Archinect - News

Designing healthier spaces through data: How one firm uses spatial analytics to shape new job opportunities for architects

2022-03-02T09:06:00-05:00

Traditional architecture firms aren't the only viable employers worth exploring as designers and architects continue to navigate the job market. New and exciting job opportunities with unique architecture adjacent practices continue to emerge with businesses seeking the expertise of individuals with architecture backgrounds. Pair this with advances in AR/VR, visualization modeling, and data analytics architects are finding new ways to approach healthcare, housing, and commercial projects.

Take the Cambridge-based spatial analytics company Spatio Metrics for example. Its founders, Sonal Singh and Jim Peraino, have combined their business, wellness, and architecture backgrounds to develop a company that "helps architects and their clients analyze floor plans and bridge the gap between design, data, and human performance."

Image courtesy of Spatio Metrics.

Both MIT graduates, the duo founded their company in 2019 and has gained attention as a startup that uses spatial analytics, visuali...

Building a gentrification early warning system with big data

2017-08-30T19:05:00-04:00

But what if there were a way to see gentrification long before the coffee shops, condos and Whole Foods appear? What if city planners and neighborhoods had an early warning system that could sniff out the changes just as they begin? [...] neighborhood advocates would have the opportunity to implement policies ranging from reserving affordable housing units to educating residents of their renting rights to helping small businesses negotiate long-term lease extensions.

In his NPR piece, astrophysics professor Adam Frank explains how various big data sets, like housing prices, eviction records, census data, or social media usage, can be utilized for "predictive analytics" to detect early onsets of gentrification for specific neighborhoods at an increasingly high resolution — and what significant perils come with it.

Editor's Picks #414

2015-05-06T14:00:00-04:00

Nicholas Korody profiled GRNASFCK, an experimental landscape studio. Therein they explained "We travel to places of material action, geologically leaky locations, where the evidence of disturbance, but also creation, is evident...While we see our narratives as a version of a field report, it seems important to acknowledge ourselves as emotional, human agents. In this way we are equally inspired by Hunter S. Thompson, John McPhee, and Chris Kraus".

Plus following last month’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake, Julia Ingalls reviewed How Architects Can Help Nepal (And Learn From Past Disastrous Mistakes/Successes). Will Galloway stopped by and provided some insight into post-tsunami redevelopment in Tohoku

"The trick is to still be there and still be engaged 2 years or 4 years or 5 years later, when communities are finally ready to build...Now is really the time for architects to act, to help build a sustainable community. But we blew our wad on sexy stuff in the early days, and anyway the news...

Methodolatry and the Art of Measure

2013-11-06T17:41:00-05:00

The default recourse to data-fication, the presumption that all meaningful flows and activity can be sensed and measured, is taking us toward a future in which the people shaping our cities and their policies rarely have the opportunity to consider the nature of our stickiest urban problems and the kind of questions they raise.

What do corporate smart-city programs have in common with D.I.Y. science projects and civic hackathons? “Theirs is a city with an underlying logic,” writes Shannon Mattern, “made more efficient — or just, or sustainable, or livable — with a tweak to its algorithms or an expansion of its dataset.”

On Places, Mattern argues that the new wave of urban data science (and solutionism) is trending toward an obsession with data-for-data’s-sake and an idolization of landscape research methods.