Archinect - News

Building a better big box

2013-04-03T16:41:00-04:00

D’Hooghe, a Belgian-born architect and director of the Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT, cares deeply about urban form and the large-scale issues cities face in achieving more efficient energy use, better transportation and less congestion. One of his main concerns is better integrating suburbs with the larger metropolitan areas in which they exist.

MIT launches new research center on advanced urbanism

2013-02-12T18:57:00-05:00

Interdisciplinary teams will focus on the planning, design, construction and retrofitting of urban environments for the 21st century.

Already, the world is becoming predominantly urban. However, the dominant form of urban living will be very similar to our older suburban regions in the U.S. This places substantial pressure on American suburban models, the dominant model of urban development copied worldwide, to set a better example of sustainability. This is even more critical as economic development grows robust middle classes in developing countries who expect more from their living environments.

To address the urgent need for better models of urban growth, the MIT School of Architecture + Planning is launching a major new research center focused on the planning, design, construction and retrofitting of urban environments for the 21st century.

Under the leadership of center director Alexander D’Hooghe and research director Alan Berger – professors of architecture and of urban design and landscape architecture, respectively – the Center for Advanced Urbanism will coordinate collaborations among existing eff...

Five tenets of a new kind of architecture

2012-12-16T20:56:00-05:00

So when people look at you know, at the ability to 3D print using a robotic arm, they're very, very curious about the possibility of in the future, printing full scale houses, so I think the media lab and specifically in the Media Matter Group, we don't focus only on efficiency translations. For that, I would open a practice in the commercial world, but that's not the function of this lab...

Neri Oxman founder of the Mediated Matter group at MIT’s Media Lab was recently profiled in a 30-minute segment and interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. CNN also published a short essay in which Ms. Oxman begins to define a design credo suitable for the contemporary context, wherein the World-as-Machine is replaced by the World-as- Organism. The five components include; Growth over Assembly, Integration over Segregation, Heterogeneity over Homogeneity, Difference over Repetition and Material is the New Software.

As Bruce Sterling noted elsewhere "Looks like Prof Neri’s working up a manifesto there."

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.

What is the Future of Academic Publishing? An Interview with Gita Manaktala from MIT Press

2012-07-17T12:16:00-04:00

University presses will endure as long as they are in a position to offer significant value to academic authors and their readers, and as long as they have the support of their home institutions. In the present and near future, we will see new models for the university press including funded open access models, collaborative publishing models, and global partnerships to develop and disseminate high quality scholarship worldwide.

Understanding the Resource Intensity of Cities

2012-05-14T17:24:00-04:00

Urban planning has focused on identifying many important questions about the formation and functioning of our cities. However, there is a lack of understanding about the spatial patterns related to material and energy use in cities. This work attempts to address this knowledge gap.

urbmet.org is a web-map that illustrates data on material and energy use in cities. The goal is to provide an intuitive way of understanding this complex problem using an interactive interface. We have analyzed 42 cities and estimated material and energy intensities.

To make this work as useful as possible, we are interested in examining whether this information is presented in such a way that it builds intuition about the functioning of cities.

MIT creates invisible glass that's fog+glare free and self cleaning

2012-04-26T17:45:00-04:00

One of the most instantly recognizable features of glass is the way it reflects light. But a new way of creating surface textures on glass, developed by researchers at MIT, virtually eliminates reflections, producing glass that is almost unrecognizable because of its absence of glare — and whose surface causes water droplets to bounce right off, like tiny rubber balls.

App's glowing arrows guide you around a new building

2012-02-20T12:58:00-05:00

Developed by Jaewoo Chung at MIT's Media Lab, Guiding Light consists of a wearable badge with magnetic sensors and a software app that makes use of a projector built into many Samsung smartphones to cast arrows onto the ground in front of you as you walk. The system relies on a map of the building based on fluctuations in its magnetic field, created by the presence of steel in the walls, floor and ceiling. In tests, Guiding Light was able to determine a user's position to within a metre.

The Senseable City: an interview with Carlo Ratti

2011-12-05T15:06:00-05:00

Architect, engineer, and director of the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carlo Ratti will focus on (you guessed it) the Senseable City—merging the digital and the physical realms by understanding how we sense and act on our built environment, and how the latter then responds to us.

'Nature is a brilliant engineer'

2011-06-07T13:00:18-04:00

Haifa-born Oxman, 35, one of the world's leading researchers in the field of digital architecture, is currently studying how our bones are affected by environmental conditions and by the weight that is brought to bear on them, and how such knowledge can be applied in other areas of life. It is known, for instance, that astronauts in outer space lose bone mass because of the absence of gravity, whereas women when they are pregnant develop stronger bones in order to withstand the added load.

Who Gives A Crap? Sanitation, Energy and Entrepreneurship in Kenya

2011-05-23T13:19:58-04:00

Sanergy, a year-old for-profit social enterprise that manufactures high-quality, yet low-cost and compact toilets for urban slums in the developing world and then uses human waste to produce energy and fertilizer. It is an “affordable, accessible and hygienic sanitation” solution for millions that live in places without sewage or electricity. They are places where the street is the bathroom. And that’s precisely the problem.

Immersive Cocoon // Step Into The Future

2011-05-17T12:08:00-04:00

Welcome to the Immersive Cocoon, a surround display dome with sophisticated motion sensor technology that inspired the technology depicted in 'Minority Report'. Now your body becomes the interface, as you are enveloped and your body movement becomes part of this digital environment to make our everyday lives more enjoyable, at least that is what this conceptual project tries to explore.

The MIT 150

2011-05-16T18:45:00-04:00

Some were invented at MIT. Others were simply inspired by time spent at MIT. But all of them (well, maybe not #150) have had a profound impact, in one way or another, on society, culture, politics, economics, transportation, health, science, and, oh yes, technology.

Check the recently published Archinect feature: MIT, Going FAST After 150 Years

Joichi Ito, new MIT Media Lab Director, wondered: Will I fit in?

2011-05-12T17:50:00-04:00

Joichi Ito initially thought he wouldn’t be a good fit for MIT. Ito is the new director of the MIT Media Lab, known as a hub of innovation; technologies created there have turned into products such as Guitar Hero and the Amazon Kindle... WBUR’s All Things Considered host Sacha Pfeiffer toured the Media Lab with Ito on his first day at work recently and asked him about his early reservations about his new job.

Previously: Joichi Ito to Be Named Head of MIT Media Lab

Joichi Ito to Be Named Head of MIT Media Lab

2011-04-25T17:55:00-04:00

On Tuesday, the university plans to announce that Joichi Ito, known as Joi, will become the fourth director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, which was originally founded by the architect Nicholas Negroponte in 1985 and has since become recognized for its willingness to take risks in developing technologies that are at the edge of the computing frontier.