Recently we’ve written a fair amount about the state of architectural research. The general consensus appears to be that it lacks rigor and, even more importantly, is not grounded in good science. Steven J Orfield has some strong opinions about architectural research. He’s been conducting it—for architecture and design firms, as well as Fortune 500 companies—at his Minneapolis-based Orfield Laboratories for more than three decades now. Late last week I talked to him about why architects are afraid of science, how he would introduce it into the schools, and his work in the field of universal design.
Designing Buildings Wiki have joined forces with BSRIA to launch a new competition looking for fresh and innovative ideas in response to the question: How can tomorrow's challenges be met by today's buildings?
A city is smart when it makes better decisions, and there are only two types of decision: strategic and tactical. Strategic decisions determine the right thing to do. Tactical decisions choose the right way to do it. SMART technology is not smart technology if it causes us as citizens to confuse strategy with tactics. In other words, there are many decisions about the operation of a city that we may delegate happily to technology. But there are questions of governance, of determining our fate, of deciding what is the right thing to do as populace, that if we delegate—we abdicate. “To govern is to choose,” John F. Kennedy once said.
If I were to have believed the many consultants and emissaries of large technology companies that came to see me when I was the Chief Urban Designer of New York City, the SMART city they promised me was a place where the traffic lights always turned green and the elevator doors always awaited our arrival. They promised a city that would anticipate our needs at every turn, given tantalizing form in the recent present of our connected personal devices and the apps that seem to know us better than we know ourselves. Now, with the advent of the internet of things on the near horizon, we are set to make SMART cities a reality. Imagine the awesome power of an entire city synchronized to our taste and movement!
Videos
Courtesy of Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal, Urtzi Grau and Daniel Perlin
Driver Less Vision, an installation at the 2017 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism by Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal, Urtzi Grau and Daniel Perlin, is an immersive 3D video experience comprised of spatial scans of Seoul, projected into a dome and paired with surround sound. The supporting audio is the internal monologue of a personified autonomous vehicle, driving through the streets of a future Seoul, Korea. The installation transports vierers to the front seat of the autonomous vehicle, providing a new perspective of traversing cities—through the car’s point of view.
Apple’s fall 2017 Keynote, which at the time of publication is already underway, is the first ever event held at the new Steve Jobs Theater right at the center of the Apple Headquarters in Cupertino. Every year at its fall keynotes, the company makes it major product announcements—last year, they announced the iPhone 7, Apple Watch series 2, and Airpods. This year, most of the hype surrounded the expected announcement of the iPhone 8 (and iPhone X!).
However, we have also been eagerly awaiting the announcement of updates to iOS 11 and its release to the public. First introduced on June 5, 2017 at the Worldwide Developers Conference, the discussion of the new Apple operating system will feature user updates but also developer updates—and it's here where we find the true star of the show: ARKit, the back-end tools which developers can use to create next-generation augmented reality (AR) apps for users of iOS 11 devices.
https://www.archdaily.com/879403/the-real-star-of-the-apple-keynote-arkit-augmented-reality-technologyAD Editorial Team
The people of Manchester, UK, recently gained access to an entirely new way to access local news and engage with their city: OtherWorld, a pilot news experiment from startup studio Like No Other and Google’s Digital News Initiative. OtherWorld uses Bluetooth and cutting-edge beacon technology to deliver geo-located news directly to your smartphone for free, without installing an app. Referred to on the OtherWorld website as “living media,” as users walk around the city and pass by story locations, a silent notification will pop up on their phones, disappearing again as they walk out of range. Because the news you see on OtherWorld is directly related to the space you’re currently occupying, the system ensures that the news you’ll see is relevant to you. This unobtrusive method allows users to choose whether and how they will engage as well as adding an evanescent, elusive quality to the stories; you could walk right by and miss one if you aren’t paying attention.
In this way, OtherWorld illustrates the layers of our cities that are often invisible to us, bringing them into focus and allowing a deeper level of exploration into even a familiar city neighborhood. Focusing on stories that involve a real-world experience, users could become aware of an event nearby, a volunteer opportunity, a public meeting, or any number of other possibilities—thereby involving themselves in the public space and public realm in a way they would not have otherwise been able to.
Techniques, technologies, construction, controls: master it all during LIGHT IN ACTION, a fast-paced, one-day lighting education.
Take a break from the office desk to earn 3 AIA credits and 2 NCQLP credits. The program includes: - tour of a rare NYC factory - 'Art of Lighting' tour (1 AIA and NCQLP credit), showing art lighting techniques, through the Edison Price Lighting Gallery. - dimming controls primer (1 AIA credit), including how to design for Title 24. - 'LEDs as IoT' presentation (1 AIA and NCQLP credit), analyzing LEDs as the future hub for the Internet of Things. ...and more! Sign up with info@epl.com
The Australasian Student Architecture Congress (ASAC)—titled Agency 2017—will be held in Sydney from the 28th of November to the 2nd of December. It will be the first congress held in Sydney since 1999 and student-led by ASAC Inc., a non-profit student body based in NSW, Australia.
Perhaps nothing can kill a project budget or give an owner heartburn quite like costly code fixes during (or in the worst case, after) construction. As architects, we do our best to navigate construction codes during design, but there’s no denying their complexity. Projects have to comply with multiple different codes at both the federal and local levels; different codes sometimes even contradict one another, leading to headaches for the design team.
However, a new website and mobile app hopes to make understanding and complying with building codes easier for architects and designers. “The solution we provide is a search engine tailored for architecture,” explains Scott Reynolds, co-founder of UpCodes. With his background in architecture, Reynolds has partnered with his brother Garrett Reynolds—who has a PhD in machine learning—and through UpCodes, the pair to ease some of that building code-driven frustration.
Elevator rides may offer an uplifting experience in the literal sense, but while they are indispensable in modern buildings, users face extremely compact spaces which are designed to fit effectively into buildings. Awkward looks at the floor or past other people’s faces reveal our discomfort with the elevator’s crowded anonymity. Couldn’t a more spatial experience lead to a more exciting journey? Flat screens and projections are starting to be included in elevators, but these are just the beginning of a revolution in the atmospheres created during vertical transportation.
A relative newcomer to the material world, smart glass (also known as switch glass or electrochromic glass) has the ability to change its properties and appearance, allowing the environmental conditions of a space to be optimized according to the use and needs of its users.
Electrochromic glass technology works by changing the electrical polarization between some of its components. Its most widely used variant, known as PDCL, consists of a thin film of liquid crystal that sits between two conductive transparent plastic layers (usually laminated glass). By changing the current running through the liquid crystal, the glass can take on different appearences.
https://www.archdaily.com/876080/this-intelligent-glass-can-change-from-opaque-to-transparent-in-just-secondsAD Editorial Team
A view of Sean Gallagher's work as seen in Morpholio's Trace App. Image Courtesy of Morpholio
If you visit an architecture office today, you may sense a slight change. The days of bulky desktops, ergonomic mouse pads and tower-high stacks of drawing sets are slowly giving way to digital pencils, tablets, and tons of architects’ hand-drawings—both physical and digital. Architects across the globe are clearing their desks, literally, and utilizing emerging touchscreen tools and software for designing, sharing and collaborating. It seems possible that, for the first time in years, the architecture profession could revisit Bernard Tschumi’s “paperless” studio which formed a key part of his tenure as dean of Columbia University’s GSAPP in the mid-1990s. However, this time, “paperless” starts with a pencil, instead of a click.
'Carrara Robotics' was presented in 2014 by Jelle Feringa (Odico) and Lucas Terhall (Hyperbody), and shows a robot that is able to cut through marble with such flexibility and freedom of movement that it generates uniquely beautiful forms. The robot occupies the technology of abrasive cutting and -through a software- it cuts marble, as well as different types of foam, delivering pieces of high geometric complexity as a result.
https://www.archdaily.com/874689/this-robotic-arm-can-cut-marble-into-unique-freeform-shapesAD Editorial Team
In this video, British YouTuber Tom Scott explores Thyssenkrupp’s potentially disruptive new "MULTI" elevator system,” which the company revealed in detail this week. Though only in its beta stage of development, being tested within the confines of ThyssenKrupp’s 246-meter tall “innovation” tower in Rottweil, Germany, Multi aims to transform high rise building design with horizontally moving elevator cabs.
The German firm’s cable-free system utilizes vertically mounted tracks, in-cab braking systems, and pivoting elevator tracks to whisk occupants up and across buildings faster and safer than traditional shaft based systems.
Mumbai Skyline. Image via Pixabay by user PDPics (public domain)
The Indian Government’s Smart City Mission, launched in 2015, envisions the development of one hundred “smart cities” by 2020 to address the country’s rapid urbanization; thirty cities were added to the official list last week, taking the current total of planned initiatives to ninety. The $7.5-billion mission entails the comprehensive development of core infrastructure—water and electricity supply, urban mobility, affordable housing, sanitation, health, and safety—while infusing technology-based “smart solutions” to drive economic growth and improve the citizens’ quality of life in cities.
In a country bogged down by bureaucratic corruption, the mission has been commended for its transparent and innovative use of a nation-wide “City Challenge” to award funding to the best proposals from local municipal bodies. Its utopian manifesto and on-ground implementation, however, are a cause of serious concern among urban planners and policy-makers today, who question if the very idea of the Indian smart city is inherently flawed.
In their latest press release, elevator manufacturer ThyssenKrupp announced new information about their cable-free system that rethinks the movement of the 1853 invention. Allowing for both horizontal and vertical transportation, “MULTI” has the capacity to innovate tall building design through its elimination of architectural constraints such as vertical alignment and elevator shaft dimensions. First unveiled as a concept in 2014, MULTI reported this month that the elevator has been installed into a test building and is soon to be implemented publicly into new developments.
Invis Mx2 is a device that allows you to connect screws and bolts easily without leaving any holes. Its cordless screwdriver works through a MiniMag rotary magnetic field, which adapts to any conventional drill, allowing to generate detachable connections with a tensile force of 250 kg per connector.
The system is designed to be applied to wooden elements and ceramic materials, allowing the construction of furniture, railings, coatings, stairs, among others.
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