Creating a model for rendering does have its own set of rules. To get you up and rendering as quickly as possible, here are SketchUp's top five tips for prepping your SketchUp model for rendering.

The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) has selected Herzog & de Meuron and HDR to design the new hospital of UCSF Helen Diller Medical Center at Parnassus Heights. Part of the university’s academic medical center, the hospital providing a home to both inpatient and outpatient services will include a research enterprise and graduate schools in the health sciences.

The Hong Kong Institute of Architects has announced the winning design of the HKIA Young Architect Award. The competition theme centered on affordable housing and asked local architects aged 35 or below to propose innovative and unique design proposals for local housing. Arnold Yok Fai Wong's winning design reimagines the adaptability, livability and build-ability of affordable housing through modular construction in urban air space.

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Videos

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Designed by NEON, the Shiver House is a radical reinvention of the common Finnish Hut (mökki). The project is a kinetic "animal-like" structure which moves and adapts in response to surrounding natural forces. Shiver House is an exploration into the idea that architecture can be used as a means to create a closer emotional link between its inhabitants and the natural world it sits within. In addition, the project explores the idea that architecture can be made to seem "alive" with the intention that this will engender a deeper and longer-lasting emotional relationship between people and the structures they inhabit.

Conceptually, the piece thus suggests that architecture, rather than static and function-led, can be a poetic, living, and dynamic element that changes the way we relate to the landscape that surrounds us.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

In March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic shifted our university—the University of California, Berkeley—totally online, along with the whole of education from childcare up across the country and most of the planet. In the wake of this forced and unprecedented experiment, debates about what it means remain ongoing. Will the episodic dream of a placeless university, or at minimum a hybrid place/placeless one, come true? Millennia of experience argue for giving higher education a local, physical anchor. And most universities and colleges have this anchor as their starting place, even as they consider what their ongoing experience with virtual teaching, research, and administration means.

Fundamental Architects and Omega Render have unveiled a new proposal for Tulip City, a redevelopment of the former Astana World Expo site. The 100,000 sq.m project makes use the of the original parking lot on site as part of the Post-Expo Use Plan. The redevelopment is designed to serve as a statement of a new human-centered design approach for the city of Astana (Nur-Sultan).

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This article is part of "Eastern Bloc Architecture: 50 Buildings that Defined an Era", a collaborative series by The Calvert Journal and ArchDaily highlighting iconic architecture that had shaped the Eastern world. Every week both publications will be releasing a listing rounding up five Eastern Bloc projects of certain typology. Read on for your weekly dose: Colossal Libraries.

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It is unquestionable that environments directly influence the behavior and emotions of their users. Human beings spend approximately 90% of their lives indoors, making it imperative that the spaces we inhabit stimulate positive behavior and emotions, or at least don't influence us negatively. There exists a specific term describing the stimuli that the brain receives from its environment: neuroarchitecture. Several studies have been published on this topic, most focusing on its impact on work environments. This article approaches this concept through a different, yet essential lens: emphasizing its importance in the design of spaces for children in early childhood.

The URBAN Photo Awards has made a selection of best photographers, for the 11th edition of the international competition. The list of URBAN 2020 Selected Photographers, is divided by section/thematic area and put in alphabetical order.

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Christensen & Co. Architects has designed a brand new culture house and library for the small town of Viby, in Denmark. Conceived as a sort of living room for the city, the project will be a “place for lingering and staying”, introducing social zones and an open architecture to the urban space.

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Sir David Adjaye has designed a new memorial in Brixton to honor the life of Cherry Groce. The project will be sited in Windrush Square as a tribute to her life, an innocent mother who was shot in her home in 1985 by the Metropolitan Police. The new memorial will be designed to act as a beacon of hope in the pursuit of equality, justice and truth.

The COVID-19 pandemic quickly shuttered the doors of businesses, schools and workplaces across the world. From telecommuting to virtual events, cities have experienced less noise, traffic and pollution. Filmmaker and Director Jeff Durkin of Breadtruck Films recently began to capture these quiet moments on the University of California San Diego campus. Taking inspirations from science fiction series Tales from the Loop, he set out with his children to explore over 100 acres of modern architecture.

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New Generations is a European platform that analyses the most innovative emerging practices at the European level, providing a new space for the exchange of knowledge and confrontation, theory, and production. Since 2013, New Generations has involved more than 300 practices in a diverse program of cultural activities, such as festivals, exhibitions, open calls, video-interviews, workshops, and experimental formats.

New Generations launches a fresh new media platform, offering a unique space where emerging architects can meet, exchange ideas, get inspired, and collaborate. Recent projects, job opportunities, insights, news, and profiles will be published every day. The section ‘profiles’ provides a space to those who would like to join the network of emerging practices, and present themselves to the wide community of studios involved in the cultural agenda developed by New Generations.

ArchDaily and New Generations join forces! Every two weeks Archdaily publishes a selection of studio profiles chosen from the platform of New Generations.

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The COVID-19 Pandemic is a disruptive moment for our world, and it’s poised to spur transformative shifts in design, from how we experience our homes and offices to the plans of our cities. The webcast series Design Disruption explores these shifts—and address issues like climate change, inequality, and the housing crisis— through chats with visionaries like architects, designers, planners and thinkers; putting forward creative solutions and reimagining the future of the built environment.

Episode 2 will be streamed online on ArchDaily, YouTube and Facebook today, Monday, July 6, at 12 pm EST, and will focus on the future of the office. Our guests will be Eliot Postma, partner at London-based Heatherwick Studio, and Verda Alexander, co-founder of San Francisco-based Studio O+A.

Hungarian analyst and cartographer Robert Szucs shared with ArchDaily another of his series of maps, this time addressing the population distribution on Earth. A large blackboard, identifying only the geopolitical boundaries of countries and continents, reveals bright constellations, representing human agglomerations and the world's great voids.

Although chemist and inventor Otto Rohm had first come up with the idea for plexiglass in 1901, it wasn’t until 1933 that the Rohm & Haas company first introduced it to the market under the trademark name Plexiglas. The material, which is considered a lightweight and shatter-resistant alternative to glass, has had a fascinating history and experienced a multitude of different uses in that time. Today, plexiglass continues to be utilized in new and interesting ways, including as a potential means with which to help combat coronavirus spread. Restaurants, stores, and other businesses have begun using plexiglass partitions as protective shields for both workers and customers, especially as cities and towns slowly reopen. Below, we dive into this unusual material, addressing its material properties, its history, and the ways it continues to be used today.

Luís Pedro Pinto has won the tender to expand The Order of Architects Headquarters in Lisbon, Portugal. Selected out of 66 works presented, part of a public design competition, the project, according to the jury, was praised for “its cohesion, coherence and unitary image”.

CHYBIK + KRISTOF ARCHITECTS & URBAN DESIGNERS have been selected as the winners of the public competition to design and build the Jihlava Multipurpose Arena. One of the largest sports and leisure complexes in the Czech Republic, the project, built on the city’s existing hockey stadium, is scheduled for construction in 2021, to be completed by 2023.

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The Australian Institute of Architects has announced the winners of the 2020 NSW Architecture Awards. Celebrating the best of the state's architecture across 13 different categories, a total of 41 awards and 32 commendations have been given this year. Held on the evening of Friday, July 3rd, the NSW Chapter live-streamed the awards presentation, allowing the public to freely join what is normally a members-only event.

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The following text was drafted in response to the initial prompt in The Architect's Newspaper’s “Post-Pandemic Potentials” series.

Barely a few weeks ago, while self-isolating in London during the grimmest, darkest day of the pandemic, I was among the many who saw the ongoing catastrophe as the final collapse of the mechanical age—or more precisely, of that period in the history of the industrial revolution that is now often called the Anthropocene, characterized by standardized mass-production, global mechanical transportation, and the unlimited burning of fossil fuels. We all thought that the demise of the Anthropocene would be brought about, incrementally, by global warming—which might, perhaps, have given us the time to mitigate or counteract the consequences of climate change and the exhaustion of natural resources. Instead, the end of the machine-made environment came all of sudden, the space of a fortnight, not by way of climate change and global warming but by way of viral change and global infection. When COVID-19 came, and a number of nation-wide lockdowns went into effect (around mid-March in Europe), the entire infrastructure of the industrial world as we knew it suddenly shut down: Planes stopped flying, factories stopped producing, schools, stores, and offices were evacuated and left empty. Yet life carried on, somehow, for those who were not infected, because farming, local artisan production, food distribution, utilities, telecommunications, and, crucially, the internet kept functioning.