Modular coatings for facades and enclosures typically deliver fast and efficient solutions. However, many times they lack richness and character since they are repeated infinitely, without relating to the architectural design and its different functions and requirements.

These aluminum foam panels are manufactured through an air injection process in molten aluminum, which contains a fine dispersion of ceramic particulate. These ceramic particles stabilize the air bubbles, and create aluminum foam panels which provide an interesting level of detail and variability, generating unique facades with different levels of texture, transparency, brightness, and opacity. These ultralight panels can be used as flat architectural sheets, are 100% recyclable and available in standard sized formats up to 3.66 meters long (custom longer panels also available). 

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British architectural photographer Peter M. Cook has documented the city of Tokyo and its evolution for more than twenty years. Following the development of the city and its buildings with a large-format camera, Cook's first book of photographs have been published by Hatje Cantz Verlag with 100 shots. The monochromatic, large-format photographs reveal a story of one of the world's most iconic cities.

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It’s a tale as old as time. The architect slaves away night after night designing the most beautiful architecture. The people are raving, excited to see what new and impressive building will go up this time. The render looks amazing!

Italian architect Gaetano Boccia has been researching drawings and architectural representation for the past two years. The Pdda (piccoli disegni di architettura) project was born with the intention of sharing Boccia's thoughts, which he has always cataloged and kept in notebooks.

Referring to no particular buildings, these drawings are part of an inspirational process that takes place in the architect's daily context and complex surroundings of Naples and Italian culture.

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Videos

Before social media took over, buildings were published on magazines, edited and refined according to their architects’ preferences. Nowadays, magazines are left on the sidelines for a much more influential platform, one that is not totally controlled by the architects. Digital communication has changed the way people view and interact with architecture, providing architects with new insights on how to design their structures.

PLANE—SITE, a global production agency involved in the world of urban, cultural, and social spaces, have put together a short video that examines the impact of social media on architecture firms. Building Images provides insights from OMA/AMO and UNStudio, two firms with different approaches to social media, who explain how social platforms have helped them see their projects in unprecedented ways.

This article was originally published on Metropolis Magazine.

Green building was always part of the firm's DNA, though a little more than ten years ago Lake|Flato formed an internal studio that would focus on landscape and resource management.

For over three decades, San Antonio’s Lake|Flato Architects have advanced the cause of critical regionalism in South Texas. Founding partners David Lake and Ted Flato met in the office of O’Neil Ford, an early Texas Modernist whose work combined structural innovation with local building traditions. When they started their own practice in 1984, Lake and Flato carried this germ with them, turning out a series of ranch houses that garnered attention for their deft blending of modern modes of living, indigenous materials, and agro-industrial vernacular.

The conversation with renowned architect and artist Zvi Hecker (born 1931) followed Crusaders Come and Go, his exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (June-July 2017). In the first part, Hecker introduces his historical critique of the Modernist turn in architecture and its effect on city planning. He points out the tension between an urbanistic approach and approach which focuses on the impact of the single building. In the second part, Hecker tackles the notion of the architect’s style and positions his work against or in distance to the endeavor of cultivating a stylistic signature. In the last part, Hecker elaborates on a recurring motif in his work, the motive of the open book as a symbol, concept and formal dynamic reference.

Throughout his distinguished career, Pritzker award winner Tadao Ando managed to trigger every human’s sensations upon entering his structures. It was never just the buildings’ forms that let the architect earn his status, but the manipulation of light and shadow and the impulsive sensation of sanctity that his buildings impose, are what led him to become one of the world’s most renowned architects.

To showcase Ando’s recent works and to honor their ongoing relationship with the architect, Oris House of Architecture have created a monograph titled Transcending Oppositions, celebrating his buildings and their relationship with the contemporary culture of Japan. Judging this book by its cover, readers will have a clear notion of what to expect, as the monograph reflects Tadao Ando’s architecture on fine print.

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As we have seen throughout the history of architecture, ephemeral installations and pavilions are important tools for talking about specific moments in architecture in an almost immediate way. While it is true some pavilions have been so relevant that they broke with their ephemeral quality to become permanent, such as the German Pavilion in Barcelona, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, most are documented in photographs, plans and experiences to be rewritten in future projects.

321 graduation projects designed by 407 young architects, landscape architects and urban designers were submitted for the 2019 Archiprix International / Hunter Douglas Awards. Among 22 finalists announced in December 2018, an international jury selected 7 winning projects which spotlight international trends in architecture, urban design and landscape architecture.

Artist and designer Es Devlin recently joined TED2019 to explore her iconic stage sculptures and upcoming work for Expo 2020 Dubai. Creating works for Beyoncé, Adele, Kanye West, U2 and more, Devlin is known for creating large-scale performative sculptures and environments that fuse music, language and light. Her TED Talk highlights a visual journey of Devlin's work to illustrate her incredible creative process.

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Videos

Italian artist Federico Babina has published the latest in his impressive portfolio of architectural illustrations. “Planimal” seeks to convey the close link between architecture and the natural world, translating animals into architectural plans. Through his set of drawings, Babina reimagines the architectural spaces as “narrative subjects that host us and lead us into a fantastic labyrinth of a dreamlike reality, architectures imagined as allusively zoomorphic sculptures.”

Houses, museums, and churches are conveyed as roaring lions, crawling snakes, and swimming whales, with dynamic spaces formed from cocktails of asymmetries and symmetries, curves and straight lines, solids and voids, sounds and silences, lights and shadows.

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1024 architecture has released details of their exhibition at La Philharmonie de Paris. Freed from the classic codes of presentation, the exhibition adopts a raw, deliberately urban design, including a scaffolding structure reminiscent of concert scenery. The firm as also designed a digital installation, Core, whose light sculptures change with the soundtrack.

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Past, Present, Future is an interview project by Itinerant Office, asking acclaimed architects to share their perspectives on the constantly evolving world of architecture. Each interview is split into three video segments: Past, Present, and Future, in which interviewees discuss their thoughts and experiences of architecture through each of those lenses. The first episode of the project featured 11 architects from Italy and the Netherlands and Episode II is comprised of interviews with 13 architects from Spain, Portugal, France, and Belgium.

SOM recently unveiled their new design for the James and Miriam Mulva Cultural Center, a institution for cultural programming in De Pere, Wisconsin. Clad in a curtain of transparent glass, the center will serve as a destination and cultural nexus for the city and region, with an array of spaces designed to celebrate De Pere’s creative community. As a new home for the creative arts, it will host traveling exhibitions from leading global institutions, diverse cultural programming, and educational opportunities for people of all ages.

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 will present interactive experiences for all ages. The lawn itself will be programmed and activated throughout the day with summer entertainment and activities, including movie nights, yoga, and meditation. By creating custom software, the LAB has also developed an Augmented Reality game alongside the installation.

Perkins+Will has unveiled its design for 799 Broadway, a 12-story boutique office building just south of Union Square in Manhattan. The scheme seeks to reinvent the classic NYC loft building with contemporary materials, systems and, and technology. An exercise in designing from the inside out, the midrise scheme features a range of flexible floorplates that extend into a cascade of undulating terraces on almost every floor. The sculptural massing responds to zoning setback regulations, delivering a human-scaled expression with meaningful connections to the outdoors.

What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at UABB 2019 to set up a discussion on how new technologies - and Artificial Intelligence in particular - might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, Politecnico di Torino, and SCUT. If you are interested in taking part in the exhibition at UABB 2019, submit your proposal to the “Eyes of the City” open call until May 31st, 2019: www.eyesofthecity.net

Comparisons, transpositions and metaphors can be misleading if one does not unpack carefully their point of departure. The notion that the digital age introduces us to a new regime of "eyes on the street", an expression famously coined by Jane Jacobs, requires understanding exactly what the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities implied when she used it. For Jane Jacobs, the active presence of city dwellers in the street, their unconscious or conscious monitoring of what was going on in their immediate surroundings was the best way to ensure public safety. "The public peace — the sidewalk and the street peace— of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves," wrote Jane Jacobs.

Bjarke Ingels Group and Uribe & Schwarzkopf have designed a 24-story rose-colored tower in Quito, Ecuador inspired by natural beauty, diversity, and the community of the city. EPIQ is BIG’s second building in the city, with a dynamic, porous structure clad in colored titles to echo the beauty of Quito, and to be the face of a new sustainable urbanism in the growing city.

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Jennifer Bonner of MALL has been named one of the 2019 recipients of The Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers. Each year, The Architectural League announces six firms as winners of the award, which spotlights young, innovative North American architects and designers. Bonner is known for work that reinvents materials, hacks typologies, and playfully reimagines everyday architectural elements from gable roofs to brick facades.

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"Soy de Azteca" (Or "I'm from Azteca") is a photographic project by Zaickz Moz that seeks to re-think the expressions of community and identity of the periphery of Mexico City—which is becoming more diffuse and overflows beyond its geographical limits. The objective of this project is to re-think the interpretations of community and identity of the residents of Ciudad Azteca (State of Mexico) manifested in private, public and urban spaces, through photographic series that addresses issues such as appropriation and modification of space habitable, urban development and the sense of community in the neighborhood of Ciudad Azteca.

The particular characteristics of a community give the inhabitants a sense of identity and belonging. Does this happen in any inhabited place? When observing that the history of Ciudad Azteca always exists in relation to Mexico City, it is worth asking if identifying traits have emerged among the inhabitants of Ciudad Azteca. As in other areas of the capital's periphery, it is possible to observe in this group of neighborhoods located in the municipality of Ecatepec the capacity of the locals to build and transform a space into a variety of forms of urban habitat.

The Ilan and Asaf Ramon International Airport has opened in the Negev Desert of Israel. Designed by Amir Mann-Ami Shinar Architects and Moshe Zur Architects, the project was made to service the Red Sea resort city of Eilat and the surrounding region. The airport's design was influenced by the futuristic world of aviation and the project's natural desert surrounding. Commissioned by the Israel Airport Authority, the project is Israel's first civil airport built from scratch.

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