Archinect - News

Walkable Plans projects 1:1 scale drawings unto floor for immersive design development

2020-07-06T11:20:00-04:00

Walkable Plans is a Pittsburg-based "floor plan projection center" that allows users to project their architectural designs unto the company's facility floor. The 1:1 scale projection enables designers and their clients to review designs at full size, providing a more immersive design experience.

Architect creates detailed floor plans of Buckingham Palace

2020-04-29T12:57:00-04:00

In a pursuit to create the most accurate floor plan of Buckingham Palace available on the internet, HomeAdvisor embarked on a research project to scour every available photo and video of the palace interiors to uncover the layout of every room. Researchers then collected additional information from the Royal Collection Trust and the official website of the British royal family, before passing all of their findings to architect Jelena Popovic, who created the drawings shown below.

With 775 total rooms, the palace includes 19 staterooms, 52 royal and guest bedrooms, 188 staff bedrooms, 92 offices, and 78 bathrooms. However, many of the spaces within the palace still remain a mystery with many areas off-limits to everyone except palace staff.

The State Dining Room is located in the Central Block of the palace.

The research team tackled the challenge by dividing the palace into three sections: The Central Block, the Queen's Apartments, and the East Front. Upon entry of the Central Block,...

Megamansions might be making their occupants unhappy

2019-06-12T14:31:00-04:00

American homes are a lot bigger than they used to be. In 1973[...] the median size of a newly built house was just over 1,500 square feet; that figure reached nearly 2,500 square feet in 2015. But according to a recent paper, Americans aren’t getting any happier with their ever bigger homes. “Despite a major upscaling of single-family houses since 1980,” writes Clément Bellet,[...], “house satisfaction has remained steady in American suburbs.”

For many homeowners in America, happiness is often incorrectly measured by how flatteringly the scale of one's home can be compared to those around them. Since the construction of Levittown and other post-war suburban developments, American homes have, on average, been built with incrementally larger footprints in a tireless search for the largest house on the block.

Interior of Versailles House under construction.

"To be clear," Joe Pinsker of The Atlantic writes, "having more space does generally lead to people saying they’re more pleased with their home. The problem is that the satisfaction often doesn’t last if even bigger homes pop up nearby."

And not only can happiness not be achieved through square footage, but these increasingly large homes also breed unhappiness through a variety of means. They contribute, for instance, to the increasing isolation of the families that occupy them - if a family can afford a large home with separate rooms, appliances and products for all its ...

Would artificial intelligence like to say something about architecture?

2019-04-26T10:07:00-04:00

Artificial Intelligence, as a discipline, has already been permeating countless fields, bringing means and methods to previously unresolved challenges, across industries. The advent of AI in Architecture is still in its early days but offers promising results. More than a mere opportunity, such potential represents for us a major step ahead, about to reshape the architectural discipline.

Stanislas Chaillou, a Master's candidate in Architecture and Fulbright fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, believes that artificial intelligence can offer in-depth analysis and alternative strategies to the design of floor plans.

Orientation Diagrams, by Stanislas Chaillou

Chaillou argues that higher degrees of optimization, contextualization and classification are just a few of the benefits of applying artificial intelligence to the design of floor plans. "Generative Adversarial Neural Networks — or GANs- are here our weapon of choice," Chaillou writes. "Within the field of AI, Neural Networks stands as a key field of investigation. The creative ability of such models has been recently evidenced, through the advent of Generative Adversarial Neural Networks. As any machine-learning model, GANs learn statistically significant phenomena among data presented to them."

GAN-enabled Space Layout under Morphing Footprint, b y Stanislas Chaillou

We have already seen design softw...

Optimizing floorplans via experimental algorithms

2018-12-21T14:13:00-05:00

Recent computational tools that model the simulation of traffic, acoustics and heat conservation, among others, are allowing a more quantitative objective evaluation of forms. The metrics could be expanded to include terrain maps, sun paths, existing trees and other environmental input, allowing the buildings to be highly adaptive to their context. The physics simulation could force certain boundary shape constraints.

Evolving Floorplans is an experimental research project created by a New York-based programmer, Joel Simon. When approaching floorplan design solely through the angle of optimization, a genetic algorithm arranges the rooms and the flow of people in a manner that minimizes things like walking time, the use of hallways, etc. The layout 'grows' from the encoding using methods such as graph contraction and ant-colony inspired algorithms, resulting in something 'biological in appearance, intriguing in character, and wildly irrational in practice'.

The open floor plan dissected

2018-05-22T14:43:00-04:00

A flowing, connected interior—once a fringe experiment of American architectural modernism—has become ubiquitous, and beloved. But it promises a liberation from housework that remains a fantasy.

In his piece for The Atlantic, Ian Bogost takes a closer look at the evolution and challenges of what has become a mainstay in American home design (and redesign) from Wright to Neutra to HGTV: the open-plan kitchen. Or, as Bogost calls it, a "prison without walls."

Spruce up with this architectural floor-plan jewelry by QUPA

2017-06-06T20:45:00-04:00

The architectural floor plans of the most extravagant structures can be a work of art themselves, as seen in the “CROQUIS” jewelry line by architects Eleni Kouineli and Stefanos Papadatos of Greek design studio QUPA. Fusing their love for handcrafting and architecture, Kouineli and Papadatos transform the floor plans of some of the world's famous cultural landmarks into elegant pendant necklaces and earrings.

The mini floor-plan pieces are made via classic molding, 3D-printing or laser cutting in materials like 24K Gold, platinum, ruthenium, and sterling silver. So far, the collection includes ancient rotundas, temples, and theaters as well as more contemporary buildings like Bernard Tschumi's Acropolis Museum and Daniel Libeskind's zig-zag Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Find more of QUPA's floor plan jewelry on their Etsy shop.

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The Architecture Of Filmmaking: See Your Favorite Movie Scenes As Floor Plans

2013-12-06T13:03:00-05:00

Interiors is a magazine devoted to investigating the architectural designs of film settings. Creators Mehruss Jon Ahi and Armen Karaoghlanian explain how they deconstruct these fictional spaces down to a blueprint level. [...] It starts out with a detailed essay on how space is used in a setting--perhaps the house from Up or the spaceship from 2001: A Space Odyssey--and continues with blueprints from specific scenes [...].