Harvard University Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has announced Marina Otero as the winner of the 2022 Wheelwright Prize. The 100,000 USD grant funds two years of research and travel to support contemporary architecture's investigative approaches, with an emphasis on globally minded research. The winning proposal, “Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse”, examines a new architecture paradigm for storing digital data. The project looks at how reimagining digital infrastructures could provide answers to the unprecedented demands facing the world today. The field research, data collection, and prototype development will result in an open-source manual for data center architecture design containing examples of ecological, circular, and egalitarian data storage models.
Adrian Lahoud: The Latest Architecture and News
Marina Otero Wins 2022 Wheelwright Prize with a Project Focused on Data Storage Architecture
Sharjah Architecture Triennial Announces Global South-based Participants and Projects for Its Inaugural Edition
Curated by Adrian Lahoud, The Sharjah Architecture Triennial opens this November, self-proclaiming as "the first international platform on architecture and urbanism of the Global South."
Lahoud, who is also Dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, has defined the theme for the inaugural edition —Rights of Future Generations— as an instance to "question how inheritance, legacy, and the state of the environment are passed from one generation to the next, how present decisions have long-term intergenerational consequences, and how other expressions of co-existence, including indigenous ones, might challenge dominant western perspectives."
Sharjah Architecture Triennial to Open as First Major Platform on Middle Eastern Architecture
The Sharjah Architecture Triennial will open in November 2019 as "the first major platform for dialogue on architecture and urbanism in the Middle East, North Africa, East Africa and South Asia." Curator Adrian Lahoud has announced the theme of the Triennial as the Rights of Future Generations, aiming to fundamentally challenge traditional ideas about architecture and introduce new ways of thinking that veer from current Western-centric discourse.
Kerez, Herzog & de Meuron and Studio Gang Shortlisted to Design London's Royal College of Art's Battersea Campus
London's Royal College of Art (RCA) have revealed seven invited shortlisted practices for its new state-of-the-art £108million Battersea South campus. Featuring a smattering of architects from Europe, including Herzog & de Meuron and Lacaton & Vassal, and from the USA, such as Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Studio Gang, the organisation intends to announce the winning scheme in October 2016.
Architectural Research in Pedagogy and Practice – in Conversation with Adrian Lahoud
The following interview with Adrian Lahoud was first published by Volume Magazine in their 48th issue, The Research Turn. You can read the Editorial of this issue, Research Horizons, here.
The political left has had a rough few decades; everything just seems to be going in the other direction. Instead of romanticizing what it would be like "only if," we’d better get to work on figuring out how to turn the engine of progress around. Volume spoke with Adrian Lahoud about the stakes of architectural research within the academy today and how it might contribute to moving towards the horizons of the left.
Geopolitical Borders Competition / Adrian Lahoud and Samuel Szwarcbord
Adrian Lahoud and Samuel Szwarcbord shared with us their honorable mention entry for the recent Geopolitical Borders Competition organized by Think Space and judged by Teddy Cruz. This project is about two lines, one existing and one proposed. The first line is invisible. It runs horizontally from east to west across the Mediterranean Sea. Like the contour lines on a weather forecast, it bends and twists according to the vast differentials of pressure between North and South. From the perspective of the African continent, Europe holds a minimal promise of opportunity that cannot be found at home. From the point of view of Europe, North Africa represents a local pool of labor power, ready to be dipped into at will, a steady reserve of energy (increasingly solar) and kilometers of unspoiled coast ready for development. Like any bad relationship, the asymmetry is secured through structural violence. This violence must be flexible enough to accommodate the contradictions and dynamics of both parties. Changing domestic imperatives, economic demands and legal requirements form plastic limits through which the stability of the line must be coordinated.