Architects take Climate Action! Archinect talks climate emergency activism with built environment groups taking a stand, Mon, Oct 5 '20

The first ‘climate emergency’ declaration by a constituency of suburban Melbourne in 2016 was an early signal that public opinion on global heating and biodiversity loss had shifted from a feeling of concern to that of crisis. Architects and built environment professionals around the world ...

Sino-African Architecture; A Look at the Rise of Chinese-Built Projects Across the African Continent, Tue, Feb 18 '20

A boom in Sino-African trade relations since 2000 has catapulted China from being a relatively small investor in Africa into becoming the continent's largest economic partner. This shift, in combination with a decreasing profit margin for construction projects in mainland China, has encouraged ...

The Emerging Female Architects of East Africa, Wed, Oct 16 '19

The East Africa region—which includes the countries of Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda—is currently in the middle of a construction boom that is transforming the region’s built environment. According to ...

Atlas of the Copenhagens: Book review, Wed, Jun 19 '19

The past two decades have seen a marked increase in city ranking indexes and urban metrics, yet across the board American cities continue to score poorly—last year no US cities made the top 25 in lifestyle magazine Monocle's Quality of Life Survey. On the opposite end of the spectrum lies ...

Books and Bots: Conversations on the Future of Architecture Publishing, Mon, Nov 5 '18

The ease of online publishing has influenced a surge in the production of architecture content—more text, images and video are now created and distributed than ever before. In this sink or swim environment of the global ‘mediasphere’, print-based architecture publishers face challenging ...

Recycled Buildings: How to Design for Disassembly, Wed, Jun 6 '18

Architecture firms and their clients are becoming increasingly conscious of the environmental impact of their buildings, from life-cycle performance to the economic and environmental costs of dumping quality used components. According to the CDRA, over 500 million tons of recoverable construction ...

Redesigning Las Vegas: Entertainment Architecture for the Experience Economy, Thu, May 10 '18

While Las Vegas is as popular as ever, visitors are spending less time on the casino floor. According to a recent report, gambling time now totals 1.9 hours during an entire stay in Vegas, an hour less than in 2015 and over two hours less than twenty years ago. This change is being driven almost ...

Drones for Architects: New Capabilities for the Construction Sector, How to Get Started and How to Navigate the Law, Wed, Apr 4 '18

According to a 2016 Goldman Sachs report, the largest commercial buyer of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS’s, more commonly known as drones) in the next five years will be the construction sector, valued at $11.2bn worldwide. What new roles will drones adopt both in the architectural design ...

New Ground II: Countryside 2030, Wed, Feb 28 '18

New Ground II, the second installment of Archinect’s two-part feature series on the contemporary countryside, is playfully set in rural California in the year 2030. Certain trends Christine Bjerke and I dug into in last month’s feature, New Ground I: Advancing the Countryside, have been ...

New Ground I: Advancing the Countryside, Wed, Jan 31 '18

Across the urbanized world, the contemporary countryside is a paradox. While media attention is absorbed by the city, many rural regions are experiencing accelerating change due to increased automation, the emergence of megastructures and new self-learning systems, all of which are reshaping the ...

Co-living 2030: Are you ready for the sharing economy?, Thu, Dec 28 '17

Last month I attended a SPACE10 forum led by New York-based design duo Anton and Irene on the resurgence of co-living. They suggest the financial squeeze of modern life combined with an upsurge in digital nomads is bringing the ‘sharing economy’ into the home. As 40% of the urban areas ...

Dwelling in the Golden Years: Experiments in Senior Living , Fri, Dec 8 '17

Global populations are aging—according to the UN, by 2030 the number of citizens aged 60 years or over is projected to grow by 56%, a figure which by 2050 is expected to double again, to a total of 2.1 billion seniors worldwide, skewed towards 'greying economies' such as those of the US and ...

America and the AV: Digital Mobility for Architects, Wed, Nov 15 '17

American cities and their suburbs were built on innovations in transport technology. The spatial imprint of car ownership is so apparent it led urban activist Jane Jacobs to question whether American cities had in fact been built for people or for cars. In the past five years, a digital-hybrid ...

Housing after Debt? A discussion with Alastair Parvin, Fri, Oct 20 '17

This month Archinect looks closer at our housing economy—how we commission and produce homes in today’s financial climate. This year a primary index tracking residential real estate value in major US cities revealed American house prices are now rising at a rate of 5.9% per annum—a ...

Rethinking Frank Lloyd Wright: Thoughts from a trip through the Rustbelt, Thu, Sep 7 '17

While in New York this July I visited MoMA’s retrospective of Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘Unpacking the Archive’, an extensive collection of Wright’s production to celebrate his 150 year anniversary. Despite his revered position as America’s protégé architect and seminal ...

Emergency Shelter: Housing for the Age of Mass Displacement, Thu, Jul 20 '17

Today, forced displacement affects more people than any crisis or conflict. According to the UN, 65.3 million people, or one person in every 113, is now internally or externally displaced. The average time families remain in emergency accommodation is now 17 years, longer than the average US house ...

Architects of Social Responsibility: Views of Humanitarian Architecture in Practice, Wed, May 24 '17

Last month, Airbnb announced they had hired former Architecture for Humanity co-founder Cameron Sinclair to lead their project to supply temporary housing to 100,000 people in need, shortly after launching a program to secure refuge for members of Chicago’s homeless community. Users of the ...

Never Meant to Copy, Only to Surpass: Plagiarism Versus Innovation in Architectural Imitation, Thu, Apr 13 '17

Wangjing SOHO, a three tower complex in Beijing penned by Zaha Hadid, became a worldwide sensation when it was revealed that the scheme was being allegedly plagiarized by a construction team in Chongqing, southern China. Despite the subsequent outcry from the professional design world, Hadid ...

The Architecture of Artificial Intelligence, Wed, Mar 8 '17

“Let us consider an augmented architect at work. He sits at a working station that has a visual display screen some three feet on a side, this is his working surface, controlled by a computer with which he can communicate by means of small keyboards and various other devices.” – Douglas ...