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Concrete, a material commonly used in the construction industry, is made of a binder combined with aggregates (or gravels), water, and certain additives. Its origins reach back as far as Ancient Egypt, when the construction of large structures created the need for a new kind of material: one which was liquid, featured properties of natural stones, could be molded, and communicated a sense of nobility and grandeur. 

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Light Collective, founders of the project "Women in Lighting", conclude that although female designers seem to make up possibly half of the lighting design profession, their profile appears much lower than men when looking at judges in awards and speakers at major conferences. Sharon Stammers and Martin Lupton started a project with interviews of female lighting designers and contacted conference organizers to enhance their visibility. 

The second round of voting has decided three winners of the ArchDaily & Strelka Award. The grand prize winner will be announced on September 10.

The joint award is organized by ​ArchDaily, Strelka KB, and Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design to celebrate emerging architects and new ideas that transform the contemporary city.

The winners have been selected by readers of ArchDaily and Strelka Mag from a shortlist of 15 architectural projects which were decided in the first round of voting. 

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In the mid-to-late 20^th century, a secular, socialist Poland served as the backdrop for the construction of thousands of Catholic churches. In their book Day-VII Architecture, Izabela Cichonska, Karolina Popera, and Kuba Snopek analyze the paradoxical facets of this architecture born at the intersection of secularity and religion, charting how its development was influenced by liturgical reform, political movements, and the growth of postmodernism. In the excerpted introduction below, the authors unfold this history, touching on the Second Vatican Council, Solidarity, the Iron Curtain, and more in relation to the development of Day-VII Architecture's ultimately unique postmodern style. The publication has collected photographs of 100 Polish churches built after the year 1945, accompanied by interviews with their architects. To read more about the authors' original Day-VII documentation project, which served as the groundwork for this book, be sure to visit the original article "These Churches Are the Unrecognized Architecture of Poland's Anti-Communist 'Solidarity' Movement."

Russia is an enigmatic country known for its sublime constructivism developed during Soviet times, its greatness and enormous scale. It comes as no shocker — architects, such as Ivan Leonidov and his student Leonid Pavlov, and artists like El Lissitzky, have definitely contributed to the history and image of a strong Russian personality.

Considering the prevalent poverty in Russia, the reason for the fixation on cheap construction is rather clear. However, even local leading architects find something attractive and beautiful in the suburban barns and flimsy dwellings. Creating authentic installations in the shape of houses or changing and enhancing the experience of existing structures with materials at hand, Russian artists and architects express the country's skill of turning the ruined and inhabitable into the lively and cozy.

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Superstudio and Archigram were the pioneers of the dystopia they had popularized in 1960, when they experienced a crisis that tore world economies, positioning Italy in a historic moment of boom and bust that harbored dreams and despair.

The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art by SO-IL and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson is the first contemporary arts museum for the University of California and the city of Davis. The museum’s signature element is the grand canopy that stretches over the surrounding site and building.

Creative duo another : have collaborated with music composer Yu Miyashita and released a short film that explores the geometric composition of the museum's structure in an exceptional way.

Having explored the design that establishes 'emotional ownership' and the antipatrons of social housing, Nikos A. Salingaros, David Brain, Andrés M. Duany, Michael W. Mehaffy and Ernesto Philibert-Petit continue their series of articles on social housing in Latin America. This time, the proposal studies how control influences the urban form and the form of housing.

It is expected that within the next few of decades, Earth will have absolutely nothing left to offer whoever/whatever is capable of surviving on it. Although the human race is solely responsible for the damages done to the planet, a thin silver lining can still be seen if radical changes were to be done to the way we live on Earth and how we sustain it.

Since architects and designers carry a responsibility of building a substantial future, we have put together an A-Z list of every sustainability term that you might come across. Every week, a new set of letters will be published, helping you stay well-rounded on everything related to sustainable architecture and design. Here are the terms that start with letters J, K, and L.

Islam, other than describing a religious belief, is a word that identifies a unique type of architecture that dates back thousands of years. It has been formed by a civilization that transformed the qualities of this belief into visible and tangible material, building structures with a striking focus on details and experiences within enclosed spaces. 

Islamic architecture is an architecture that does not change its form easily. In fact, its principles have been more or less the same since thousands of years ago, with minor changes based on functional adaptations. To this day, hundreds of buildings still stand as a representation of the history of Islamic architecture and are still used just as they have been in the past.

War, however, has no religion or cultural nostalgia, and even the holiest, most historically-significant sites are threatened with complete destruction. The Great Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, originally built by the first imperial Islamic dynasty and currently situated within a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stood yet again as a battlefield during the recent Syrian War, but this time, lost its most significant and resilient element, an 11th-century Seljuk Minaret.

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Cities’ greatness should be judged by whether they have succeeded in accumulating extraordinary works of architecture. They can be fantastic for their food, music, or lifestyle overall, but if there is no architecture, they are hard to grasp, they are not anchored, not grounded, not memorable… not real, in a way. Maybe I am a maximalist but there are a number of cities that I visited with just one goal in mind – to see a single extraordinary building. For the record, these cities are Fort Worth, Bilbao, Valencia, San Sebastian, Guangzhou, Sydney, and Kuala Lumpur, among others. The last one on this list has acquired its instantly recognizable image in 1996, when the 88-story Petronas Twin Towers have risen high above it. These unique buildings remained the world’s tallest until 2004. This iconic structure was designed by Argentine-American architect César Pelli who passed away last week at the age of 92.

Though born in Tehran and remaining deeply inspired by her native Iran, architect Yasaman Esmaili has worked on projects all around the world. These primarily include humanitarian and crisis intervention works that deeply engage the local communities in which they are situated. A recent article by Metropolis Magazine discusses these projects in depth, as well as Esmaili’s story and inspirations.