This short essay, written by the author and critic Jonathan Glancey, coincides with the launch of the inaugural Architecture Drawing Prize – a competition curated by the World Architecture Festival, the Sir John Soane's Museum, and Make. The deadline for the award is the 18th September 2017 and successful entries will be exhibited in both London and Berlin.

For John Ruskin, Venetian Gothic design in the guise of polychromatic gasworks in Brentford, ornate factory chimneys in Croydon, glistering gin palaces in Bloomsbury and even the well-meaning Reform Club in Manchester was nothing short of anathema. Even at their risible best, these flamboyant Victorian buildings were idle travesties of the influential 19th Century critic’s beloved Ca’ d’Oro and Palazzo Ducale adorning the Grand Canal.

This article was originally published by Common Edge as "10 Lessons Learned by Rereading Jane Jacobs."

Last week I was in the middle of packing and came across a well-thumbed copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I don’t remember when I read the book, but it was way more than twenty years ago (and predates my professional involvement with cities). As a very belated tribute to the anniversary of her 100th birthday, I decided to dip back into that remarkable book. Here’s ten takeaways from the godmother of the American city.

Looking at the Hearst tower made out of Lego

A post shared by Norman Robert Foster (@officialnormanfoster) on Mar 7, 2017 at 1:07pm PST

Norman Foster only began to casually upload photos to Instagram in 2017. But don’t be fooled by his short tenure on the thirteen-year-old social media platform. At the ripe old age of 84, the British architect has demonstrated that his talents go far beyond designing buildings.

What makes Norman Foster’s Instagram feed more charming than Bjarke Ingels’, or more impressive that Richard Branson’s, is a complex mix of je ne sais quoi, athletic prowess, and a taste of the “he’s just like us!” Architects love that the photos provide behind-the-scenes insight into the life of one of the most prolific and revered professionals of our time. Behind the accolades and behind the Barony, we discover a man swimming, biking, rowing, and helicoptering his way into his eighth decade. It’s reassuring to see that an architect who has always sought to stand at the vanguard of the innovative and the bold doesn’t show signs of letting up anytime soon.

Lord Foster’s Instagram posts show us positive, human endeavors that we should respect as a profession: spending time with family, taking a vacation, and, most importantly, enjoying his work as an architect – a creative passion, or way of living, that permeates everything we do. If we are indeed moving beyond the age of “cults of personality” cultivated by the media, it’s fascinating to see that Norman Foster is taking full advantage of the one-to-one relationship between public figure and the public by openly showing us what he enjoys, treasures, and strives to achieve.

Contrary to how Hollywood movies portray the quintessential architect—creative, sensitive, and virtually flawless—architects are a diverse bunch of fallible people. This stems from the fact that the study and practice of architecture are wrought with several “perils.” Architecture school is a beast, if not the profession at large, and it essentially reinvents the psyche of its students by simultaneously breaking them down and building them up—say hello to unresolved issues!

While this process produces bright intellectuals with a deep understanding of architecture’s place in society, it can also end up shaping architects into pretentious snobs. Young architects invariably graduate with a distinct outlook on life. Pair that with a largely thankless job and architects soon discover that they can only relate to other architects. Rare friends who bravely stand by an architect through thick and thin deserve a strong pat on the back because architects, despite their innumerable charms, exhibit several incredibly annoying traits. The following is a compilation of eight complaints that non-architect friends and partners have against their architect counterparts:

If you ever have those moments where you take a step back from your life and feel like you’ve suddenly fallen into a scene from a movie, you may appreciate the subreddit /r/AccidentalWesAnderson. Director, producer, screenwriter, and actor Wes Anderson is well known for creating scenes in his films that blur the lines between the real and the unreal. His extreme symmetry and restricted color palettes can often give the impression of a surreal, self-contained world. The purpose of the Accidental Wes Anderson subreddit is for users to post photos of real-world architecture and scenes they’ve stumbled upon that look like they could be stills from one of Anderson’s movies, with Redditors finding Anderson-esque scenes around the globe in everything from bathrooms to staircases to city streets. Even a viewer unfamiliar with Anderson’s films can browse the collection of photos and easily understand his aesthetic. Below is just a small selection of some of the most evocative photos to be found on the subreddit.

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Currently, virtual reality and 360-degree video are somewhat niche tools, but they are rapidly gaining in popularity. These immersive technologies give architects a means to better decipher a client’s expectations—everything from a building’s natural lighting to the choice of tile backsplash can be actively assessed at any point in the design and construction process. This transformative technology has already been fully incorporated into some practices. ArchDaily interviewed Henning Larsen’s Chief Engineer of Sustainability Jakob Strømann-Andersen to better understand the current and future applications of virtual immersion in architecture.

Do Architects Learn Enough About Construction and Materials? We asked this question to spark a discussion among our readers, and the number of responses on our sites in English and Spanish was overwhelming.

Having read and collected all these comments, it is clear that most of our readers agree that what is currently taught about materials and building processes is not enough. The vast majority of them admit that they have acquired this knowledge through fieldwork, years after having graduated. So once again we ask: if material knowledge is so important for the development of our profession, why is it not a fundamental part of the programs in universities around the world?

However, some of our readers contest this view, stating that architects don't have to know everything, and that we can't sacrifice good design to the constraints that impact the construction process. They base their arguments on the presence of specialists, to whom we should go whenever necessary, in a cohesive and collaborative process between the different disciplines.

Review the best comments received and join the discussion below.

This article was originally published on the blog of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the largest platform for contemporary architecture in North America. The 2017 Biennial, entitled Make New History, will be free and open to the public between September 16, 2017 and January 6, 2018.

Form follows function—that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.

Frank Lloyd Wright may have famously said these words in 1908, but he was by no means the first to embody them. In fact, the deeper sense of unity that Wright sought in Modern architecture had existed centuries before his time as a guiding principle for Native peoples all over the world.

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This article was originally published by Autodesk's Redshift publication as "Realizing Architectural Dreams Through Design-Assist and Precast Concrete."

Ancient Romans mixed lime and volcanic rock to form a mortar, a precursor to modern reinforced concrete. This made engineering marvels like Rome’s Colosseum possible—still standing more than 2,000 years after its construction.

Today, this versatile material is evolving further: Precast concrete, which is formed and cured in factories before being installed onsite, is bringing about a new wave of architecture that streamlines the building process while reaching toward big, complex ideas.

Against the backdrop of an ever-increasing number of its farmers committing suicides, and its cities crumbling under intensifying pressure on their water resources—owing to their rapidly growing populations—India has revived its incredibly ambitious Interlinking of Rivers (ILR) project which aims to create a nation-wide water-grid twice the length of the Nile. The $168 billion project, first envisioned almost four decades ago, entails the linkage of thirty-seven of the country’s rivers through the construction of thirty canals and three-thousand water reservoirs. The chief objective is to address India’s regional inequity in water availability: 174 billion cubic meters of water is proposed to be transported across river basins, from potentially water-surplus to water-deficit areas.

The project is presented by the Indian government as the only realistic means to increase the country’s irrigation potential and per-capita water storage capacity. However, it raises ecological concerns of gargantuan proportions: 104,000 hectares of forest land will be affected, leading to the desecration of natural ecosystems. Experts in hydrology also question the scientific basis of treating rivers as “mere conduits of water.” Furthermore, the fear of large-scale involuntary human displacement—an estimated 1.5 million people—likely to be caused by the formation of water reservoirs is starting to materialize into a popular uprising.

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.

In 2017, many of the world's cities have become potpourri time capsules of architecture. We live in an eclectic era in which a 19th-century industrial loft, post-war townhouse, and brand new high rise condominium are all comparably desirable properties. This increasingly varied urban landscape—and the appetite for variety of the people who live there—makes it more difficult than ever for new architecture to grab the public's attention.

To combat this, architects often attempt to produce an "iconic" work: a building whose design is so so striking that it attracts even a layperson's focus. Sometimes this ambition pays off as timeless, and sometimes it irreversibly pock-marks the skyline. What follows is a collection of attention grabbing structures. Will they be remembered as eccentric landmarks or glaring eyesores? You decide.

Videos

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.

In this six-minute-long video, Vox makes the argument that the primary reason behind the recent resurgence of streetcar systems—or proposals for streetcars, at least—in the USA is not because of their contributions to urban mobility, but instead because of the fact that they drive and sustain economic development. As it uncovers the causes for the popular failure of the streetcar systems in cities such as Washington DC, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City (low speed and limited connectivity, mostly) it asks why an increasing number of American city governments are pushing for streetcars in spite of their dismal record at improving transit. Is it solely due to their positively modern aesthetic? Are streetcars destined to function as mere “attractions” in a city’s urban landscape? Or is the real objective something more complex?

In this series of images, photographer Rasmus Hjortshøj has captured the Kolumba Museum by renowned architect Peter Zumthor in Cologne, Germany. The museum, constructed atop the ruins of a Gothic church destroyed during World War II, was a response to a competition that aimed to protect the remains of the Gothic work and create a space to house the art collection of the archbishopric of Cologne. In his winning design, Zumthor fused the existing ruins with modern architecture ideal for religious art in an elegant and minimalist way.

With his photographs, Rasmus Hjortshøj offers a tour of Zumthor's design, portraying the building within its urban context, while examining the architect's dedication to detail.

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