Conceptual Design: The Latest Architecture and News

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 discuss architecture concepts in the office. The two cover the importance of conceptual thinking, the lack of concepts in architecture offices, projects in architecture school vs in practice, the challenges of merging conceptual thinking and technical aspects in practice, and more. Enjoy!

Pihlmann Architects is a young Copenhagen-based architectural run by Søren Pihlmann. In this interview with Louisiana Channel, the rising architect elaborates on his unique practice, the values he holds, and what he finds fascinating about architecture. Most notably, Pihlmann explains that his view on the practice has transformed from being an architect into becoming a type of curator, selecting very few things with great sensitivity.

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2022 has been the year of AI image generators. Over the past few years, these machine learning systems have been tweaked and refined, undergoing multiple iterations to find their present popularity with the everyday internet user. These image generators—DALL-E and Midjourney arguably the most prominent—generate imagery from a variety of text prompts, for instance allowing people to create conceptual renditions of architectures of the future, present, and past. But as we exist in a digital landscape filled with human biases—navigating these image generators requires careful reflection.

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Videos

Delicately excavated from the natural grounds of Jordan’s Wadi Rum, Jordanian architect Rasem Kamal transformed the phrase of “form follows function” into “subtraction follows function”, emphasizing the relationship between external form and internal space with a resort that promises a sanctuary both above and underground.

In the newly-released video of the proposal, the architect uncovers the hidden resort and takes viewers on an enchanting walkthrough of the proposed Wadi Rum Sanctuary Resort. Kamal complements the desert’s jagged landscape with the resort’s subtle architecture, letting the structure blend seamlessly with its surroundings.

Citizens of Earth is a conceptual proposal by Marc Thorpe Design for the city of Marfa in Texas. Located 20 miles outside of the city on the border of Mexico and the United States, the installation aims to “question the value of international borders within the context of the 21^st century”.

Designers Warith Zaki and Amir Amzar have imagined a project that seeks to find alternatives to traditional construction material in order to build the first settlements on Mars. In fact, they opted for a natural earthy element that competes with wood, brick and concrete, and drafted a project that uses bamboo.

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Writing is an unending dialogue that has been connecting one generation to another, maintaining history, culture, and information. For the National Museum of World Writing, stories were built rather than written.

Just as writing transcends the author to another realms, SAMOO Architects and Engineers have proposed ‘PAGES’, a structure of architecturally-devised scripts that disconnects visitors from the outer world, and introduces them to an exceptional architectural narration.

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Villages and cities in Iran have always had a fixed low-rise horizontal skyline due to the lack of beam and column technology. Although some cities have already adopted contemporary styles and have constructed soaring skyscrapers, but the majority of towns remain committed to traditional building techniques.

Iranian architect Mohammad Hassan Forouzanfar decided to give traditional Iranian architecture a structural upgrade but kept its main features intact. In his conceptual creations titled "Retrofuturism", the architect used traditionally-designed houses as a starting point, but introduced them to the modern world of skyscrapers and surreal forms, mixing both styles together.

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