Trends: The Latest Architecture and News

Although the field of architecture likes to think it is cutting-edge, adamantly liberal, and on the forefront of history, we still look towards the compulsive tendencies of the glorified visionary, their revolutionary thoughts, illuminating process, and iconic vision. This historiography is, in and of itself, an obsession - fetishizing personas, establishing camps, crafting a storyline that awards persuasion and trend over quality and sincerity. In the longstanding tradition of self-made, winner-take-all fanaticism, now more than ever do we see a craving for attention that is pulling (or rather dragging) the field even further from its core values and closer to soulless squander.

Throughout the past year, the concepts of Smart Homes (+160% YoY) and Domotics (+450% YoY) have been gaining traction as they define the automation and connectivity between devices found within homes, and which constitute the basic units of the growing Smart Cities concept.

A large percentage of a city’s building stock is designated for housing. Considering that our way of life is changing significantly, housing in cities has also begun to follow these changes. This creates interesting challenges and opportunities for the materials suppliers in this industry.

Certain topics in ArchDaily become a trend when our users begin to search for the same information or show more interest in one topic in relation to others. Architecture and Construction Industry started to worry about issues as important as recycling and environmental awareness, that is why there has been a considerable increase in the searches of the concepts related to this topic.

As users of ArchDaily demonstrate certain affinities and greater interest in particular subjects, these topics emerged as trends. Inclusive Architecture was one of the most searched concepts on ArchDaily in 2018.

Materials, products, and construction systems are constantly evolving and following new technologies, discoveries, and market trends. The question is: are we, as architects, evolving with them? We have heard about robots working on construction sites, responsive and intelligent materials and the continued rise of 3D printing, but is it all white noise at the moment of starting a new design? More importantly, could these new systems continue to progress without sensitively and effectively taking people's quality of life into account?

How should we use materials—both in their traditional forms and in their future conceptions—so that our projects are making relevant contributions to the way we are inhabiting our planet?

In order to evolve, we have to know how, so it' s worth beginning a discussion around these issues.

As users of ArchDaily demonstrate certain affinities and greater interest in particular subjects, these topics emerged as trends. Gender Equality is one of the trends that will influence urban and architectural discussion in 2019.

Every year we see new tools and techniques for better, faster architectural visualization. The last few years have been a particularly exciting time because of advances in real-time rendering applications. When coupled with supporting technology like virtual reality headsets, projectors, and graphics cards, real-time photoreal rendering is putting stunning, dynamic visualization media within reach—mixed and augmented reality worlds, interactive configurators, game-like presentations—so architects and designers can truly tell their stories.

ArchDaily has become the most consulted architecture website in the world and the volume of our traffic reveals key data about the topics that architects consider relevant. In the past few months, user behavior has shown a growing interest in various concepts related to comfort in architecture.

In a year packed with headlines, you’d be forgiven for occasionally letting them pass you by. But even within the mass of project proposals, awards, competitions, and events, a few trends emerged in 2018 - trends that both tell us about the year past and suggest where things might be heading. These trends, below:

The 'Customer Involvement Program' of Autodesk's research department has, over the years, compiled a database of over 60 million individual commands created by anonymized users. Each reveals shortcut paths and thought flows among its customer base. The team have visualized the product usage (here described as the Command Usage Arc project) by ordering known and new commands from the most-frequently-used to the least-frequently. Revealed as a sequence of infographics, the results demonstrate how people work – and how they often deviate from prescribed usage.

According to the latest Tall Trends Report, 73 buildings in excess of 200 meters were completed in 2013 worldwide, the second highest total only behind 2011 with 81 completions. The increase of completions from 2012 to 2013 continues a significant upward trend that, since 2000, has seen an astounding 318 percent increase in tall buildings.