Archinect - Features

Urban Archive Opens a New Door for Digital Architectural Archives

2020-01-17T14:52:00-05:00

Historical archives and repositories are notorious for holding endless amounts of data and information of the built environment while struggling with offering public accessibility and access. The team at Urban Archive, a non-profit technology app, aims to merge passions for history, architecture, technology, and preservation to create a platform that enables others to not only learn about, but also experience the built environment in a whole new way.

Powered by a diverse team of professionals that includes preservationists, urbanists, coders, and museum specialists, Urban Archive has spent the past three years creating a new face for historical building archives. According to team member Sam Addeo, "This blend of technology, institutional buy-in, and data allows architects and students to trace contemporary debates over development and urban policy (including topics like gentrification, housing, and transit access) back to the records themselves." Archinect connected the multidisci...

EXTENTS on the Importance of Being Earnest, Contemporary Urbanism, and the Digital World

2019-08-21T12:00:00-04:00

How do you re-image a city? How would you re-tell this narrative? The Ann Arbor-based duo Cyrus Peñarroyo and McLain Clutter use their passions in digital media, urbanism, and visualization to help answer this very question. Heavily invested in reshaping and reworking architectural practice and academia, both are faculty at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, and also, co-founders of EXTENTS, their architectural practice. Keen on finding new ways to "see the city," the duo creates digital and spatial practices for experiencing and understanding contemporary urbanism.

According to Peñarroyo and Clutter, "if we're able to see the city differently, maybe we can get other people to see it differently, too."

For this week's Studio Snapshot, Archinect had a chance to connect with Peñarroyo and Clutter. Together, they share their goals for running a practice as well as the role academia plays in their work. They also share their values when co...

Are We Digital? Of Mice and Pens

2019-05-11T11:47:00-04:00

In the short history of computing, an ongoing research project is human-computer interaction (HCI). We know the results of this research as the ever-expanding catalog of input devices developed since the 1950s for interfacing with computers. A few successful and obvious ones are: the keyboard, the mouse, the trackpad, the touchscreen, the pen, and the joystick. If most of design labor today is produced with mice (and/or pens), why are there so few discussions on those instruments? In a field bombarded with debates on the digitization of design, I’ve found everyday devices to be the most fascinating, yet overlooked, subject. So in lieu of reviewing the latest touchscreen, VR controller, or AR app, I’d like to talk briefly about mice and pens.

Post-Screen: A Criticism of Digital Screens

2019-03-22T09:30:00-04:00

I was struggling for a while with how to label/title possible thoughts and ideas for this column on Archinect; a series of texts and visual materials developed around creative robotics, philosophy, interaction design, XR, etc. and all as part of a design-thinking towards post-digital discourse! I know! It seems to be a lot, and it IS a lot! This struggle, however, led into a bigger/deeper question about the notion of what I—and a group of my colleagues and friends, do.

Forging Alternate Hybrids of Practice; Conversations with the Writers of The Blindspot Initiative

2019-02-06T09:00:00-05:00

Soapbox is a weekly series delivering a curated set of lectures, talks and symposia concerning contemporary themes but explored through the archives of lectures past and present. With the plethora of lectures, talks, symposia and panels occurring world wide on a daily basis, how can we begin to keep up and if not, find them once they are gone? Soapbox looks to assemble a selection of recent, archived and outlier lectures surrounding a given theme. Soapbox looks to curate this never-ending library of ideas into an engaging and diverse list of thoughts and provocations. Soapbox is just that, a collection aimed at discovering the occasional needle in a haystack.

This week, we look at the themes and voices from within the newly realized publication, The Blindspot Initiative. The Blindspot Initiative, the latest book of projects and essays on design resistance and alternative modes of practice edited by Jose Sanchez and will have a special launch event at Archinect Outpost this Saturday...

The Internet Was a Desert

2017-01-27T12:47:00-05:00

Looking for a picture that represents something related to the internet, we thought about the desert.