Archinect - News

Do architects make better video games? Cue Shedwork's Sable, 2019's beautifully anticipated video game

2019-01-11T19:20:00-05:00

Captivating audiences with their brief presentation at last year's 2018 E3 Expo, the game's development team Shedworks featured a strikingly captivating trailer that showed a world filled with beautiful desert landscapes, eye-catching color palettes, and of course beautiful renditions of towering architecture. Taking much inspiration from classic graphic artists like Jean “Moebius” Giraud and games such as 80 Days and Sunless Sea, the overall plot of the game revolves around a young character named Sable and her exploration of a world whose history is unknown. Sable's lead designer uses his architectural education to create a world that expressed a way for gamers and enthusiasts to understand architecture through exploration.

Sable - game play screen capture Image © Shedworks

When developing the game's overall concept lead designer Greg Kythreotis explains it was important to build something artistically evocative. Much of the game c...

Bureau Spectacular's installation to be exhibited at SFMOMA

2017-02-02T13:45:00-05:00

Not content to be merely groundbreaking, Bureau Spectacular's imaginative work is increasingly becoming prestigious. The SFMOMA will display "insideoutsidebetweenbeyond," a large-scale installation the museum specifically invited Bureau Spectacular to design, from February 11th through August 13, 2017.

As Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design at SFMOMA explains, "Led by Jimenez Lai, the Los Angeles–based studio considers architecture to be a medium capable of rewriting sociological narratives. In this view, architecture is not solely functional; informed by client input and civic policy, buildings also reveal societal values. Noting the banality of developed cities worldwide, Lai suggests that boxy skyscrapers are the result of a drive for economic efficiency. In their place, Bureau Spectacular proposes an architecture that reflects a balanced democracy of creative individuals."

An illustrated history of Canberra, the Australian capital designed by American architects

2014-09-25T20:13:00-04:00

Cartoonist and journalist Eleri Mai Harris tells the story of Canberra's creation by architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin (who also happened to be married to one another, and worked with Frank Lloyd Wright).

Read the piece in full, gorgeous watercolor on Medium: The Utopian City That Wasn't: How two American architects won a competition to design Australia’s capital in 1912