Archinect - News

Inside a new robotic housing factory in British Columbia, Canada

2021-10-20T11:50:00-04:00

Intelligent City, a Canadian company focused on innovation in housing, has offered a glimpse inside their new factory in Delta, British Columbia. The facility, which has now begun building mid-to-high-rise urban housing projects for Canada and the United States, will use advanced robotics to automatically assemble mass timber building systems.

Intelligent City's new factory in British Columbia. Image courtesy: Intelligent City

The company was founded in 2008 by German-Canadian architect Oliver Lang and Canadian designer Cindy Wilson, who also comes from an architectural background with a Bachelor of Architecture and Bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia. The team is currently working to deliver 2,880 homes in Canada and 1,400 homes in the United States, with delivery of their first projects expected in early 2022 in Vancouver.

Intelligent City's new factory in British Columbia. Image courtesy: Intelligent City

The company’s approach is centered on the use of mass...

MVRDV completes ambitious mass housing scheme located on the outskirts of Pune, India

2018-11-29T16:13:00-05:00

MVRDV has completed 'Future Towers,' a massive residential complex comprised of 1,068 homes, amenities, public facilities, parks and courtyards. Combining strategies from both Europe and India, where the project is located, the ambitious scheme is the Dutch firm's attempt to answer the prevalence of monotonous large scale housing estates cropping up on city outskirts.

“In Asia, cities are growing so fast, and uniform repetitive residential towers are the norm”, says Jacob van Rijs, the principal architect on this project and founding partner of the firm. "With our design, we are making an effort to offer more variety and bring people from more different backgrounds together....The MVRDV team thoroughly researched modern Indian housing and came up with a system to create a mix of different types of apartment inside one building."

The design settles for a structure with peaks and valleys organized around hexagonal court...

The tower block as a recurring theme in post-Soviet photography

2018-05-04T15:24:00-04:00

In some places, the tower block has never faded from view. The history of mass housing in eastern Europe is complex and uncomfortable. Yet what’s striking is how prominently the tower block features in the work of contemporary photographers from that territory. These artists have every reason to turn their backs on such buildings. They’re ugly and overbearing, not to say reminiscent of an authoritarian past. But the mass housing block is a recurring presence in their work.

Writer and critic Ekow Eshun provides a beautiful overview of the tower block as a recurring architectural, social, and aesthetic theme in the works of post-Soviet-era photographers in Russia, Serbia, the Baltic states, and throughout Eastern Europe.

"However ugly and monolithic such buildings were after all, they provided homes for people and are worth time and scrutiny as sites of possibility and connection," Ekow writes. "They were places where people gathered to sleep and eat, to argue and to raise families. And they continue to be so. Perhaps this is a modest artistic aim. But it’s also a worthwhile one."

'Breaking' the Mega Block by 'dressing' it? UNStudio completes exterior work on South Korea mass-housing project

2017-08-30T17:02:00-04:00

Over the past decade of South Korea's rapid urbanization high-density apartment development has become the most popular type of housing in the country, producing a myriad of identical, close-set, utilitarian blocks.

When in 2012 the Hyundai Development Company invited UNStudio to design an 'intervention' for two new residential developments in Daegu Wolbae, South Korea's fourth largest city, the firm proposed to simply re-skin the existing structures with multi-color panels. Their plan to break the homogeneity with color was inspired by the city's history of manufacturing clothing and textiles—the facade designs bare similarity to the texture of a fabric or a media screen.

Image courtesy of Hyundai

On the urban scale, color was also utilized for zoning—as the architects put it, not only reinforcing identity, but also establishing community, revealing principal access points and communicating the relationship between the inside and outside of the two mega-blocks.

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Robin Hood Gardens residents dare Lord Rogers to spend a night in the blighted estate

2015-06-23T18:12:00-04:00

When Lord Rogers launched a campaign to save one of London’s most notorious housing estates from demolition, he was adamant that it was a desirable place to live. [...] It is a claim he may regret. Unhappy residents of the estate have challenged the peer to be true to his word and swap his £12 million Chelsea townhouse for a few nights in one of their blighted flats.

Previously: Robin Hood Gardens Set For Demolition

Owen Hatherley on the mass housing history of Moscow’s suburbs

2015-06-22T15:23:00-04:00

The ideals of Novye Cheryomushki may have died, but its methods and techniques remain — having managed to make some people very wealthy. Moscow suburbia is not so much the remnants of a great experiment, perhaps, but suburbia like any other suburbia — a place of dreams and boredom, great ideas being implemented and then slowly crushed.

Building blocks to a new mass housing

2012-02-07T15:39:00-05:00

Goldhoorn’s concept, called Block City, proposes the introduction of a standard size urban block that — as with standard shoe sizing — won’t create standard architecture, but on the contrary, diversity. At the Jaroslav Fragner gallery in an exhibition bearing the concept’s name, Goldhoorn walks viewers through past and present mass housing to his future vision.

More info on the event page: Block City/ The Past, Present and Future of Mass housing

The exhibition is based on a fifteen-year research of Dutch architect Bart Goldhoorn into the possibilities of housing development in the future. His concept of the „Block City“ is a combination of analysed housing complexes of the 1960s and the 1970s as well as the contextual, individual, but also very expensive „Designer City“. Goldhoorn had the opportunity to test this concept in a new town for 40 000 inhabitants south of Moscow. The outcome of his endeavour are four master plans and 150 models of housing blocks created by architects from around the world which are part of a touring exhibition from 2011.
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