Archinect - News

Designing healthier spaces through data: How one firm uses spatial analytics to shape new job opportunities for architects

2022-03-02T09:06:00-05:00

Traditional architecture firms aren't the only viable employers worth exploring as designers and architects continue to navigate the job market. New and exciting job opportunities with unique architecture adjacent practices continue to emerge with businesses seeking the expertise of individuals with architecture backgrounds. Pair this with advances in AR/VR, visualization modeling, and data analytics architects are finding new ways to approach healthcare, housing, and commercial projects.

Take the Cambridge-based spatial analytics company Spatio Metrics for example. Its founders, Sonal Singh and Jim Peraino, have combined their business, wellness, and architecture backgrounds to develop a company that "helps architects and their clients analyze floor plans and bridge the gap between design, data, and human performance."

Image courtesy of Spatio Metrics.

Both MIT graduates, the duo founded their company in 2019 and has gained attention as a startup that uses spatial analytics, visuali...

London-based spatial practice Cooking Sections uses architecture, ecology, and geopolitics to reshape the public's relationship to food cycles

2021-04-07T15:11:00-04:00

Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual of the London-based studio Cooking Sections explore food systems through architecture, ecology, visual arts, and geopolitics.

Featured in the second issue of Archinect's print publication Ed Issue 2, The Architecture of Disaster, the duo discussed their project CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones. Using a lightweight installation to explore the changing nature of Loch Portree's waters in Scotland, the pair explains their goals to adapt to changing ecosystems through food and architecture. A project that is both a "performance project and a form of responsive eating—a model Schwabe and Fernández have developed as a possible method for adaptation to the precarious conditions of climate change."

Featured on Archinect: Cooking Sections Explains Their Efforts to Adapt to Changing Ecosystems Through Food and Architecture. Photograph by Ruth Clark.

Recently, Schwabe and Pascual debuted their latest project, Salmon: A Red Herring, at the Tate Britain. Part o...

Has open concept design finally run its course? Here's what we've learned

2019-03-29T12:22:00-04:00

For decades, Open Concept, and the togetherness-loving, friend-filled lifestyle it was supposed to bring, has been a home buyers’ religion, the one true way to live. Go to Houzz, the home remodeling site, type in “open concept,” and up come 221,569 photos. Over on HGTV, DeRon Jenkins, costar of the popular “Flip or Flop Nashville,” will tell you, as he recently told the Globe, that an open floor plan “allows the love to flow.” But now, experts say, people are starting to openly yearn for walls.

Uninterrupted space. This is what real estate agents, interior designers, and almost every host on HGTV have promoted for the past decade. However, design experts are saying that people are beginning to miss walls. Homeowners realize they don't want to live in this "fantasy of uninterrupted views." Perhaps having walls throughout a house can allow for the return of, dare I say, privacy. Like most design trends, open concept design grew rampant and quickly adopted by designers, architects, and anyone looking to make an impression on spatial design.

Open Concept Interior Design Contemporary House. Image © Hall Inter

In 2018, architecture and design critic Kate Wagner shared an insightful stance on open-concept interior designs. Her article in CityLab expressed reflection and opposition to this design trend that seemed to "seduce" the globe. Wagner shared, "overall, the open concept was a reaction against years of small, low-ceilinged living, which felt restricting and stuffy to a new ...

The Salone del Mobile installation exploring design's impact on human biology

2019-03-26T10:31:00-04:00

The installation is called A Space for Being: Exploring Design’s Impact On Our Biology, and it digs into the topic of neuroaesthetics–basically, the study of how beauty affects your brain. It’s three rooms that will be set up in Spazio Maiocchi, built in conjunction with architect Suchi Reddy. They’re not exactly identical, but each room decorated with the same furniture line from Muuto...

In 2018 Google debuted its first home installation at the Milan Furniture Fair, aka Salone del Mobile. Although the company's debut of its domestic software was not something new or revolutionary, it allowed for the multi-billion dollar company to enter the realm of spatial design through their industrial design products. For this year's Salone de Mobile, Google has teamed with Suchi Reddy, founder of Reddymade Architecture, Muuto's Design Director Christian Grosen, and the team from the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University to create an immersive design installation which addresses the topic of neuroaesthetics.

Google makes its debut at Salone del Mobile 2018 with a special exhibition at Rosanna Orlandi’s iconic gallery in Milan. Image courtesy of Google

Google has already established itself as a front runner in enhanci...

Olafur Eliasson links his breakdancing years to spatial thinking in art and architecture

2018-09-17T15:34:00-04:00

“As a teenager I became very interested in street-dance culture and was active on the Scandinavian breakdance scene,” the artist Olafur Eliasson tells his friend and collaborator Anna Engberg-Pedersen in our new book, Olafur Eliasson Experience. This admission is a slight understatement. In 1984, the nascent artist’s three-man troupe, Harlem Gun Crew, actually won the Scandinavian breakdancing championships.

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson discusses his teenage breakdancing years in relation to how he thinks of architecture and space. Eliasson links the body awareness of moving through an urban landscape in dance to his development in spatial thinking as an artistic practice in design and architecture.

What past designs for outer space can teach us about the future

2018-08-20T14:45:00-04:00

A drawing in [Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's] 1883 manuscript Free Space might be the first depiction of humans in orbital weightlessness. Four figures float in a spherical spaceship, each pointed in a different direction, disoriented... This basic design — primary thruster, secondary retro rockets, axial gyros for orientation — has been used by all crewed Russian and American spacecraft to date, including the International Space Station.

Looking back at the history of outer space design, Fred Scharmen brings past innovations into the present with applications for our future. Starting back in 1883 with the first design for humans in outer space (seen below), Konstantin Tsiolkovsky imagined a new way of thinking about spatial design.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Free Space, 1883. Image: Russian Academy of Sciences.

Scharmen follows this path of design up through 1975 with Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill's project, funded by NASA, to develop habitats for civilization in space. A team of engineers, space scientists, physicists, artists, urban planners, and architects were assembled to create isolated and controlled interiors for humans to live in.

Bernal Sphere, 1975. Image: Rick Guidice/NASA Ames Research Center.

Habitats like the Bernal Sphere were created as exercises in imagining completely new systems of design. Scharmen advocates that these outer space design exercises are the key to innovation for design both on and...

Christopher Hawthorne reflects on the spatial design in "Citizenfour" and other Oscar nominees

2015-02-23T13:12:00-05:00

"Citizenfour," in fact, enlarges and underlines ideas about architecture, privacy and culture that run more subtly through a number of Oscar nominees. Several [...] movies exploit the dramatic appeal of the constricted, labyrinthine, tightly packed, claustrophobic or paranoid space: the crowded backstage corridors of "Birdman" by Alejandro G. Iñárritu; the tunnels, hallways and dollhouse-like spaces of Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel"; the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Ava DuVernay's "Selma."

Related: Julia Ingalls' Material Witness series on Archinect

Advanced geometry with Oyler Wu Collaborative's "The Cube"

2014-03-05T20:24:00-05:00

L.A. architectural practice Oyler Wu Collaborative designed "The Cube" from a fundamental notion: to challenge the spatial and geometric properties of the cube, a geometric form long regarded as a basic element for design, art, and science. Built for the 2013 Beijing Biennale, the sculpture transforms a solid idea into an abstract piece -- and just a really cool-looking installation that surely makes a nifty backdrop for picture-taking.

We'll let Oyler Wu explain the intricate details behind the project:

"The Cube was designed with the intention of challenging the perceptual reading of the volumetric object. Beginning with this iconic and basic geometry, the overall scheme is designed to maintain the clear presence of the six-sided object in space.

Closer inspection of the scheme, however, is intended to reveal a more nuanced and experiential spatial effect - one that moves beyond the object and offers a radically different reading. Approximately sixteen meters tall and constructed of ...

UNStudio’s Motion Matters exhibition at the MAXXI Museum in Rome

2013-12-10T16:10:00-05:00

After two successful showings, the third edition of UNStudio's Motion Matters exhibition opened at the MAXXI Museum in Rome on Dec. 6. As an exploration of movement, space, and perspective, the site-specific installation has visitors interact with and experience 10 rescaled representations of UNStudio's architectural designs.

Get more details at Bustler.

‪Film psychology THE SHINING spatial awareness and set design

2011-07-26T13:26:51-04:00

How Stanley Kubrick used Escher-styled spacial awareness & set design anomolies to disorientate viewers of his horror classic The Shining.