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Trahan Architects Unveils Design for USA Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka

Trahan Architects has just unveiled the design of the USA Pavilion for Expo 2025 Osaka-Kansai in Japan. During the six-month expo, the proposal aims to showcase American architecture, innovation, culture, and industry. The display will be focused on celebrating contemporary American achievements in various fields, featuring exhibitions focused on sustainability, space exploration, education, and entrepreneurship.

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Placemaking in the AI Era

This article is the second in a series focusing on the Architecture of the Metaverse. ArchDaily has collaborated with John Marx, AIA, the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, to bring you monthly articles that seek to define the Metaverse, convey the potential of this new realm as well as understand its constraints.

For architects, one of the most captivating aspects of AI and the Metaverse is that of placemaking. How do we create compelling places that bring people to this new world and enable them to enjoy their experience there, getting them to return once the novelty has worn off? How much of this digital world needs to connect back with our day-to-day physical environs for it to feel meaningful and how do these artificial cities, towns, and neighborhoods come to life?

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Experiencing Reality in the Metaverse from Life-Like to Surreal

This article is the third in a series focusing on the Architecture of the Metaverse. ArchDaily has collaborated with John Marx, AIA, the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, to bring you monthly articles that seek to define the Metaverse, convey the potential of this new realm as well as understand its constraints.

"I had lunch on the moon, took a swim in a shadowy lake on Mars, played croquet with the clouds, and chased rainbows under the sea, all in one glorious afternoon" ... how real and meaningful these experiences felt will be greatly influenced by how and where you interact with a Metaverse opening near you soon. While in a fundamental sense, the Metaverse can be seen as a series of overlapping economic intentions, there is a unique and important opportunity for architects and designers of space and place to influence the outcome of these efforts and to create a more humane and vibrant future.

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If Space Settlements Explained How to Live in Space, Space Forces Explains the Why

If Space Settlements Explained How to Live in Space, Space Forces Explains the Why - Featured Image
A painting of a prospective future lunar colony by artist Rick Guidice for NASA. Image Courtesy of NASA

As the world spins deeper into the third year of a global pandemic with no sign of abating, a new space race is forming over our heads. Entry is open to all, and the tickets are literal. The Architect's Newspaper's Jonathan Hilburg explores how the world's richest men are charting new paths for the human species, and how the public are reacting to the future of private space tourism. 

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BIG, NASA, and ICON Reveal 3D-Printed Research Habitats for Mars

Bjarke Ingels Group has collaborated with NASA and ICON to create Mars Dune Alpha, a 3D-printed research habitat that will provide long duration habitation for astronauts on missions to Mars. The 1,700 sq.ft. structure, which is currently located at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, is designed by the award-winning architecture firm, 3D printed by construction developers ICON, and will soon be home to NASA's future crew.

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Lithuanian Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Biennale Ventures into a Fictional Outer Space

Titled "Planet of the People", the Lithuanian pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, brings cosmic imagination to the picturesque Renaissance church Santa Maria del Derelitti. Curated by Jan Boelen, the pavilion will be on display from May 22nd until November 21st, 2021.

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BIG and ICON Imagine Project Olympus, a Space-Based Construction System Developed with NASA

BIG has partnered up with ICON, a developer of advanced construction technologies, and with SEArch+ (Space Exploration Architecture) to imagine humanity’s home in another world. Working with NASA, the collaboration seeks to develop a “space-based construction system that could support future exploration of the Moon”.

SOM Collaborates with the European Space Agency to Research Habitation on the Moon

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has signed a Memorandum of Collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) in order to further develop their existing research for Moon Village. Signed in Paris, by Colin Koop, Design Partner at SOM, and Johann-Dietrich Wörner, Director General of ESA, the announcement was made earlier this month.

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SAGA Space Architects Design Simulated Mars Habitat in Israeli Desert

In the Negev Desert of Israel, SAGA Space Architects are collaborating with D-MARS to build a Mars Lab Habitat that will simulate the conditions of living in a confined space on the hazardous surface of the red planet. The laboratory structure they’ve designed is an addition to D-MARS' existing Mars simulation habitat and will be part of a larger experiment. This habitat will serve as a prototype for a longer mission scheduled for 2020.

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Big Bang Brainstorm: Be Inspired by NASA’s Free Images of Outer Space

Architects often look for inspiration in anything and everything around them: forms, volumes, artwork, music, nature… But some sources (and projects) are just out of this world. Literally.

NASA has created an online library of 140,000 high-resolution photos, videos, and sound clips, all free and available for download. Here is a selection of images for your dose of interstellar inspiration.

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SOM Unveils Vision for First Human Settlement on the Moon

Skidmore Owings and Merrill have unveiled their vision for the "Moon Village", the first permanent human settlement on the Lunar surface. Developed in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the multidisciplinary project will be masterplanned, designed, and engineered by SOM.

Architecture Students Imagine a Moon Base with the European Space Agency

The European Space Agency has teamed up with a group of architecture students to speculate on the future design of sustainable lunar habitats. From the ESA’s astronaut center in Cologne, Germany, the organization challenged the students to draw on extreme environments in remote places, and speculate on sourcing and producing materials on the Moon to build a sustainable habitat.

Giving consideration to sunlight, temperature, and terrain, the design team developed a system of inflatable modules that can land at the base of a small crater on the South Polar Region of the Moon, where they will gradually fill the cavity with lunar soil until the modules are effectively buried.

Clouds AO Unveils Floating Space Lab in Japan

Clouds Architecture Office have revealed a new design for a space research lab that floats above a crater in Oita, Japan. Called AVATAR X LAB, the design was made for ANA Holdings Inc. and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The lab aims to be part of ANA's AVATAR Vision, an endeavor to advance and pioneer real-world Avatar technologies, and JAXA's new research and development program J-SPARC. The lab was designed to advance understanding of space exploration and development.

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Life on the Moon, According to 8 Architects and Artists

Following the announcement by SpaceX founder Elon Musk that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa would be the first paying customer to visit the Moon, the retail tycoon generated further excitement by declaring he would bring between six and eight artists to accompany him.

The “Dear Moon” project would see a painter, musician, film director, and others, accompany Maezawa in order to “dream dreams that have never been dreamed…to sing songs that have never been sung, to paint that which has never been seen before.”

AERIAL FUTURES: The Next Frontier

A public event will be held to kick off World Space Week at AIA Houston on the evening of Thursday, Oct 4 as part of the AERIAL FUTURES: The Next Frontier think tank taking place in Houston between Oct 4-5, 2018.

Expanding Houston’s reputation as Space City, USA, Ellington Airport’s conversion into the Houston Spaceport will reiterate the city’s role as a front-runner in the space race of the 21st Century. As the most urban-centered commercial spaceport to date – Houston Spaceport is within a 15-minute drive of the central business district – this development will serve as a detonator in

Life on Mars? Foster + Partners to Showcase Extra-Terrestrial Habitats at UK's Goodwood Festival

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.

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP RCR 2018: III International Workshop of Scenography

The International Workshop RCR is born of a way of understanding Architecture and Landscape from a humanistic spirit. The coexistence in a space and time of different creative disciplines creates synergies for mutual enrichment between the parties.

The workshop is designed following four main ideas that articulate the program:

- Competition Format: Closed exercises that condense a complex process within a specific time frame
- Transversality: An integrative interdisciplinary approach
- Sharing: Shared creativity fostering the capacity for dialogue
- Experience: Understanding derived from observation, participation and experience

The Program consists in

- Creative Atelier. The workshop offers a brief approach to the elements that surround scenography: