“When we started out, our goal was to change the world, to do something that would really make a difference to the lives of people,” said Chad Hamilton, AIA LEED AP BD+C, Principal Architect of Hamilton + Aitken Architects (H+AA). “And education is one of the things that really determines how people live the rest of their lives. “So, for us it’s just a wonderful feeling, to improve kids’ educational spaces.”
The Botan Valley in eastern Turkey has been attracting thousands of tourists annually due to its unique rock formations and canyon-like topography.
To further promote the area's scenic landscape, Turkish architecture firm Fabric.a Architects have proposed the ‘Botan Visitor Center’, an observation pavilion and restaurant overlooking the rocky landscapes of the Botan Valley.
The Midnight Charette is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by architectural designers David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features a variety of creative professionals in unscripted and long-format conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and more personal discussions. Honesty and humor are used to cover a wide array of subjects: some episodes provide useful tips for designers, while others are project reviews, interviews, or simply explorations of everyday life and design. The Midnight Charette is available for free on iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, and all other podcast directories.
On this episode of The Midnight Charette, hosts David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet are joined by Architect David Briggs—Co-Founder of Gowanus by Design and Founding Principal of Loci Architecture—to discuss living in New York City during the 1980s, gentrification, urban preservation, the planning challenges of Gowanus, Brooklyn and its severely polluted canal, designing better cities, wastewater treatment and more.
Antakya Atatürk Stadium of Hatay, Turkey, was originally built in 1950 but closed recently due to its inability to meet growing demand. In a new public project titled Green Wings, ONZ Architects aim to transform this former urban center into a new park with a cultural hub.
Architects and designers, just like all citizens, have a responsibility to participate in global conversations regarding the environment. Their power, however, lies in the fact that they are able to make an impact through the conscious decisions they make with their projects, such as sustainable building materials or expressive artworks.
To shed light on the current climate crisis, artist Alicja Biala and architect Iwo Borkowicz have created Totemy, a series of 9-meter-tall sculptures that translate the state of the environment into an immersive architectural experience.
Olson Kundig is one of the quintessential Seattle-based architectural practices, with a focus on creativity, experimentation, and craftsmanship that has allowed them to expand on a global scale over the past few decades. This expansion has necessitated office improvements and renovations throughout the years, the most recent of which occurred in 2018. As explored in a recent article by Metropolis Magazine, this 2018 expansion reflected key values of collaboration and flexibility, expressed through the firm's unique visual and kinetic language.
In their recently completed thesis project, Sebastian Siggard, Neemat Azizullah, and Thomas Ron propose the revitalization of a 19th century Parisian water reservoir into a new cultural hub. Addressing growing social issues and inequality across Europe, the project, titled “New Parisian Stories,” promotes social interaction in an effort to create a more integrated and cohesive society. Two primary questions motivate their design: With the 2024 Olympics games coming to Paris, what role can architecture play in capturing the opportunities and potential of such events? And how can architecture better the lives of those lowest in society while also creating social and sympathetic spaces for people of all languages, cultures and ages?
Although small residential projects tend to be limited in spatial capacity, the design possibilities remain endless, especially if the project’s site is the biggest source of inspiration.
For a small family’s vacation home, Turin-based architecture firm Wafai Architects proposed a uniquely-designed luxury villa overlooking the picturesque Türlersee lake in Switzerland.
Past, Present, Future is an interview project by Itinerant Office, asking acclaimed architects to share their perspectives on the constantly evolving world of architecture. Each interview is split into three video segments: Past, Present, and Future, in which interviewees discuss their thoughts and experiences of architecture through each of those lenses. The first episode of the project featured 11 architects from Italy and the Netherlands and Episode II is comprised of interviews with 13 architects from Spain, Portugal, France, and Belgium.
The goal of the series is to research these successful firms and attempt to understand their methods and approaches. By hopefully gaining a clearer picture of what it means to be an architect in the 21st century, the videos can also serve as inspiration for the next generation of up-and-coming architects and students as they enter the field.
Initially created for aerospace purposes, materials based on advanced fiber-reinforced thermoset technology are increasingly being considered not only to manufacture specific building elements but also to change the way buildings are conceived, designed and built. Despite being incredibly resistant –almost six times stronger than steel– fiber-reinforced materials are light and easy to handle, allowing the creation of complexly shaped but efficient architectural projects.
We spoke with experts from ShapeShift, the creators of the ShapeShell product, in order to deepen our understanding of this technology and learn more about how we can take advantage of its possibilities in our future projects.
Originally published in Metropolis Magazine as "Inside the Homes and Workspaces of 8 Great Architects", this article shows the spaces occupied by some of the best-known architects in the world. Documented for an exhibition that will be featured at the Milan Design Week 2014, the images give a glimpse inside the private worlds of some of our favorite designers.
It's a cliche that architects have messy workspaces. From chaos comes creation, so the phrase goes. But an upcoming exhibition at this year's Salone del Mobile intends to dispel the myth. Studio Mumbai.
Curator Francesca Molteni interviewed each of the designers in their private homes and came away with one finding: architects are actually quite tidy. The studios are all pristinely ordered; books are neatly stowed away, figurines and objets astutely displayed, and table tops swept clean. The photographs below are part of the exhibition materials, produced with the help of scenographer Davide Pizzigoni, which faithfully document the physical environments in images, video, and audio. These will be used to recreate the architects’ “rooms” at Salone del Mobile in April.
Where Architects Live is not limited to satisfying our curiosity about what these architects’ homes look like. Richard Rogers’ affirmation that “a room is the beginning of a city” resonates with the project’s aim in trying to articulate its subjects’ personal tastes and obsessions, and how those are reflected in their architectural work.
Read on to see more images of the inside of architects' homes and studios
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This article was originally published on Common Edge.
As the architecture and interior design professions have advanced through the centuries, so too have their tools, from drawing on parchment in the Middle Ages to drafting on vellum with graphite in the 20th century. Today, tools like Revit and numerous 3D-modeling programs allow users to create an image of a design more quickly than ever before; in some cases, programs even generate elevations and details. Digital imagery of finish materials and 3D-block libraries of furniture and fixtures allow us to create an entire project without any tactile interaction with the items or finishes specified. But these tools, and the instant gratification offered by them, raise critical questions: Are architects and interior designers losing the physical aspect of design? Has our relationship with the physical qualities of design been watered down because we no longer have to draw a chair or bathtub, but can simply download them, thereby losing the intimacy of working out the details ourselves?
What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at the Biennial to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies – and Artificial Intelligence in particular – might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, the Politecnico di Torino and SCUT.
With no shortage of historical buildings in need of expansion or repurposing, alterations of older architecture via contemporary interventions have flourished in the past four decades – particularly in service of new or growing art museums. These spaces represent the resilience of our historical legacy through contemporary times, demonstrating that the combination even of two vastly different architectural styles can be both beautiful and impressive. Here are ten of the best examples of contemporary interventions on historical buildings in art museums around the world.
This article was originally published in Metropolismag.com.
Set to screen at the ADFF:NOLA festival, Frank Gehry: Building Justice showcases how Gehry-led student architecture studios developed proposals for more humane prisons.
Thanks to initiatives like the Art for Justice Fund, Open Society Foundations, and a slew of insightful reporting, the American criminal justice system has been under great scrutiny and pressure to reform. Some of these changes have been quite prominent—such as the increasingly-widespread decriminalization of pot and pending major federal legislation—and have faced opposition from the powerful lobbying of the private prison corporations. However, despite the depth and breadth of criminal justice reform, one critically important element has remained mostly overlooked: the design of correctional facilities.
Post World War II, Brutalism found its way across Europe, redefining modernist architecture and establishing a new style for mass housing and communal buildings. Although most of the light was shed on concrete landmarks in major cities, European suburbs have also housed many exceptional brutalist buildings such as the 'Hammer-shaped Tower Blocks' or the 'Houses on Chicken Legs'.
To showcase Central and Eastern Europe's "unnoticed" brutalist architecture, Zupagrafika have shot and put together more than 100 photographs in a book titled 'Eastern Blocks', inviting readers to explore brutalist mass housing developments across Moscow, East Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, Kyiv, and Saint Petersburg.
Universal accessibility in architecture refers to the capacity that all people have to access and inhabit a space regardless of their cognitive and physical capacities, and it is a subject that cannot be dismissed. Although little modifications can make a difference, it is ideal for the spaces to be thought out according to universal design guidelines from the beginning.
In the case of the kitchens, a series of new technologies that increase the comfort and efficiency of our daily spaces have made an appearance. Thus, multiplying its functions and allowing better use of the available surface. Let's take a look at the latest innovations presented by Häfele.
Commercial project performance has risen globally on a year-to-year basis. Reports from the Project Management Institute (PMI) show that 71 percent of projects have met their original goals and business intent in 2018, up from 68 percent in 2016.
Project managers have continued to be a driving force behind this change and they are in high demand around the world. PMI also reported the need for 97.7 million project professionals globally by 2027. Without qualified talent in these positions, billions of dollars could be lost to businesses worldwide.
Picture this. You're in a restaurant and you can hear the conversation of the person in the table next to you better than the person you're sitting with. Then, everyone begins to speak louder, making the environment chaotic. Absorption, reflection, reverberation, frequency, decibels, etc. Although acoustics is a complex science that can render buildings almost uninhabitable when not properly thought out, architects do not always possess the theoretical resources nor have the necessary concern to develop acoustically comfortable spaces.
Federico Babina has published the latest series from his extensive collection of architectural imagery. “Abstructure: architectural embryos” seeks to question the use of architecture in creating a drawing, rather than the use of a drawing in creating architecture.
Through the compositions, Babina proposes an ideal link between architecture as a form of representation and the representation used in the drawings. Volumes of architecture are broken down to achieve an “abstract” representation, without losing the essence of the design.
Unlike its TV and film counterparts, which imagine the future as an over-populated dystopian nightmare overrun with violence and chaos, Black Mirror paints a picture of a near future that aligns far more with our current reality--and nowhere is this more apparent than in the architecture shown in the series.
The relationship between the human body and architecture has always been a key element in architectural design and practice, however, the connection between the two wasn't documented or even accepted until the rise of ergonomics some years ago. Nowadays, the question is how is the body perceived in modern times? How does this perception influence the way we design the buildings and spaces that we inhabit? Too often, ergonomics is seen as a discipline that emphasizes the separation between body and object; however, not only is it the connection between them, it is also the pre-established blueprint that maximizes and synchronizes their productivity. At its most basic level, it's a technical discourse on the increasingly mechanized human dwelling.
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A single family house may often have been considered as a very small pixel within any urban context, but the fact is, on average more than fifty percent of the urban fabric is being shaped by these tiny small pixels. It is well said by Tadao Ando: “The house is the building type that can change society.” Thus, this is how a client, a developer, a builder, an architect, or a designer could or should be responsible and willingly participate in a collective effort to shape a better urban context.
There are many kinds of white, all have no color but they are very different from each other: some silent, others deafening; there is the white of absence and also the one of eloquent presence; neutral white is very common, which one day may be painted with other tones; but there are also things born to be white, which could not be of any another color. Fran Silvestre’s architecture is composed of few essential signs, lines, planes and volumes thought and built with great geometric control.
