Façades don't always have to be opaque. Whereas in the past the only options were heavy and raw–such as stone and brick–in recent years façades have adopted an increasingly lighter appearance, with innovative materials becoming the protagonists. These give the building a different look, delicate and transparent, while still maintaining privacy and thermal comfort. Examples of these include polycarbonate, translucent sheets, perforated tiles, glass and even metal chain links, which was the chosen material for a building in Montpellier, France.

The terms critical regionalism, popularized by theorist Kenneth Frampton, proposed an architecture that embraced global influences, albeit firmly rooted in its context. That is, an approach defined by climate, topography and tectonics as a form of resistance to the placidity of modern architecture and the ornamentation of postmodernism. Bringing familiar elements to a particular location can allow the building to be better accepted and incorporated into the local context. This was the case of the New Maitland Hospital, which incorporated a large brick panel next to the main façade, as a reference to the community's traditional symbols.

Aedas has unveiled the design of the Hangzhou Yun He Wan International Tourism and Leisure Complex in Hangzhou, China. Located in the southern area of the Grand Canal New Town in the Gongshu District of Hangzhou, the site is the first phase of a larger project, starting off as a vibrant international tourism and leisure complex that highlights the waterfront of Yun He Wan and the historical remains of the nearby industrial pier.

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In theory, urban planning is a process of elaborating solutions that aim both to improve or requalify an existing urban area, as well as to create a new urbanization in a given region. As a discipline and as a method of action, urban planning deals with the processes of production, structuring and appropriation of urban space. In this sense, its main objective is to point out what measures should be taken to improve the quality of life of the inhabitants, including matters such as transport, security, access opportunities and even interaction with the natural environment.

If you’re reading this right now, or have read an article on ArchDaily, it’s because you were in a place that enabled you to connect to the internet. Think about a time when you found yourself in a dead zone, where the internet was lagging and you were unable to connect your computer to WiFi to finish an assignment or even without the ability to connect your phone to quickly Google something. You likely dashed to the nearest coffee shop, or place where WiFi was more reliable, just to have the feeling of being online again. The internet, in an ideal world, is equally open to all providing access to knowledge and the ability to easily connect with others. But what happens when you don’t have internet? How is your life impacted if you’re on the wrong side of the digital divide and live in an area without broadband access?

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Architecture has always played a key role in exhibitions. Museums, exhibitions, and expositions are not only cultural offerings, but are defined by space, by an exhibition itinerary that is able to surprise and fascinate the visitor who is drawn inside an active and inspiring experience.

For an exhibition, architecture is as fundamental as works of art, collections, and artifacts and their contents. The “Architecture for Exhibition” course has been created on these premises: its aim is to train professional designers who are able to materialize diverse artistic and museum experiences, enhancing the ever-changing story behind each cultural proposal. The students will acquire new skills in exhibition design and will move into a very prestigious environment – culture – which nowadays registers an increasing demand by the most critical and exclusive customers.

One of the most urgent problems faced by Ukrainians today is the unsettled situation faced by displaced citizens, along with the challenge of returning to the cities they were forced to abandon earlier this year. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has shared that efforts to rebuild Ukraine will require ‘colossal investments’, and as leaders gather to work out ‘Marshall plan’ to rebuild the country, local architects have already begun developing emergency housing, healthcare, and educational facilities in cities further away from the Russian border.

As a temporary solution to the displacement of north-eastern and eastern Ukrainians, Drozdov&Partners, together with Replus Bureau and Ponomarenko Bureau, have begun refurbishing shelters for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Lviv and its region, using school campuses and other large-scale facilities as temporary housing.

Architecture practice Grimshaw has revealed designs for the Futures Institute at Dollar Academy (FIDA) in Scotland, UK, an open-access learning platform developed by the Dollar Academy, one of Scotland’s leading independent schools. The Institute’s new building will receive the country’s first Living Building certification.

FIDA was launched in May 2021 to tackle fundamental challenges in education: providing equitable access and closing the poverty-related attainment gap; finding compelling alternatives to traditional teaching and exam systems; and addressing sustainability. The initiative invites young people across Scotland to participate in innovative projects rooted in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These challenges include workshops, skills-based courses, design challenges, and competitions, all offered in-person and via an online platform to enable the broadest possible participation.

Manga is an umbrella term for a wide variety of comic books and graphic novels originally produced and published in Japan, and unlike western comic books that we may be more familiar with seeing printed in full color, are primarily published in black and white. Manga is the Japanese word for comics published in Japan, with the word itself comprising of two kanji characters: man (漫) meaning 'whimsical' and ga (画) meaning 'pictures'.

Not to be confused with the popular Japanese medium of anime, manga is print media whilst anime stands as visual media that is either hand-drawn or computer-produced, combining graphic art, characterization, cinematography, and other forms of creative and individualistic techniques. It is most notable that a lot of anime is developed as a result of a successful franchise that began as mere manga novels, but what continually unites the medium of manga and anime is the use of diverse art styles throughout various narratives that have been constructed for us consumers to follow.

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This week’s curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights educational facilities submitted by the ArchDaily community. From a contextual Earth school in Senegal, to a borderless, collaborative school in Vietnam, this round up of unbuilt projects showcases how architects infused nature with architecture, offering students the chance to engage with the landscape and learn more about their surroundings from their academic institutes. The article also features projects from Lebanon, Switzerland, Armenia, Ukraine, and Greece.

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The EPFL Innovation Park (EIP) has selected 3XN | GXN and IB (Itten+Brechbühl SA) to design and build a new "ecotope", expanding the university's Science Park and Innovation Square to a new site, west of the main EPFL campus in Ecublens, Switzerland. The Ecotope is set to be a vibrant and innovative marketplace for ideas, serving as an "ecosystem in which policymakers, researchers, investors, executives, students, and citizens can come together for open dialogue or debate.” The concept of the project not only brings together leaders in business, science, and technology, but also puts a high priority on access to green spaces and biophilic principles.

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The Outsider magazine and the City Municipality of Maribor have announced the winners of the international competition “Floating Pavilion on the Drava River.” The purpose of the competition was to obtain an innovative design for a floating pavilion that would have two main functions: a space for smaller events during the Lent Festival and a space for contemplation by the river. The City Municipality of Maribor will invite the winning candidate to participate in the implementation of the project.

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Clearly, graphic designers are not architects, but collaborative projects between these two fields of knowledge, which intersect in their details, can work well.

Creative industry as a sector has evolved, and many people are now in new fields. If you're collaborating, you can move quickly and we've covered that here. The trend is to be collaborative, and very different from 25 years ago, when you should be a graphic designer alone doing layout and paper weights or an architect isolated in an office running autocad.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

There are extraordinary connections between the natural world and the capacity for creativity in human beings. In his book Last Child in the Woods, journalist and author Richard Louv observes: “Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses. Given a chance, a child will bring the confusion of the world to the woods, wash it in a creek, turn it over to see what lives on the unseen side of that confusion.” He concludes that in nature, “a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.” The architect Frank Harmon likewise wrote touchingly about the outdoors, woods, and water as perfect settings for cultivating a thirst for learning and discovery: “Children raised by creeks are never bored. Creek children don’t know about learning by rote, neither are they conditioned to working nine to five. Berries are their first discoveries, and birds’ nests, and watching the stars come out. Later they discover books. To creek children, learning is discovery, not instruction.”

The term 'high-performing' may bring different images, ranging from a star student to a virtuosic violinist to a hard-working employee. As diverse as they may be, these 'high-performing' people have common attributes. A cut above the rest, they transcend expectations and bring added benefits through their functioning. They deliver the best possible outputs within their constraints and ensure quality while doing the same. Most importantly, they are consistent in their results, and they use their excellence to positively influence their own lives and the lives of the people around them.

As more smart cities make their way across the globe, whether it being in countries of the Far East, Latin America, or the Middle East, Toronto is stepping back from the smart city bandwagon, and reassessing its substantial contribution to the community. The Canadian city, which ranked 15th on Global Finance's ranking of the world's best cities to live in for the year 2022, plans on "killing the smart city forever", especially after Quayside's controversial cancellation reasons, questioning its lack of privacy, necessity on an urban scale, and whether people truly want to live in a tech-driven environment.