As we move past Thanksgiving and step into December, the festive season is fast approaching. This time of year brings celebrations, holidays, and travel plans into full swing. Particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, there is a strong association between end-of-year festivities and cold, snowy weather.
Among the many traditions that celebrate the season, one of the most logistically and architecturally challenging is arranging for the giant Christmas tree for Rockefeller Center in New York City. This spectacle of moving a 70+ foot, 10+ ton tree into one of the busiest city centers in the world continues to capture the holiday spirit annually.
Courtesy of [applied] Foreign Affairs, Institute of Architecture, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Public Markets are complex cases that beautifully combine an engineering exploration with the instigation of a beneficial public function. In fact, it doesn't take much to designate an open and accessible commercial hub that would encourage commercial exchange and economic development for small or local businesses. All one needs is a lot and a sheltering roof. However, many designers and architects have chosen to take this exercise beyond the social level and into further material and technical exploration.
While hybrid working and flexible hours represent the most obvious ways to improve work/life balance for many, because of the missed social interactions and the lack of space or functionality at unproductive home workspaces, the majority of 16-24-year-olds are the only age group who prefer to work from the office.
As a highly transparent material that stands up to all but the most extreme of weather conditions, is easily formed into any size or shape, and, once formed, will last for thousands of years, glass is still one of the most innovative and crucial materials used in architecture. Although contemporary building practices allow us to form huge, glittering skyscrapers of glass that rise hundreds of meters into the air, the ancient material’s original purpose – to welcome light into weathertight and secure interiors – remains its most important more than a thousand years on.
As important as glass is to almost every typology of architecture in the form of windows, when it comes to the roof of a building, the use of glass is not so simple. We’ve understood the power and danger of combining light and glass ever since we saw a magnifying glass used to concentrate the heat of sunlight into incredibly high temperatures in children’s cartoons. Under a glass roof, the solar gain can make for uncomfortable internal environments without the correct protective precautions.
Architecture – once it moved out from under its cavernous beginnings – started off largely nomadic. For a long time, the shade of trees and moveable tents made from animal skin were utilized instead of more permanent dwellings to meet nomadic lifestyles and basic survival needs. These early portable structures were primarily supported by wooden frames and were used by various ancient civilizations, including the Bedouins in the Arabian Peninsula and the Native American tribes in North America. The advent of woven cloth some 40,000 years ago made the dwellings even lighter and easier to transport, a boon to nomadic cultures around the globe.
Though tents have remained popular since then in recreational contexts and as a staple of the architectural form, contemporary architecture has rediscovered the principle of draping fabric and taken its development further – not just for temporary structures, but for permanent buildings and installations, too. Advanced and durable materials have turned fabric into a facade and roof alternative that has sparked a highly specialized sector within the construction industry and created some of the most intriguing exteriors around the globe.
In his Robie House, Frank Lloyd Wright created an ingenious arrangement of public and private spaces that slowly moving away from the street through a series of horizontal planes. Pronounced eaves made the interior space expand toward the outside. Considered the first phase of the American architect's career, the so-called Prairie Houses had marked horizontality, mainly due to the enormous plans created by slightly inclined eaves. Eaves are ubiquitous in most traditional architecture, and in addition to their aesthetic role, they serve several important functions, the primary one being to keep rainwater away from the building's walls and structure. But for some time now, we have seen plenty of projects with sloping roofs without eaves, forming pure and unornamented volumes. This brings us to the question: in these projects, how are practical issues such as draining rainwater?
In addition to their primary function, roofs are one of the most fundamental elements in the aesthetics of a building, taking different shapes, being composed of different structures and sealed by different materials. But, in addition to aesthetics, roofs need to meet the climatic conditions of where they are located, considering the periodic changes related to rain, sun and winds.
It’s an essential architectural element, one we tend to immediately take note of when we look at buildings new to us – the roof. The roofs that shelter the buildings we see in our cities today are diverse in their typology. Flat roofs are a common sight in the city centers of urban metropolises, hip roofs are a popular choice for dwellings around the world, and the gable roof is arguably the most common of all, a roof type popular in stylized depictions of what a standard house looks like.
It is a commonly held belief by non-architects (and even some architects) that gabled roofs are inherently better than flat ones. The argument typically goes that a gable demonstrates a ‘form follows function’ sensibility, easily shedding water and snow using geometry and gravity. So, flat roofs might leak. While that’s true, this video blows the roof off the topic by taking a finer look at some points that might change your mind. This includes Louis Sullivan’s original reason for writing the phrase “form ever follows function,” as well as the ability of flat roofs to offer outdoor public spaces, supporting green roofs, structural simplicity, wind considerations, among many others. There’s also another, competing functional/formal reason for why a low slope roof might be more prudent than a more aggressive slope, even in snowy areas like Chicago.
With three more years to go until the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics and the re-opening date announced by French President Emanuel Macron, Notre Dame's restoration work progresses. After a long safety phase and months of work interruption last year due to the pandemic, all burned timber from the roof has been removed, and scaffolding has been installed inside the cathedral. As a homage to the heritage structure and "the collective effort to rebuild Notre Dame", the Catholic University of America is building a replica of one of the cathedral's roof trusses in Washington D.C., using medieval techniques.
In this week's piece by Metropolis, author Kelly Beamon explores in her original article "the patriotism associated with pitched roofs and shares how architects are reimagining this staple of suburban house styles". According to its definition, a gable roof is a classic roof shape, usually in cold or temperate climates, consisting of two roof sections sloping in opposite directions and placed such that the highest, horizontal edges meet to form the roof ridge. Emblematic of the US, this article discusses its return to the urban fabric.
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J. MAYER H., in partnership with Architekten, celebrated the groundbreaking ceremony for their competition-winning Pavillon am Ring Project in Freiburg, Germany. Located at the edge of Freiburg’s historic district, this new tram stop will feature a café and dynamic roof structure.
A competition for the innovative design of public housing in Malaga has been won by Spanish firms PRÁCTICA and Daroca Arquitectos, whose proposal offers a new housing typology based on energy efficiency, sustainability, and urbanization from a human and ecological perspective. Titled Al Sur, the 15,196 square meters development transforms Malaga’s “Green Block” urban plan, combining social housing, free market units, and commercial areas.
https://www.archdaily.com/873666/practica-and-daroca-arquitectos-mixed-housing-complex-to-develop-malagas-green-blockArchDaily Team
Winning proposal by GMP. Image Courtesy of City of Verona Press Office
The results of a competition to propose an openable roof over the Arena di Verona, Italy have been announced. Three winners were chosen out of eighty-seven proposals to cover the famous amphitheater, a defining symbol of the city of Verona. The competition was announced in March 2016 in order to protect the Roman monument from the elements and to ensure that it continues to provide quality entertainment to spectators two thousand years after its construction.
.jpg?1653990029 "Khayelitsha Township - Cape Town. Image © Olga Ernst under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.")
