At the turn of the 19th century, a British publishing house would release a book written by an English urban planner – a book with an optimistic title. The title of this book was To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, later reprinted as Garden Cities of To-morrow. The English urban planner in question was Ebenezer Howard – and this book would lay the foundations for what would later become known as the Garden City Movement. This movement would go on to produce green suburbs praised for their lofty aims, but it would also produce satellite communities that only catered to a privileged few.
Living in an urban environment is demanding. Busy and competitive lifestyles leave people numbed from the effects of stress. Individuals in urban areas are more prone to mental health issues and demonstrate a noticeable lack of personal connection. Rosy city lights and skyscrapers are thorned with rising stress levels, posing an essential question to architects - how do spaces affect wellbeing?
Designer Paul Wellington, based in Milwaukee, United States, is the author of Black Built: History and Architecture in the Black Community, a book that documents more than 40 works of architecture around the country by Black architects that have had a direct impact on communities of color. He’s now working on a new book that will focus on Black women architects in a field dominated by white males. I spoke with Wellington about the new book, what he learned through his research on Black architects and their work, and the future of increasing the ranks of Black architects in the U.S.
https://www.archdaily.com/949665/hidden-figures-the-historic-contributions-of-black-architects-in-the-united-statesMichael J. Crosbie
Social responsibility and the desire to improve society has long been influenced by the built environment. Looking at city centers, architecture has contributed to the improvement of the urban fabric, whether it being through planning and zoning strategies, integration of public spaces, or small interventions. In some cases however, these interventions are in fact used as tools to keep the homeless off the streets, disguised as art or conceptual designs. Several public urban policies have all implicitly prohibited the homeless and other marginalized social groups from city centers, claiming that their presence and “irregular” use of public space could compromise the reputation, security, and desirability of the city.
Built environments are a reflection of the social order and dynamic ideals of society. Neighborhoods and cities are cultural relics shaped by diverse communities, some of whose voices are heard louder than others. In the past few decades, Indian metropolitans have been booming with urbanization. Holding cities back from being Utopian hubs of growth is spatial inequality. The residential segregation that patterns the cities of India can be understood through the caste system. The issue, however, is largely intersectional. Forces rooted in class, religion, and gender also structure the country's social landscape.
In 2013, Medellín (Colombia) was declared the most innovative city in the world as part of the City of the Year Competition, organized by the Wall Street Journal. It competed alongside metropolises like New York and Tel Aviv.
The Antioquian capital has become one of the most advanced technological and intellectual epicenters in Colombia, not to mention the important urban development that has occurred in the city since the beginning of 2010. The city’s mobility-orientated integrated infrastructure together with interventions of high social impact have turned Medellín into the center of the debate on the growth and development of Latin American cities.
The following projects tell you the story of a city that bet on urban consolidation through quality public spaces and projects that encouraged citizen management by supporting the development of marginalized areas in a process of social reconstruction, where architecture has played an important role as a spatial formulation tool.
It is often times that when living in Japan, whether you're occupying a shared house or renting out your own apartment, you'll find yourself having a limited amount of space to work with. This primarily stems from land scarcity within the country, with 73% of the land available to us being considered mountainous, with another large percentage of the country's flat land serving as farmland and a means for agricultural purposes. There is also the issue surrounding overcrowding within Japan's urban areas. Due to these factors, inflation amongst properties is rife, thus, resulting in many residents turning to small dwellings.
How relevant is the use of color in architecture? Throughout history, we find various scenarios where color takes centre stage in its integration with the architectural work. Nowadays this is no exception. This is because colour is a medium that can be used to provoke deep and immediate emotions and reactions in the person observing. Because of this, colour plays an important role in the architectural reading, as it has the power to clarify the components that make it up or, on the contrary, to change the perception of the work or space.
The following list shows various Latin American housing projects that have had a particular approach to color in their composition. In them, we see the conception of color as the integrator of the work, or as a means of enhancing a particular element, be it interior or exterior.
In 2016, Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena announced that his firm, ELEMENTAL, had released the rights to four of their social housing projects, and all documents would be uploaded to their website for public use. Aravena’s goal was to start a movement in which architects would work together to tackle the world’s challenges around housing shortages and affordability, especially with increased migration. The shared drawing sets and a description of the project’s principles provide architects with the necessary documentation for building a low-cost home, encouraging designers to do the same with their work, contractors to assist in building these homes, and governments to shift their thinking of how they can approach mass urbanization. Six years later, how has the concept of open-source architecture progressed, and how has it impacted the architectural profession ever since?
In 1782, Bangkok became the capital of Siam – as Thailand was previously known. Its strategic position within the protective curve of Chao Phraya River to the West and the vast, swampy delta of the Sea of Mud that secured the city to the East was key. King Rama I modeled the new city on what had been the urban reference of Thailand since the 14th century: Ayutthaya, which by 1700 had become the largest city in the world with a total of 1 million inhabitants.
Bangkok progressively saw the construction of temples (wats), schools, libraries and hospitals. However, few other typologies were erected and the city lacked significant paved streets. Instead, the river and a network of interconnected canals served as the transport infrastructure of the city. With time, the floating houses anchored along the riverfront decreased and the pavements spread.
Upon becoming a sovereign country, free from British Rule, the people of India found themselves faced with questions they had never needed to answer before. Coming from different cultures and origins, the citizens began to wonder what post-independence India would stand for. The nation-builders now had the choice to carve out their own future, along with the responsibility to reclaim its identity - but what was India's identity? Was it the temples and huts of the indigenous folk, the lofty palaces of the Mughal era, or the debris of British rule? There began a search for a contemporary Indian sensibility that would carry the collective histories of citizens towards a future of hope.
Architecture, with all its practitioners, academics, and theorists, have long been exploring utopic ideas with hopes of turning them into something concrete for the sake of a better world. But as the world heads towards an even greater polarization than it currently has, the architecture practice found itself having to adapt to the current systems of the planet, constrained by its ever-growing conditions. Slowly, practitioners realized that utopia can not truly be seen as the ideal solution, and needed to be readapted or morphed with other concepts for it to actually work. DETAIL's latest monograph BIG. Architecture and Construction Details / BIG. Architektur und Baudetails, a rapport between BIG’s imaginative, unbuilt utopias and functional, built architecture, explores 20 projects from the firm's workshop.
It’s an essential architectural element, one we tend to immediately take note of when we look at buildings new to us – the roof. The roofs that shelter the buildings we see in our cities today are diverse in their typology. Flat roofs are a common sight in the city centers of urban metropolises, hip roofs are a popular choice for dwellings around the world, and the gable roof is arguably the most common of all, a roof type popular in stylized depictions of what a standard house looks like.
Half of the world’s population now lives in cities, according to UN-Habitat’s latest reports. While this number is set to increase to two-thirds by 2050, urban challenges are growing exponentially, making it more crucial than ever, to transform our cities. Annually, the world population review assesses the growth of cities and the number of residents living in metropolitan areas, to understand global evolution trends. In 2022, the list of the top 20 most populated countries remained similar to the 2021 edition, with a slight change in numbers and positions. Tokyo kept its status as the world’s largest city, with 37 million inhabitants, while Delhi and Shanghai, followed in second and third positions.
Comparing the results to the 2021 edition, the only decrease that can be seen in the top 20, involves both Japanese cities, Tokyo and Osaka. The rest of the list had, on average, a growth of 1.8% in the total of people residing in metropolitan areas. In fact, African cities Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Lagos in Nigeria gathered the highest rates, with respectively a 4.39% and a 3.54% increase in residents in 1 year. The largest city in the American continent is still Sao Paulo in Brazil, followed closely by Mexico City and Buenos Aires in Argentina, further down the table. In Europe, Istanbul is the most populous, with more than 14.5 million residents.
The visual aesthetic of the past few decades could be defined as designing with the principles of ‘nothingness’. Whether it’s through art, lifestyle, fashion, industrial, or interior design, there has been an alleged need to keep things at a bare minimum, promoting the globally-loved-yet-highly-criticized trend of minimalism. Minimalism is this notion of reducing something to its necessary elements, but who is deciding what is necessary, and who is deciding what is too much? With those questions in mind, combined with radical changes in consumerism and the way people live seen during recent years, current trends have shown that minimalism might be here to stay, but with a twist.
Have you ever heard of neuroarchitecture? What would spaces look like if architects designed buildings based on the emotions, healing and happiness of the user? Hospitals that help with patient recovery, schools that encourage creativity, work environments that make you more focused…
This is neuroarchitecture: designing efficient environments based not only on technical parameters of legislation, ergonomics and environmental comfort, but also on subjective indices such as emotion, happiness and well-being.
When cities grow, fuelled by an expanding population, housing becomes an essential component of the urban character of a metropolis. Across the world, housing experiments have been propagated by governments and states, with mixed results, and undoubtedly mixed opinions. The Soviet-era housing estates of Central and Eastern Europe are particularly interesting in that regard. These mass housing projects have been dismissed as eyesores and viewed as unimaginative monolithic structures. The legacy of these developments, however, is a lot more complicated than that.
The award-winning firm based in London, England, Jan Kattein Architects, works to realize the civic and spatial opportunities that architecture presents’ with their projects establishing a social and physical legacy, achieved by embracing an open, interactive design process that responds positively to the needs and aspirations of the clients.
Allowing the process to drive each individual project, their method stimulates innovative design, seeking to add benefits through education, economic growth, cultural activity, and greater community coherence.
.jpg?1653990029 "Khayelitsha Township - Cape Town. Image © Olga Ernst under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.")
