Bricks are as old as the hills. An enduring element of architectural construction, brick has been a material of choice as far back as 7000BC. Through the centuries, bricks have built ancient empires in Turkey, Egypt, Rome and Greece. Exposed stock brick came to define the Georgian era, with thousands of red brick terraces still lining the streets of cities such as London, Edinburgh and Dublin.
This article is part of our series "Material Focus", where we ask architects to share with us their creative process through the choice of materials that define important parts of the construction of their buildings.
Responding in part to recent debates on how big data will affect our built environments, Synthesis Design + Architecture have teamed up with IBM Watson Analytics to design an interior feature wall for the Watson Experience Center in San Francisco. The project, named Data Moiré after the dizzying patterns created by overlapping sets of lines, uses data from the influence of mobile phones on monthly consumer spending to create a precise screen material that defines the wall.
In 2016, Arauco launched a call to rethink the space of the kitchen with the objective of finding simple and attractive solutions for the houses of the Worker's Housing Plan (PVT), located in Constitución, Maule Region, Chile.
The competition developed within the framework of the II Encuentro Espacios Vesto, and it forced participants to consider a simple, low-cost assembly that could be self-constructed and expanded according to the needs of the users. In addition, each project had to consider self-supporting furniture that didn't require support holes on the walls to preserve the acoustic insulation of the dwellings.
With the aim of raising awareness and expanding knowledge about the advantages of wood in the built environment, reThink Wood has created an online library that collects a series of articles, reports, studies and videos that can be freely accessed right now.
What's behind our current obsession with all things Superheroes, from the Marvel and DC comics spinoffs for TV and Film, to the more eccentric offerings on Netflix from the Wachowski’s Sens8 to the cosmic supernature of The OA? Critics see the classic superhero expressing the desire to re-establish order in the face of chaos (Batman/Joker) but some of our more recent superheroes are about the power of change, of remaking the world through a kind of ‘superempathy’. The power of the superhero depicted as an eccentric group of people reskilling with new forces and energies – think the aerobics-physics of The OA which invents and designs a new collective body and superpower and the transcultural/transtemporal superempathy of Sens8.
Italian firm Giovanni Vaccarini Architetti has designed the new Headquarters of the Swiss Société Privée de Gérance (SPG), built on Route de Chêne, at the gates of the historical center of Geneva. The work involved the conversion and extension of the existing building, starting with a glass façade that meets the need for solar shading in the interiors while achieving maximum visual permeability.
In celebration of the inaugural Melbourne Design Week, which took place in March 2017, Chilean design studio Great Things to People (gt2P) presented their Catenary Pottery Printer, aimed at exploring the boundaries between digital and analog machines. Throughout the design festival, local designers and students used the pottery printer to create their own custom works, with visitors welcomed to watch the craft in action.
How much do you know about different kinds of wood that might be used in your architectural projects?
Following the success of their highly intricate Arabesque Wall, Benjamin Dillenburger and Michael Hansmeyer have once again achieved new levels of ornamental eye candy – this time, with a full-scale 3D printed grotto created from seven tons of sandstone. Commissioned by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the grotto is an example of how the spatial expression of computational technologies can make for remarkable architectural experiences.
A multidisciplinary design study by J.Roc Design, based in Boston, has developed a proposal using wood to restore value to an underused rooftop at the southern end of the city.
A thorough architectural response towards the growing problems of population, climate, and urban migration is currently on display at the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen, in the form of the upcycled Wasteland exhibition. Curated by Danish architecture firm Lendager Group, the exhibits shown in Wasteland are filled with raw materials, processes, experiments and methods, backed up with a long list of shocking facts about our effects on planet Earth: over 2 million tons of CO2 have been emitted globally this year; over 3.3 billion tons of resources have been extracted from the earth globally this year; over 127 million tons of waste have been dumped globally this year—all totalling a cost of over $14 trillion USD resulting from our failure to act on climate change. These are the live statistics (as shown at the time of ArchDaily’s visit last Friday) which confront visitors in the first room of the exhibition space. They provide context for what is to follow.
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Over the years, one unique tradition has been growing among architecture students: building a pizza oven. To help maintain this tradition, we decided to share this small guide for a 1.20m diameter mini-oven. Follow these easy steps and quick tips to build your own crust-worthy oven.
Dutch firm Mecanoo has partnered with furniture manufacturer Gispen to create a new collection of modular and customizable furniture geared specifically towards creating variable working and learning environments. HUBB has been designed to adapt to a range of working requirements and scenarios, seamlessly accommodating different collaborative activities and individual work preferences.
In recent years, timber construction has surpassed its previous limit of two or three stories to create buildings of much greater height. This is not only due to wood's intrinsic strength, stability, and flexibility, but also to a number of new technologies that have further increased its performance, including cross-laminated timber (CLT), nail laminated timber (NLT) and glued laminated timber (glulam).
In order to support the design work of our readers, the company Teka has shared with us a series of .DWG files of its various kitchen products. The files include both 2D and 3D drawings and can be downloaded directly from this article.
In a prototype developed for the 2016 London Design Festival, Arup Associates designed The Circular Building, one of the first buildings in the UK built to satisfy Circular Economy principles, in which “all components need to be implemented and utilized to their full potential and to the duration of their life cycle, while creating a comfortable and aesthetic environment for the user.”
A team of architects and engineers at the Politecnico di Milano in Italy have unveiled Atropos, a six-axis robotic arm capable of printing continuous fiber composites. The one of a kind robot was developed by +Lab, the 3D printing laboratory at the Politecnico, who have taken inspiration from fibres found in the natural world. Through a technology known as Continuous Fiber Composites Smart Manufacturing, Atropos has the potential to create large, complex structures to aid the design and construction process.