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14 Chrome Extensions to Make Your Architecture Browsing More Efficient

Architecture can be demanding. As designers, we perform enough roles to fill a Shakespearean drama - from artist, scientist, and mathematician, to economist, cartographer, and writer. Fortunately, one trait many of us share is curiosity - a willingness to embrace new ideas, continually asking how we can improve ourselves and the world around us. The internet, therefore, is somewhat of an architect’s playground - a labyrinth of inspiration, ideas, and hacks.

As the internet continues to respond to societal needs, browsers such as Google Chrome are hosting an array of clever gadgets to enhance productivity, many of which you may not be aware of. From page rulers and palette generators to screen recorders and time trackers, designers can equip their browser with an arsenal of icons to rival a CAD toolbar. Below, we’ve listed 14, just to get you started!

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Architecture Takes Center Stage With Google Earth Relaunch

Google Earth is no longer a clunky, data-intensive desktop or mobile application. As of today, one of the tech-giant's flagship (and unrivalled) products has been relaunched as a widely accessible web application for Google Chrome. This means that anyone can now access the full Google Earth product, free of charge, without having to install software or download mobile applications.

Google's New AutoDraw Feature Will Complete Your Drawings for You

via GIPHY

Drawing on a touchscreen or trackpad can be a huge pain – but when you’re on the go, sometimes that may be your only option to quickly convey an image. To the rescue, Google has unveiled its latest AI experiment, AutoDraw, which uses machine learning to pair your wobbly doodle with a corresponding artist-drawn image – like autocorrect for sketching.

New Renderings Revealed of Google's Mountain View Campus

New images of BIG and Heatherwick Studio’s proposed Google campus in Mountain View California have been revealed in planning documents presented to the city last month. Initially announced in 2015, the project has seen several revisions after first running into difficulty with the city planning board, and then after swapping sites with fellow tech giant LinkedIn. The latest iteration, the 18.6-acre Charleston East campus, features a 2-story, 595,000-square-foot building topped with a flowing, tent-like canopy.

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Land Lines: Trace an Infinite Path Around the Planet Using Maps

Land Lines, a new Chrome Experiment exploiting the satellite image data collated by Google Maps, allows anyone—cartographic aficionado or otherwise—to marvel at the contours of the world through gestures. Intelligently designed to detect dominant visual lines from a dataset of thousands of images, cut down from over 50,000 by using a combination of OpenCV Structured Forests and ImageJ’s Ridge Detection, users can simply "draw" or "drag" on a mobile browser or on a desktop to "create an infinite line of connected rivers, highways and coastlines."

Google Timelapse Shows the Rapid Expansion of the World’s Cities over 32 Years

Google Earth has released an update to its Timelapse feature, giving viewers a better look at the rapid expansion of the world’s urban areas between 1984 and 2016.

Originally released in 2013 in partnership with TIME and NASA, the update adds in four more years of data, as well as petabytes of imagery data from two new satellites, Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2, to provide clearer views of new developments and the recent effects of climate change on our natural environments.

BIG & Heatherwick Studio to Design New London HQ for Google

BIG and Heatherwick Studio have been selected as the architects for the new Google Headquarters at their King’s Cross campus in London. The ten story, 650,000 square foot building will be the first wholly owned and designed Google facility to built outside of the United States, and is part of a campus expansion plan that will eventually contain offices for 7,000 employees.

The Internet's Unanswered Questions And Strange Assumptions About Architecture and Architects

The usefulness (and, at times, unintended hilarity or abhorrence) of Google's autocomplete function is nothing new. The screenshots, listicles and articles dedicated to exposing humanity's curiosity, bias and, alas, stupidity have circulated the interwebs since the "Search Suggestion" feature was launched in 2008. As you type a query, topic or name into the the search bar, you are served search predictions, which the company describes as "related to the terms you’re typing and what other people are searching for."

27 of the Best Google Doodles Celebrating Architects and Architecture

Since 1998, Google has been manipulating their iconic logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries and the lives of famous artists, pioneers and scientists, creating what they call Google Doodles. Since the very first doodle (used to indicate founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s attendance at Burning Man that year), Google has produced over 2000 fun, colorful drawings to inform their users about the important milestones that fell on that date.

Google and La Biennale di Venezia Release Online Catalogue of 3700 Images from the 2016 Venice Biennale

Google and La Biennale di Venezia Release Online Catalogue of 3700 Images from the 2016 Venice Biennale - Featured Image
Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Google and La Biennale di Venezia have teamed up to release an online catalogue of the 2016 Venice Biennale. Hosted on Google’s Arts and Culture platform, the digital archive contains over 3700 images and videos from the 15th International Architecture Exhibition “Reporting From The Front”, curated by Alejandro Aravena, and a selection of National Pavilions and ancillary events.

MIT and Google Team Up to Create Transformable Office Pods

The MIT School of Architecture’s Self-Assembly Lab has teamed up with Google to create Transformable Meeting Spaces, a project that utilizes woven structure research in wood and fiberglass pods that descend from the ceiling, transforming a large space into a smaller one. Designed as a small-scale intervention for reconfiguring open office plans—which “have been shown to decrease productivity due to noise and privacy challenges”—the pods require no electromechanical systems to function, but rather employ a flexible skeleton and counterweight to change shape.

This skeleton is composed of 36 fiberglass rods, which are woven together into a sort of textile or cylindrical braid. Thus, the structure behaves “like a Chinese finger trap: The circumference of the pod shrinks when it’s pulled, and expends when relaxed.”

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BIG and Heatherwick's Futuristic Google HQ Back on the Table After Massive Land Deal with LinkedIn

The “Googleplex” is back on. After the Mountain View City Council announced last year that they would be awarding the majority of the land needed to construct the futurist masterplan designed for Google by BIG and Thomas Heatherwick to fellow tech giant LinkedIn, the future of the ambitious glass-canopied corporate campus seemed to be dead in the water, with the architects even releasing images of a pared down design that would occupy a much smaller footprint. But all of that has now changed thanks to a surprising property swap between the two companies that will see over three million square feet of real estate switch hands.

BIG and Heatherwick Reveal Revised Plans for Google’s Mountain View Campus

Following the loss of part of their proposed site to LinkedIn and the subsequent reveal of an alternative site, Google has unveiled the revised plans for their Mountain View Campus. Designed by BIG and Heatherwick Studio, the original proposal featured several “Lego-like” buildings covered by glass canopies. The new proposal uses similar design decisions, with the building massing adjusted to the new site.

Immerse Yourself in 3D Models Online With Sketchfab's New Virtual Reality Feature

Sketchfab, the browser-based platform for sharing and viewing 3D models, has announced a new feature on their software that turns any of their models into a virtual reality experience when viewed on a smartphone and combined with a simple headset like Google Cardboard. Sketchfab allows users to upload a wide variety of 3D model file types that could then be shared and viewed in any web browser, or embedded on websites or social media, without the need for any additional software or plug-ins. As a result, over the past few years they've built up a huge database of over half a million 3D models, and this new VR feature allows viewers to experience those models in a whole new way.

Walk Inside: Google Cultural Institute Puts New York's Guggenheim On The Map

The Google Cultural Institute have teamed up with New York City's iconic Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1959, to open its doors through Street View. Additionally, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has made over 120 artworks from its collection available for online viewing. "Using Street View technology, it will now be possible to tour the museum’s distinctive spiral ramps from anywhere online," the Foundation said.

Esquire Interviews Bjarke Ingels on the Google Headquarters, 2 World Trade Center and the NFL

This past February, BIG and Heatherwick Studio unveiled their designs for Google’s new Mountain View Headquarters in California. The project, which will be built by robots, faced sizeable critique, as well as site complications—that have since been resolved—over the past year. Now, as a part of Esquire’s 2015 Breakouts, Bjarke Ingels—founder of BIG—is speaking out about how the firm won the Google bid, and why the headquarters could create a new mold for Silicon Valley urbanism. Ingels goes on to discuss other major BIG projects, like 2 World Trade Center, and an upcoming NFL stadium. Read the full Esquire interview, here.

6 Designs By And For Architects that Made TIME's 25 Inventions of the Year

In this day and age, innovation is occurring at a faster rate than ever before. And while a majority of ideas may make a small impact before fading away, some inventions are able to slip through the cracks and become a real game changer in their field. Our field, of course, is architecture, and this year there have been no shortage of inventions that may change the way we live and work forever. In TIME magazine’s annual release of inventions of the year, at least 6 may have an impact on the world of architecture, encompassing inventions within the field of architecture itself and developments that could change how we design and experience space. Read on for those projects and what they might mean for our future.

Launch of Google Sunroof Brings Valuable Solar Power Data to the Mainstream

Google is in the unique position to truly understand what people want. As millions key in their questions, the search giant is actively working to provide better answers. When it comes to questions about solar energy, Google wondered, “If people are lost trying to get answers about solar, why don’t we give them a map?” And so, the tech company announced the beta launch of Project Sunroof: a tool “to make installing solar panels easy and understandable for anyone.”

In a post on Google’s Green Blog, engineer Carl Elkin addressed common misconceptions about the viability of solar energy for the average owner by saying “many of them are missing out on a chance to save money and be green.” Sunroof hopes to be the answer that gives people clear, easy to understand answers.