Archinect - News

Henning Larsen debuts Open Detail, a digital biomaterials resource for architects

2024-03-21T18:34:00-04:00

Henning Larsen has unveiled a new tool for designers that allows them access to a database of biogenic materials examples taken from around the world.

The firm debuted its new Open Detail resource at the AEC Hackathon in Copenhagen. Together with collaborators Copenhagen School of Design and Technology (KEA), Ramboll, Speckle, and Chevrant, the entry took home first place for the 'Best Mashup Project' at the Hackathon.

Now, their aim is to "foster a shift towards low-carbon architecture" by making such "tangible" biogenic design solutions more easily accessible to the public and practitioners as an open-source repository and knowledge-sharing platform.

The searchable Open Detail will allow users to contribute and download material details in either 2D or 3D format once actualized. Henning Larsen says this is "only the beginning" for Open Detail, adding that the project's off...

Better Block Foundation, a nonprofit for open-source neighborhood design and ‘wikiblock’ urbanism, is hiring

2023-12-07T12:42:00-05:00

Following last week’s look at an opening for an Architect/Designer at Build Block, we are using this week’s edition of our Job Highlights series to explore an open role on Archinect Jobs for a Landscape Designer at the Better Block Foundation.

The role, based in Dallas, TX, “goes beyond the conventional office setting, requiring a genuine commitment to hands-on, physical work in the field,” according to the company. Among the responsibilities will be delivering site design and presentation materials, material sourcing and ordering, construction documents, and potential public speaking and development roles. “The Landscape Designer should be passionate about new urbanism and willing to swing a hammer, get paint on his/her clothing, answer volunteers’ questions, etc.,” the company adds. “This position is very hands-on.”

Before/After: Collaborative neighborhood placemaking. Image credit: The Better Block Foundation

Why the role interests us

The role at the Better Block Foundation offer...

Pulitzer Prize-winning architect Alison Killing to join Financial Times visual investigations unit

2023-10-16T18:41:00-04:00

Alison Killing, the British-born and Netherlands-based designer who in 2021 was named the first-ever architect to win the Pulitzer Prize, has been tapped to lead a new visual investigations unit supported by the Financial Times. The paper announced the appointment on Thursday.

Killing will work under the title Senior Investigations Reporter and expand on a body of work that includes the Putlizer-winning investigation for The New York Times into Muslim detention camps operating in China’s Xinjiang province. The published reporting led the country to withdraw from this year’s Venice Biennale while shedding light on the difficulties journalists and human rights advocates face in performing open-source research in authoritarian regimes across the world.

Killing was educated in the UK and later immigrated to the Netherlands to found her practice Killing Architects in 2010. The financial downturn of the time caused her to venture into curation and researching vacant buildings. She would ...

A new Kharkiv School of Architecture student project delivers valuable design solutions for rebuilding schools in Ukraine

2023-09-06T18:43:00-04:00

A new project aimed at improving the educational experience of Ukrainian schoolchildren is helping students at the Kharkiv School of Architecture participate in their country’s concerted response to an infrastructure crisis that began in February 2022 and has seen the destruction of an estimated 331 educational institutions nationwide, thus far.

The "First-Aid Spatial Kit" initiative is being taught as part of the school’s first-year construction practice curriculum and allows students to develop copyable designs for various interventions (furniture, pavilions, play spaces, etc.), which, in turn, can be implemented using readily-available materials by affected school districts looking for “self-help” solutions in rebuilding.

Photo: Zlatoslava Kryshtafovych & Oleksandr Holovashkin, courtesy Kharkiv School of Architecture

Over the course of four weeks, students developed a suite of six solutions that were also marked by a consideration for accessibility and universal design. Each of t...

MIT team tests open-source cooling chamber using 75% less energy than refrigerated cold rooms

2023-07-27T11:18:00-04:00

MIT researchers have published details of a new open-source forced-air evaporative cooling chamber. Described as being less expensive than refrigerated cold rooms, the chamber is intended to offer accessible cold storage for smallholder farmers, as well as significantly reduce post-harvest waste in hot and dry climates.

The chamber, which can be housed in a used shipping container and powered by either grid electricity or solar panels, has a capacity of 168 produce crates. The design uses industrial fans to draw in hot, dry air, which is passed through a porous wet pad. This creates cool, humid air that is directed through crates of produce, allowing rapid cooling. The air is then directed through the raised floor and to a channel between the insulation and the exterior container wall, where it flows to the exhaust holes near the top of the side walls.

The project was led by MIT Professor Leon Glicksman of the Building Technology Program within the Department of Architecture and Res...

Design collaborative launches open-source 'bee homes'

2020-06-03T13:08:00-04:00

IKEA's research and design lab SPACE10 has teamed up with Bakken & Bæck and designer Tanita Klein to launch an open-source Bee Home. The offering is in response to the collaborative's recognition of the essentiality of bees for life on earth, which includes one third of all of the food we eat. The team's aim is to mitigate the impact humans have made on bees' natural habitats.

Bee Home is free and open-source, allowing users to customize, fabricate, and assemble a design of their making locally. "For almost 80 years, IKEA has enabled people to create a better everyday life at home," said Kaave Pour, Director at SPACE10 in a statement. "But our home is more than just four walls, our home is also the planet we live on. That is why we launch Bee Home: we want to enable people everywhere to help rebalance our relationship with the planet and ensure a sustainable home for all of us."

Constructing a Bee Home is a fairly simple process. One would first design their structure online, select...

Architecture students from the Royal Danish Academy create a "Guide Book Of DIY Chairs"

2020-04-27T21:38:00-04:00

“We decided to treat the situation as an opportunity to reflect, unite and create together with a group of young talented architecture students, who were all crawling the walls due to lock-down and home isolation.” A-A Collective

At a time where the world is closing down and consumerism is on hold, A-A Collective completes a digital based workshop for 80 architecture students at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation - Institute of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape.

Chair by Helene Engehagen

Students and teachers in home isolation around Europe, from a total of 5 different countries, completed the virtual workshop in one week. Students could only build with household work tools and materials available from their local builders merchant.

Chair by Elen Finstad

Due to current restrictions the workshop draws inspiration from the principles of Enzo Mari’s classical Autoprogettazione collection. The students were challenged not only to design a chair, but also to do a manual of their design, allowing other people to “copy” it.

The guidebook, containing a total of 63 different chair designs, can be downloaded for free here.

An Eco-Building Toolkit

2016-07-21T02:33:00-04:00

**I'm truly impressed that Mr Open Source Ecology & Ms Open Building Institute got married and built a house...Of course it's an open-source house that's all makered-up from straw, wood and brick from their neighborhood - Bruce Sterling

Kelly McCartney highlights the work of Marcin Jakubowski and Catarina Mota, who decided to reinvent the home-building wheel a few years back.

For more check out the Open Building Institute and/or contribute to their Kickstarter

h/t @Bruce Sterling

Editor's Picks #444

2016-04-13T17:48:00-04:00

ICYMI Amelia Taylor-Hochberg published a 3 part interview with Coy Howard, by students in John Southern's “Architectural Media and Publishing” Cultural Studies seminar at SCI-Arc. Ewa Lenart was impressed "Great Work and greatly inspiring teacher!"

Plus, Nicholas Korody explored ‘Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work’ by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Chris Teeter thought it was "good work...very interesting...these guys are 100% correct about scale".

News
Dame Zaha Hadid DBE passed on March 31st. Frank Gehry remembered "she was one of the guys...[That’s] sexist in its own way I suppose. I don’t mean it that way...She was undaunted by all the stuff that would be against a woman coming into a field at that level. She didn’t pay attention to it…She was very confident."

Daniel Elmore criticized some of commentary "She deserves to be remembered not as one of the best 'female architects' but one of THE BEST architects of our time...A visionary before her time and a...

Amanda Baillieu weighs in on "Architect-free" Open Source Architecture

2015-04-16T14:20:00-04:00

We are told that the “architecture of tomorrow” needs to be networked, collaborative and inclusive, drawing its inspiration from crowdsourcing, open access and mass customisation. But to do this “architecture must be put into the hands of people themselves” and the architect possibly “guillotined”. [...] This is inflammatory stuff [...].

Relocation or Adaptation: Building a DIY Civilization

2014-06-26T17:47:00-04:00

How do you build a civilization from scratch? According to Open Source Ecology (OSE), the first step is building the right machines.

Started by Marcin Jakubowski in 2003, OSE is a network of farmers, architects, and engineers based in rural Missouri with branches in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and California. According to their website, their mission is “to create a collaborative economic platform that optimizes development, production, and distribution – via open source collaboration – to accelerate innovation to unprecedented levels.”

Basically, the idea is that a self-sufficient community requires proper tools and equipment, which within our current economy are prohibitively expensive both to purchase and maintain. By developing open source industrial machines, OSE hopes to reduce such expenses to a fraction of their current cost while simultaneously eliminating reliance on global corporations.

The eventual goal of OSE is to manufacture the Global Village Construction Set (GVSE), ...

UNStudio Tried Riding the Open Source Wave, but Failed

2013-10-24T13:41:00-04:00

What exactly are [UNStudio] going to share? Will it be more than just some sketches they have laying around? Could it be a big database of materials and tools? Or maybe a bucketload of failed competition entries? Unfortunately, the platform features none of this. At his very moment there are only 27 articles available (they’ve been online for 6 months now), 26 of which were written by UNStudio, and most of them are as vague and imprecise as their view on open source.

Previously on Archinect: UNStudio launches open source knowledge sharing

Who's Your Data? Urban Design in the New Soft City

2013-06-25T14:55:00-04:00

Smart city infrastructure can augment the ability of managers, planners, designers and engineers to define and implement a fundamentally better next generation of buildings, cities, regions — right? Maybe. For that to be a serious proposition, it’s going to have to be normal for planners and designers not only to collaborate productively with engineers, but to do so with the full and competent participation of the only people they mistrust more than each other ... customers.

"A city is not a BMW," writes Carl Skelton. "You can't drive it without knowing how it works." In a weighty think-piece on Places, he argues that the public needs new tools of citizenship to thrive in a "new soft world" increasingly shaped by smart meters, surveillance cameras, urban informatics and big data. "To be a citizen of a digital city requires understanding what the databases do and don’t contain, and what they could contain, and how the software used to process that data and drive design decisions does, doesn’t, and might yet perform."

UNStudio launches open source knowledge sharing

2013-04-11T17:21:00-04:00

In June this year UNStudio will launch the new organisation of its practice as an open-source knowledge-based practice operating projects around four specialised Knowledge Platforms. As part of the reorganisation of the studio a new interactive online knowledge platform will be launched, aimed at facilitating the open exchange of knowledge, with the ultimate goal of introducing and encouraging the expansion from a collaborative to a co-creative working model for architecture.