Archinect - Features

Designing Realities: Games, Simulations and Architecture—In Conversation with Kazys Varnelis

2017-01-25T12:35:00-05:00

Towards the tail end of an interesting year, a series of articles appeared on Archinect that focused on game design and its role in architectural education, inspiring this interview with Kazys Varnelis of the Network Architecture Lab.

'Open Mushware': Making the Invisible Visible in Tactical Urbanism

2016-11-25T13:18:00-05:00

In 2012, the Network Architecture Lab was invited to participate in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) “Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities” exhibition, curated by Pedro Gadanho. The exhibition was the third installment in the “Issues in Contemporary Architecture Series,” which included “Rising Currents,” a contemplation on future sea level rise in New York City, and “Foreclosed,” a study of the architectural responses to the foreclosure crisis.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Modulex, Lego's Building System for Architects

2016-11-03T11:52:00-04:00

A success among urban planners but a failure among architects (with the exception of Eero Saarinen, who used them in his prototype modeling stages), Modulex—the architectural modeling Lego-offshoot—was largely shuttered by the 1980s, almost revived in 2015, and now serves as an XS cult classic in architecture.

Michael Rotondi's GamerLab™ Wants to Revolutionize Architecture Education Through Gaming

2016-10-31T15:41:00-04:00

In a typical media narrative, video games are responsible for social isolation, decreased attention spans, and even violent tendencies. But according to GamerLab™, a new educational platform and pedagogical method developed by the LA-based RotoLab, as well as an increasingly large body of research, games can offer major benefits for education, particularly when it comes to architecture.

Win ECO-MONOPOLY by playing for sustainability, not profit

2016-09-07T11:42:00-04:00

When the Parker Brothers' version of the game Monopoly was released in 1935, it was primarily a celebration of capitalism; players were encouraged to build as much high-priced real estate as they could by acquiring desirable tracts of land and then forcibly renting them out to unlucky arrivals. The goal was to bankrupt the other players, all the while dodging the slings and arrows of the often financially ruinous 'Chance' cards.

Level up: using video games to unlock the city

2016-09-02T12:02:00-04:00

From Monopoly to SimCity, games can foster a special sort of engagement with an urban environment, helping us hash out and represent the complex socioeconomic and political forces that determine its morphology. It’s no surprise, then, that architects employ games to work out and convey new ideas, or that game designers look to the city for inspiration.

Gaming the System: role-playing spatial and political change

2016-09-01T09:13:00-04:00

"[The] sovereign art, of course, will be the one whose laws rule over the relations among men in their totality. That is, Politics.

Nothing is alien to Politics, because nothing is alien to the superior art that rules the relations among men.

Medicine, war, architecture, etc. – minor and major arts, all without exception – are subject to, and make up, that sovereign art." — Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, 1973

Playtime! 7 bold and whimsical playgrounds from around the world

2016-08-12T12:44:00-04:00

The act of play rests heavily on the ability to indulge in the imagination. While a certain degree of functionality is required for elements like swings, slides, and climbing walls, the key to any great playground design is that it be inspiring: and oddly enough, it doesn’t always have to be strictly for children. Game-playing takes multiple forms, from the stream of consciousness rules of a child's adventure to the psychologically penetrating/illuminating construct of an artist. These examples of architectural spaces for play from around the world openly embrace the esoteric and playful.

The theory of everything in sandbox city: Will Wright's keynote at ACADIA 2014

2014-11-04T12:25:00-05:00

How the creator of SimCity turns reality into playground.