Future Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

Laka released the results of its competition that gathered over 200 entries. Aiming to diversify the outcomes, the theme focuses on architectural, urban, technological, or product design “capable of dynamic interaction with its social, natural, or built surroundings”. In fact, the subject revolves around interdisciplinary “solutions developed through a process of changes and adjustments”.

An international panel of judges went through the projects of 350 participants from 40 countries, and selected the proposals that “took advantages from disciplines such as robotics, mechanics, digital fabrication, biodesign and biofabrication, computational design, materials science, bioarchitecture, social sciences, industrial design, mobility, and more”. Read on for the complete list of winners.

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The Future Architecture Platform has announced the final list of Fellows for 2020. With 433 ideas from 53 countries, over 800 applicants in individual and group applications participated. Fellows will be invited to the 2020 Creative Exchange in MAO Ljubljana, exchanging ideas and networking to find avenues toward international recognition.

The Future Architecture Platform has issued its 5th Call for Ideas asking multi-disciplinary creatives who work on transformative projects and ideas for the future of architecture to apply for participation in the 2020 European Architecture Program. The Future Architecture Platform acts as a platform for exchange and networking for European architecture and integrates some of Europe’s most important architectural events.

Lukasz Platkowski, Principal and Design Leader at GENSLER, presents his vision on how the world of work undergoes a tectonic shift, due to advancements in technology such as artificial intelligence and job automation, which are disrupting the already known and tested working models. Our new lifestyles, needs and expectations are shaping the way we work, and this is overwriting the boundaries between workstyle and lifestyle.

Laka has published the results of the 2018 edition of their annual Architecture that Reacts competition, focusing on “architectural, design, or technological solutions that are capable of dynamic interaction with their surroundings.” This year saw 200 participants from more than 30 countries submit 130 designs, following an interdisciplinary approach reaching beyond typical building solutions.

This year’s winners hailed from the USA and Austria, confronting issues such as climate change, ubiquitous computation, and new ways of perceiving space in a machine-driven future. Below, we have rounded up the winners, special recognitions, and honorable mentions from the 2018 edition. For more information on the competition, and previous results, visit the official website here.

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“Architects don’t even look at it as an opportunity to put any living experience there…we can open that up” muses Sankarshan Murthy, former Tesla and Apple Watch engineer.

As humans inhabit ever-tighter living arrangements, Murthy’s start-up “Bumblebee Spaces” takes a novel approach: put everything in the ceiling.

In a world of 3D, HD, 4K, and CGI, architectural representation in the film, television, and gaming industries are becoming ever-more realistic, ever-more dazzling, and ever-more expensive. But strip away the special effects, and the beautifully-crafted architectural forms of fictional worlds such as Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and Marvel are no less impressive.

To demonstrate this, Angie’s List has produced a set of elemental, greyscale, pen-and-paper illustrations of some of the entertainment industry’s most iconic fictional worlds, celebrating style, form, materiality, and shadow. From the sleek futurism of Star Wars and Marvel to the vernacular fortresses of Game of Thrones and Skyrim, the “Fictional Architecture” series captures the finer details of our favorite fictional universes.

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Carrots cannot help you see in the dark, but they could make your buildings stronger, and more environmentally friendly. Engineers at Lancaster University in the UK have worked in collaboration with Cellucomp Ltd UK to study the effects of adding “nano platelets” extracted from the fibers of root vegetables to enhance the performance of concrete mixtures.

The vegetable-composite concretes, made from vegetables such as sugar beet or carrot, have structurally and environmentally out-performed all commercially-available cement additives, such as graphene and carbon nanotubes, doing so at a much lower cost. 

Foster + Partners will detail its vision of life on Mars and the Moon at the UK’s Goodwood Festival of Speed 2018. Forming part of the festival's Future Lab event, the vision will be presented through a range of models, robotics, and futuristic designs exploring the future of life in space.

The firm's showcase will include a virtual reality experience, allowing visitors to explore the inside of a proposed state-of-the-art habitation pod.

UNStudio has released images of its design for IJbaan, a green, future-proof cable car linking West and North Amsterdam. The result of a crowdfunding campaign started by founders Bas Dekker and Willem Wessels in 2015, the project is to be implemented by 2025, marking the city's 750th anniversary. The “all electric” transport scheme forms part of Amsterdam’s ambition to be a European center for urban innovation, integrating forward-thinking technology with existing public transport modalities.

Stretching over one mile (1.5 kilometers), the cable car links the two thriving residential districts of Amsterdam-West and Amsterdam-Noord through a system of three slender pylons and two stations. The cable car has been designed to accommodate a future third station depending on the pattern of growth for surrounding districts.

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Humphreys and Partners, a Dallas-based architecture firm, presented a vision of future residential living at the 2018 International Builders’ Show earlier this year. Tackling current issues of affordable housing, sustainable design and how technology is changing the way we live, their futuristic vision Pier 2: Apartment of the Future consists of two soaring skyscrapers on the Manhattan waterfront.

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The members of Future Architecture have selected 21 ideas out of more than 200 submissions in this year's open call for ideas. The winners will be invited to the two days Matchmaking Conference in February at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) located in Ljubljana, where they will present their submissions and earn a chance to participate in the conference’s series of events.

Check out the list of winners and their proposals after the break.

Future cities have captured our imaginations for centuries. From Thomas F. Anderson’s 1900 vision for a Future Boston, through Le Corbusier’s 1924 Ville Radieuse, to modern ‘future-proof’ cities such as Songdo, South Korea, architects and town planners have considered how cities will respond to the movement of people, capital, technology, and ideas.

Today, groups such as the Senseable City Laboratory at MIT have been created with the goal of suggesting ideas for the city of tomorrow. Through a technique known as ‘Futurecraft’, the Senseable City Lab places the designer in a possible future environment and asks them to generate design proposals which could enhance daily life. As we are about to see, some of their ideas would make heads turn even in a galaxy far far away.

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