According to Pliny, Roman Emperor Tiberius’s doctors instructed their charge to consume a fruit of the Cucurbits family each day. To grow these melon and cucumber fruits year-round on his home island of Capri, Tiberius directed construction of specularia: “[He] had raised beds made in frames upon wheels, by means of which the Cucumis were moved and exposed to the full heat of the sun; while, in winter, they were withdrawn, and placed under the protection of frames glazed with mirror-stone.”
The Architectural realm has always been torn between artistic and rational cosmos. During our architectural studies, we are rarely given one specific methodology with which we can approach a project, resulting in diverse outcomes and methods of designing. However, in order for us to discover our personal stand, we must look back at the logic and philosophy of the great pioneers who influenced architecture before us.
Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn are four of the most notable architects to date. Read on to find out more about the creative process of these four leaders of the modern era, and why their projects and practices are still influential to our modern times.
Many initiatives around the world have lately focused on ways to improve the urban environment through the actions of their inhabitants, be it in designing, building, or managing projects. Open-source urbanism is a collaborative approach that seeks to enhance the citizens' capacity for change.
An in-depth look at the concept of open-source urbanism is happening nowadays, and one can find many different definitions and approaches to it. But overall, open-source urbanism can be defined as the co-production of open-source common urban assets.
Dallas is home to a high concentration of structures by world-renowned architects. With some of the most iconic architecture per square mile of any American city, Dallas boasts designs by six Pritzker Prize Laureates, all within close distance to the up and coming Arts District. From Norman Foster’s Opera House to Thom Mayne’s Museum of Nature and Science, these projects are emblematic of a larger city-wide design culture.
San Luis Potosí has become one of Mexico's busiest destinations for both national and international tourism. Thanks to a population boom throughout the state, Mexican architects have dedicated themselves to designing residential, cultural, and recreational buildings that highlight the region's architectural style and traditions. In this article, we present a few of these projects to illustrate a portion of Mexico's vibrant and varied architecture.
The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.
A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.
This week David and Marina discuss the design process. The two discuss researching, using intuition, their six different ways to test if an ‘in-progress design’ is good and how it can be bettered (the different mediums test, the abstraction test, the architectural criteria test, the development test, the conceptual sequence test, and the excitement test), why a consistent step-by-step process is problematic, how the design process if viewed differently by designers and non-designers (clients), and solving designer’s block.
Throughout history, sunshades--light-weight screens typically made of interwoven wooden reeds--have been the go-to method of sun protection and temperature control for dwellings across civilizations, especially those located in tropical and Mediterranean climates. While offering protection from the sun's heat and rays, sunshades also allow air to permeate, making them an effective and economical cooling system for interior spaces.
Suburbs as we know them are changing forever. Partially exacerbated by the effects of the pandemic, residents are leaving cities in droves in search of more favorable living conditions where more space, privacy, and affordability offers what some consider to be a more comfortable lifestyle. But as time goes on, and development sprawls, it’s harder to tell where cities end and suburbs begin.
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.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
I attended graduate school, in geography, in Tucson, Arizona, United States, in the late 1990s. Tucson draws fame from a number of things, including its Mexican-American heritage, its chimichangas, its sky islands, and its abundant population of saguaro cacti.
Every architect has certainly already had the experience of designing a house throughout his or her career (or at least in university). Yet, developing a residential project with limited space, either due to physical restrictions of the land or a small budget, can be an interesting challenge while attempting to optimize the space, satisfy the architectural brief and provide maximum comfort to the future residents. With this in mind, we have gathered 21 Brazilian houses under 100 square meters along with their floor plans. Check out below:
What might be called the Art Fair Industrial Complex has been an ambivalent force on both art markets and art itself in recent years: in one view, fairs offer their attendees chances to see international work they wouldn’t otherwise have access to; in another, the vast mall of it all dulls context into commerce.
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With an on-going digital and physical evolution, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial took a new approach. “Rather than focusing on the presentation of final results in a compressed period of time and space”, the global circumstances created the opportunity to present new projects on a longer period of time and in expanded spaces, offering not an exhibition but “a digital and research program with a series of permanent interventions in the city.”
Launched on October 15, 2020, the event brought together, with its new structure, different formats under the theme of Empathy Revisited. As the first part of the physical display has ended, ArchDaily had the chance to discuss with Mariana Pestana, architect and curator of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial, the event and choice behind this year’s theme, the programs and the participants as well as the evolution of her approach due to the global circumstances.
One of the most rewarding aspects of working with architecture publications is the possibility of meeting and becoming closer to the experts that are effectively transforming the discipline, either with built projects, research, experiments, theories, or even with works in other fields. In this sense, interviews perform a special role among all the different types of content published every day by ArchDaily, as we can get a closer insight into what some of the most distinguished and promising people have to say about the present and the future of architecture and cities.
With more than two hundred interviews published in our platforms, in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese, conducted in various formats – video recordings, transcripts, interviews by e-mail, video calls, or even podcasts –, it's safe to say that 2020 was a year of intensive learning during which we have become, paradoxically, closer than ever before to an inspiring group of architecture professionals.
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Sinaloa is a state located in the northwestern part of Mexico bordered by the states of Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, Nayarit, and by the Gulf of California to the west. It consists of over 58200 km² of territory and is the agricultural hub of Mexico.
Composed of microcell panels, polycarbonate offers various solutions for the use of natural lighting in architectural enclosures. Whether applied to facades, interior spaces or roofs, the benefits of polycarbonate, such as lightness, clean lines, colored panels, and light effects, offer a wide range of design freedom. Microcell panel technology reduces the need for artificial light and favors uniformity in the diffusion of natural light, achieving energy efficient facades and the illusion of spaciousness in interior spaces. Below, we've selected 10 projects that have used polycarbonate as a wrapping material.
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.
Every December talking heads (or screens) trumpet “Everything Has Changed”. But this year it is true. Imminent inoculations may bring back human contact, but the Coronavirus Year has changed us.
I think 2020 ended the 20th Century in architecture. Architecture never leads in pivotal periods. Modernism was birthed by a Western World leaving monarchies and diving into the Industrial Revolution: it caused neither.
This article was originally published on Common Edge as "Presenting Architecture as Progressive, but Practicing Through Exclusion."
For a profession that likes to congratulate itself about how well-meaning it is, and sees itself as liberal, diverse, open, and progressive, British architecture has a serious problem with diversity of pretty much every kind. It is dominated by people from well-off backgrounds. It trains a lot of brilliant female architects but doesn’t pay them as much as men, and loses many of them after 30 when they are not supported in balancing work and family life. Its ethnic makeup is very, very white, considering that it’s 2020. A supposed beacon of success is the acceptance of the LGBTQ community within the field, but as with women and those from and religious and ethnic minorities, stories of unprofessional comments, inappropriate jokes, and insidious forms of jovially “innocent” othering and the diminution of identity-specific concerns abound.
Housing is a ubiquitous typology ripe for experimentation. Exploring form, view, materials and hierarchies, residential projects center on daily life and retreat. Designed to bring people together and provide space for isolation, homes can be open and inviting, secluded and private, or both at the same time. For unbuilt housing projects, these concepts are designed to rethink traditional forms and spatial layouts in the context of local climates and landscape conditions.
This week’s curated selection of the Best Unbuilt Architecture focuses on homes and residential projects located around the world. Drawn from an array of firms and local contexts, they represent proposals submitted by our readers. They showcase both single family and multi-unit homes, from a series of villas for three friends overlooking the Caspian Sea, to a Cambodian countryside retreat and a pine cabin in the Jezzine village of south Lebanon.
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In 1941, Swiss engineer George de Mestral was coming back from a hunting trip with his dog when he noticed that some seeds kept sticking to his clothes and his dog's fur. He observed that they contained several "hooks" that caught on anything with a loop, and from studying this plant, seven years later, he invented the hook and loop fastener, which he named Velcro.
For this end of the year special roundup, ArchDaily has compiled a selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture, submitted by established and well-known firms. Including conceptual, in progress and, even in some cases, under-construction projects, this curated list covers a wide spectrum of programs and approaches.
From KPF, Sasaki, COOKFOX, and FCBStudios to name a very few, this week’s article highlights worldwide interventions. It actually encompasses a terminal transformation in Manhattan, an integrated mixed-use development in Central Belfast, regeneration of an entire district in Shanghai, and the modernization of the infrastructure at Davis research station in Antarctica.
Facing the current and accentuated global challenges, we ask ourselves: What should we address first?
2020 was a tremendous opportunity to focus all our efforts and attention on the most urgent issues of architecture. Through articles, interviews, debates, and projects, ArchDaily's Topics presented each month an in-depth response to the most relevant problems - from the climate crisis and emergency architecture to artificial intelligence and How Will We Live Together.
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