The world's most visited architecture platform

Archicad 25 allows you to continue selections by switching between 2D and 3D views without reselecting items thanks to new and improved commands. Furthermore, you can also speed up your workflow by using overlapping elements and hiding the selected elements in the active view.

Throughout his career, Renzo Piano has designed dozens of museum buildings becoming the most prolific museum designer of our time. Yet, it has been some time since one of his designs has been as widely discussed and analyzed as his latest, the Whitney Museum in New York. In this interview, originally published on The Value of Architecture as "A House for Freedom: an Interview with Renzo Piano," David Plick speaks with Piano about the many inspirations of the Whitney Museum, from the previous Whitney Museum by Marcel Breuer to the neighboring High Line, the city on one side and the river on the other.

Renzo Piano is the great champion of public space. Whether the visitors and citizens of the city are aware of it or not, he improves their quality of life by sharing with them a living space designed specifically for the cultivation and dispersion of ideas and the enrichment of civic life. He’s the architect who cares about the individual’s experience of a building, who cares about how people interact with the space, and how the space then interacts with the world. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, much like the Centre Pompidou, or Beaubourg as he would say, he showed this by including a large area in front—a “piazza” he calls it—for people to meet, congregate, chat, and even loiter. He’s somehow simultaneously innovative and selfless. And because of this, he can masterfully fuse form and function, creating beauty for himself because he loves it and thinks it will save people, yet it all means nothing to him if he can’t share in this emotion with others.

+ 4

+ 17

Nothing is more iconic of progress than the skyscraper - but as developers continue to build up, it begs the question: what effect does higher living have on our mental health? Taking opinions from authors, architects, engineers and residences of high-rise apartments, Fast Company reports on the pros and cons of the vertical obsession of the 21st century. Comparing the liberation offered by the Hancock building and the failure of the Pruitt-Igoe project, the article looks at how living at high altitudes may change the way that we socialize and perceive space. Read the full article, “The Psychology of Skyscrapers,” and decide for yourself whether this trend of growing buildings is a good or bad thing.

Spanish designer and photographer A.L. Crego has brought street art to life in his latest project, adding movement to murals from the around the world. In order to maintain the original artwork, Crego first photographed the sites and then digitally intervened to convert them into animations.

All the murals selected by the designer convey messages about dependence on technology and its effects on personal interactions.

View his urban GIFs after the break.

+ 9

+ 18

+ 11

+ 27

“The City and the Water” Summer School is organized by the University of Pisa (DESTeC, Long Cycle Master Degree Course in Architectural Engineering), the Visual Art Center of Pietrasanta and the Municipality of Pietrasanta (Tuscany, Italy), with the contribution of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca. The Summer School, that will take place from 7th to 20th September 2015 at the Visual Arts Center, will see students in Architecture, Engineering, Design, Art Schools and young professionals, working together on the Versilia Area, and in particular on the “Due Laghi” artisan area: a context with a high environmental value and a precious landscape, with several artistic and artisanal laboratories, but actually mined by a strong decay. The project proposals aim to provide indications for the creation of new spaces, in order to make the area more functional and enjoyable for those who live and work there, and for all the future potential visitors, with particular attention to the creation of spaces for cultural and artistic events. After the first design stage, a self-construction laboratory will take place in the “Due Luaghi” area. Students will be guided by the architect Santiago Cirugeda (Recetas urbanas, Seville), Scientific Director of the Summer School, and they will work in close collaboration with the artists and artisans of the "2 Luoghi". The Course Director is Roberto Pierini, President of the Master Degree Course in Architectural Engineering at the University of Pisa. The Summer School, among the guest lecturers, will have Alessandra Capanna, architect and professor at the Faculty of Architecture of Roma La Sapienza University. Open events will be organized also in the Cloister of S. Agostino (Piazza del Duomo, Pietrasanta) and in the “Due Laghi” artisan area (Via Sarzanese 111, Pietrasanta). Inscription deadline: June 30th 2015.

+ 2

+ 19

+ 14

BIG has unveiled plans for a new transportation hub in the heart of Västerås - one of Sweden's largest cities. The ambitious plan, "3B - Build Away the Barriers" will redevelop 17-acres surrounding an existing railway station in an effort to reconnect it to the city. As it exists now, the station's tracks divides two areas of the city; BIG's proposal aims to unite them with a single "floating roof" shaped by the "flow of people and public life" that will integrate new public programs into the site.

+ 14

"A living space should be a sanctuary. It has to be a place where you can reflect on your life." - Tadao Ando

NOWNESS has released a new video, this time interviewing the legendary Japanese architect Tadao Ando about his first New York building: Ichigoni 152. Planned to replace a parking garage on the corner of Kenmare and Elizabeth Street in Manhattan’s Nolita, the seven-story, seven-residence building aims to embody the energy of living in New York, while maintaining its role a "quite" and "sensitive" place of refuge for its inhabitants. "I would like to create something that only a Japanese person could do," says Ando. "It's about sensitivity."

+ 11

In architecture circles, it's a sadly familiar trope: a postwar modernist building by a celebrated architect is slated for demolition, and the only people to come to its defense are not the local community, but the architects and critics who can see past the weathered concrete to the ideals within. But despite this familiarity, it's rare to find a critic with first-hand experience as the user of the building in question, and rarer still for them to have experienced it with the unprejudiced eyes of a child. Such is the case with Alexandra Lange, who went to kindergarten at Josep Lluís Sert's Martin Luther King Jr School in Cambridge. In this article from MAS Context, originally titled "Never-Loved Buildings Rarely Stand a Chance: Josep Lluís Sert in Cambridge" and featuring photographs by Lee Dykxhoorn, Lange recounts her experiences of the school and laments its destruction. The latest issue of MAS Context focuses on the theme of "Legacy" - from the legacy we have inherited from our predecessors to the legacy we are leaving for the future.

It’s a detail too perfect, better suited to a novel. Architecture critic goes to kindergarten at modernist school. Years later, she returns to the city of her birth and discovers the school again, surrounded by construction hoardings, on the brink of destruction. Can she save it? Except that was me, and I was too late.

+ 15