The Coronavirus pandemic has been taking over the news for a few months now, and has imposed unimaginable changes on the daily lives of the world’s entire population. Although the situation is worrying, and rather devastating in some cases, being aware of the virus's behavior and understanding ways to avoid it seems to be the best way to deal with the crisis. COVID-19 is a respiratory disease that spreads through droplets in the air. What makes it especially dangerous is its high rate of contagion, as the virus has the ability to survive outside the human body, in the air, and on surfaces such as metal, glass and plastics, if they were not properly disinfected. But how does the virus behave on each of these materials? [Latest Update: July, 2020]

Mulher, Mujer, Woman, or simply MMW, is an online platform dedicated to architectural representations, whose objective is to spread the women's production within our professional field. Created by the Brazilian architects Carol Vasques and Débora Boniatti as a reaction to the still scarce diffusion of female references, the platform seeks to "highlight the importance and relevance of women in the past, present and future of the profession."

IJP Architects and structural engineers AKT II unveil their concept design for a new 230m Dubai Creek Harbour Central Footbridge, after a 2019 competition. Commissioned by Emaar, the project will connect the soon to be world’s tallest tower, the Dubai Creek Tower and Dubai Creek Harbour.

With most of our lives spent indoors, the space we occupy has a major role in our psychological behavior. Environmental psychology or Space psychology is, in fact, the interaction between people and the spaces they inhabit. Lighting, colors, configuration, scale, proportions, acoustics, and materials address the senses of the individual and generate a spectrum of feelings and practices.

From inducing warmth and safety, defining well-being, or creating a positive and efficient working environment, space can have a whole lot of impact on how we act or on what we feel; therefore, design and creative measures should be considered according to the social and psychological needs of the occupants.

No one ever dies too late, but Vittorio Gregotti died too soon for some of his radical ideas to be fleshed out in form, and too soon for the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale of 2020, which has been postponed by the same pandemic that took him away last week, to say thank you.

Architecture owes a lot to Gregotti.

Commissioned by real estate developer Euroboden, Kolberger 5 is a contemporary take on the historical typology of Munich’s Stadtpalais. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects and Studio Mark Randel, the project featuring different size apartments is located at the entrance of historic Herzog Park.

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Airbnb has launched a $1 million design fund to finance 10 “unconventional and unusual” homes. Looking for the “wildest home ideas”, the competition-based program is called the Unique Airbnb Fund and will be judged by actor Billy Porter, MVRDV partner Fokke Moerel, and Airbnb Superhost Kristie Wolfe. Each of the finalists will receive a grant to make their eccentric Airbnb design concepts a reality.

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It may sound like a silly rhyme, but it’s true: wood is good. As a construction material, wood is beautiful, practical, and versatile. The great strength, light weight, and excellent insulating properties of wood make it ideal for many applications, especially at a time when timber is delivering efficient solutions at different scales. Despite these benefits, wood is highly susceptible to decay, especially when used outdoors.

Introducing elements of nature - such as water, vegetation, natural light, stones or even the use of wood - into interior design can provide richer and more complex compositions in the built environment. In these landscaping projects, the textures, silhouettes and, especially, the generated sensations, can establish new relationships of well-being and comfort for the user.

Users now can virtually visit museums all over the world thanks to Google Arts & Culture. The project offers 360 ° views of places that can often be inaccessible due to financial costs or distance.

Kengo Kuma Associates and K2LD Architects have won the competition to design the new Singapore Founders Memorial. Selected from 193 submissions, the project is made to honor Singapore’s first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, as well as those leaders that played significant roles in the city-state’s path to independence. The jury unanimously selected the winning design for its response to the brief and site, emphasizing Singapore as a “City in a Garden” while allowing for future growth.

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Gilles Saucier, one of the leading Canadian architects and a design partner at Montreal-based Saucier+Perrotte Architectes that was founded in 1988 invited me to his studio to discuss how he starts his designs and where he finds his inspirations. Simply by looking and even visiting his buildings one may think that the architect is all about performance and efficiency. His edgy, well-crafted edifices may recall Formula One racing cars. But when I stepped into Saucier’s office – dark, mysterious laboratory where he personally experiments with tree roots, branches, wood, glass, rocks, resin, beeswax, and other organic materials – the real intentions of his work started to reveal.

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SANAA’s recently completed social housing complex in Paris was captured by the Architecture and Photography studio of Vincent Hecht. Part of Paris habitat, France’s largest public utility social housing company, the project comprises four buildings accommodating more than 100 social housing units in total.

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Henning Larsen’s concept was selected as the winning design in the international competition for the redevelopment of Cockle Bay Park in central Sydney. The project, co-led by the GPT Group and AMP Capital was chosen from six shortlisted designs by UN Studio + Cox Architecture, Woods Bagot, Grimshaw, FJMT, and Wilkinson Eyre.

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At the apogee of the Roman Empire, its territory extended over more than five million square kilometers, between Europe, Asia, and Africa. Rome exercised power over a population of more than 70 million people, which equated to roughly 21% of the world population at the time. In fact, as we have already shown in another article, all roads led to the city of Rome. The great seat of the empire and the material and immaterial heritage left by it is immeasurable, and even today researchers seek to understand its full impact on the current world. From the beginning of its expansion in the 6th century BC until its fall in the year 476 AD, the legacy left by the Romans encompasses areas such as law, plastic arts, Latin (which originated many different languages), systems of government, and, importantly, architecture.

Calls to quarantine and social distancing throughout the world, in response to the novel coronavirus, have left unique and historical postcards: the cloudy canals of Venice are now crystal clear and the satellite images of China show a significant decrease in pollution. The renowned photographer Erieta Attali, with her phone in hand, was able to walk through the empty streets of Paris and portray, under her signature gaze, the French capital in isolation.

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The city of Merida –capital of the Yucatan state in Mexico– is a region that has experienced a rise in architectural development in recent years due to the emerging talent that has made a name for itself with national awards and biennial proposals throughout the country. Due to Merida's tropical climate, the architecture on this site corresponds to specific geographical conditions that make it one of the most visited destinations in the world.

In a condition of growing superimposition between digital and physical, the threshold of the real is being pushed by a vast set of apps and platform that as a wired-wiring infrastructure manipulate cities and citizens in a constant exchange of data; in turn, this is progressively invading and exceeding the set of references we have to describe the urban condition. Users, now actors-producers of the human environment, will likely lose their physical agency and become producers of data, in what Federico Ruberto describes as the digital schizophrenia of the city of tomorrow. Through philosophical, artistic and cinematographic references the author paints varying scenarios, investigating what might be the limits for digital infrastructures and what tools we might employ in manipulating them.

For the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," (21 December 2019-8 March 2020) ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies might impact architecture and urban life. The contribution below is part of a series of scientific essays selected through the “Eyes of the City” call for papers, launched in preparation of the exhibitions: international scholars were asked to send their reflection in reaction to the statement by the curators Carlo Ratti Associati, Politecnico di Torino and SCUT, which you can read here.

OMA is designing a 10,000-square-metre shopping center integrated with community spaces in Melbourne, Australia. Entitled the Wollert Neighborhood Centre, the project is located in Wollert, Whittlesea, one of Victoria’s fastest-growing regions, in the suburbs of Melbourne.

While the risk of COVID-19 is increasing everywhere in the world, the stable situation in Wuhan allowed officials to stop operations in the newly settled temporary hospitals to fight the Coronavirus outbreak.

Moriyama & Teshima Architects are designing a new Honey Bee Research Center at the University of Guelph in Canada. Announced last fall, the team won the competition to create a new facility for the school’s Ontario Agricultural College. Aiming to be a landmark project, the center will feature mass timber construction and will be dedicated to sustainability, honey bee health and well-being.

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Modernism could be described as one of the most optimistic styles in architectural history, drawing from notions of utopia, innovation, and the reimagination of how humans would live, work, and interact. As we reflected in our AD Essentials Guide to Modernism, the philosophy of Modernism still dominates much of architectural discourse today, even if the world that gave rise to Modernism has changed utterly.

As we say goodbye to 2019, a year that saw the centenary of the Bauhaus, we have collated a list of key architectural styles that defined Modernism in architecture. This tool for understanding the development of 20th-century design is complete with examples of each style, showcasing the practice of Modernism that lay behind the theory.

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