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The construction industry is traditionally one of the most resource-intensive sectors, but with rigorous planning and digital tools, the construction process can instead make an active contribution to environmental protection. Energy, resources, and materials can be intentionally saved during the construction process to widen the conversation from simply sustainable buildings as an end product, but sustainable construction as a process. Digital solutions can play a decisive role, yet the industry has so far made too little use of the numerous possibilities that are available. Below, the experts from the Nemetschek Group present some of the opportunities they provide.

IE School of Architecture and Design is launching its new IE Next-Gen program, an international forum that gives young professionals from the world of real estate and the built environment the opportunity to make their voices heard, increase their knowledge about the cities of tomorrow and grow their professional network.

Parking garages present an aesthetic challenge to even the most creative design minds. Their vast scale and monotonous appearance are necessitated by function, but result in the difficulty of making the garages visually interesting instead of simply overbearing. Cladding a parking garage in a unique material can add visual interest and texture to achieve a more human connection. However, this in turn creates concerns about still bringing light and air into the garage.

The 2020 COVID-19 outbreak has deeply redefined our relationship to public spaces. Fear of transmission (both direct and indirect) has closed schools, restaurants, office buildings, and transportation hubs, and has limited access to other densely populated locations and shared spaces. We have also learned that COVID-19 primarily transmits through the spread of water droplets from infected individuals, especially in scenarios of close contact, such as prolonged indoor activities. As a result, new building regulations have been put in place that reduce the circumstances in which the disease can spread. These safety precautions include mask mandates, redesign of ventilation systems, and social distancing policies. In this article, we will focus on social distancing.

Multifamily housing in urban environments provides social, economic, and environmental benefits to both individual residents and cities as a whole. Kicked into overdrive after the 2008 financial crisis, demand for multifamily housing has since continued to rise and remains strong today. Generations Y and Z are the youngest urbanized group of adults and these young professionals are fueling much of the demand for compact living in city centers. Though the younger generations are the ones driving the changes, the result is expected to be more secure, convenient living for everyone.

Florian Schaffner has had a passion for architecture ever since his childhood. After he finished his bachelor’s degree in business at IE University, he went straight on to pursue the Master in Real Estate Development. We spoke to Florian to find out more about his experience in the MRED and to learn about Triadic Labs, a real-estate startup project founded during the pandemic.

If you've been debating whether to submit your work to the 2021 A’ Design Award Competition, now is the time! This is your last chance to enter your design, because the final call for entries ends February 28th, 2021. The international A' Design Awards give designers an opportunity to showcase their work to a global audience, whether you're a designer, architect, or an innovator from any other design field. Among other design competitions and awards, the A' Design Award stands out for its exceptional scale with over 100 design categories.

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Vectorworks Architect is well-known for its BIM capabilities, allowing firms around the world to maintain the integrity of their internal design and documentation strategies with an all-in-one solution. The ability to collaborate between firms and share files with ease lets users shift their focus to their designs and all but forget the stress of document sharing. This was the case for Idle Architecture, a Melbourne-based firm that got into Big BIM completely by accident.

The Advanced Master[1] “Design by Data” in Computation Design & Robotics for Architecture and Construction was launched in 2016 and is one of the latest programs in innovative professional education at l'École des Ponts ParisTech. The program was designed to meet the increasing need of the professional sectors of architecture and engineering for combining architectural awareness and skills in creative engineering. Design by Data trains professionals to master advanced design tools (coding, generative design, machine learning) as well as digital manufacturing and design processes (robotics, 3D printing, and mechatronics) applied to architectural and construction projects.

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The building rises from a rock face jutting up from the ocean at Skutvik in Nordland, Norway. Steni Vision façade panels give the Arctic Salmon Center a unique and notable appearance. “It has been unbelievably exciting to work with such a special building in such a special place. This is a quite extraordinary building, that has been greeted with astonishment by my colleagues,” comments architect Peter W. Söderman at Norconsult AS. “We chose Vision panels from Steni due to the printing possibilities – we could project an exciting and quite subtle print onto a large surface." The client wanted to have an expressive building that reflected their purpose as an experience center for the fishing industry.

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If you’ve been procrastinating, now is your last chance to enter your design for an A’ Design Award before the deadline on February 28. The international competition was "born out of the desire to underline the best designs and well-designed products" of designers, architects, and innovators from all design fields. Among other design competitions and awards, the A' Design Award stands out for its exceptional scale with over 100 design categories.

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The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced us all to adapt quickly to new ways of living: new ways of working, communicating, buying groceries, and so much more. That adaptability is the key to navigating our changing world. Modular and flexible building systems can help us adapt our physical spaces to the new realities of social distancing or even to the need for rapidly deploying field hospitals.

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Quebec Wood Export Bureau is adding another tool to your arsenal: a free BIM plugin on Revit. With the help of its wood-producing members, the nonprofit group has stepped into the free software world to put a growing suite of structural wood system components at architects’ fingertips.

Do you know a great example of high density living environments built within the last 30 years? Share your knowledge and contribute to the creation of an open repository via Crowd Creation. To be truly exemplary, the area should include a mixture of functions (at least some of them high-rise) where the physical fabric retains a human scale at street level despite the high density.

"And a window that looks out on Corcovado. Oh, how lovely." Tom Jobim's lyrics, immortalized by João Gilberto and Astrud Gilberto's voices and a soft guitar, was one of the early songs that introduced the world to the idea of a paradisaical Rio de Janeiro and a promising Brazil, with an increasingly urban population and a modern capital being built from nothing. Almost 60 years later, Paulo Mendes da Rocha casually quotes this song in an interview and points out that for him, in this scene, the most important element is the window, not Corcovado or Christ the Redeemer. That's because it frames the view and directs our eyes to what matters. It is a phrase that goes almost unnoticed, but that carries enormous poetic and artistic significance to the craft of architecture.

SCI-Edge, Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture, offers 5 postgraduate Master of Science degree programs. This year is the fourth class at SCI-Arc Edge and previous graduates are already establishing themselves as innovative voices defining what it means to be an architect in the twenty-first century. The current students have just completed the fall semester, which is the first of the three-semester sequences of the programs. The students coming into the programs represent an astonishingly wide range of backgrounds and research interests. We have asked two of them to describe their research interests and how they are beginning to bridge between their previous education and their new experiences at SCI-Arc Edge.

The A’ Design Award is an international award whose aim is to provide designers, architects, and innovators from all design fields with a competitive platform to showcase their work and products to a global audience. Among the design world's many awards, the A' Design Award stands out for its exceptional scale and breadth, including over 100 award categories and having honored over 12,000 designers with an award over its 11-year lifetime.

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Today’s rapidly changing world calls for entrepreneurs who question the status quo and are able to leverage people, resources, and processes to produce dynamic solutions. As spatial design activities and the global construction industry experience unprecedented transformation, there are endless opportunities for those with the courage to stand up and take them.