Architectural visualization company Brick Visual has been loading its most complex scenes into Chaos Group’s real-time 3D ray-traced engine, Project Lavina, since the private beta first launched. With the first public beta now available, Attila Cselovszki, CDO at Brick Visual, shares how adding Project Lavina to the architectural visualization (arch-viz) pipeline has revolutionized the way they work.
Metropolis catches up with the High Line Network, a consortium of North American reuse projects that has been sharing notes and best practices through the pandemic.
Since the pandemic began, the High Line Network—a group of North American infrastructure reuse projects founded in 2017—has been conducting regular teleconference calls among its members, comparing notes on operations and sharing best practices and advice with fellow members. With many open or planning to reopen soon, and as the pandemic continues, many observers expect these projects will become even more popular among the public, since they provide outdoor space where visitors can walk, bicycle, and safely enjoy themselves—usually at an appropriate distance from one another. Especially now, the network believes its constituent projects can deliver tremendous and much-needed social, health, environmental, and economic benefits.
When urban spaces become the medium for expression, protest, criticism, and defiance, the audience is limitless. Pedestrians and bystanders of all ages and ideologies become spectators of demonstrations that walk the line between art and activism and transform the city's streets, walls, and sidewalks into canvases for diffusing ideas on a massive scale. Banksy once said that "a wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with." This call to arms has rung true for many as they take to the streets in a bid to make themselves heard.
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: Historic Hotels.
Whether you're looking for an upgrade or to replace broken pieces for floors or walls, tiles are always an effective and readily available option for any project that you have in mind. With their relatively low production cost, tiles are rarely reused or recycled and, if they are, it's usually for their original function.
Recycling has long been an entry point into sustainable design. It's personal, achieved at a micro scale where individuals can reduce waste and preserve energy. But between resource shortages, environmental habitat loss and the global climate crisis, there has been a shift in daily practices towards more circular thinking. Increasingly, the need to sustain life is part of a continuous process of production, resorption, and recycling where waste becomes the input for production.
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.
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Earlier this month, Steven Holl Architects designed and created their project Obolin, a sculpture made locally from a single panel of cross-laminated timber, or CLT. It was made for and is now exhibited in the Art Omi Sculpture and Architecture Park, an art center that seeks to explore the intersection of architecture and art through the production of pavilions, installations, landscape interventions, and built environments designed by architects.
It takes more than creativity to create exceptional designs. Effective collaboration is an essential element in any successful project, as well as in day-to-day business. Using the right tools can help architects and designers overcome project obstacles and elevate their designs. Real-time rendering tool Enscape has introduced a collaborative issue-tracking feature, aptly named Collaborative Annotation, in their latest software version 2.8. This new feature promises to provide architects and designers with a more collaborative workflow.
Structural components can be the main stars in architectural projects, contributing to the understanding of how the building's intrinsic forces are organized and distributed. Cables are constantly being used to steal the scene: they subvert the logic of supporting structures and build stable systems using tension, creating both a sense of strength and lightness in the building.
This kind of element is found in buildings of many different sizes, ranging from the steel cables of large and majestic suspension bridges to the cables on residential roofs. We have picked a series of Brazilian houses that benefit from this delicate and powerful structural component in different ways, showing the versatility of its potential applications.
The export of American culture is one of the most influential forces in our interconnected world. From Dakar to Delhi, American pop music, movies, and artery-clogging cuisine are ubiquitous. However, one of the most damaging exports is the American suburb. When the 20th century model for housing the swelling populations of Long Island and Los Angeles translates to 21st century Kinshasa and Kuala Lumpur, the American way of life may very well be our downfall.
Seeing the Earth from a great distance has been proven to stimulate awe, increase the desire to collaborate, and foster long-term thinking. Daily Overview aims to inspire these feelings — commonly referred to as the Overview Effect — through their imagery, products, and collaborations. By embracing the perspective that comes from this vantage point, the team believes they can stimulate a new awareness that will lead to a better future for our one and only home. Check out Daily Overview's Gallery of Amusement Parks and follow the team's work on their Instagram.
Whether we like it or not, every architect is a recycler.
The phrase “Swamp Yankee” is neither a diss nor a stereotype. Swamp Yankees lived in pre-20th-century New England. They were those poor folk who could only afford to live near water – where disease, vermin and bad weather regularly wrecked lives. Those folk never threw anything out that could be reused (someday). They bartered and they salvaged as a way of life. There was never waste (“waste not, want not”). Swamp Yankees made recycling a lifestyle. Sustainability was not a Green choice – it was the way they survived.
I am a Swamp Yankee Architect.
Repurposing a building is not a simple task. Not only does it require keen sensitivity to identify and acknowledge the historical value of pre-existing elements – thereby deciding what will endure over time and what will be replaced by new features, consistent with the current program – but it is also a strategy that pushes the boundaries of design and embraces issues such as sustainability and resource efficiency. After all, we are speaking of recycling a structure, or parts of it, and this impacts both design and the environment.
“Out with the old and in with the new,”....or so they say. In the United States, a cloud of dust and debris paired with a wrecking ball and bulldozer tends to represent signs of forward progress, innovation, economic activity, and the hope for a better future through architectural design.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
Monuments, as Alois Riegl pointed out a century ago, are aids to memory. “In memoriam,” the carvings cry out. Though they are almost always tainted with political ideologies and social values, they can stand on their own as works of art, absorbing meanings over millennia. Many that we continue to treasure were once associated with events and practices antithetical to modern mores and taboos: Greek temples were founded on the altars of animal—and, earlier, human—sacrifice; the pyramids were made by slaves; market crosses may have served as flogging posts. There really are no innocent human artifacts dedicated to remembering human acts, as fact or fiction.
Urban connections define modern cities. From public transportation to walking and cycling paths, mobility has the potential to enrich urban life. In Europe, planners and designers have a long history of working through city connections to integrate with existing historic fabrics and make room for contemporary transport solutions.
One of the most important design considerations that residential architects have the responsibility to address is accessibility, ensuring that people with disabilities can comfortably live at home without impediments blocking basic home functionality. Accessibility for wheelchair users is a particularly important architectural concern due to unalterable spatial, material, and other requirements necessitated by wheelchair design and use. Because guaranteeing the comfort of all users, including disabled users, is one of the most essential obligations of all architects, designing for wheelchair users must be done with utmost the attention and care, especially in residential environments. Below, we delineate several strategies for designing floors for wheelchair circulation, helping architects achieve this goal of maximum comfort and accessibility.
I can’t stop thinking about refugia. In the years, months, and days before the COVID-19 pandemic, the term was confined to the literature and philosophy of climate crisis, referring to pockets of life that through geographic isolation or species resilience manage to hang on in spite of the environmental forces against them. Think of clusters of Pacific Northwest barnacles nestled high on coastal outcroppings to avoid falling prey to sea snails. Or old-growth forests insulated from rising temperatures in cool mountain valleys.
As self-quarantine set in earlier this spring, the word refugia, at least for me, expanded in definition from specific ecological condition to conceptual touchstone—a necessary leap to metaphor when faced with planetary crisis. The magnitude of this pandemic falls outside human comprehension, but for the luckiest of us, refuge is manageable: a place of relative safety, of sourdough starters and online Jazzercise classes.
Taller de Arquitectura Carmelina&Aurelio, by Tuxtla Gutiérrez in Mexico, has launched a coloring book with illustrations of famous architectural works. Due to the success of the first edition, the studio has just published the second volume of the series, with illustrations of works by Zaha Hadid, Kengo Kuma, Rozana Montiel, BIG, and Eileen Gray. The digital book in PDF format is available for free on the studio website.
Commonly used as storage support for products in supermarket stocks and fairs, pallets are versatile. After their primary function has been discarded, the reuse of pallets for other purposes is increasingly common, collaborating to the reduction of the amount of waste discarded, especially as raw material for the creation of furniture and decks. However, going beyond the commonly highlighted DIY furniture tutorials on youtube, these structures are gaining ground as the main element in the construction of ephemeral architecture, such as small pavilions and urban installations. In fact, these small pieces can be stacked and united together in different ways and patterns.
When reflecting on recycling, sustainability, measures to take, and innovative technological solutions, one cannot help but think that there are also familiar approaches that should be taken into consideration. In fact, when examining the impact of the built environment on the climate, one notes that in many countries, 80% of the buildings that will exist in 2050 have already been built. The most effective form of sustainability may, therefore, be saving energy by eliminating or minimizing new constructions, and by avoiding the demolition of existing structures.
That is what adaptive reuse stands for: instilling a new purpose on an existing “leftover building.” Nowadays, the refashioning process is becoming essential because of numerous issues related to the climate emergency, plot and construction costs, a saturation of land, and a change in living trends.
Hessenwald School in Weiterstadt, Germany, is an example of energy-efficient, contemporary architecture that offers a new teaching and pedagogical model. At the centre of both model and building stands a well-lit and well-ventilated three-storey atrium.
Recycled and reused materials continue to grow as a more attractive alternative in the construction field. They are at most times a coveted sustainable substitute to conventional building materials, offering a financially resourceful solution when appropriately sourced and implemented. Aside from saving up on raw material costs, establishing recycling facilities or factories might present a good opportunity to generate jobs within a local setting (collecting, handling). The recycling process might also be used as a gateway to lower energy consumption, with some plants eventually generating their own power through specific material transformation techniques (Heat generated power).
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