Archinect - News

People volunteer to “work” in these fake offices to help Well Living Lab make future building design healthier

2018-07-18T19:26:00-04:00

When complete, the 25,000 sq ft Well Living Lab, the first scientific research centre in Asia to focus on the indoor environment, will feature a range of simulated homes and offices. The facility will make small variations to the environment – in lighting, air quality and noise levels, for example – and monitor how they affect workers’ health, happiness and productivity. The research findings will be used to change the way future buildings are designed.

Connectivity matters most in global urban economic growth

2016-04-22T13:57:00-04:00

Cities are mankind’s most enduring and stable mode of social organization, outlasting all empires and nations over which they have presided...it is not population or territorial size that drives world-city status, but economic weight, proximity to zones of growth, political stability, and attractiveness for foreign capital. In other words, connectivity matters more than size. Cities thus deserve more nuanced treatment on our maps than simply as homogeneous black dots.

Global strategist Parag Khanna gives his outlook on the economic future of the world's megacities.

Jan Gehl's perspective on making "a good urban habitat for homo sapiens"

2015-08-24T14:09:00-04:00

Every time we build something, we manipulate the conditions of people’s lives, but most planners don’t know enough about this manipulation...I have worked very hard to find out what the life is that goes on inside our buildings and how our buildings influence that life...Because if you just do form, then you are doing sculpture, but if you look after the interaction between life and form, you are doing architecture.

Hippies, craftsmen, and sociologists: "Learning by Doing at the Farm" examines radical education in 1960s southern California

2014-03-14T11:07:00-04:00

It’s easy to forget that Irvine, the minutely planned southern California city awash in tract housing and shopping complexes, was regarded as a pretty radical place at the time of its 1971 incorporation. Almost entirely ranchland up until the mid-1900s, the area that would become Irvine jump-started its urban development as the egg-white to the University of California’s yolk. Looking for land to accommodate expanding enrollment, the UC bought a large chunk of dusty land owned by the Irvine Company to establish a new campus, adding surrounding territory for residential and commercial development. The school isn’t named after the city -- both are named after the Irvine Company. City and campus were master-planned by architect William Pereira, and the University opened in 1965, still largely unfinished but marked by Pereira’s concrete brutalism and Olmsted’s New York Central Park plan.

In the era of this extremely young urban territory, beginning in 1968, UC Irvine began an experiment...

Archinect - News

People volunteer to “work” in these fake offices to help Well Living Lab make future building design healthier​

Connectivity matters most in global urban economic growth

Jan Gehl's perspective on making "a good urban habitat for homo sapiens"

Hippies, craftsmen, and sociologists: "Learning by Doing at the Farm" examines radical education in 1960s southern California

People volunteer to “work” in these fake offices to help Well Living Lab make future building design healthier