Parametrica [Digi Fab School] invites you to BREATHING PROTOTYPES Workshop (19-25 February 2013) to participate in the digital design build workshop, seeking to create an inventive collaborative environment. The workshop is part of a series of PARAMETRICA events aimed in promoting and exploring the world of parametric design.
The workshop is aimed at: students, postgraduates, architects, interior, product and urban designers, engineers, anybody interested. All the details after the break.
This brief history of BIM ("the software that has disrupted traditional methods of representation and collaboration in architecture") comes to us thanks to our friend at the Architecture Research Lab, Michael S Bergin.
We know you’ve been anxiously waiting to have ArchDaily with you everywhere you go - whether on the road or on your couch. Well, we’ve listened, and we’re more than proud to announce the launch of our first iPad application!
Our new App will give you in-depth access to the winners and finalists of The Building Of The Year Award, the most important architecture award in the online world (since 2009). It’s an award that recognizes architects - both established heavyweights and emerging talents - as the best and brightest of today, and they’re all chosen by you, our community of ArchDaily readers. While you'll have to wait a bit longer until you can vote for your favorite 2012 projects (TBA early 2013), the App offers the perfect distraction: full access to the 2011 winners.
Find out more about our “Building of the Year” App, after the break...
If you thought "Architecture for Dogs," the project in which world-class architects design "sincere architectural structures" for dogs, couldn't get any cuter, you were very, very wrong.
Today, the project's interactive web site, which allows viewers to browse each of the architect's designs and then download the free blueprints to make them on their own, launched. The site, designed by Yugo Nakamura, the web designer for Uniqlo, features an adorable introductory video, complete with scampering puppies, which imparts the site's mission: "brining a new kind of joy to the relationship between dogs and humans."
More info and Images on "Architecture for Dogs," after the break...
The results are in!
After publishing our 10 Best Apps For Architects, getting your comments, and then polling your votes on Facebook, we are finally ready to introduce our new (and improved) list: The 4 Apps every architect should download now! And we mean now. Trust us.
Find out the 4 contenders who stood out from the pack (and a full list of other awesome Apps) – after the break…
![UPDATE: WINNERS of the [STEEL] Promo Code! - Featured Image](https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/55f1/8e68/99e9/bac4/a500/003f/medium_jpg/step0-iphone4s-gallery-image4-3.jpg?1441893986)
UPDATE: Thank you all for sharing your favorite Apps! We took the 10 Apps that received the most votes and polled them on our Facebook page. We’ll be publishing the results later on, but, for now, a big Congratulations to the 5 recipients of our Prize: Kalyan Basetty, Mica Nickson, Azra Kapic, Matt Iden, and Nick Gentile!
We’ll be contacting you later today with your codes for (iPhone), [steel HD] (iPad), and The META Calculator - brought to us by our friends at The Mobile Engineer. Congrats!
Last week, we asked our Facebook Fans to suggest the best Apps for architects so we could put together a list of the 10 Best Apps For Architects. But while a few great Apps got featured, tons of other great Apps got skipped. ArchDaily reader ArchNYC, for example, commented “how is morpholio, Paper, or i-Rhino 3D not on this list? they are incredible apps.” Reader Anna responded: “Agree 100% ArchDaily should consider a second list.”
Well, you spoke, and we listened. We’re going for Round II. But, this time around, we want to know: What Great Architecture Apps Did We Miss?
And we haven’t even gotten to the best part. The folks at The Mobile Engineer, creators of our App , will give 5 lucky commenters a Promo Code – either for (for iPhone) or [steel HD] (for iPad) – for FREE. Not bad, eh?
So, just register to let us know your favorite Apps (iPhone or Android) in the comments below!
Before even stepping out of the car, residents of the Porsche Design Tower will experience extravagant luxury. It features a one-of-a-kind robotic parking system that allows owners to park their vehicles in sky garages directly next to their units. Miami, Florida based Archiform 3D used ArchiCAD to initially create the tower from the architect’s sketches. They shaped the building and its features in cooperation with Porsche to pursue and receive initial city approvals.
In the frenzy leading up to the iphone 5′s anticipated release last week, we asked our Facebook Fans the best thing about their smartphone (when it comes to their professional lives at least).
The answer was overwhelmingly in favor of one key feature: the camera. From snapping shots on-site to taking photos for inspiration (or just to remember later), the ease of having a camera in your phone has made your lives that much easier (and Apple fans rejoice, as the new iPhone 5′s stand-out new feature is its souped-up camera, now with low-light and panorama modes). Many also mentioned the handiness of having email, maps, and a compass always at hand.
But apart from these standard features, we also got tipped to some really useful Apps that are changing the way you work. We’ve (not very scientifically, we’ll admit) compiled them into a top 10 list…check after the break to see which Apps made the cut!
The Alvar Aalto Museum’s first mobile-phone service, AALTOsites, brings the Alvar Aalto-designed buildings in the Metropolitan Helsinki region to your smartphone. AALTOsites, downloadable free for smartphones, puts an interface to Aalto’s architecture and design directly into the user’s pocket.
Erottaja Pavilion, the Otaniemi campus, the Sähkötalo Electricity Building, and Artek, founded in 1935 as a showcase for Aalto’s design, are just some of the numerous Aalto sites shown by the service. More information on the mobile guide after the break.
GRAPHISOFT recently announced the release of the next upgrade to its BIM design software; ArchiCAD 16. This version of ArchiCAD provides solutions that respond to some of the most dynamically developing segments of the BIM industry. They are building components, freedom of design and energy efficiency.
The value of BIM software can be measured only by how well it is used, within a given workflow and how well a team accurately generates and shares data across project teams; ultimately managing that data throughout the building lifecycle. On June 19th, in a live webinar, GRAPHISOFT will cover the basics of ArchiCAD and give attendees a foundation to make the most of the new tools found in ArchiCAD 16.
More after the break.
Sunglass, built by two TED fellows, Nitin Rao and Kaustuv DeBiswas, is a collection of three products: the company’s Sunglass Player, which allows artists to incorporate the objects that they’ve created with the software into other web services like Behance. The player is fully interactive, allowing someone to rotate, flip, and scale the model that they’re currently building, through their mouse and, again, without Flash installed. At a time when Autodesk’s AutoCAD suite of software, costs upwards of $5,000 for a single copy and feels clunky on most machines, Sunglass brings some true innovation to the drawing table.
Architects and designers everywhere know the amount of time it takes to get accurate floor plan measurements with a measuring tape, a pencil, and some graph paper, but now there’s an app that gives you the convenience of measuring right in the palm of your hand in a matter of minutes. The Magic Plan app, conveniently named, simply asks for certain areas of a specific room and is able to assemble a floor plan for you. The app also includes tutorials on how to use it effectively and get fully adjusted to it. Above is a video to give you an idea of how this magic app works and some images can be viewed after the break.
PointCrowd is a RhinoScripting workshop using the remarkably easy to learn Python programming language that is available in the upcoming release of Rhino 5. This three week mini-course will start with the basics of programming and move into the mathematics of space and Rhino’s representation of geometry. The workshop is designed specifically for architects and designers with little or no programming experience or those interested in learning a new platform for expressing geometrical ideas algorithmically. Anyone with a good working knowledge of Rhino is welcome.
Carnegie Mellon University has a building in its School of Architecture that is a lab. No, the building does not house experiments, it is the experiment. It is called the Intelligent Workplace Energy Supply System and it provides the Energy Supply System (EES) for Carnegie Mellon’s Intelligent Workplace, which is part of the School of Architecture’s Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics. It is a physical construction from 1997 that consists of offices, meeting rooms, and work spaces for faculty and students, all located atop the Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall.
What’s the goal? To study the viability of providing power, cooling, heating and ventilation to a building using thermal energy and renewable, bioDiesel fuel. The specific investigations range from design and installation to evaluation of both individual components as well as their ability to work efficiently in concert with one another. Ideally, once all this information is compiled, more comprehensive design strategies can then be identified and used by architects everywhere.
Dr. Margot Krasojevic is known for using digital parameters to explore the psychological effects of architecture – materials and spatiality – on its inhabitants. The Hanging Hotel / Suspended Campsite is one such project that was completed in October 2011 for Holden Manz Wine Estate Cape Town in Massif de L’ Esterel, (Gorges Du Vedron) South of France. The project is an investigation in the choreography of perceptions of the environment around us. In this particular project, catering to rock climbers, Dr. Krasojevic uses compound glass and a prism louver system to alter how the climbers see their environment and stimulates different psychological experiences based on these subtle shifts in vision.
More on this project after the break.
The MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter group is perhaps not the first choice of exploration for architects and architecture students. What does “mediated matter” have to do with the design of urban and suburban space and structures? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Because the goal of this group is to develop “novel processes that enable and support the design of physical matter,” using computer design combined with “biologically inspired fabrication.”
Below, I look at three projects developed and directed by Neri Oxman, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab. Professor Oxman also received her PhD in design computation from MIT.
We begin with a project that combines local and global-based knowledge as they relate to construction. The Rapid Craft project basically mines local construction designs and techniques and combines them with the latest design technologies.
The at the University of Washington is a cross-disciplinary group from the College of Built Environments and the Department of Architecture. It’s directive is to explore and develop ideas “that will shape the future of design and information technology.”
Their research projects range from fabrication tools to new ways of rendering large-scale models. Amongst the most exciting is the SPOT tool. First of all, this tool is free, so anyone, anywhere in the world can use it. And because it was developed for architects, its features have the needs of architects in mind.
Architecture professionals often agree that CAD applications, whether in the PC or Mac platforms, could use some help. Revit of course offers some dramatic improvements but not everyone uses it. So some Engineering faculty at Washington State University have come up with an alternative solution. The Virtual Reality and Computer Integrated Manufacturing Laboratory or VRCIM offers a unique solution for increasing the effectiveness of CAD-based design and visualization.
The approach is very simple: embed VR capabilities into CAD to improve the tools and effectiveness of CAD. Basically, we are discussing the ability to perform such simple tasks as visualization and tracking to complete haptics drawing within the CAD platform. This first step in improving CAD involves the construction end of projects using VR and CAD. Thus, one can envision the assembly and disassembly of projects using VR versions of mechanical tools such as wrenches and the like. And the functionality is easily adapted to haptic devices. And of course, the team has designed templates that can be easily implemented.
