Videos

This article was originally published in Metropolismag.com.

Set to screen at the ADFF:NOLA festival, Frank Gehry: Building Justice showcases how Gehry-led student architecture studios developed proposals for more humane prisons.

Thanks to initiatives like the Art for Justice Fund, Open Society Foundations, and a slew of insightful reporting, the American criminal justice system has been under great scrutiny and pressure to reform. Some of these changes have been quite prominent—such as the increasingly-widespread decriminalization of pot and pending major federal legislation—and have faced opposition from the powerful lobbying of the private prison corporations. However, despite the depth and breadth of criminal justice reform, one critically important element has remained mostly overlooked: the design of correctional facilities.

The LAB at Rockwell Group has partnered with The National Building Museum to present the 2019 Summer Block Party installation LAWN. Designed to be an immersive installation taking up the entirety of the Museum’s Great Hall, the project presents a series of interactive experiences for all ages. The lawn itself is programmed with summer entertainment and activities, including movie nights, yoga, and meditation. By creating custom software, the LAB also developed an Augmented Reality game alongside the installation.

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Steven Holl Architects and Architecture Acts has won an international competition for the design of a concert hall in Ostrava, Czech Republic. Chosen by six of the seven-person jury, the new 1,300-seat concert hall is situated next to the existing House of Culture, and is designed as “a perfect acoustic instrument in its case.”

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The initial phase of London’s first linear culture park has opened to the public along the Thames. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Neiheiser Argyros, the project is sited on the Greenwich Peninsula as a new outdoor destination for the city. Called The Tide, the park offers free-to-view public art by emerging and world-renowned artists and includes a landscaped route for running, walking and meditation that is freely accessible to all.

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JDS Architects have won the competition to design a new residential tower and mixed-use development in France. Located in Rennes, the project will include new buildings on the Blériot-Féval site to generate an inclusive neighborhood within the Eurorennes development. As the master plan's geographic centerpiece, the new Féval Tower will offer 188 new apartments to the city.

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Universal accessibility in architecture refers to the capacity that all people have to access and inhabit a space regardless of their cognitive and physical capacities, and it is a subject that cannot be dismissed. Although little modifications can make a difference, it is ideal for the spaces to be thought out according to universal design guidelines from the beginning.

In the case of the kitchens, a series of new technologies that increase the comfort and efficiency of our daily spaces have made an appearance. Thus, multiplying its functions and allowing better use of the available surface. Let's take a look at the latest innovations presented by Häfele.

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Commercial project performance has risen globally on a year-to-year basis. Reports from the Project Management Institute (PMI) show that 71 percent of projects have met their original goals and business intent in 2018, up from 68 percent in 2016.

Project managers have continued to be a driving force behind this change and they are in high demand around the world. PMI also reported the need for 97.7 million project professionals globally by 2027. Without qualified talent in these positions, billions of dollars could be lost to businesses worldwide.

Danish architecture firm COBE has won an international competition for a new science museum in the Swedish university city of Lund. The museum will be sited in the middle of the new urban district around Science Village Scandinavia, which is an international research environment dating back to the tenth century. The new science center will be fully CO2-neutral and aims to become an icon of sustainability.

The architect Rafał Barnaś, the owner of Unique Vision Studio, a company that specializes in audiovisual arts, architectural visualization, animation, and film, would like to present a trailer of his original project. ArchiPaper is a non-commercial, experimental, short animated film that tells a story about architecture in an unconventional way. The basis and starting point for this work was a physical model of a house designed by BXB Studio. The model was photographed and transformed into an image that teems with life, creating a leisurely-paced, surrealist story immersed in an abstract world, built solely out of paper elements.

PARTISANS, in collaboration with HXouse and Besix, have unveiled their proposal for the Expo 2020 Canada Pavilion, titled “Portal.” The pavilion seeks to create an “alluring architectural invitation to step inside the Canadian identity.” Visitors to the scheme experience the diverse social framework that makes Canada a model for the world, using data collection and AI to reconceive the country’s diverse population as a crystalline AI-generated interactive cloud.

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Picture this. You're in a restaurant and you can hear the conversation of the person in the table next to you better than the person you're sitting with. Then, everyone begins to speak louder, making the environment chaotic. Absorption, reflection, reverberation, frequency, decibels, etc. Although acoustics is a complex science that can render buildings almost uninhabitable when not properly thought out, architects do not always possess the theoretical resources nor have the necessary concern to develop acoustically comfortable spaces.

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Videos

Federico Babina has published the latest series from his extensive collection of architectural imagery. “Abstructure: architectural embryos” seeks to question the use of architecture in creating a drawing, rather than the use of a drawing in creating architecture.

Through the compositions, Babina proposes an ideal link between architecture as a form of representation and the representation used in the drawings. Volumes of architecture are broken down to achieve an “abstract” representation, without losing the essence of the design.

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Scandinavian practice White Arkitekter has won the architectural competition for Jönköping Bathhouse in southern Sweden. Designed to be an all-season bathhouse on the shores of Lake Vättern, the project takes advantage of different conditions in the cardinal directions to create an all-year bathing experience. Built entirely from wood, the bathhouse is designed to create a contemplative setting, immersing the bather in tranquil, natural surroundings.

The relationship between the human body and architecture has always been a key element in architectural design and practice, however, the connection between the two wasn't documented or even accepted until the rise of ergonomics some years ago. Nowadays, the question is how is the body perceived in modern times? How does this perception influence the way we design the buildings and spaces that we inhabit? Too often, ergonomics is seen as a discipline that emphasizes the separation between body and object; however, not only is it the connection between them, it is also the pre-established blueprint that maximizes and synchronizes their productivity. At its most basic level, it's a technical discourse on the increasingly mechanized human dwelling. 

A single family house may often have been considered as a very small pixel within any urban context, but the fact is, on average more than fifty percent of the urban fabric is being shaped by these tiny small pixels. It is well said by Tadao Ando: “The house is the building type that can change society.” Thus, this is how a client, a developer, a builder, an architect, or a designer could or should be responsible and willingly participate in a collective effort to shape a better urban context.

Eight buildings by acclaimed American architect Frank Lloyd Wright have been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Titled “The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright,” the list of eight major works is a revision of a previous application lodged in February 2015. Submitted by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, the list spans Wright’s 70-year career with schemes such as Unity Temple, Taliesin West, Fallingwater, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Presenting your model containing various assets can give your client a better understanding and vision of how everything would look in real life. There is no need for building 3D scene objects by yourself or pay a lot of money for them. For example, if you own an Enscape license you have access to many kinds of 3D models, such as people, furniture, vegetation, street items, vehicles and other accessories. Just by using drag and drop, you can put the assets into your model and scale them to the size you need.

In some cases, an experienced user would be able to create similar content using your CAD software or import it from other sources – but even then, those assets would demand a lot more resources. But if you would use unnecessarily complex and/or foreign geometry in your CAD, those assets would take a lot more resources and the 3D views would be much slower. Enscape content, instead, is represented by a simple placeholder in your CAD program (Revit, SketchUp, Rhino or ArchiCAD) and replaced with these high-quality components in Enscape’s real-time rendering environment. The web-based library is being updated regularly.

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Developer Sunland has revealed plans for four residential towers in a $1.3 billion masterplan along Australia's Gold Coast. Sited in a former 42-hectare dairy farm, the project is designed to create a new urban village. Dubbed “The Lanes”, it would include the towers and new retail space, boulevard, and outdoor amphitheater. Conceived by ex-Zaha Hadid designer Contreras Earl, the towers are made to represent the geometry of plant life.

“Are you looking at the latest revision?”

This is just one of the many questions we architects frequently ask, and get asked. But how much easier it would be if there was a foolproof way to manage revisions and know that everyone else is on top of it too.

Juries, assessments, 15 minutes of hell... no matter what you call it, a critique is always agonizing. Regardless of how confident you are with your proposal and how much thought and effort you have put into every detail, at least one of the jury members will make sure to find something to complain about.

To prepare you for upcoming juries, artist Chanel Dehond has illustrated 12 steps to having a successful critique (or surviving one, at least).