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24 Projects Shortlisted in 2019 RIBA East Awards

As part of the RIBA annual Regional Awards programme, 23 architectural works and one masterplan have been shortlisted for the RIBA East awards. These projects cover a range of types, from homes to schools to follies, and represent some of the finest work produced in Britain in the last year.

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50 AutoCAD Commands You Should Know

After spending countless hours in front of AutoCAD working on a project, you’re bound to have your own set of favorite commands to standardize a few steps. We also bet that you don’t have them all memorized or often forget them. To help you remember, we've made a list of 50 commands that can help you speed up your work game, discover new shortcuts, or come in use as a handy tool for when you forget what the command you need is called.

The following listing was developed and corroborated by our team for the 2013, 2014 and 2015 versions of AutoCAD in English. We also prepared a series of GIFs to visualize some of the trickier ones.

When you’ve finished reading, we would love to know what your favorite commands are (including those that we didn’t include). We will use your input to help us update the article!

Happy 11th Birthday to ArchDaily!

11 years ago, ArchDaily set out on a mission: to provide inspiration, knowledge, and tools to the architects tasked with designing for the 3 billion people that will move into cities in the next 40 years. A bold vision for a rapidly changing world.

Since then, the way we consume architecture has changed. Projects on the other side of the world no longer feel quite so far away, and inspiration can come from any project, at any scale, anywhere. The mission we set out with so many years ago has captured the passion of architects and architecture lovers worldwide: nearly half a million people visiting our sites daily in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese. 

We are especially proud of our global reach. With more than 40,000 new articles and 4300 projects added to our site in the last year alone, we are committed to providing the most relevant resources to our readers to better their knowledge and appreciation for the field we all love. We are proud and excited to reach readers in every corner of the world, and we savor the opportunity to continue sharing the inspiration, knowledge, and tools needed to design a positive urbanizing world.

Glass in Retail & Commercial Architecture: Texture, Brightness and Color

Nowadays, new technologies for the treatment of glass provide new ways to use this material in architecture. Applied indoors, specifically in retail stores, glass in its different textures, colors, finishes and levels of transparency can allow the unobstructed view of certain products, hide more private areas without blocking the passage of light, and attract the attention of customers as focal points, among many other uses.

Review below a selection of applications in commercial projects.

When the Best Laid Plans Go Awry: What Went Wrong with New Orleans' Make It Right Homes?

This article was originally published on CommonEdge as "Rob Walker on the Mistakes of Brad Pitt's Make it Right."

I will start with a confession: I was part of the fawning media swarm that lauded and applauded the accomplishments of Make It Right, Brad Pitt’s bold attempt to rebuild a portion of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. The project was, it seemed once, one of the few post-Katrina success stories coming out of that flood-ravaged community.

ArchDaily's Top 11 Projects in 11 Years

ArchDaily turns 11! To commemorate the occasion, we want to share with you the 11 projects most visited by our readers during this incredible journey. From the indisputable and timeless classics from of designers like Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, to the pioneering works of architects such as Zaha Hadid and OMA, passing through the delicate work of Gabinete de Arquitectura, these 11 examples teach us valuable lessons about architecture, most importantly: how to design for specific requirements without losing the creativity and beauty of architectural design.

On behalf of ArchDaily, we want to thank you for sharing with us the best architecture in the world, helping us to inspire professionals from all over the world to build better cities.

Sir Terry Farrell Speaks to Monocle on Design About His Six Decade Career in Architecture

Sir Terry Farrell to speak about his long and varied career in architecture. Farrell, who is known for his exuberantly postmodern works in Britain, tells of how he became interested in architecture, the role architects will play in our rapidly urbanizing world, and speaking openly about our cities. 

Architecture for Landscape: Lectures and Internships with Internationally-Renowned Architectural Firms

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YACademy launches the second edition of Architecture for Landscape, a high-level training course offering 8 scholarships and internships in internationally-renowned architectural firms.

101 hours of lessons, a 32-hour workshop and internships/lectures held by internationally-renowned architectural firms like Stefano Boeri Architetti, Snøhetta, Hhf Architects, Rodrigo Duque Motta, Jean Nouvel Design, Rintala Eggerston, and Jensen & Skodvin.

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Copper Cladding: A Glittering Room With Baroque Twists

This renovation project by Peter Ebner and friends ZT GmbH is about the history of a place and changing tastes and times. It is about not needing a large scale to radically improve the space around. It is about the beauty and character of the city with its reflected sparkling life, gloomy evening sky, raindrops and lights of passing cars. It is about people who are mostly in a hurry, but who still sometimes stop for a few seconds to take note of a special, glittering room.

A New TED Talk by Ronald Rael Puts Architecture's Power to Divide in the Spotlight

"Isn't it fascinating how this simple act of drawing a line on a map can transform the way we see and experience the world?" asks Ronald Rael in his December 2018 TED Talk. "And those lines on a map can create scars in the landscape and scars in our memories."

A Selection of the Most Representative Drawings by Yona Friedman

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Yona Friedman is a French architect and urban planner with more than 92 years of experience that has led him to participate in numerous events, including the Venice Biennial and the Shanghai Biennial. One of his most important works was published in 1958, entitled L'Architecture Mobile, which exposed one of his most ambitious projects named: "La Ville Spatiale", a utopia that recycled mega-structures of existing cities to provide citizens with the chance to live with complete flexibility in their decisions.

China Projections

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Image Courtesy of Martijn de Geus
. Fig.8 - Qing Dynasty - by Xu Yang - Springtime in the Capital

This article serves as a brief introduction to a way of thinking that I assume to be foreign and new to most of the readers. It is based on some observations I’ve made during the past 5 years as part of my PhD research into the comparison between two traditions of architectural representation, between China and Europe, under guidance of prof. Li Xiaodong at Tsinghua University in Beijing. With that in mind this article has no pretension, nor the proper length, to fully convey the complexity of the representations of architectural space in drawings from China, but should be seen as a first try to communicate some of these ideas to a wider audience.

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The Architecture of Memory: A Tale on the Importance of Design and Well-being

Architecture, in all its forms, has the innate ability to trigger our emotions and alter our perceptions. Consequently, a lot of light is currently being shed on the relation between architecture, landscape, and health.

In the 2018 edition of the Blank Space Fairytales Competition, Katie Flaxman from Studio 31 Landscape Architects, wrote a story of a father, Horace, an architect suffering from late-stage dementia and his offspring, Rowan. The fiction describes Horace’s journey in different healthcare institutions and how his presence in a building and landscape properly designed for well-being, improved his psychological and physical health.

Here are some excerpts from Flaxman's fictional story, illustrated by architectural artist Sam Wilson.

Why Equal Representation for Women in Architecture is Better for Everyone

This article is an updated version of its original post on March 15th, 2016.
"In the ongoing debate about women in the architecture profession, you rarely hear an argument for why equal representation is important; it's generally assumed to be an unquestionable moral imperative. However, in this article originally published on the Huffington Post as "Why Women's Leadership Is Essential for Architects," Lance Hosey argues that, regardless of your position on equality as a moral imperative, better representation of women in architecture could benefit everyone in the profession—in very tangible ways.

Today, on International Women's Day (March 8) we want to share again the American Institute of Architects (AIA) publication "Diversity in the Profession of Architecture," its first diversity report in a decade. The release follows the creation in December 2015 of the AIA's "Equity in Architecture Commission," a panel of twenty architects, educators, and diversity experts to investigate diversity and inclusion in the profession. The new report documents a survey of over 7,300 professional architects and students, including men and women, 79% of them whites and 21% people of color.

The Best Architecture Portfolio Designs

When applying for an architecture job, you need to make sure you have the perfect portfolio. While a clever and attractive business card might help you initially get a firm's attention, and a well-considered résumé or CV might help you prove your value, in most cases it will be your portfolio that makes or breaks your application. It's your portfolio that practices will use to measure your design sensibilities against the office's own style and to judge whether you match up to the talents claimed in your résumé.

After launching a call for our readers to send us their own portfolios so that we could share the best design ideas with the ArchDaily community, this selection below shows the best of the nearly 200 submissions we received, which were judged not on the quality of the architectural design they showed (though much of it was excellent) but instead the design quality of the portfolio itself. In making the selection, we were looking for attractive graphics, a clear presentation of the work itself, the formulation of a visual identity which permeated both the architectural designs and the portfolio design, and of course that elusive and much-prized attribute: "creativity."

The City in the Air by Arata Isozaki

Arata Isozaki, the Japanese architect and winner of the Pitzker Prize 2019, is not only renowned for his fruitful portfolio of works built all over the world (more than a hundred) but also for his continuous input to the theory of urbanism, including texts and proposals. 

It is precisely in the field of urbanism, that he developed one of his most interesting non-built projects: the futurist master plan, known as City in the Air, in the Shinjuku neighborhood in Tokyo, Japan.

Arata Isozaki's Palladium Nightclub Through the Lens of Timothy Hursley

In May 1985, an old theater and concert hall opened its doors to the public for the opening of a brand new nightclub in New York City. Located on 126 East 14th Street, the project was commissioned by entrepreneurs Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, owners of the also famous club Studio 54, and was conceived as a vibrant and luminous independent structure arranged inside a rather classic shell, which appears as a beautiful backdrop behind the clean geometry of Isozaki.

As The New York Times pointed out in its May 20, 1985 edition: 'Arata Isozaki is at once a great eminence of Japanese architecture and a source of some of its freshest thinking. And all sides of Mr. Isozaki are visible in the Palladium'.

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Offices and Workplaces: Examples in Plan

The functional distribution plays a fundamental role in the contemporary design of offices and places for work. The study of the architecture plan shows an interesting form of approach; not only allows for proper logistics and circulation but find efficient variations and innovations that will enable better workspaces that adapt to the current needs.

We have selected more than 50 plans of projects that will inspire you, recognizing the different ways in which architects have faced the challenge to design offices, in all different scale ranges.

60 Best Residential Axonometric Drawings

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During the professional life of an architect, the task of designing a residence can be a frequent occurrence. As the project develops, representing a vision in a determined space through a set of drawings is certainly one of the primary tasks of the design process. While the architect has a certain level of visual literacy, sometimes the client won't necessarily understand all the drawings. Going beyond the two-dimensionality of the plans, sections and elevations, axonometric perspectives are presented as an efficient instrument in the spatial representation of the project. When adding the notion of third dimension—and even though it’s presented by on a 2D sheet of paper—it gives a better understanding to those unfamiliar with technical drawings.

Sun-Filled Spaces Created By Skylights In 20 Architectural Projects

Perhaps the most renowned 'skylight' ever built is the Pantheon of Rome commissioned by Marco Vipsanius Agrippa during the reign of Emperor Augustus (27 BC-14 AD) and rebuilt by Hadrian (117-118) around 126 AD. At the highest point of its dome (in this case, the oculus) the sunlight shines, casting its beams over the various statues of planetary deities that occupy the niches on the walls. The light that enters the space symbolizes a cosmic, sacred dimension. In projects around the world, natural light continues to fulfill this scenic role, especially in religious projects.

It is characterized as zenithal illumination as that which comes from above, from the sky (zenith). Very useful for large spaces that can not be adequately lit by windows, skylights are a widely used device for providing a pleasant, diffuse light. Generally, care is taken to prevent direct entry of sunlight; the openings must be well designed so that they do not overheat the space of allow water infiltration. Below is a collection of projects that make good use of this technique.

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Who is Arata Isozaki? 20 Things to Know About the 2019 Pritzker Laureate

The prolific and varied career of 2019 Pritzker Laureate Arata Isozaki, which includes more than 100 works built on virtually every continent, gives us a huge amount of facts that are relevant to understanding his life and architecture. Considered the first Japanese architect to develop his work on a truly global scale, Isozaki took special care to respond to the context and the specific requirements of each project, expanding the heterogeneity of his work and resulting in a variety of styles from vernacular to high tech.

See below 20 fascinating facts that illuminate his particular genius:

A Selection of the Best Instagram Photos from Arata Isozaki's Work

2019 Pritzker Laureate Arata Isozaki has been designing for more than half a century; several of his works are considered architectural classics due to their influence and impact on international design.

His work combines a number of styles, from vernacular to high tech  and organic to brutalist, giving his projects a sculptural and undeniably photogenic appearance. With such richness in design, it is perhaps no wonder that people around the world are excited to photograph his work.

We've selected 23 of the most beautiful photos of Isozaki's work posted to Instagram by users across the globe. Our selection, after the break:

The World's Top Universities for Studying Architecture in 2019

Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) has revealed it's ranking of the world’s top universities for the study of Architecture / Built Environment for 2019, based upon academic reputation, employer reputation and research impact.

On this edition, the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL (University College London) has been named the best university for studying architecture, taking MIT's place, which has topped the rankings for the past four years .

Keep reading and check out the complete ranking.

“Form-Generating is Similar to Music – You Try to Compose Music and Suddenly the Melody Comes”: In Conversation with Kevin Roche

American architect Kevin Roche passed away this past Friday, March 1 at the age of 96. He was born in 1922 in Dublin, Ireland, educated at the University College Dublin (1945) and Illinois Institute of Technology (1948). In 1966, he formed Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates (KRJDA). He has designed more than 200 buildings, including renovation to the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2012), National Conference Centre in Dublin (2010), Lafayett Tower in Washington DC (2009), J.P. Morgan Headquarters in Manhattan (1992), Central Park Zoo in Manhattan (1988), The Knights of Columbus Building Headquarters in New Haven (1969), The Ford Foundation in Manhattan (1968), and Oakland Museum of California (1966). In 1982 he became the fourth Pritzker Prize winner and in 1993 was awarded the AIA Gold Medal. The following excerpt is from our 2011 interview at the architect’s office in Hamden, Connecticut.

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