Archinect - News

Archinect's Founder, Paul Petrunia, shares his true feelings about Archinect's trolls

2019-02-06T16:45:00-05:00

With a plethora of podcasts readily available, sometimes a good one worth listening to is hard to come by. This week Archinect's very own Founder/Director, Paul Petrunia, sat down with David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, from Midnight Charette, to discuss an array of topics. Known for their informal, unscripted, and in-depth interviews, Paul discusses Archinect's humble beginnings back in 1997 (22 years ago!), the problem with journalism today and the faults of internet technology, expanding Archinect into print and retail, dealing with forum moderation and trolls, and much more. The entire conversation runs almost 2 hours long.

Finding a balance between light-hearted discussion and in-depth design focused conversations Midnight Charette has created a platform, especially for young design professionals, to hear and learn what's out there in the profession. Known for their "brutally honest and often not work appropriate" discussions, these podcasts should be added to the must listen t...

Meet the bricklaying robot that can build a house in 3 days

2018-12-20T11:56:00-05:00

The 180-sqm, three bedroom, two bathroom structure was completed in under three days by Hadrian X, a new version of the robot.

Designed by an Australian company, Fast Brick Construction, the first version of Hadrian X was unveiled in 2015. Today the robot is capable of building and assessing a house from start to finish. Throughout its testing at the factory, it succeeded at completing a two-course structure, involving all combinations of brick cuts, sizes, and layering configurations; a larger two-room house from CAD model as well as an eleven-course pillar built from slab to cap height.

When supplied with a 3D model, the machine converts it into code that then uses proprietary software to calculate the location of every brick in the building. Once a concrete slab is laid, the laser-scanning technology surveys the foundation and then loads and arranges bricks using a 28m articulated telescopic boom. The components are held together by a special adhesive applied to each block through the robotic laying head. Hadrian X's laser alignment system provides an accuracy of within 0.5 mm.

Allison Arieff describes Silicon Valley's outdated and dysfunctional planning

2017-07-10T14:08:00-04:00

The built environment of the Valley does not reflect the innovation that’s driving the region’s stratospheric growth; it looks instead like the 1950s. Looking at aerial views of midcentury campuses like the Eero Saarinen-designed Bell Labs next to contemporary ones like Apple, it’s nearly impossible to tell the midcentury structures from the 21st-century ones.

While Silicon Valley is a place of much interest to many, its architectural image and overall planning is hard to grasp or call successful.

Allison Arieff of NY Times argues that the isolated corporate headquarters of tech giants have no consideration for the larger context of their surroundings, and heavily contribute to the Bay area's ever-worsening traffic which in combination with the outdated zoning laws, makes the whole region an extremely hard place to live in.

"In 2011, when asked by a City Council member what benefit the new Apple headquarters would have for Cupertino, Steve Jobs responded that it’d get to keep the company there. And that’s about the extent of what it got. A project like the new Norman Foster-designed Apple Park shows a blatant disregard not only for the citizens of Cupertino but also for the functionality of the region."

Apple Headquarters in Cupertino

"Because of the Bay Area’s chronic underinvestment in housing and transit, home prices escalate and cong...

What's the newest project for Silicon Valley investors? Building cities

2016-06-28T17:39:00-04:00

Y Combinator, the startup accelerator and investment firm that helped produce Airbnb, Dropbox, and Instacart, is embarking on a creation project arguably more ambitious than any company. "We want to build cities," wrote Y Combinator partner Adora Cheung and President Sam Altman...the project aims to develop ways to reduce housing expenses by 90 percent and to develop a city code of laws simple enough to fit on 100 pages of text. Eventually the plan is to actually produce a prototype city.

"We’re not trying to build a utopia for techies," says Cheung, the project’s director and the former CEO of failed housecleaning startup Homejoy. "This is a city for humans."

For more news from Silicon Valley, check out these links:

Sorry architecture, you're being 'disrupted.'

2016-06-07T09:58:00-04:00

Mr. Greenberg expects its future clients' new offices can expect similar results. In R/GA's first five months in its more "connected space" employee retention is up 5%. The ultimate goal and "magic number" will likely be akin to the higher retention rates of tech companies, like Google and Facebook. Those companies are growing in cities like New York and forcing agencies like R/GA to offer more desirable workspaces if they want to keep their talent, explained Mr. Greenberg.

Silicon Valley campuses at risk as sea levels rise

2016-05-03T14:29:00-04:00

Sea level forecasts by a coalition of scientists show that the Silicon Valley bases for Facebook, Google and Cisco are at risk of being cut off or even flooded, even under optimistic scenarios where rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions avoid the most severe sea level increases. Without significant adaptation, Facebook’s new campus appears most at risk.

San Francisco to mandate solar panels for new constructionsWhile the Frank Gehry-designed campus was elevated to prevent flooding, even a 1.6 ft rise – on the low end of predictions – will "inundate" the campus. Google is a little better off but will also be swamped if the Antarctic ice sheet starts breaking up, as evidence suggests may happen imminently.

For more news on rising tides in the Bay Area:

This month, Archinect's news and editorial are organized around a special theme – Help – with focused coverage on social and humanitarian issues affecting the built environment with an eye towards ways architects can mobilize and enact positive change.

Have related projects of your own? Submit to our open call before Sunday, May ...

Silicon Valley is set to get over 10K more housing units – is this the beginning of the end of its housing crisis?

2016-03-08T21:03:00-05:00

Last week the city council in Mountain View, California, took a significant step toward addressing Silicon Valley's housing affordability crisis. The city approved a new planning document for its North Bayshore district that envisions the creation of up to 10,250 units of high-density housing. Mountain View only has about 32,000 households total, so that would be a substantial 32 percent increase [...]

"The big question is whether this represents an isolated victory for housing advocates or whether it's the start of a trend toward denser development in Silicon Valley more broadly."

For more on the housing woes of the world's tech capital, check out these links:

The Siberian Silicon Valley: the billion-dollar tech hub built on the ruins of a Soviet science city

2016-01-06T14:14:00-05:00

Located in the middle of the Eurasian landmass 3,000km east of Moscow, with a climate that ranges from 30C mosquito-ridden summers to -40C snow-drenched winters, this isn’t the most obvious place for a tech startup hub... The Academpark is not some random outpost in the middle of nowhere, but the latest part of a plan to revive Akademgorodok, the Soviet science town that was established here in 1957, and long since left to languish.

Did Tesla almost go bankrupt without anyone noticing?

2015-05-05T19:39:00-04:00

Can a high-profile company led by a celebrity CEO come within two weeks of bankruptcy without anyone noticing? In early 2013, ...Tesla Motors came so close to running out of cash that its brash leader, Elon Musk, approached Google about buying the company, according to a new Musk biography. A surge in sales of the company’s pricey Model S sedan staved off disaster. Musk broke off the Google talks, no longer needing a white knight. And no one outside the two companies knew about it.

The monuments of tech: architecture in the age of planned obsolescence

2014-03-06T13:55:00-05:00

Silicon Valley long prided itself on building world-changing technologies from the humble garage, or the nondescript office park. The new spaces are more distinctive, as companies seek to build a consumer profile [...] [There] is a sense that nothing is permanent, that any product can be dislodged from greatness by something newer. It’s the aesthetic of disruption: We must all change, all the time. And yet architecture demands that we must also represent something lasting.

Twitter installs 19th century log cabins in San Francisco HQ

2014-03-03T15:12:00-05:00

In keeping with the designer's forest-themed interior motif, a pair of homesteader cabins from the late 1800s are being installed in Twitter's new digs in the historic Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart building, a 1937 art deco landmark on Market Street. [...] In this spirit of reuse and reclamation, Lundberg saw the cabins as a novel way of breaking up the wide open spaces of a gutted floor in the old furniture mart that will become a casual dining area.

Taking architectural anachronism to a whole new level, Twitter turns the open-plan office on its head by installing original one-room wood cabins from Montana as lunching spaces. Designers for Twitter's offices feel the choice is coherent with the company values of reuse and reclamation, while also strengthening the brand's bird imagery as related to the forest/nature.

What's left behind is the sour sense of irony coating such a move. In a city fuming with affordable housing and gentrification disputes, it's a bit hilarious for Twitter to insert original homesteading-iconography into its own HQ.

Will Zappos turn downtown Las Vegas into the next Silicon Valley?

2014-01-21T13:28:00-05:00

Late in 2011, [Zappos CEO] Hsieh became even more legendary by announcing almost larkishly that he’d be leading a $350 million effort to rejuvenate a blighted stretch of Las Vegas’ downtown […] His plan was to spend much of his own personal fortune to transform this lifeless area about a mile north of the neon blitz of the Strip into an entrepreneurial tech nirvana. [...] Doubters have no place in the ecosystem. Pragmatists stand little chance. A love of hyperbole prevails.

Google X developing online city-building platform, "Genie"

2013-10-16T19:56:00-04:00

[Genie is] a platform with online-based planning applications to help architects and engineers in the design process, especially for skyscrapers and large buildings. The platform includes planning tools of expert architects and engineers and advance analytics and simulation tools. Genie standardizes and automates the design and construction processes with unlimited design options, enabling an architect to preserve the building's uniqueness in the urban environment.