledge, and does it differ from the concept of participatory design?
When the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA) announced its winners of the 2022 edition, 20 projects were selected for their excellence in the fields of contemporary design, social housing, community development, and preservation and improvement of the environment. Among them, one project in Jhenaidah, Bangladesh, managed to capitalize on the strength of the local community to reverse the ecological degradation of its riverscape and create a functional and socially inclusive public space along the riverbanks. ArchDaily’s Managing Editor, Christele Harrouk, had the chance to interview Suhailey Farzana, and Khondaker Hasibul Kabir co-founders of Co.Creation.Architects, and Rubaiya Nasrin from Platform of Community Action and Architecture, POCAA, part of the team behind the Co-creation of Urban Spaces by the Nobogonga River, in Bangladesh. The project also won the 5th category of the UIA 2030 Award for the Access to Green and Public Spaces.
2022 could be remembered as the year when surprising AI-fueled tools became accessible to a larger audience: from text-to-image generation Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E 2 to unsettling design experiments such as This House Does Not Exist, to surprisingly smart OpenGPT, a language-processing designed artificial intelligence to generate human-like text.
Cautiously described by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as "a preview of progress", any user can talk with OpenGPT about almost anything: the results are astonishing and it easily can embody an umpteenth so-called threat for creative-related jobs. However, OpenGPT does not have access to browse the internet. Instead, it interacts based on the gigantic database that it has been trained on. As expressed by Gannett's Eric Ulken, "even the best generative AI tools are only as good as their training", so what an "inappropriate request" is has previously been tuned (by humans) as well.
Staged stories on community and identity, ephemeral architecture showed that in 2022 it doesn't have to be permanent to be powerful. A direct and popped-up public installation can shift from preparation to action, reclaiming and defining what makes a community unique. Highlighting installations to acknowledge linguistic diversity in NYC, a giant table to celebrate culinary in Barcelona, and a large-scale net in Dubai to represent the local culture, among others, these initiatives seek to understand ways in which local and regional expressions can help cities to be more equal and diverse.
Globalization has connected the world boundaryless. While it has also made information more accessible, it has led to homogeneity and identity crisis at melding unique societies and cultural expressions. Cultural differences are undeniable as globalization grows. Hence, as architecture produces common living standards, it can also highlight singularities. Festivals, installations, and pavilions, 2022 was the year to express local memories to be recognized and celebrated, setting Community and identity as central topics in ephemeral architecture throughout the year.
“Seneca Village was an important community. It was 40 acres, two-thirds African American, and had a church and school,” explained Sara Zewde, ASLA, founder of Studio Zewde and assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, during a session at the ASLA 2022 Conference on Landscape Architecture in San Francisco.
The 225 residents of Seneca Village were displaced by the New York City government in the mid 1800s to make way for Central Park, which is considered one of the masterpieces of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux.
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 Orleanspublic 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.
Community development proposals in Disney World come from back days. One of Walt Disney's last visionary projects was the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), a center for American enterprise and urban living. Disney advocated that the problems of cities were the most critical issues facing society and planned a city that could develop in a controlled manner, contrary to the urban expansion in the USA during the first half of the last century. After Disney died in 1966, the "EPCOT" concept was abandoned as the company was uncertain about the feasibility of operating a city. Fifty- five years later, after a thorough search, Walt Disney World chose The Michaels Organization for its experience in building and managing attainable housing communities.
