Archinect - Features

What Is the Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence to the Architecture Profession?

2021-04-22T08:03:00-04:00

Artificial intelligence could potentially help us streamline the more rudimentary and tedious aspects of design to free up more time for creative problem solving and response to human needs. It would be unreasonable to say that any AI that we could conceive in our lifetime would be able to intimately familiarize itself with the breadth of human experience to allow it to make accurate determinations about the things we need. Oftentimes the things we need are rooted in aesthetics that are meant to facilitate our emotional well-being or they are otherwise rooted in cultural lineages and traditions that are difficult as yet to quantify.

What Died with John Portman and Syd Mead, America's Last Urban Optimists?

2020-04-25T09:00:00-04:00

Writer Colin Marshall takes a long look at the lasting aesthetic and architectural legacies of two of the late-20th Century’s most visionary designers: John Portman and Syd Mead. Part compare-and-contrast, part-homage, Marshall’s essay focuses on the outsize vision these two creatives projected into their work, and by extension, onto popular culture.

Redesigning Las Vegas: Entertainment Architecture for the Experience Economy

2018-05-10T10:09:00-04:00

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 entirely by the younger generation who are spending just 8.5 percent of their income on gambling compared to the 23.5% spent by their parents. The American entertainment industry has therefore made it a top priority to grab, and keep, the attention of the millennial market.

What does a less gambling-centric future mean for cities like Las Vegas? This month’s feature takes you on a virtual tour of The Strip to investigate a selection of new experience-driven, ‘Instagram-ready’ architecture projects commissioned by the top entertainment conglomerates. I check in with Stefan Al, architect and associate professor of Urban Design at the University of Pennsylvania and author of ‘The Strip: Las Veg...

Soapbox: Fiction

2018-04-04T09:00:00-04:00

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.

A home that molds itself to your memories

2016-08-18T09:13:00-04:00

Traces of the past permeate a home, which acts as a sort of repository for memories. Thus, a move is never just a relocation, it’s also a departure from the past and its signifiers. But what if houses conformed to our memories rather than the other way around? In The Settlement, a submission to our July open call, Noah Gotlib and Pica Limbaseanu propose a future where a family “will soon be able to experience everything within the confines of the home, yet part with nothing.”