Founded by architects Felipe Mesa and Federico Mesa, the Plan:b arquitectos studio is located in the city of Medellín, Colombia, bringing together building design, participation in academic activities, and the construction of concepts capable of connecting architecture with the urgent realities of everyday life. Understanding the architectural project as a provisional pact, permeable configuration, and positive expression of eco-social constraints, they have constructed a large number of buildings of various scales and programs since 2000, ranging from public, educational, and sports spaces to housing, offices, hotels, and installations.
A Trombe wall is a passive solar building feature that enhances thermal efficiency. Positioned on the sun-facing side of a structure, it consists of a wall made from materials like brick, stone, or concrete, and a glass panel or polycarbonate sheet placed a few centimeters in front of it. Solar radiation penetrates the glass during daylight hours and heats the masonry wall. This wall then slowly releases the stored heat into the building during the cooler nighttime hours, maintaining a more consistent indoor temperature without the need for active heating systems.
In the hustle and bustle of modern life, with deadlines, goals, and performance, finding moments of tranquility is essential for maintaining overall well-being and peace of mind. These moments provide a necessary break from daily stresses, allowing the mind and body to reset and thoughts to reorganize. Rituals of relaxation can create a sanctuary of calm amidst the chaos, promoting a sense of balance and peace, providing a healthier and more harmonious lifestyle, and contributing to better physical and emotional health. However, these rituals need not be expensive or complex.
Simple activities, such as breathing exercises, taking a walk in nature, or a relaxing bath, can be extremely effective. In fact, taking time to experience the calming and energizing effects of water can significantly enhance mental clarity, bring new ideas, provide comfort, and improve mood.
In her Dhaka, Bangladesh–based practice, Marina Tabassum seeks to create a language of architecture that’s simultaneously contemporary yet rooted to its place. One of the first buildings she undertook after establishing her own practice in 2005—the Bait Ur Rouf Mosque in her own city—won an Aga Khan Award for Architecture, which recognizes design that addresses the needs and aspirations of Muslim societies.
Bangladesh’s Museum of Independence, which she designed with her former partner, Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury of the practice URBANA, has become a national landmark. But Tabassum also works at the intimate scale of housing, pursuing innovative modular space-frame designs constructed of bamboo. She’s taught at architecture schools around the globe. Recently, she was recognized with an award from the Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum and identified by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people for 2024 for her work in sustainable, socially responsible design.
https://www.archdaily.com/1017460/light-empathy-and-silence-the-architecture-of-marina-tabassumMichael J. Crosbie
Gallaudet University was established in 1864, becoming the first American educational institution for the deaf and hard of hearing. The university is officially bilingual, with American Sign Language (ASL) and written English used throughout the educational programs. Over the years, the university has grown, adapting both its teaching methods and its spaces to the needs of its students, in turn learning from them how to counter the challenges they face and create a safer and more comfortable environment. These lessons turned into design guidelines, created to educate the architectural community about the strategies they can employ to create more accessible spaces for all.
Transforming an initial idea into a concept design is a complex process. It requires understanding project requirements like context, program, budget, and functionality and rapidly iterating—usually with a team—to arrive at a concept, leading to multiple iterations at an early stage.
A common frustration among architects is that concept tools today are either too rigid for design exploration or don’t integrate well with BIM tools—forcing them to either constrain their design to the tool or spend days re-working a concept model on Revit to transition to schematic and detailed design.
A recent study suggests that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, cannot be seen by one-third of humanity. Why? Millions of city lamps brighten our cities every night, but only part of their light is used to actually illuminate streets or sidewalks – the rest is lost and emitted above the horizon, brightening the night sky and contributing to what is known as light pollution. However, as the artificial glow from towns and cities increases every year, the consequences of this urban phenomenon go beyond just preventing us from seeing stars. Other harmful effects include: causing a hazardous glare that can reduce safety, excessive energy consumption, waste of money and resources, disruption of ecosystems’ natural day and night cycles, suppression of melatonin production and several negative repercussions on public health. In this sense, choosing the right lamps (with a well thought-out design) is crucial to reduce light pollution.
Furniture made from natural materials is widely valued for its beauty and texture, especially when it comes to wood, bamboo, reed, and rattan. However, they often face challenges such as weather damage, pest infestations, and high maintenance requirements like regular cleaning and treatments to prevent fading and structural weakening. Additionally, their lack of uniformity and strength can compromise consistent quality, while harvesting the raw materials can have negative environmental impacts. These issues, combined with inconsistent availability and higher costs, have driven innovations in synthetic materials that aim to replicate the aesthetics of natural products, often using recycled materials to promote sustainability.
Today, interconnected and fast-paced lifestyles, future mobility trends and constant material innovation puts pressure on a slow-moving building industry. How can architecture keep up with this trend? Following dynamic and nomadic lifestyles, architects must explore new structural systems that should be able to reach multiple locations, as well as be adaptable and reusable in the future. By applying revolutionary technology for circular, scalable components and carbon-negative buildings, UrbanBeta –a spatial innovation studio designing strategies, building concepts, predictive tools and platforms for creating transformative spaces– has developed BetaPort, a robotic construction system powered by artificial intelligence and automation.
Based on the principles of a circular economy, Urban Beta and BetaPort create a sustainable construction plan, ready to grow and change over time. The studio conceives sustainable on-demand architecture systems for flexible buildings based on a kit of parts.
Sitting for extended periods is an everyday reality in many workspaces, which can lead to a dangerously sedentary working day. This makes office chair design a crucial element for both productivity and overall well-being. Ergonomic design takes into account the human body's needs, including posture, comfort, support, and health. A good ergonomic chair is adjustable, allowing for better control and customized settings that support the spine and promote a natural position for the body's joints. An even better ergonomic chair employs technology to accommodate all seating nuances—including occasional slouching, neck rest, and continuous hip movements, among others—, helping to maintain good body posture at all times.
Anne Lacaton, renowned for her groundbreaking work with partner Jean-Philippe Vassal, has been working to push the boundaries of sustainable and socially responsible housing architecture for decades. The Pritzker Prize laureates are celebrated for their innovative approach to social housing and are committed to enhancing the quality of life for residents. Their philosophy centers around creating generous, adaptable spaces that rethink how we live together. Onsite in San Sebastián, ArchDaily had the chance to interview the Pritzker-Prize winner to delve into her architectural practice and philosophy. In the conversation, the architect explored core values, the significance of reuse in social housing, and the promising trends in collective housing design that emerged from the first edition of the awards.
Nowadays bicycles are not only used for sports or as a recreational activity, as more and more people are choosing bicycles as their main means of transportation. Architecture plays a fundamental role in promoting the use of bicycles, as a properly equipped city with safe bicycle lanes, plentiful bicycle parking spots, and open areas to ride freely will encourage people to use their cars much less.
Cities are now positioning themselves as a key promoter of sustainable mobility, and Denmark and the Netherlands are currently the leading countries in the field of architecture for bikes. They are considered a cyclist's paradise because of their excellent infrastructure and architecture, making them a worldwide reference.
Camping, as defined in dictionaries, involves temporarily staying outdoors, setting up makeshift accommodations, and settling in natural surroundings. In architecture, tents symbolize these aspects, representing a typology that has endured across centuries and cultures, often linked with notions of impermanence and vulnerability.
In light of this common understanding, the term 'glamping' emerged in the early 2000s, blending 'camping' with 'glamour,' suggesting a fusion of camping with luxurious amenities. However, despite its recent popularization, the concept is far from original. Camping has not always been seen as the antithesis of luxury.
Beyond being a prefabricated material currently produced in large quantities, the use of concrete blocks in architecture continues to evolve to meet the demands and needs of contemporary societies that are constantly changing. Whether in interior or exterior spaces, their use can align with concepts of circular economy, resource efficiency, sustainability, and more, with the goal of creating habitable spaces while also understanding their constructive advantages and disadvantages, their expressive and aesthetic qualities, and so on.
As dwellers of big cities, we tend to be dragged into a very fast-paced lifestyle. Surrounded by monumental buildings and infrastructure, we can easily lose sight of key spaces that connect us with our neighborhood and provide us with rare moments of peace and enjoyment. Appropriation of the environment we inhabit becomes an uncommon circumstance.
The act of play creates a welcome escape from the demands of daily life, encouraging joy, creativity and collaboration, with tangible benefits from stress relief to improved cognitive function. So when it comes to the interiors of spaces for play—for leisure and socializing for example—how can design enhance these effects? Specifying adaptable modular furniture that can blend the boundaries between indoor and out is one method to improving the freedom and spontaneity of space, bringing agency to moments of joy, possibilities for fresh configurations and equipping interiors for shifting future dynamics.
For Italian designer Matteo Nunziati’s latest collection of outdoor furniture for Unopiù, the Davos collection, he was inspired by the geometric simplicity of children’s games as functional devices for enlightenment and to reconnect spaces to movement and expression. The generous yet lightweight modular seating system, which includes sofas, chaise longues, armchairs and coffee tables, is easy to assemble and offers infinitely adaptable scenarios to encourage play in daily life. To unlock these qualities, Nunziati was drawn in particular to the logical beauty of the abacus, with its magnetic balls connected on linear elements.
For architects and designers, unbuilt/unrealized projects are confounding, bittersweet, frustrating, elusive, even ghostly—the ultimate what-ifs. Often launched with the grandest ambitions, only to become derailed by the multiplicity of complications that can beset every proposed work of architecture. Author, editor, and critic Sam Lubell has spent a healthy chunk of his career cataloging these thwarted fever dreams. Now he has released, with co-author Greg Goldin, a new compilation, Atlas of Never Built Architecture (Phaidon), a global survey of more than 300 unbuilt projects ranging from the 20th century to the present day.
Recently I reached out to the writers to talk about the book, what unbuilt projects say about the culture at large, and some of their favorite unrealized projects. This interview was conducted via email, with Lubell and Goldin choosing to respond jointly.
As an architect I find it truly interesting to read cities and architecture through films, and this is why I went to see the latest film by one of my favourite directors Wim Wenders: Perfect Days. In Wenders’ cinema, his gaze over the city is always the protagonist. He possesses the remarkable ability to make the space of the photographic image the central focus of his filmmaking. It is not only the story that is important to him, but the time and space in which the story takes shape almost by chance.
Concert halls, music, and performance venues stand as iconic symbols of cultural vitality within urban landscapes. Through these structures, which often become landmarks of the city, the residents are invited to take part and experience artistic expression, fostering a sense of community and connection. For architects, this program poses the intricate challenge of balancing form and function, creating spaces that enhance the acoustic experience, allow for the flow of audience and performers, and create visual spectacles in their own right.
Featuring both emerging and internationally recognized offices, this week’s curated selection showcases music and performance venues, from mixed arts and cultural centers to opera and ballet halls. Including proposals for international competitions such as David Chipperfield Architects or SHL and PAX architects’ designs for the Polish Royal Opera in Warsaw or Hariri Pontarini Architects’ design for an integrated center for the arts in Canada, the selection explores the program of music venues across scales and programs.
Following various studies and polls, a number of players in the US real estate market that focus on offices (CBRE, JLL, and Gallup) agree that managers and operators must offer flexible, amenity-rich offices to support the modern employee commute. Broadly speaking, we are all being called to do more with less space, and for many in the office space world, pods will prove part of the solution. Let’s consider the trends supporting this notion.
Vibrant colors, ping-pong tables, video games, free food and extravagant decorations. Photographs of the Silicon Valley offices of the early 2000s became the model for ideal, disruptive work environments, meticulously designed to attract and retain new talent in a highly competitive job market. Most importantly, they were the extreme opposite of the famous cubicles of previous decades. Over time, these same companies have invested in creating healthier and more dynamic working environments, giving special consideration to providing contact with nature and better ergonomics for employees. Among the innovations of the past years, the so-called “standing desks” have been gaining popularity, as they offer flexibility and promote a culture of health and well-being. Having the flexibility to work either standing up or sitting down encourages more movement throughout the day and has been proven to improve health and stretching, burn more calories and even increase concentration.
In contemporary architecture, the boundary between indoor and outdoor spaces has increasingly been dissolved. This dissolution establishes a smooth transition between spaces, promoting a sense of harmony and connectivity with the surrounding environment. This trend reflects a fundamental change in contemporary lifestyles, where seamless integration between humans and their environment is increasingly valued and sought after. One of the ways this can be achieved is through fluid spatial arrangements or distinctive architectural elements, such as large windows, open plans and integrated outdoor areas.
Other elements that promote integration and connection are multifunctional furniture. These can play a fundamental role in blurring the boundaries between indoor comfort and outdoor freedom. Andreu World, a Spanish company, offers furniture that transitions easily between indoor and outdoor environments. Three of their furniture lines—Dado, Nuez and Liceo—work especially well in both indoor and outdoor setting.
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