Archinect - News

Portfolio tip: Show your work

2019-10-25T12:38:00-04:00

A couple of weeks ago we looked at the importance of tailoring your resume to a particular job opportunity. While a resume provides a brief picture of your experience, a portfolio presents a tangible proof of your ability. Today, we'll look at one overarching principle that can work as a measuring stick for all of the decisions you make as you create your application package. When it comes to your work samples, you want to do your best to capitalize on your opportunities to show your work.

Page spread from Archinect user Sirapa Supakalin's portfolio

There are too many portfolios out their that just look too pretty, too perfect. We need to start roughing them up a bit. The final product (the "money shot") is the culmination of all of your work. An employer wants to see how you arrived at that final result. Think about math class in grade school. You had to show the teacher how you solved your long division problem. The teacher's job was to teach you how to arrive at the solution not j...

How does an architect reflect the life of a city in an abstract skyscraper?

2016-07-06T12:46:00-04:00

Ole Scheeren wanted to meet his client's request for a skyscraper that would stand out in the already hyperbolic architecture of Bangkok primarily by designing something that wasn't trying so hard. Instead of going for a wild, crazy shape, Scheeren started by vertically extruding an abstract square.

However, as he notes in this CNN video, "Of course, this move exactly exemplifies the problem of the skyscraper. It is an abstract silhouette in a skyline that has no relationship to the city, and does not speak at all of the people that actually live in it or inhabit it. So I wanted to open up the new shaft of the tower and reveal the grain of its inhabitation. Through the usage of it, the people that will live in these three dimensional units will start to define the image of the building. The building will project the life of the people back to the city that gave it."

Watch the full video on CNN

What comprises a company's culture, physically? News innovator, Quartz, is looking for answers and documenting the process

2016-03-24T14:36:00-04:00

Moving offices can be a pain, but it’s also an opportunity to take stock of how the company has grown and what it could still become. With this move, we’ve put an emphasis on capturing the culture, or Quartziness, that defines Quartz employees and their work: global, nerdy, creative, and so on...This diary is part of a new obsession at Quartz, also called The Office, which is exploring the future of work, from management structures to the gig economy to distributed workplaces to compensation.

From mass-scale organizations like WeWork to four year old "digitally native news outlet" Quartz, the questions of what defines work culture in a largely post-manufacturing, perennially fluid global infrastructural era are still being formulated. Quartz is currently asking how "How do you capture a company’s culture in a physical space?" as they prepare to move into a new office while documenting that process on Medium.

Desai Chai Architecture is designing this as-yet-undefined space for Quartz. Desai is correspondingly basing their ideas not only on the titular physical mineral, but a more abstract notion of what constitutes the company. Citing parallels to Sol LeWitt with the company's tendency to resemble "a structured grid with unexpected deviations," the team has so far defined vital elements of the Quartz culture as incorporating "glitch moments" in an intellectually playful environment. It's a clickable front row seat to the design concept process, as well as an intimate tour ...

Instantly see your designs in the world with Context

2013-10-29T19:00:00-04:00

At its core, Context encourages hyper-efficient iteration by allowing designers to see their work three-dimensionally as they’re in the creation process. The goal is to radically reduce the time and effort it takes to realize a fully-developed design, which in turn will let designers spend more time on brainstorming great ideas and less time on the mechanics of bringing them to life.

Context, an app for Mac from former Apple and IDEO designer Joshua Distler, allows anyone to apply their designs to a real-world setting in a simple, reactive way. The app works in sync with Adobe Illustrator to essentially map a design (for a book cover, bottle label, cake decoration, etc.) onto its complementary surface, realizing the design instantly, virtually. Without resorting to cumbersome (and expensive) physical prototypes, or adapting designs into Photoshop environments, anyone can easily visualize their project in each stage of the iterative tweaking process.