Archinect - News

HOK designs quantum research facility for Caltech with glass prism facade

2023-08-25T11:41:00-04:00

Caltech has held the groundbreaking ceremony for the HOK-designed Ginsburg Center for Quantum Precision Measurement in Pasadena, California. Upon its projected completion in 2025, the center is set to become “one of the world’s most advanced hubs for studying quantum science and technology.”

Image credit: HOK

The four-story building will house research offices, meeting rooms, and dedicated collaboration areas, with laboratories strategically located at the basement level to minimize disturbances from noise and vibrations. Externally, a transparent facade on the south and west sides is designed to “suggest a prism or the bending of spacetime, an allusion to research that will take place in the building.”

In an effort to foster community and collaboration, parts of the ground floor are recessed to provide room for greenery and open spaces for outdoor gatherings. The design further encourages interaction with glass panel doors and a breezeway linked to a neighboring seminar room, enabli...

Walkie Talkie Tower summons the elements again — this time it's wind!

2015-07-09T14:30:00-04:00

The City of London Corporation has promised a more "rigorous" assessment of developers' predictions of ground winds, following complaints about strong gusts outside the 20 Fenchurch Street Building, better known as the Walkie Talkie. "I almost got blown over the other day walking up past the building," a sales assistant working nearby said earlier this year. "When I got around the corner it was fine. I was scared to go back."

It's not the tower's first run-in with the laws of physics:

Stand on the shoulders of giants as CERN's architect in residence

2015-02-05T15:40:00-05:00

A year before discovering the Higgs boson, aka “God”, particle, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) established its own arts residency. Formed in 2011, the Collide@CERN program pairs artists with CERN physicists in Geneva to collaborate on art and research projects, banking on the idea that artistic experimentation and theoretical physicists are both ultimately concerned with the same thing: "both are ways to explore our existence – what it is to be human and our place in the universe,” according to program director Ariane Koek. The first collaboration between artist Julius von Bismarck and theoretical physicist James Wells was so fruitful that CERN developed Accelerate@CERN in 2013, which enables a country to set up and sponsor a specific "Research Stay" within CERN’s labs. Now, Austria is looking for an architect to work at CERN.

What does this entail? For one month of pure research, an architect will be paired with a CERN physicist – to work, think, and ideate to...

Temple University Physicist proposes three 1,000-foot walls to tornado-proof Midwest

2014-06-30T20:31:00-04:00

In a paper he recently published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B, Tao points to two regions of China... that have a similar geographic location as the Midwest—but far fewer tornadoes. The difference, he says, is that China's plains are surrounded by three east-west mountain ranges, which slow down passing winds enough to prevent tornados from forming. Tao, then, is essentially suggesting we build mountain range-sized walls across Tornado Alley...

Inside three vast halls

2013-02-06T11:27:00-05:00

As dark matter particles steam through the detector, scientists hope that a few will collide with the argon atoms. This will generate two flashes of light - one in the liquid argon and another in the gas - which will be detected by the receptors.

Rebecca Morelle visits the Gran Sasso National Laboratory a man-made cavern, deep beneath a mountain, designed by scientists hoping to shed light on one of the most mysterious substances in our Universe - dark matter. Physicists are hoping to detect WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).

An App For Architects That Makes Physics Easy

2012-10-15T18:58:00-04:00

After seven years of teaching structures to a mixed group of architecture and structural engineering graduate students at MIT, Paul Kassabian found that many of his future architects took a just-enough-to-get-the-homework-done approach to understanding those fundamental components. So he created an app to help them out.