Archinect - News

Studio ST Architects and HSB Architecture & Design develop comprehensive reopening plan for NYC K-12 academy in response to COVID-19

2020-08-27T12:43:00-04:00

SAR Academy and High School, a private Modern Orthodox Jewish facility in the Bronx, was the first NYC school to close due to COVID-19. The school administration quickly acknowledged the need to reevaluate its building facilities and operations, along with class schedules and sizes amongst other factors to develop a flexible plan to reopen the school safely this fall.

SAR Academy Classroom.

Architects Esther Sperber and Hila Stern were called upon to lead the Academy in its efforts towards reinvention. "We had to revise both facilities and usage plans, but we also had to include some student/teacher behavior change in our design methodology," said Hila Stern, owner of HSB Architecture & Design in a statement. "Our approach included some newly acquired habits and behaviors."

SAR Academy Classroom.

Owner of Studio ST Architects Esther Sperber added, "Rethinking design and furniture placement, alongside greater integration of technology, created a highly flexible environment. And with a ...

'Deep adaptation' in the face of planetary climate catastrophe

2018-10-02T18:36:00-04:00

In the language of climate change, “adaptation” refers to ways to blunt the immediate effects of extreme weather, such as building seawalls, conserving drinking water, updating building codes, and helping more people get disaster insurance. [...] But some researchers are going further, calling for what some call the “deep adaptation agenda.”

Bloomberg's Climate & Environment Reporter, Christopher Flavelle, lays out a range of climate change projections—from the general consensus to the more pessimistic—and how an array of 'deep adaptation' measures could help to mitigate the damage. "Rather than simply asking people to water their lawns less often [...]," Flavelle writes, "governments need to consider large-scale, decades-long infrastructure projects, such as transporting water to increasingly arid regions and moving cities away from the ocean."

RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Fellow will look at the adaptation of urban wildlife to mega-cities

2018-05-15T15:06:00-04:00

The Royal Institute of British Architecture, alongside Norman Foster, has announced the winner of their twelfth Travelling Scholarship. After receiving the highest number of entries of any year thus far, the annual, £7,000 prize has been awarded to Steven Hutt of University of Greenwich for his proposal, ‘East of Eden.’

Travelling to Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, South Korea and Japan, Steven will investigate how urban wildlife has adapted to the rapid rise of densely populated mega-cities in the far east of Asia. Some of the urban environments Hutt will be looking include the ‘Sanzhi Pod City’—a dilapidated city that has become a breeding ground for five new species of orchid—and the wider Pearl River Delta—a rapidly growing concrete jungle with conditions that has also allowed other species to thrive—among others.

Norman Foster, whose Foundation helps support the program, said: "In the end, we all felt the winning proposal dealt with a topic that was extremely relevant given the accel...

Taking up the challenge of the back loop

2017-07-01T19:40:00-04:00

Like a Shell futurologist, one can imagine multiple disastrous futures for Miami. Will it become a southern Super Venice, a la Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York of 2140...Perhaps the hard realism of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife is more apt...Or imagine a super Katrina resulting in something a little more Odds Against Tomorrow:

from Key Largo John Pennekamp nature center, by author, February 12, 2017

Stephanie Wakefield penned some Field Notes from the Anthropocene, inspired by a recent honeymoon in Miami Beach. In which she explores 'experimentation' as a mode of dwelling in the Anthropocene and the emancipatory possibilities offered by the concept of the 'back loop.'

Copenhagen copes with extreme weather by building parks that turn into ponds

2016-01-22T13:21:00-05:00

Eventually, Saint Kjelds will be able to withstand — and even welcome — heavy rainfall and flooding. [...] More parks like it are being built to purposefully turn into small ponds during heavy rains, allowing them to capture and retain water on site until the drainage system has capacity to handle it.

More news on cities' response to climate change:

Our cities must adapt to climate change and growing populations within a single generation, according to the head of Arup

2016-01-04T13:43:00-05:00

Cities around the world have only one generation to meet the twin challenges of climate change and a rapidly growing urban population, the head of a global engineering firm has warned. Gregory Hodkinson, chairman of the Arup group, said that with more than half the world’s population already living in cities, and the proportion set to rise to 70% by 2050, city leaders need to take urgent action.

Gregory Hodkinsin, the chairman of the engineering giant Arup Group, has warned that cities must adapt to climate change and booming population growth within the timespan of a single generation.

“If we don’t, in my view, we’re screwed: my children and my grandchildren and everybody else’s children," Hodkinsin told the Guardian. "We need to find a way to do this rapid urbanisation in a way that’s not going to kill us – and to do it once.”

Climate change and urban population growth are "twinned" challenges for a variety of reasons. As global temperatures rise, an increase in natural disasters and resource-driven conflict will likely drive displaced populations to urban centers, where shelter and access to basic necessities are more available. This is a pattern already emerging, for instance, in the mass migration of refugees from Syria and Iraq into Europe and elsewhere.

Cities currently house more than half of the world's population – and will most likely have to shelter up to 70% in t...

The Pragmatics of Adaptating to Sea Level Rise: The Next Wave @ UCLA

2015-03-09T15:49:00-04:00

Beneath the vertiginous LED-strip lighting of Michael Maltzan's Billy Wilder Theater, a diverse audience gathered last Tuesday for a talk entitled "The Next Wave: Urban Adaptations for Rising Sea Levels." Co-presented by the Hammer Museum and UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the event brought together coastal geomorphologist Jeremy Lowe and civil engineer Peter Wijsman in a conversation moderated by Kristina Hill, a UC Berkeley Professor of Landscape Architecture. The talk was part of an on-going lecture series on "the most pressing issues surrounding the current and future state of water."

Hill began the evening's panel with a brief introduction to the unfolding realities of sea level rise, as well as some of the efforts underway to mitigate its impact. Pointing to an image of the San Francisco's Embarcadero embattled by high tides, Hill discussed the urgency of our particular temporal moment: we are in the last slow period of sea level rise that the Earth wil...

Adaptation - architecture and change in China

2014-05-29T12:59:00-04:00

EMG set up EMGdotART Foundation [in 2012] – the first art and culture foundation established by a Chinese enterprise, to have a permanent gallery and headquarters in the heart of Venice, Italy.

"More than roofs, doors, courtyards or staircases, adaptation is fundamental for the understanding of Chinese architecture. If the fleeting fascination for fundamentals during the upcoming 14th International Architecture Exhibition [June 7 – 23 November 2014, Venice] will deal and try to understand the basic principles that create architecture; than, ADAPTATION - architecture and change in China《应变——中国的建筑和变化》 focuses on the flexible framework that makes architecture (in China) possible." MovingCities co-curatorial statement

Taking place on the ground floor the historic Palazzo Zen – newly renovated by Chinese architectural studio O-OFFICE – ADAPTATION, architecture and change in China – selected as one of 21 Collateral Events – is curated by Prof. Marino Folin (Rector of the IUAV University (19...

Gensler brings ‘hackable’ buildings to the real estate market

2014-03-10T15:26:00-04:00

Gensler recently began a research project focused on Los Angeles and D.C., “Hackable Buildings – Hackable Cities,” exploring how building owners can adapt their properties to meet changing demand. “It really started with some research that we were doing on the evolution of office buildings,” said Raffael Scasserra, a Gensler principal. “What we were looking at is what is that evolution like? What is it transforming to and what are buildings going to be?”

Abitare China#34 | HUTONG/adaptation

2013-11-04T23:36:00-05:00

ABITARE China magazine invited MovingCities to guest edit its 34th issue on the topic of "(re) Design Heritage – Strategies of Urban Renewal and the Chinese City." Published in October 2013, MovingCities took this opportunity to address one of the most urgent issues to discuss when dealing with the urban, architectural, cultural, social and economical development of China and the city of Beijing 北京: heritage, preservation, adaptive strategies and the hutong 胡同.

Formal definition of hutong: Hutongs are a type of narrow streets or alleys, most commonly associated with Beijing, China. In Beijing, hutongs are alleys formed by lines of siheyuan, traditional courtyard residences. Many neighbourhoods were formed by joining one siheyuan to another to form a hutong, and then joining one hutong to another. The word hutong is also used to refer to such neighbourhoods.

MovingCities choose "HUTONG /Adaptation" as the unifying theme for this themed issue, wishing to approach this much debat...