Archinect - News

The Most Relevant News of 2014 (for Architects)

2014-12-30T14:02:00-05:00

Sometimes it's easy to pretend that architecture exists outside of this world, erupting instead in the blank of a 3D space governed only by the laissez-fair laws of software. But sometimes a news headline will penetrate through this fog of imagination, appearing as a blazing light shining forth from an image of some distant row of houses hollowed by mortar fire and colored with the blood of a strangers' body. "This is the real of architecture," the news seems to silently implore.

As gravity serves as the counterweight to the feverish, technofuturism fashionable to today's students, news events seem to ground architecture just at the moment it seems like it may finally escape into the vapors of idealism. While it may seem that architecture is increasingly consigned to the building of institutions or expensive residences, the demand for buildings and dwellings simultaneously grows louder and more desperate with every unfolding disaster.

A year-end round-up is as fraught as a ranking. If...

Study Finds NY Rats Have Alarming Diseases

2014-10-15T14:32:00-04:00

Recently, a team of pathogen hunters at Columbia University...conducted a survey of the viruses and bacteria in Manhattan’s rats, the first attempt to use DNA to catalog pathogens in any animal species in New York City [...] Although the scientists examined just 133 rats, they found plenty of pathogens. Some caused food-borne illnesses. Others, like Seoul hantavirus, had never before been found in New York. Others were altogether new to science.

New York's notorious rat problem is just one of the many complex human-animal interactions that can lead to disease outbreaks. Ebola, which has decimated West Africa and is now appearing in the US, likely spread to humans from contact with infected primates. Avian flu (H5N1) spreads from contact with contaminated birds, with the most deadly strains for humans likely coming from exposure to infected domesticated birds. Similarly, swine flu comes from contact with pigs. And the bubonic plague, famously thought to have come from rats, is now thought to have spread from fleas carried by said rats.

All this shows that human habitations are actually within a complex mesh of interactions with other non-human agents, many of which pose grave or even fatal health risks. As Dr. Lipkin, director of the rat study, told the NY Times: “I think people are going to have to start paying attention to this.”

Big businesses and baby steps: Weekly News Round-Up for September 22 and 29, 2014

2014-10-06T18:43:00-04:00

Friday, October 3:

Eisenhower Memorial clears key hurdle on Gehry design: In a positive step for the Memorial's Approving Process Odyssey, the National Capital Planning Commission has OK'd the Commission on Fine Arts (the other federal body that must approve the design) to vote on the Memorial.
Where are the women? Measuring progress on gender in architecture: A series of infographics on the representation of women in architectural practice and education, courtesy of ACSA.

Wednesday, October 1:

Guggenheim plans New York expansion… again: Not for more art space (Gehry tried that before) but for offices.
Zaera-Polo steps down as dean of Princeton's School of Architecture: From the press release: "the school's former dean, Professor Stanley T. Allen, will serve as acting dean until a permanent successor is appointed and that Professor Allen will chair the search for the new dean."
Tiny Spanish Island to be First Energy Self-Sufficient Island: The 10,000 population island will use renewable e...

Texas A&M architecture students design portable Ebola treatment clinics

2014-09-23T12:47:00-04:00

Design concepts for portable, rapidly deployable Ebola virus treatment clinics created by Texas A&M Master of Architecture students will be unveiled at a 2 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 24 presentation on the fourth floor of the Langford Architecture Center’s Building A on the Texas A&M campus.