Environmental Design: The Latest Architecture and News

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's "Living Structures" exhibition, running from November 8th, 2024, to March 23rd, 2025, features Deep Forest, a new installation by Prof Claudia Pasquero and Dr. Marco Poletto founders of architecture and design innovation firm ecoLogicStudio, together with academic partner Innsbruck University. This immersive work challenges traditional architectural paradigms by embracing the naturalization of architecture and technology, a direct counterpoint to modernist attempts to mechanize nature. The exhibition represents the culmination of twenty years of research in bio-digital design, showcasing the potential of symbiotic relationships between technology and the natural world within built environments.

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Can academic projects explore new directions and contribute to public discourse on global and local issues? The 2024 Politecnico di Torino Students Award aimed to address these questions, showcasing how architectural research, training, and experimentation can be integrated into a school curriculum.

Politecnico di Torino is ranked among the top 10 architecture schools in Europe (QS World University Rankings by Subject 2024 - Architecture and Built Environment). With over 3,000 students, the Department of Architecture and Design offers a Bachelor's degree in Architecture and three Master's programs—Architecture for Sustainability, Architecture Construction City, and Architecture for Heritage—all featuring dedicated English tracks. The Department offers also two Bachelor's and one Master's programmes in Design.

Honduran architect Angela Stassano is contributing to Central America's architectural landscape with her applied research regarding bioclimatic designs. Based in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, her projects draw from local heritage techniques to address the needs of hot, humid tropical environments. Stassano has developed her expertise through over 30 years of hands-on research, culminating in a bioclimatic architecture guide that outlines her methods for construction in this region. One of her most notable projects, Las Casitas, is a residential complex that embodies this research. The project includes multiple energy-efficient tropical houses that harness the local climate, resulting in low energy and operational costs.

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Greenways, as a typology of urban design, have become an essential element in the planning of modern cities. They emerge in response to the increasing fragmentation of urban landscapes by elements such as highways. They usually integrate natural and constructed spaces, providing much-needed connections across various parts of the city. At the same time, they promote pedestrian accessibility, recreation, and social interaction. The Rose Kennedy Greenway in downtown Boston, United States, exemplifies this human-centered approach to design. The project, which began construction in 1991, showcases the potential of greenways to reconnect urban environments and enhance community life. As a series of parks designed by various architecture firms, it aims to create physical links and meaningful spaces that foster social development and a sense of place.

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CityMakers, The Global Community of Architects Who Learn from Exemplary Cities and Their Makers, is working with ArchDaily to publish a series of articles about Barcelona, Medellin, and Rotterdam. The authors are the architects, urban planners, and/or strategists of the projects that have transformed these three cities, which are visited in the "Schools of Cities" and studied in the "Documentary-Courses" made by CityMakers. On this occasion, Alejandro Restrepo Montoya, Director of Urban Planning and Architecture of Medellín, presents his article "Environmental Urbanism and Urban Geographies, Medellín 2024-2027"

Medellín's urban plan focuses on answering how urban planning can improve people's quality of life. By developing its proposal, the city is promoting the social benefits that these urban planning practices can generate. Medellín emphasizes the use of natural and environmental conditions, such as valleys, streams, rivers, mountains, and hills, to develop urban planning criteria that address social needs.

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This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Developers often make it sound as though their latest LEED platinum office building will single-handedly reverse climate change. The unfortunate reality is that they could spend a lifetime designing and building all of their work to meet the highest environmental standards, but it wouldn’t fix the problem. The planet will grow hotter, the seas will rise, and storms will intensify. A century of burning fossil fuels has baked global warming into the atmosphere for our lifetime.

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“Landscape architects have started conversations about embodied carbon. There is a realization that we can no longer ignore the grey parts,” said Stephanie Carlisle, Senior Researcher, Carbon Leadership Forum and the University of Washington, during the first in a series of webinars organized by the ASLA Biodiversity and Climate Action Committee.

The grey parts are concrete, steel, and other manufactured products in projects. And the conversations happening are laying the foundation for a shift away from using these materials. The landscape architect climate leaders driving these conversations are offering practical ways to decarbonize projects and specify low-carbon materials.

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What about architecture in North America – its history, policies, but also building codes – makes it particularly vulnerable to the global housing crisis? And how can those inherent flaws be counteracted with purposeful residential design and a more inclusive approach to the architecture discipline?

In a presentation at World Architecture Festival 2023 under the programme theme ‘Catalyst’, Johanna Hurme and Sasa Radulovic, Co-Founders of Winnipeg-based 5468796 Architecture, showcased how these and other questions are key to their building style and also addressed in their forthcoming book platform.MIDDLE: Architecture for Housing the 99%.

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After being awarded the prestigious Silver Lion for his contribution to this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, Brooklyn-based artist Olalekan Jeyifous shows no signs of slowing down. Currently in the midst of preparing his entry to the next Sharjah Architecture Triennial, he also recently celebrated the opening of Climate Futurism, a group exhibition that highlights the power and efficacy of artists’ methods and processes to imagine a more equitable future – and is working on a public monument to former United States Representative Shirley Chisholm as part of New York City's She Built NYC initiative, among other projects.

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In 2018, Archi-Tectonics NYC and !Melk were announced as the winners of a competition to develop a masterplan transformation for the Hangzhou Asian Games Park 2022. Spanning 116 Acres, the now-completed project includes an expansive Eco Park and seven buildings. Although its initial purpose was to serve as a venue for the Hangzhou Asian Games 2022, the team extended its vision far beyond this event, charting a new path for the city’s environmental future.

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