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Residential Home: The Latest Architecture and News

Marc Thorpe Designs House of Four Gardens along Savannah River Tributary

Marc Thorpe Design has unveiled a new home concept along a tributary of the Savannah River in the United States. Sited in the deep south, the "House of Four Gardens" was designed between live oaks and perennial ferns. Access to nature was a central concept throughout the entire home, and each space is defined by the geometry of the structure in plan.

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Concrete and Stone: New Homes Reinterpreting Tradition in Cyprus

The architecture of Cyprus has been defined by larger geopolitical forces throughout history. Located in the Eastern Mediterranean, the island country is shaped physically and socially by the Cyprus dispute. Dating back to the bronze and iron ages, its architecture has been influenced by the Greeks, Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, and Romans. Today, new homes are built across the island that reinterpret past building methods and construction techniques.

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What Makes a City Livable to You?

What Makes a City Livable to You? - Arch Daily Interviews
© Flickr user Hafitz Maulana licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. ImageA music festival in Singapore

Mercer released their annual list of the Most Livable Cities in the World last month. The list ranks 231 cities based on factors such as crime rates, sanitation, education and health standards, with Vienna at #1 and Baghdad at #231. There’s always some furor over the results, as there ought to be when a city we love does not make the top 20, or when we see a city rank highly but remember that one time we visited and couldn’t wait to leave.

To be clear, Mercer is a global HR consultancy, and their rankings are meant to serve the multinational corporations that are their clients. The list helps with relocation packages and remuneration for their employees. But a company’s first choice on where to send their workers is not always the same place you’d choose to send yourself to.

And these rankings, calculated as they are, also vary depending on who’s calculating. Monocle publishes their own list, as does The Economist, so the editors at ArchDaily decided to throw our hat in as well. Here we discuss what we think makes cities livable, and what we’d hope to see more of in the future.