Archinect - News

KI Wall lets designers configure architectural walls and pods in a breeze

2024-08-21T08:00:00-04:00

This post is brought to you by KI Wall

This year’s NeoCon 2024 introduced KI Wall, a new interior architecture brand from leading commercial furniture maker KI. The line focuses on wall and pod systems and creates greater spatial configuration flexibility for designers of office spaces in corporate businesses, healthcare centers, government facilities, educational environments, and more.

Image courtesy KI Wall

Five products are available in a highly sustainable and easy-to-install suite that straddles the intersection of elegance and functionality. Each is custom-built to match clients' specific project specifications and a highly modern design aesthetic.

Image courtesy KI Wall

For those looking to enable impromptu private or collaborative spaces, a freestanding WiggleRoom Pod option and larger WiggleRoom Super Structures are also available. Both options are approved for use as Certified Autism Resource spaces and come backed by a ten-year warranty.

Image courtesy KI Wall

Architects w...

Zigzag facades found to be the coolest wall solution for lowering energy consumption in new Columbia study

2024-08-12T15:46:00-04:00

Corrugated facade patterns were shown to reduce surface temperature on structures by up to 3.1°C (5.6°F) in a new experiment from a team of researchers at Columbia University. Their research into a scalable FinWall model, first published this spring in Cell Reports Physical Science, provided insights into a less common radiative cooling (RC) solution for walls to complement more popular techniques, such as white roofs affecting areas of the building envelope that receive considerable less heat stress from the ground.

Furthermore, "building simulations indicate that a mid-rise apartment building equipped with FinWalls can save 24% (or 10%) annual energy versus the same building with high-emissivity walls (or low-emissivity walls) in the US," the paper states. The product allows for retractable fins containing alternatively emissive and reflective surfaces to be deployed in order to "seamlessly transition between the cooling mode and the heating mode by adjusting [their] orientation....

Indian bar legally evades closure by adding 250-meter long maze entrance

2017-04-18T12:38:00-04:00

Since April 1 a large number of the bars, pubs and liquor shops across India has gone out of business, thanks to a Supreme Court order that the outlets should be at least 500m away from state and national highways...The Aishwarya Bar in North Paravoor, a Kochi suburb has built a 250m-long maze-like walkway to the entrance, theoretically making it more than 500m away from the highway.

In a move that has even delighted the bureaucrats who initially drafted the rule that no bar could be within 500 meters of a highway, an Indian bar has managed to stay in business by virtue of building a 250 meter long maze that, like the snaking lines at an amusement park, greatly expands the literal number of feet one must traverse to get to the bar's actual entrance. While this clever invention may necessitate a designated walker to help steer patrons back out, it ranks among the best architectural interpretations of law we've seen in some time. Cheers!

h/t bldgblog

One brick per Bible verse in Napp Studio's enormous, lightbulb-infused "Archive of Light"

2017-01-05T14:44:00-05:00

The imaginary realm of architecture frequently ventures off into scales that are improbable, if not outright impossible, on the politically and gravitationally constrained Earth (think Étienne-Louis Boullée, or Lebbeus Woods). In a similar if less secular vein, Napp Studio has conceived of an enormous, walkable brick wall that would feature every verse of the bible and/or other spiritual texts inscribed on titled, lightbulb-illuminated bricks. The idea here is to create the sensation of leafing through a book page by page, with each page being loosely represented by a brick.

As the architects note, "The bricks are books written with text of living stories of the everyday reality, yet, a reality with hope. Hope is the most significant spiritual grain we rely on when facing the sometime harsh life, it provides us with strength and will – the light to live on." The massive scale of the project does not place it beyond the realm of the possible, although there's no word yet of an officia...

Temple University Physicist proposes three 1,000-foot walls to tornado-proof Midwest

2014-06-30T20:31:00-04:00

In a paper he recently published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B, Tao points to two regions of China... that have a similar geographic location as the Midwest—but far fewer tornadoes. The difference, he says, is that China's plains are surrounded by three east-west mountain ranges, which slow down passing winds enough to prevent tornados from forming. Tao, then, is essentially suggesting we build mountain range-sized walls across Tornado Alley...