The A' Design Awards recently completed its 2022-2023 cycle, for which it awarded hundreds of projects, in various categories, from around the world. As one of the world's leading international juried design competitions, its objective is to recognize and promote the best in global design, across a number of creative disciplines. With over 100 categories –including Furniture Design; Architecture, Building and Structure Design; Interior Space and Exhibition Design, and more– the award is currently open for entries for the 2023-2024 cycle.

The city of San Miguel de Allende is located within the state of Guanajuato, in the central-northern region of Mexico, geographically bordering the states of Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Querétaro, Michoacán, and Jalisco. It covers an area of 43.6 hectares and is one of the most populated regions in its state. In 2008, it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and is characterized by its baroque and Spanish architecture. It is part of the list of magical towns in Mexico. Additionally, in this city, you will find the Parish of San Miguel Arcángel, built with the pink quarry stone typical of the region.

Designers and architects have a mountain of modern, high-performance flooring options at their disposal. From standard choices like wood, carpet, ceramic tiles, or natural stone; to heavy-duty commercial favorites like terrazzo, concrete, or poured epoxy. Add less well-tread options like cork and leather and then multiply them all with imitation solutions like laminate and luxury vinyl, and it’s easy for decision-makers to get lost in indecision.

Despite the size of the marketplace, however, we tend to just make our choices and stick with them, using just one type of floor for each room. Not so in the case of the following four projects, which select and arrange various flooring types together in the same room, adding functionality to the floor and helping to improve how we interact with the spaces above.

Slovenia has continuously redefined design across rural life. With an architecture that’s intimately tied to the country’s geography, Slovenia emerged as a crossroads of European cultural and trade routes. This produced hybrid building styles and typologies defined by history and exchange. Expanding upon modernist roots and the work of architects like Max Fabiani, Ivan Vurnik, and Jože Plečnik, contemporary building projects are designed through ideas on multiplicity and coupled programming.

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James Wines, a New York architect and environmental artist, has been on a mission of sorts. He believes that architecture needs to be liberated from itself. This act of liberation is expressed in many radical projects that he and his company, SITE (Sculpture In The Environment) realized in 11 countries. Wines is world famous for such projects as Ghost Parking Lot (Hamden, CO, 1977), Highrise of Homes (theoretical project, 1981), Highway 86 (Vancouver, Canada, 1986), Fondazione Pietro Rossini Pavilion (Briosco, Italy, 2008), and Off-White Showroom for Virgil Abloh (Ginza, Tokyo, 2021). The very essence of the architect’s work is expressed in his fascinating stores for BEST Products Company, the key focus of my conversation with the architect that took place over Zoom on August 10, 2022, following many of our in-person meetings.

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As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, the relationship between nature and design has taken on a renewed significance. Residential design projects that intertwine with natural elements are shown to encourage a sense of tranquility in the inhabitants and the surrounding environment. Moreover, the integration of greenery, specifically through gardens, flourishing landscapes, or complete forest and hillside integrations, can be a powerful testament to the coexistence of human habitation and the natural world.

It is well known that exposure to more green spaces and cleaner air has profound impacts on human health and psychology. This kind of exposure has been linked to reduced stress, improved cognitive function, and enhanced creativity. These sanctuaries offer relief, allowing the human to reconnect with the natural world. These residential homes are often a refuge from busy city life, ranging from vacation homes to retirement homes. Moreover, as the global call for sustainable practices becomes more pressing, the role of natural elements in architecture becomes imperative.

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Videos

The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.

A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.

This week David and Marina of FAME Architecture & Design are joined by designer and educator Andrew Kudless, Founder of Matsys, to discuss the fundamentals of generative Artificial Intelligence (A.I.); how he teaches Midjourney; its potential role in the architecture profession; the evolving role of an architect; how students can make the most of the tools; and more.

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"I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore," Dorothy says to her dog in 1939's 'The Wizard of Oz' as she walks around, discovering a fantasy set in which, without realizing it, we find ourselves immersed. From the initial sketch to the construction of the sets, production design for film requires careful detail to truly bring visions to life and transport viewers.

In this combination of creativity, research, and collaboration, various production designers have approached us to share their adventures and design processes. The importance of creating a cohesive visual aspect, understanding language and styles, and translating all of this to the screen come together in the following series of 8 interviews we conducted with Annie Beauchamp, Luca Tranchino, Felicity Abbott, Jacinta Leong, Alexandra Schaller, Ina Mayhew, Amy Lee Wheeler, and Stefan Dechant.

For many years, often spoken in tones of anticipation and excitement, we have heard that 3D printing will revolutionize the architecture industry as we know it. But if we stop for a moment, reflect on the present and look back at the past, it becomes evident that the technology has long been reshaping the field, continuously undergoing profound transformations and ushering in new eras of design, construction and spatial creativity. Operating as a layer-by-layer additive manufacturing process, 3D printing uses digital models to create customized three-dimensional objects with a remarkable level of precision and efficiency, saving time, generating zero waste, reducing labor costs and opening avenues for rapid prototyping and iterative design. It enables architects to explore creative opportunities and regain autonomy by designing complex, non-standardized elements within an industrial and mass-customized process.

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Architects have always adapted their designs for the key building indicators of their time. After decades of focus on energy efficiency, embodied carbon is quickly becoming the key indicator for our next generation of buildings. Yet most of us are only beginning to understand the work of life cycle analysis (LCA), which is central to assessing the environmental impacts of building products both before, during, and after construction.

In the face of the environmental crisis and the need to mitigate climate change, adopting clean and renewable energy sources, such as solar energy, in architectural projects is becoming increasingly imperative. As a country with abundant sunlight incidence throughout the year, Brazil has enormous potential to take advantage of this energy source, which has become an increasingly attractive and viable option in the Brazilian scenario. There are numerous benefits solar energy can provide to both residents and the environment that make it a popular choice for residential use.

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Architects and designers are often looking for ways to make building facades and interior surfaces stand out from the crowd. But sometimes just the smallest change can have the biggest impact once you step back and see the whole picture. By employing an illusionary pattern such as dithering pixels or halftone dots, or by making subtle but intentional changes to the position or orientation of materials, flat surfaces can be transformed into curved, moving forms.

Halftone patterns work by reducing a solid surface of color into dots of decreasing size. As the dots gradually reduce to nothing, they leave nothing behind except a background color. The result is a flat surface with a gradient that mimics the shadows or highlights of a three-dimensional curve. Dithering, meanwhile, is the process of feathering multiple shades of the same color to blend them together. The effect allows designers to, on a large enough scale, create images with depth and curves, while using only a single color. Or even to create the illusion of an intermediary color.

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In the past, glazed surfaces tended to be small and almost opaque; but this began to change throughout the years due to the growing trend of increasingly larger glass panes in construction. Accompanied by thinner frames, they dilute the boundaries between the inside and the outside, and have become ubiquitous in modern buildings. In fact, it is increasingly rare to find a contemporary work of architecture that does not include the remarkable presence of glass: this material is present in the most diverse architectural scales, and its transparency provides harmonious integration with the surroundings and generous natural light for buildings. Traditional systems with frames are still predominant, but frameless glass facades are gaining ground in specific architectural projects, as they create perfect connections between the glass and the structure of the building, resulting in a singular aesthetic with soft and harmonious transitions. By eliminating heavy frames, a project's aesthetics can be enhanced while also improving the quality of life inside.

The Islamic Architecture style has a diverse history, spanning over a millennium, stretching from Western Africa to Europe to Eastern Asia. Beginning in early 7th century Arabia, this form of architecture emerged with the rise of the Islamic civilization. In fact, Al Masjid Al Nabawi, the first Mosque to ever be constructed was built in 622, in Medina, Saudi Arabia. Moreover, early Islamic architecture was influenced by the pre-existing styles around the region, such as Roman, Byzantine, and Persian qualities.

Today, Islamic architecture is known for its acute attention to detail, craftsmanship, and its spiritual symbolism. Furthermore, as color plays an essential role in architecture, influencing the emotional experience of the space, different colors have been utilized over the years in Islamic Architecture to evoke certain meanings. In Islamic Architecture, colors hold significant spiritual symbolism, reflecting the values and beliefs of the Islamic faith. Four core colors, Green, Blue, Gold, and White, are each used to convey various cultural, religious, and symbolic meanings.

Read on to discover the use of these colors in various Islamic architectural icons around the world.

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Far beyond its decorative features, landscaping brings with it biological and cultural issues that need to be addressed in projects. However, what can be seen in most public, residential, condominium, commercial and business gardens is a series of approaches that distance landscaping from all its attributes, reducing it to a decorative layer in the construction. Next, we have put together strategies to avoid the main problems of landscape design, joining aesthetics with its environmental and cultural possibilities.

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