Archinect - News

Carlo Ratti on Brasília's future

2021-09-02T15:22:00-04:00

Brasília’s design limitations offer a crucial lesson for many other cities. By resisting the temptation to fill every square inch of space on their paper and instead leaving as many blank areas as possible, architects and urban planners can allow people and changing times to co-create a city as spontaneous as life.

Carlo Ratti revealed plans last year for a one-million-square-meter extension of Brasília dubbed BIOTIC. Oscar Niemeyer's UNESCO World Heritage Site has been in disrepair for several decades. The whole text of Ratti's essay can be found here.

Remembering Syd Mead and his futuristic visions of the built environment

2020-01-03T14:04:00-05:00

Revered as a legend in the field of science-fiction, the American industrial designer Syd Mead has given the world memorable and inspiring designs of what the future could be. Recognized for his contributions on the silver screen, he produced conceptual art for blockbuster Hollywood films like Tron, Alien, Star Trek, Short Circuit, and Blade Runner, to name a few. After graduating from Art Center College of Design, Mead started his career as an automobile illustrator for the Ford Motor Company in 1959. He eventually became a sought after illustrator creating architectural renderings and drawings for clients all over the world.

Image from Mead's U.S. Steel Series. Image © Syd Mead.

Beyond his numerous accolades and unforgettable artwork inspiring retro-futurists and science-fiction enthusiasts alike, what strikes me the most is Mead's commitment to transforming possibilities of the built environment. According to Mead, in a 2008 i...

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."

...

What should we do with beautiful, fascist buildings?

2019-03-07T15:18:00-05:00

By championing virtues such as speed, technology, youth, and flight, the Futurists worked to cement Italy’s status as highly advanced and, thus, superior. In Asmara, the handsome structures built between 1935 and 1941 became multi-faceted tools of oppression. Eight decades later, these Italian-designed edifices are still standing, albeit in need of rehabilitation. But preserving Asmara’s Futurist architecture necessarily preserves the fascist agenda that erected them in the first place...

Though the Futurists are featured in virtually every textbook on Modernism, their politics can be described as more than controversial. As they embraced speed, technology and scientific progress, the Italian group was also upfront about its misogyny, sympathetic towards fascist ideologies and eager to shed lessons learned from the past.

The Futurist Alfa Romeo building in Asmara, Eritrea

The Futurists built a significant number of buildings based on their principles in Asmara, a city in the African country Eritrea, that remain to this day. As they begin to show their age more than 80 years after their initial construction, the question remains: should we preserve buildings designed by hateful and oppresive ideologies? As the buildings of the tumultuous 20th century show their age, we must decide which should withstand the tests of time and which should be abolished.

A look back at the 60's "Minnesota Experimental City", the brainchild of South African futurist Athelstan Spilhaus

2018-11-06T13:43:00-05:00

In proposing his prototype 21st-century city, Spilhaus correctly diagnosed many of the shortcomings of the 20th-century one. He cottoned on early to concepts such as air pollution, even speculating that it was changing the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Minnesota Experimental City has been documented in the film The Experimental City. Watch the trailer below...

By no means a comprehensive description of the city of the future

2018-10-16T11:50:00-04:00

More speculation on the always-relevant subject of "Old People in Big Cities Afraid of the Sky." #futurism #urbanism #demographics #climatecrisis #Mid21C

Joe Frem, Vineet Rajadhyaksha and Jonathan Woetzel report on four major forces (the competition for talent, an increasingly connected world, the Anthropocene age, and technology’s ever-expanding role) shaping today’s cities and offer a 14-point vision for thriving cities of the future.

h/t @Bruce Sterling

Home is where your hard drive is.

2017-11-17T13:45:00-05:00

Within 40 hours of the project being announced in 2016, over 100,000 people had applied for citizenship on Asgardia's website. After three weeks, Asgardia had 500,000 applicants.

On November 12, a hard drive 'nanosat' containing the information of 18,000 newly naturalized citizens of Asgardia took off for its two-day flight to the international space station. The nanosat — it is roughly the size of a loaf of bread — contains 0.5 TB of data such as family photographs, as well as digital representations of the space nation's flag, coat of arms, and constitution.

The project, lead by a 53-year-old rocket scientist Dr Igor Ashurbeyl, says its mission is to provide a "peaceful society," offer easier access to space technologies, and protect earth from space threats, such as asteroids and man-made debris in space.

"I really want to be able to see if human beings are able to have more opportunity to express their opinions, The society we live in now — everything seems to be either capitalism or communism — there's a lot of conflict. As a human being, I would hope (to see) if we could have other ways (of living). For a better life, and for more options." Says Dr Ig...

Designing for drones: a condo tower with drone-friendly balconies

2016-08-15T13:08:00-04:00

Make no mistake: Drones are coming, and they’re going to change a lot of things about how we shape our lives. So why shouldn’t we change how we shape our buildings to get ready for them? [...] That’s the basis for my Drone Tower, which would look like a futuristic condo building, with large balconies built to accommodate small electric aircraft or shipping drones. You wouldn’t need to buy your own drone, you’d simply order a ride with an app like a taxi—and hop in right from your terrace.

For more on the intersections between autonomous flying machines and the city, check out these links:

Multitasking Musk: the busy life of Elon Musk

2015-12-16T13:35:00-05:00

Elon Musk has plenty of other ideas. If anyone asks and he has a moment to explain, he'll talk distractedly of as-yet-unrealized concepts—a vertical takeoff-and-landing supersonic electric jet for long-distance travel; an entirely new form of transport that he's named the Hyperloop... He is a man with the rare problem of having more ideas for how to radically change our world than the time to realize them. Still, you do what you can. And so this Monday evening, his mind is on space suits.

Related:

Drones for Good: the UAE's million-dollar drone competition

2015-09-10T18:58:00-04:00

...From seemingly out of nowhere, a large quad-rotor drone drops out the cloudless sky over Dubai Internet City, hovering insect-like just above the heads of the men, watching them with camera-eyes. Before they can even notice, a squad of policemen – wearing helmets, body armour, and carrying assault rifles – rush them... Welcome to Dubai, and to one of the more awkward moments of an already odd competition called Drones For Good. We’re here to watch teams compete for a million-dollar prize...

Future cities of the past

2015-04-29T18:17:00-04:00

But supplementing that aesthetic of “the future” sketched in imaginary edifice, the full SF vision of the future city is a mosaic, constructed from fragments of the cities that we recognize, including symbols that are decidedly from the past. [...] If SF functions by taking the world we know and altering it with a constructed future fantasy, the Statue of Liberty serves as the junction point, the axis where the speculative fantasy begins and ends.

Smart Cities: Buggy and Brittle

2013-10-07T20:26:00-04:00

My bewilderment quickly yields to a growing sense of dread. How is it that even in the heart of Silicon Valley it’s completely acceptable for smart technology to be buggy, erratic, or totally dysfunctional? ... We are weaving these technologies into our homes, our communities, even our very bodies — but even experts have become disturbingly complacent about their shortcomings. The rest of us rarely question them at all.

Electric car sharing in Paris, dynamic road pricing in Singapore, nationwide smart meters in the UK. “The technology industry is asking us to rebuild the world around its vision of efficient, safe, convenient living,” writes Anthony M. Townsend in an excerpt on Places from his new book, Smart Cities. But wireless sensor networks and integrated communications systems are vulnerable to power failure and hacking, not to mention software errors. What if the smart cities of the future are chock full of bugs?

Architecture publication CLOG releases gorgeous "SCI-FI" issue

2013-08-30T19:48:00-04:00

Rod Serling, creator of the 1950s television series "The Twilight Zone", defined science fiction as "the improbable made possible." The same might be said for the practice of architecture. After all, architects by trade conceive of spaces, places, and worlds that do not (yet) exist. Furthermore, the ability to make the improbable possible is held in especially high regard today and is oftentimes what defines an architectural practice as “innovative” in the first place.

Contemporary architecture publication CLOG has released its seventh issue, SCI-FI. In the digital glow of the internet age, architectural discourse has become both bountiful and ephemeral, oftentimes muddling the lay of the land. In response, “CLOG slows things down. Each issue explores, from multiple viewpoints and through a variety of means, a single subject particularly relevant to architecture now. Succinctly, on paper, away from the distractions and imperatives of the screen.”
With its precise curation and focused content, CLOG’s SCI-FI examines the mutually-affecting relationship between architecture and science fiction in a variety of ventures. SCI-FI honors this “two-way artistic influence between architecture and science fiction” while provoking readers to consider future architectural aesthetics and the aesthetics of futurism. Previous issues have showcased themes surrounding BIG, Apple, and Brutalism. SCI-FI features over forty contributors from the architecture world ...

Cities Of The Future, Built By Drones, Bacteria, And 3-D Printers

2013-05-08T12:43:00-04:00

*This screed is awesomely entertaining and full of cool links, even though it’s almost entirely implausible..There’s also the occasional built-from-scratch Brasilia. So, some people might build a city like this in some central-planned, high-tech rush, before realizing that urban drones, bacteria, and 3DPrinters are fated to become as old-fashioned and pokey as swoopy, Space Age Brasilia is right now. - Bruce Sterling

As part of the Futurist Forum series, Chris Arkenberg composed some vignettes, suggestive of how urban architecture(s) could transform from than the rigid construction methodologies of today, the result being that "Architecture will lose its formal rigidity, softening and flexing and getting closer to the life we see in plants".

h/t Bruce Sterling here

Design's Invisible Century

2012-04-23T14:17:00-04:00

All human artifacts and activities — not just our objects and architecture, but also our organizations and operations, policies and procedures, systems and infrastructures — have been designed, and too many of the most critical have been badly done by professionals and politicians who didn’t know the first thing about design. While we cannot blame them for what they didn’t know or couldn’t see, the stakes have gotten too high for us to continue in this way.

On Places, Thomas Fisher, dean of the Minnesota College of Design, argues that the 21st century is poised to become the "invisible century of design" (rivaling the last hundred years, the invisible century of science). Who will be the Einstein and the Freud of the new design century? We need a revolutionary thinkers to identify and solve critical structural problems.

Deyan Sudjic's London Spacecraft, 1985

2011-12-29T12:28:39-05:00

British journalist and author (then) and now Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic's awesome London loft, designed by Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. It actually itself looks like a small Design Museum itself, or a spaceship that's been travelling around galaxies, curating.

The Accidental Futurist: Steven M. Johnson's Alternate Realities

2011-08-26T14:00:46-04:00

Steven M. Johnson (b. 1938) is a former urban planner and future trends analyst from California, who defines himself in terms of Chinese astrology as a tiger "with a tendency to rush forward, defend the weak, and be foolishly brave." Since the early 1970s, he has been creating scores of alternative products and systems—on paper—that he hopes will benefit "or at least amuse" his fellow consumer-citizens.

A brief history of the pneumatic tube transport systems that never were

2011-07-22T18:32:12-04:00

Alfred Ely Beach is best known for his invention of New York City's first concept for a subway: the Beach Pneumatic Transit, which would move people rapidly from one place to another in "cars" propelled along long tubes by compressed air.