Archinect - News

Google updates Open Buildings data sets using AI

2024-10-28T10:46:00-04:00

In 2021, the Google Research Africa team launched Open Buildings, an open-source dataset of building footprints across the Global South produced using AI and high-resolution satellite imagery. The team had a simple vision: to fill a major gap in data for population and density in the developing world. Now in its third version, their dataset contains polygons for 1.8 billion buildings over an area of 58 million km² in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The data is useful in determining population size and other factors to solve urban density problems.

Google's Research product manager Olivia Graham says: "About 2.5 billion more people could move to cities by 2050, most of them in the Global South — this could be a real step change for governments and organizations working through that growth. If a city is planning where to put essential services like healthcare and education, or where to develop infrastructure like water and energy supplies, this dataset shows the areas that are actively growing."

The data can be explored via a searchable map using that's accessed here.

DoD-funded study helps predict building maintenance costs using climate data

2024-10-22T16:17:00-04:00

A new study funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) using climate data to predict the cost of maintenance for military facilities threatened by extreme weather events has outlined new approaches for estimating condition loss and reduction of services. The findings, which can be applied to civilian organizations with similarly large building portfolios, aim to "understand the risks that may be present in certain buildings and building systems" with the aid of a specially-developed damage matrix (or DAM).

The risk calculations from the DAM are then applied to specific facilities to compute potential damages.

Iowa State University associate professor Christina Patricola, who led the team national researchers, explains: "We calculate future changes in extreme weather based on climate model simulations and translate it to estimate how much certain components of a building are expecte...

An updated study led by Gensler tracks progress of office-to-residential conversion data

2023-12-04T10:15:00-05:00

Gensler Principal Steven Paynter shares an update announcing important statistical findings related to his firm’s work surrounding the adaptive reuse and conversion of office buildings worldwide.

The data report has been updated to reflect changes in office conversions. The firm shares that an estimate of only 25% of buildings (from Gensler's original assessment) are suitable for conversion. This is a decrease from the 33% figure that was reported in January as Gensler began marketing its proprietary metric of office conversions.

The new study was expanded to cover some 1,000 buildings, an increase from their previous analysis of 300 buildings. Paynter and his team now report that conversion is "an unprecedented opportunity to create new residential stock quickly, sustainably, and at a 30% lower cost than new construction."

Previously on Archinect: Gensler Principal Steven Paynter further details office conversion algorithm in podcast sit-down

The assessment also provided some intere...

Archinect's Lexicon: "Metadata"

2023-08-11T11:19:00-04:00

Archinect's Lexicon focuses on newly invented or adopted vocabulary within the architectural community. For this installment, we're featuring a term relevant to the both recent wave of generative AI tools released for public use in the AEC sector and beyond, and the software tools already underpinning the profession.

"Metadata," often described as "data about data," refers to information that provides details about other data. In essence, metadata offers context, description, or additional details about the main data it pertains to. Examples of metadata include the title of a document, the date a photo was taken, or the author of a piece of content.

In the context of building design, metadata plays several crucial roles:

Building Information Modeling (BIM): BIM is a digital representation of the physical and functional characteristics of a facility. Within BIM, metadata can include information about the materials used, the manufacturer of a component, maintenance schedules, and much...

Will the AEC industry keep up with America’s demand for new data centers?

2023-06-29T12:11:00-04:00

Data centers will increasingly be built farther from some of the traditional locations and will move closer to the clients they serve, according to research by Gartner, an I.T. consultancy. But the search for land is not always easy. [...] And as major players in the data industry strive to become greener in the next decade, the pressure is on.

The crunch for new data infrastructure is straining local utility companies in areas such as Northern Virginia owing to a requirement for "inhaling massive amounts of energy," a reality that leads to concerns that local residents will be asked to foot the bill in the end.

Water use is also becoming an issue, despite smaller colocation centers being the more preferred building type. Still, the billions of dollars flowing into their construction are not expected to abate any time soon, according to a report last November from Dodge Data & Analytics, which predicted the boom to last at least another two full years.

"Data centers might not seem like an exciting place for an architectural project," Dutch academic Marina Otero said last year at the announcement of her Wheelwright Prize win. "However, the huge scale of the operations of the data industry and its pervasiveness an...

New data reveals the growing state of adaptive reuse residential conversions nationwide

2022-11-10T17:57:00-05:00

In the last two years, apartment conversions jumped by 25% compared to two years prior. More precisely, this increasingly popular real estate niche brought a total of 28,000 new rentals in 2020-2021, well above the pre-pandemic years of 2018-2019 when 22,300 apartments were brought to life through adaptive reuse.

The new data set from real estate researchers Yardi Matrix gives some additional context to the information in yesterday’s 2022 AIA Firm Survey, which said that almost half (48%) of all projects currently being pursued by U.S. firms involve the renovation, rehabilitation, extension, or preservation of existing buildings.

An analysis of the data (which only concerns residential construction) shows that adaptive reuse schemes more than doubled (10% compared to 25%) the growth rate of new apartment construction in the country since the beginning of 2018.

The figures include an unsurprising 43% jump in the conversion of office buildings into apartments between 2020-2021 and 2018-19, representing some 40% of the whole. Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia are the leading cities for the method, and thus far in 2022, Los Angeles is leading all markets with a total of 1,242 converted a...

AIA Chief Economist Kermit Baker breaks down the industry's burgeoning renovation revolution

2022-10-26T11:58:00-04:00

It’s the first time in the 20 years the AIA has collected this data that renovations have breached 50%. In 2005, toward the end of a pre-recession building boom, renovations made up approximately one-third of billings. That share has been increasing steadily since 2017, when it was 44.4%, up to 52% this year. Kermit Baker, the AIA’s chief economist, says that the last time the market for design services was so heavily weighted toward renovations was likely during the Great Depression.

According to Baker, about 25% of renovation projects constitute interior remodels, while adaptive reuse schemes make up another quarter of those registered with the AIA. Just 3.8% are done in the interest of improved building energy performance, with a scant 1.6% being resiliency projects. The article also mentions the organization's estimate that only 10% were undertaken "as a result of the pandemic" in spite of the prevailing industry narrative.

Data centers are unsurprisingly leading the renovation charge, followed by office upgrade projects aimed at luring back remote workers ("There’s almost a perfect correlation between what sectors are the strongest and where there was the most renovation activity," according to Baker.)

"Buildings are just getting older," he explained further, pointing to demographic causes. "Our economy is growing more slowly, our popula...

Meet the first class of Harvard Climate Justice Design Fellows

2022-05-24T11:02:00-04:00

Harvard University has today announced its first-ever cohort for the brand new Climate Justice Design Fellowship, recognizing young leaders across the country in the fields of environmental justice advocacy, law, and climate organizing.

The first class of fellows consists of seven members, primarily from the non-profit sector. Each fellow will be tasked with pursuing data-oriented tools (e.g., the First Street Foundation’s new wildfire risk map) to aid their individual communities’ strides toward environmental justice.

The fellowships are funded through Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) and are pilot programs of the broader Harvard-Google Data+Climate Initiative that incorporates proprietary innovations like Google Data Commons and the data visualization service Glue to further empower both scholars and engineers to fight challenges related to climate change.

The progress of the fellowship can be followed online on both Twitter and Instagram. Scroll down to...

Short-term rentals are putting a record squeeze on renters in the Big Apple

2022-05-20T12:14:00-04:00

The total number of short-term rentals of entire homes in the city’s five boroughs -- those listed on Airbnb Inc. and Expedia Group Inc.’s Vrbo -- is more than 13,000, according to third-party data tracker AirDNA. Meanwhile, rental inventory in Manhattan, Brooklyn and a portion of Queens hovers just over 7,500. The vacancy rate in Manhattan sat at just over 1.5% last month, the second-lowest level on record, according to appraiser Miller Samuel Inc.

Adding to the all-too-familiar notion that short-term rentals have the ability to destroy the livability of a place in its entirety, new data from Douglas Elliman and AirDNA making the rounds today indicate a record-setting shift in the dynamics of urban life as the number of hosted retreats in New York City has surpassed traditional apartment rentals for the first time.

New York’s rental market is in the midst of coming out of the pandemic strong as ever with prices skyrocketing 23 percent to early 2020 levels, fueled in part by an 83.3 percent drop in the total number of rental listings in Manhattan year-over-year. Airbnb responded by saying the findings offer merely “an unfairly narrow look at rental unit availability in a portion of the city,” but the numbers tell a different story. In the last year alone, the stock of available units in the city dwindled by a staggering 16,000 from its 20,743 peak to a new record-low of 4,709.

The end result for renters is sadly predictable as...

U.S. Census Bureau changes its definition of an urban area, impacting 1,300 former cities and towns

2022-05-03T11:41:00-04:00

The U.S. Census Bureau has changed its definition of an urban area, which will cause hundreds of existing urban areas to be reclassified as rural. The change is centered on a new methodology for how urban areas are calculated, with the number of housing units being used as the key metric, rather than the number of inhabitants.

Under the century-old definition used prior to now, an urban area was classed as one with at least 2,500 people. Now, a place will need 2,000 housing units before being classed as urban, equivalent to around 5,000 people. In addition, the previous distinction between an “urbanized area” (50,000 residents or more) and an “urban cluster” (2,500 to 50,000 residents) will be removed, with all qualifying areas simply referred to as “urban areas.”

In addition, the Census Bureau has created three levels of definition for census blocks, the smallest geographic unit in the United States. Census blocks will be considered urban if they contain a density of 425 housing u...

Our coming apocalypse is now being recorded thanks to this new intervention

2021-12-09T13:37:00-05:00

A digital record of earth’s man-made demise is about to begin thanks to an intervention in Australia called Earth's Black Box.

A remote part of Tasmania is the home of the ominous new steel box that’s meant to capture and record climate data such as oceanic acidification, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and land and sea temperature increases in addition to information about population growth, energy use, and newspaper stories related to climate change.

The box runs on a combination of batteries and solar power and can collect the data thanks to an algorithm that was developed by the communications firm Clemenger BBDO with the help from the University of Tasmania, and the artist collective Glue Society, which had help from architects Thomas Bailey and Kate Philipps of Room11.

Image: Earth's Black Box

“The idea is if the Earth does crash as a result of climate change, this indestructible recording device will be there for whoever's left to learn from that,” Clemenger’s Jim Curtis ...

When Facebook and Instagram went dark, architecture Twitter was there for the laughs

2021-10-05T11:46:00-04:00

In my opinion, remembering what it was like before social media and high-speed internet access is a gift. The early days of social media barely resemble the landscape of how impressionable and profit-driven it is today. Data privacy wasn't considered "a thing," and promoting a product or service back then was influential thanks to television, radio, and print media. However, when social media titans Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down, many came flooding back to Twitter to stay connected. Thanks to this 6-hour social media outage, 'architecture Twitter' was there to express what many of us were thinking.

Social media is defined as "forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)." Today, this term has become synonymous with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, and Twitter to name a few...

MIT lab creates digital model and formula of how people move across cities

2021-07-07T13:18:00-04:00

Researchers at the MIT Senseable City Lab have unveiled their latest project, which seeks to understand human mobility in cities. Titled Wanderlust, the project uses large-scale cellphone data to understand the movement of people in the metro areas of Boston, Abidjan, Braga, Lisbon, Porto, Dakar, and Singapore. The result is an interactive digital model which quantifies data through time and space, unlocking a new way of seeing and reading cities.

To undertake the project, the MIT researchers analyzed over 8 billion human mobility traces collected across four continents. In doing so, they found that the flows of movement to all locations in each city followed a predictable, universal pattern. This pattern can be reproduced through a mathematical formula: “The number of visitors to any given location decreases as the inverse square of the product of their visiting frequency and travel distance.” This formula can be simplified to say “people are unlikely to travel far too often.” ...

Urban street-network sprawl is trending globally, new study finds

2020-02-11T15:10:00-05:00

Satellite images dating back to 1975 allow researchers to map how millions of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends have proliferated in street networks worldwide. [...] A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences charts a worrying global shift towards more-sprawling and less-hooked-up street networks over time.

The study's authors, Christopher Barrington-Leigh at McGill University and Adam Millard-Ball at UC Santa Cruz, were able to identify the global trend toward urban street-network sprawl by analyzing high-resolution data from OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery of urbanization since 1975 and then measuring the "street-network disconnectedness index (SNDi), based on every mapped node and edge in the world."

The documented global drop in street connectivity due to the proliferation of urban and suburban developments that feature cul-de-sacs, dead-ends, and gated communities should require a "rapid policy response, including regulation and pricing tools," the study suggests, "to avoid further costly lock-in during this current, final phase of the urbanization process."

The researchers write that their street-network measure can predict future climate, energy, health, and social outcomes related to urban form.

Data suggests that most cities with 2020 emission reduction targets have not hit them yet

2019-12-11T15:24:00-05:00

For nations and cities across the world, 2020 was set to be a milestone year in their fight against climate change. It’s the first in a series of globally earmarked emission-reduction waypoints—2020, 2030, 2050—with 2020 planned as an initial benchmarking moment, a time to see progress towards meeting targets aimed at limiting global warming. Now, the year is nearly here, and early signs of overall progress should signal concern.

Quartz looked at the environmental data of selected cities that had set emission reduction targets for 2020 and analyzed the progress made thus far. According to the outlet, "only 20% of those targets have completed or are more than half-way towards their goal."

Among the high-achieving cities regarding their 2020 goals are Toronto, Cape Town, Barcelona, Moscow, Boston, and Bangkok. Very little or no progress in reducing emissions was made in Reykjavik, Dubai, Vancouver, Milan, and Montreal.

This conceptual sound installation will let San Franciscans “hear” the sinking Millennium Tower

2019-11-15T15:42:00-05:00

Creating a work about the sinking high-rise was an easy choice, according to Martínez. “We started researching San Francisco, and current events in the city, and the Millennium Tower popped up,” Martínez said. “We knew almost instantly we wanted to do a project that was in some way going to connect with some of most expensive real estate on earth collapsing under the weight of itself as a metaphor for late capitalism.”

Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist of interdisciplinary arts collective Postcommodity were compelled to make an art piece based on the sinking, tilting Handel Architects-designed Millennium Tower in San Francisco, as a timely metaphor for late capitalism collapsing under the weight of itself. The duo made a data map of the tower's minuscule movements and created a conceptual sound-art piece called “The Point of Final Collapse.”

Starting today, the piece will be played for 4 minutes at 5 p.m. from the tower at San Francisco Art Institute's campus on North Beach, and projected to Downtown San Francisco via long-range acoustic devices. The piece will play every day until the tower is fixed or torn down, the artists say in the article.

Revisiting "A Pattern Language"

2019-07-12T13:09:00-04:00

“A Pattern Language” is not about architecture, but about how specific design choices can help us build better relationships. By fitting a series of those choices—the patterns—together, you get a room, a house, a neighborhood and eventually a city.

Curbed architecture critic Alexandra Lange takes us on a journey through some of the key lessons from Christopher Alexander's seminal work, A Pattern Language.

The book, originally published in 1977 has long been out of fashion in architecture schools, but, Lange argues, with the rise of smart cities and other quick-fix approaches to contemporary urban and global design problems, now is perhaps a good time to revisit Alexander's earnest, methodical, and people-centered tome.

Lange writes, "As New York, Toronto, Singapore, and more places around the globe build so-called smart cities, maybe we need to read “A Pattern Language” again in that context," adding, "Who is the audience for the smart city? Who has access to the data? Who has the ability to make design decisions based on that data? Is this city going to build better relationships? People are the scoring system, whether you’re deciding on a rug for the living room, or a light rail system for the city."

...

Amazon to re-program human workforce

2019-07-11T16:42:00-04:00

Amazon has increasingly turned to robots and automation technology to fetch products from the shelves of its warehouses to ship to customers. Now the company says it needs to help its workers adapt to the rapid change. The e-commerce giant said on Thursday that it planned to spend $700 million to retrain a third of its workers in the United States, an acknowledgment that advances in technology are remaking the role of workers in nearly every industry.

Amazon is planning to spend $700 million over the next five years retraining 100,000 human workers to help smooth a transition toward greater automation in its operations.

“When automation comes in, it changes the nature of work but there are still pieces of work that will be done by people,” Ardine Williams, Amazon’s vice president of people operations, told The New York Times. She added, “You have the opportunity to up-skill that population so they can, for example, work with the robots.”

The retraining effort, according to The New York Times, will include software engineering classes, part of the company's plan to fill a growing need for data mapping specialists, data scientists, security engineers, and logistics coordinators.

Transportation research and education continues as two new UTCs are announced by the U.S. Department of Transportation

2019-06-10T13:17:00-04:00

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) announced Wednesday that it will open two new University Transportation Centers (UTCs), one at the University of South Florida (USF) and one at Washington State University (WSU). Each UTC will receive $7.5 million in grant funding for transportation research and education.

Initiated in 1987 by the United States Department of Transportation, the University Transportation Center (UTC) program aides to improve research and education in transportation in order to improve the durability and lifespan of transportation infrastructures. Data and other transportation technology will help create new improvements to reduce congestion and boost transportation education programs. Currently in its 30th year, the UTC has 37 universities currently involved in the program.

David Plautz of Smart Cities Dive explains, "Diana Furchtgott-Roth, deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at USDOT, said in a statement that the UTCs will help to develop solutions 'that America needs now,' and this need will only continue to grow. A February study from transportation analytics firm Inrix found that American drivers lost an average of 97 hours in 2018 to congestion, the equivalent of $1,348 in lost productivity per driver. While solutions like congestion pricing an...

Is age just a number when it comes to a career in architecture?

2019-05-08T18:27:00-04:00

Architect and urban designer Matthew Frederick states in his book, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, "architects are late bloomers. Most architects do not hit their professional stride until around age 50!" Taking Frederick's statement into consideration how does age play into an individual's job decision and transition over time? How does age affect individuals exploring a new career in architecture?

Peak Age for Job Switches: Teenage and Twenties. Image © Nathan Yau | Flowing Data (View full graph here)

Statistician Nathan Yau uses his professional experience with data and data visualization to create a graphic exploring the correlation between age and 100 common jobs individuals switch to overtime. Ranging from age 15 to 90 each job is listed on its own timeline. Any peaks within the timeline reflect the age where individuals are most likely to make a job switch. With this data, Yau then organizes the graph ranking jobs people are more likely to have when they are young...

U.S. skyscrapers kill about 600 million migrating birds a year — and Chicago, Houston, and Dallas are the deadliest cities

2019-04-11T15:13:00-04:00

An estimated 600 million birds are killed by buildings every year. Especially during spring and fall migrations, birds are attracted to the glow of residential homes and skyscrapers alike. Sometimes the birds crash directly into their windows. Other times, it seems to throw off their internal compass, causing them to circle until exhausted.

The saddening statistic comes from a 2014 study led by Scott Loss, an assistant professor of global change ecology and management at Oklahoma State University. More recently, a new study from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology found that Chicago, Houston, and Dallas are the top three U.S. cities that are especially deadly for birds, and artificial light at night is a contributing factor.

“Chicago, Houston, and Dallas are uniquely positioned in the heart of North America’s most trafficked aerial corridors. This, in combination with being some of the largest cities in the US, make them a serious threat to the passage of migrants, regardless of season,” said Kyle Horton, the lead author of the study, in a statement published by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

“Now that we know where and when the largest numbers of migratory birds pass heavily lit areas we can use this to help spur extra conservation efforts in these cities,” added study co-author Cecilia Nilsson.

Making changes like incorp...

According to WeWork "Buildings equal Data"

2019-03-02T13:08:00-05:00

There are T-shirts floating around WeWork’s New York City headquarters that say “Buildings equal data.” The nano manifesto hints at a conviction that architecture should be shaped by a methodical study of how people utilize spaces instead of unique aesthetic signatures. More than that, correlating digital information with physical structures is good business—it has quickly become a core strategy for the eight-year-old, $47 billion company racing to expand its footprint globally.

Architects today are very familiar with data and its influence over design, construction, and feasibility. However, what else can data teach us? When you're a massive billion dollar company like WeWork, opportunities for turning data into teachable tools coincides well with the company's progressive ethos.

Say what you will about the company, regardless of your views their intentions of transforming the tools and perspectives of real estate, architecture, and design is reflective of the decisions they've made thus far. For WeWork, data isn't just a tool but an asset to the company's overall growth and success. "It’s hard to overstate how essential data is to WeWork’s operations. Specifically, architectural data. Nearly four years ago, the company underscored this dependency when it acquired Case, a BIM consultancy whose expertise WeWork relied on even in its early years (it was founded in 2010). With David Fano, Case’s co-foun...

Artificial Intelligence helps mapping urban trees (all of them)

2019-01-07T14:19:00-05:00

To train the model, he identified known locations of tree canopy using lidar data and NAIP imagery over California. Using that as ground truth, the model was trained to classify which pixels contain trees in the corresponding satellite images. The result is a machine-learning model that has learned to identify trees just using four-band high-resolution (~1 meter) satellite or aerial imagery—no lidar required!

Former New York Times cartographer Tim Wallace describes how his current firm, Santa Fe-based Descartes Labs, has built a machine learning model to identify tree canopy from satellite imagery thus making accurate mapping of trees and urban forests far more accessible to cities worldwide.

San Francisco Open Forest Map tree inventory (point data) in comparison with the Descartes Labs tree canopy layer (image data). Image: Tim Wallace/Descartes Labs

"The ability to map tree canopy at a such a high resolution in areas that can’t be easily reached on foot would be helpful for utility companies to pinpoint encroachment issues—or for municipalities to find possible trouble spots beyond their official tree census (if they even have one)," writes Wallace. "But by zooming out to a city level, patterns in the tree canopy show off urban greenspace quirks. For example, unexpected tree deserts can be identified and neighborhoods that would most benefit from a surge of saplings revealed."

New York...

Google's Environmental Insights Explorer tracks carbon pollution on a local level

2018-10-05T18:35:00-04:00

Google has started estimating greenhouse-gas emissions for individual cities, part of what it recently described as an ambitious new plan to deploy its hoard of geographic information on the side of climate-concerned local leaders.

Google has launched a new online tool, the Environmental Insights Explorer, which tracks emissions inventory on a city scale. The program is still in beta mode and currently only provides data for five cities (Pittsburgh, PA; Mountain View, CA; Victoria, BC; Melbourne, AU; Buenos Aires, AR) but could eventually turn into an enormously helpful planning tool for municipalities—especially while the consensus on man-made global warming can be frustratingly murky on the state and federal level.

How the data collected by dockless bikes can be useful for cities (and hackers)

2018-10-05T14:37:00-04:00

In the 18 months or so since dockless bike-share arrived in the US, the service has spread to at least 88 American cities. (On the provider side, at least 10 companies have jumped into the business; Lime is one of the largest.) Some of those cities now have more than a year of data related to the programs, and they’ve started gleaning insights and catering to the increased number of cyclists on their streets.

Technology Review writer Elizabeth Woyke looks at ways how city planners in Seattle, WA and South Bend, IN use the immense stream of user-generated location data from dockless-bike-sharing programs to improve urban mobility — and how hackers could potentially access and abuse this (supposedly anonymous) information. "In theory, the fact that people can park dockless bikes outside their exact destinations could make it easier for someone who hacked into the data to decode the anonymous identities that companies assign their users," Woyke writes.

Why 'smart homes' aren't really that smart yet

2018-09-14T15:38:00-04:00

Today you can have a fully connected home complete with sensors to monitor temperature, humidity, air quality, energy usage, and more, and check in on almost any appliance from anywhere in the world with just a smartphone. But even with all of the various connected appliances, virtual assistants, and copious sensors that can be installed in a modern smart home, the “smart” side of things is still rather lacking.

The Verge senior editor Dan Seifert asks: Wouldn't it be cool if my home could figure everything out on its own?

How Amazon's patents shape our city of the future

2018-06-08T15:00:00-04:00

Taken as whimsical follies by the design press and broader culture, Amazon's architectural and logistical patents are altogether more sinister, signalling new, automated urban ambitions. [...] While some of these patents could be marked as routine publicity stunts, lurking beneath Amazon’s bravado is an obsession with organisation and productivity: oriented towards abstract users, measured in data, and governed by algorithms.

In his piece for Failed Architecture, designer and writer Matthew Stewart investigates the implications of the overwhelming flood of architectural and logistical patents filed by Big Tech, and Amazon in particular, on our cities and expectations of the world of the future.

"We’ve been treated to an Archigram-esque world of walking cities, inflatable mega-structures and roaming blimps," Stewart writes. "This world has included proposals for multi-level drone fulfillment centers; mobile robotic warehouses; augmented reality furniture; inflatable data centers; underwater and flying warehouse facilities; infinitely expandable data centers; on-demand clothing manufacturing, automated shopping with image recognition systems and the ever-present spectre of drone delivery."

The “infrastructural excess” of data centers and cloud-computing colonization

2018-05-22T14:20:00-04:00

With the cloud being increasingly lifestyled and infrastructured into a range of everyday social and economic practices and processes, data centres continue to grow in size. Far from a massive database in the sky, it is the planet’s surface and our everyday lives that are gradually being colonised by the cloud.

This piece by Alexander Taylor, a social anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, looks back on the evolution of data center infrastructure, which continues to grow larger as our everyday lives become increasingly influenced by cloud computing.

KieranTimberlake develops an app to analyze occupant experience in passive architecture

2018-05-08T15:51:00-04:00

Architecture studio KieranTimberlake used passive strategies to cool their new Philadelphia office building and installed 300 sensors to record data on how it was performing. Along with their network of sensors, the firm also developed an app called Roast for their employees to rate how they felt in the building.

The Roast app asks the user, “How are you feeling today?” allowing quick surveys pre-populated questions based on building industry standards.

The app offers an interactive online interface to analyze occupant comfort. Filter results to compare comfort acrosss space over time.

This kind of post-occupancy evaluation focuses not just on the building's stats, but also on how people are experiencing the space. Together with metric data and employe experience feedback, the firm was able to produce an overall better design. The building was awarded the AIA’s new Top Ten Plus Award this month, an annual honor given to a building with outstanding performance data.

Want to work at K...

How the Speed of Elevators Impacts our Urban Environment

2017-09-07T14:46:00-04:00

The first commercial passenger elevator was installed by Otis Elevator Company in 1857 and climbed at a glacial pace of 40 feet a minute, though it felt staggering at the time. Since then, we have come a long way both in terms of elevator speeds and in terms of the heights these elevators are needed to traverse in order to meet the needs of super-tall structures around the world. Today, an Otis elevator in Dubai soars at a speed of 22 mph, which is still less than half the speed of those topping new rankings for the fastest elevators in the world.

Looking into the ways these improvements in elevator speeds have effected our urban environment, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has released new research in a study titled Vertical Transport: Ascent & Acceleration. The study defines the fastest and longest elevator runs and shows a strong correlation between the increase in elevator speeds and the increase in skyscraper heights. As elevator technology advances and allows b...