As the finishing touches are applied to the long-awaited Apple Campus 2 (due to be completed in spring of this year), a new report from Reuters has revealed the fantastical strive for perfection demanded by Apple’s in-house project management team. Compiled from interviews with over 20 current and former workers on the project, the piece delves into the exceptional level of detail to which they have held their construction team, which is said to have been the cause of the delay from the project’s original 2016 completion date.
No one puts solar panels on their house because they’re sexy—at least, not yet.
Jon Gardzelewski, an architect and associate lecturer at the University of Wyoming in the Building Energy Research Group (UW-BERG), wants to change that. He believes the fact that solar panels are usually an afterthought to the design of a building is a big barrier to integrating them into a critical mass of houses and buildings.
"Rethink the City; New Approaches to Global and Local Urban Challenges" is a free online course given by Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, starting on March 28, 2017.
The course aims to address urban challenges in emerging countries to provide a new perspective in understanding and analyzing the southern hemisphere. For this reason, the content is structured in the following three thematic axes: "Spatial Justice," "Housing Provision and Management," and "Urban Resilience".
Enrollment is now open through the Edx.org online education platform. The course has a duration of six weeks between 3 to 4 hours per week and is aimed especially at undergraduate students, especially those in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, according to the course content.
Scott Brown’s receipt of the prize is a culmination of the grassroots drive to see her contribution to the profession adequately recognized – a movement that sprung from the Women in Architecture campaign in 2013–a quarter of a century after her partner Robert Venturi was awarded the Pritzker.
“Things have happened which have made me very happy in my old age and one of those is this prize,” said Scott Brown.
One of the United States’ most recognizable skyscrapers, the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower), is set to receive a $500 million renovation designed by the Chicago office of Gensler. Announced by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel with real estate holders Blackstone and Equity Office, the project will transform and reinvigorate the 43-year-old building, which held the title of world’s tallest building for nearly a quarter century.
The Architectural Review (AR) has announced the shortlist of 9 female architects in the running for its 2016 Woman Architect of the Year and the Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture awards. This year’s candidates come from a wide range of backgrounds, operating in UK, Mexico, France, the USA and Canada, and have been lauded by the AR for their “projects demonstrating exceptional design and awareness of geographical and political contexts.”
1st Prize: Mykhailo Ponomarenko for “Last Day”. Image Courtesy of Blank Space
Yesterday evening, in a ceremony at the National Building Museum in Washington DC, Blank Space announced the winners of their annual Fairy Tales competition. Representing the best the architectural imagination has to offer were 4 winners and 10 honorable mentions, selected by a jury of high-profile judges including Dan Wood, Michel Rojkind, Marion Weiss, and Stefano Boeri, among many more.
“The winning entries in this year’s competition include oblique references to current events, mundane daily activities and human emotions that we all easily relate to—they make visible how we shape space, and in turn, how space shapes us,” said Executive Director of the National Building Museum and jury member Chase W Rynd. “The images and narratives are so wildly outlandish, and yet, so grounded that it seems like we could mistakenly stumble into any of them.”
The winning entry this year went to Mykhailo Ponomarenko, a Ukrainian architect whose sci-fi landscapes and painterly presentation provide the backdrop for a surprisingly relatable tale. Read on to find out more about this Fairy Tale, as well as the remaining 3 winners and 10 honorable mentions.
https://www.archdaily.com/804815/environmental-fable-set-in-sci-fi-landscapes-wins-2016-fairy-tales-competitionAD Editorial Team
To most people, Facebook is simple. They use it as a survival tool during never-ending university lectures. They use it to distract themselves during arguments at the family dinner table. They use it to ‘research’ that new person in the office. But when the architect signs in, everything changes. To us, Facebook is an ‘archi-forum’. Every passionate, powerful sketch of ours is uploaded. Every deep, reflective, opinion of ours is posted. Every non-architectural event is advertised with the intensity of an adventure to Narnia. Happily, we know our audience – other architects...
The first 3D printed pedestrian bridge in the world opened to the public on December 14 in Madrid. Led by the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) in a process that took a year and a half from its conception, the structure crosses a stream in Castilla-La Mancha Park in Alcobendas, Madrid.
Although similar initiatives have already been announced in the Netherlands, this is the first to have finished construction. The structure is printed in micro-reinforced concrete, and measures 12 meters in length and 1.75 meters wide.
One of architecture’s greatest tales – the commission of Mies van der Rohe’s seminal Farnsworth House – is set to receive the Hollywood treatment. As reported by Showbiz 411’s Roger Friedman, the story of the home’s construction will be taken on by actors Jeff Bridges (as the architect) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (as Dr. Edith Farnsworth), who last teamed up for 2009’s acclaimed Crazy Heart.
AART Architects has won a competition to design a significant new residential and commercial complex in the heart of Aarhus Ø, the newly developed port district of Aarhus, Denmark. The winning proposal, dubbed the Nicolinehus, focuses on “injecting life and authenticity into the new port district and [paving] the way for the unique opportunities the setting provides.” Its design draws inspiration from the old residential blocks of the city center, rethinking the courtyard block typology into a “hybrid of classic residential block and terraced landscape.”
An eclectic stacked skyscraper may become downtown Los Angeles’ newest landmark. Designed by Gensler, the 52-story tower at 1600 South Figueroa would add to Central LA’s current development boom, contributing a mix of housing, retail, offices and a hotel to the area located near the Staples Center and LA Live Entertainment district.
Vizualisation of the library. Image Courtesy of Page\Park
A little over two years since a fire devastated parts of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art, which was deemed to have been caused by fumes from a can of spray foam entering a projector fan, appointed architects Page\Park are making headway in their restoration of the building's iconic library. As part of the project, and alongside Edinburgh-based joinery firm Laurence McIntosh, the practice will create a full-scale prototype of one of the library bays in order to "test the materials and techniques used to construct the original library."
https://www.archdaily.com/804770/full-scale-prototype-to-be-erected-as-part-of-glasgow-school-of-art-restoration-projectAD Editorial Team
Our modern day, image-obsessed culture has got us consuming a large quantity of architecture through photographs, as opposed to physical, spatial experiences. The advantages of architectural photography are great; it allows people to obtain a visual understanding of buildings they may never get the opportunity to visit in their lifetime, creating a valuable resource that allows us to expand our architectural vocabulary. However, one must stay critical towards the disadvantages of photography when it comes to architecture. Jeremy Till, author of “Architecture Depends,” summarizes this in his chapter “Out Of Time”: “The photograph allows us to forget what has come before (the pain of extended labor to achieve the delivery of the fully formed building) and what is to come after (the affront of time as dirt, users, change, and weather move in). It freezes time or, rather, freezes out time. Architectural photography ‘lifts the building out of time, out of breath,’ and in this provides solace for architects who can dream for a moment that architecture is a stable power existing over and above the tides of time.”
The following tips aim to not only improve the visual strength of your architectural photography, but also the stories that they can tell—going beyond the individual images in order to communicate buildings’ relationships with their contexts, space and time.
Winning proposal by GMP. Image Courtesy of City of Verona Press Office
The results of a competition to propose an openable roof over the Arena di Verona, Italy have been announced. Three winners were chosen out of eighty-seven proposals to cover the famous amphitheater, a defining symbol of the city of Verona. The competition was announced in March 2016 in order to protect the Roman monument from the elements and to ensure that it continues to provide quality entertainment to spectators two thousand years after its construction.
In the 1960s James Stirling asked Ludwig Mies van der Rohe why he didn’t design utopian visions for new societies, like those of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City or Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse. Mies replied that he wasn’t interested in fantasies, but only in “making the existing city beautiful.” When Stirling recounted the conversation several decades later it was to the audience of a public enquiry convened in London – he was desperately trying to save Mies’ only UK design from being rejected in planning.
Preliminary Research Office has recently been selected to design a pedestrian bridge in Shenzhen, connecting the two tower buildings, each 210 meters (689 feet) high, which will serve as their client’s future headquarters.
The bridge’s formal composition is the result of two intersecting conic masses, positioned about their common axis and directed towards the towers’ core. Perpendicular cones are split by these larger cones at two points on the bridge’s axis, extending to form observation platforms for flying and viewing drones, while also serving as meeting spaces.
The Faculty of architecture at KU Leuven, which last year featured on QS's Top 100 Universities in the World for Architecture, is Belgium's largest and most established university. The following essay, by Dag Boutsen—Dean of the School—and Kris Scheerlinck, examines cyclical learning in architectural education. It was first published by Volumein their 50th issue, Beyond Beyond, the editorial of which is available to readhere.
Design Forum International has unveiled Dakshineswar Sky Walk, a 380-meter long pedestrian intervention designed to improve traffic and movement leading to the Dakshineswar Kali temple in Kolkata, India.
Located on the banks of the Ganges River at the northern tip of the city, the Dakshineswar Kali temple is one “of the most revered places of worship in Hinduism, the seat of divine female power, Shakti,” and draws in a large number of devotees year-round. Because of its popularity, the roads leading to the site have become congested due to increased vehicle traffic, foot traffic, and the appearance of small shops and kiosks.
Taking these existing conditions into account, Dakshineswar Sky Walk aims to become a dynamic solution to the site’s problems. At 10.5 meters wide, the skywalk will connect a nearby traffic rotary with the gates of the temple compound, with 12 escalators, four elevators, and eight staircases to allow users to embark and disembark.
Amongst the rapid materializing of telecoms, media and tech companies within the Blackfriar’s Southbank region, PLP Architecture has been chosen for the design of a new office building with the challenge of successfully integrating into the ever-changing local fabric.
“Our proposal speculates on the nature of the contemporary office tower,” explained the firm. “What is the architectural expression of today’s high-density workplace? How does the building acquire an identity specific to its media/tech occupiers and how is that identity conveyed to the city?”
https://www.archdaily.com/804616/plp-architectures-proposed-office-building-responds-to-londons-historic-urban-identityOsman Bari
At Autodesk's 2016 conference in Las Vegas, a team from Autodesk's BUILD Space led by principal research engineer Andrew Payne collaborated with manufacturer Quarra Stone, engineers Simpson Gumpertz and Heger, and University of Michigan assistant professor Sean Ahlquist to unveil its new Generative Design Pavilion. The project is an exploration of materiality, with stalagmite stone forms that rise up from geometric floor panels to meet fabric that stretches down from a canopy above. The junction of textile and stone aims to emphasize the distinct behaviors of the two materials.
You've seen the floor plans offamous TV homes, but this fun new endeavor from Drawbotics is something a little different. With detailed 3D models of offices from Parks and Recreation, Suits, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Mad Men, The IT Crowd,Silicon Valley, and, yes, The Office, the marketing agency provides a new level of familiarity with the sets of these cult workplace TV shows. Take a break from your own office and check out each model after the break.
The team at TwoEyes Tech made up of HunJoo Song, SeonAh Kim, and Vivek Soni has launched a kickstarter campaign for its TwoEyes VR 360 camera, which is the first binocular 360-degree VR, 4K camera that mirrors human eye sight.
Using two pairs of 180-degree lenses that are placed 65 millimeters apart—the average distance between a person’s eyes—the camera captures 360-degree footage, “just like your natural eyes would view the world.” This footage can be uploaded to 360-degree-compatible social media platforms like YouTube 360, Facebook 360, and Twitter 360, or enjoyed through virtual reality binoculars or 3D television.
In honour of its 10th anniversary, the Curry Stone Design Prize will recognize a large group of the world’s most socially conscious and active design practices, in what the Foundation has coined as the Social Design Circle.
Over the course of the year, 100 firms will be added to the Circle for their sustainable, socially inclusive and impactful design work, under twelve specific themes. Each month, select firms’ work will be highlighted individually on the Prize’s website, while also featuring on the Curry Stone Foundation’s new podcast, Social Design Insights.
The following seven practices were selected for the month of February, in response to the theme “Is The Right to Housing Real?”:
https://www.archdaily.com/804554/curry-stone-design-prize-recognizes-7-practices-for-strides-in-social-housingOsman Bari
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