Archinect - News

I'd bug-out there: 8 remote and beautiful spots to hide out in during the next 4-8 years

2016-11-10T19:09:00-05:00

Whether your bout of electora nerviosa ended in celebration or mourning, you may be looking for a little peace and quiet. OFIS arhitekti's recently completed winter cabin on Mount Kanin, Slovenia (home country of our next First Lady) is about as isolated as you can get—its materials had to be helicoptered in, and visitors must scale the mountain on foot to reach it.

Once you do, you've got a shelter to view the gorgeous Slovenian and Italian landscape below, all the way to the Adriatic Sea. Don't forget to bring firewood though.

The weather on Mount Kanin can get pretty extreme, snowing up to ten meters in the winter, with snow persisting for over half the year. Not to mention powerful winds, landslides, and earthquakes, as well as numerous caves and abysses. Good thing it sleeps up to nine, enough people to form an undefeated baseball team should you get trapped up there and start going stir-crazy!

OFIS sought out the dramatic site with the intent to test its minimal shelter in extre...

Denver is “Baroque-a-colas” and “CAD-itecture” galore

2016-04-20T16:19:00-04:00

If Donald Trump were a building, he’d be Baroque-a-cola: It’s bombastic, pretentious, clumsy, tacky and absolutely over the top, just like he is. Most Baroque-a-cola structures are in the form of showy townhouses or McMansions, but downtown Denver has been unlucky enough to have witnessed the erection of several high-rises of the type...

Denver does have its historic architectural gems, but several recent developments in the city have been dull, if not straight-up hideous (What's with all the random patches of brick?). Writer Michael Paglia dives into Denver's “sea of awful architecture” and lists the city's “Hateful Eight” buildings.

Previously on Archinect:

How Denver is failing at Good Design

Jeff Sheppard calls downtown Denver's new housing developments "meaningless, uninspiring"

Editor's Picks #429

2015-09-18T12:46:00-04:00

Today's Editor's Picks is a special themed "place based" edition - highlighting content (old/newish) from the archives/site - about Denver and Colorado. Partly as an apology for the brief/unexpected lull in the Picks. Also, inspired by my own recent relocation to The Mile High City. Just one part of an ongoing attempt to learn about my new home.

While MArch students at the University of Colorado, Denver, Patrick Beseda and Lacy Williams realized a design/build project for a micro-dwelling. FOUNDhouse inspired by the WikiHouse project, was an exploration of digital fabrication, the possibilities of DIY and the democratization of housing/shelter.

News
Back in the 1990s the Denver area was site of an extreme makeover (aka environmental remediation) for the 6,500 acre Rocky Flats DOE nuclear industrial site.

Archinect ex-Editor in Chief | Staff Editor John Jourden coined Bil(Denver)bao in response to the news that David Adjaye, Steven Holl, and Daniel Libeskind, all had active projects in the same city - Denver. Similarly in a post on how cities across America are gambling on architecture to revitalize aging downtowns, Orhan Ayyüce criticized "i hate the new 'ready made culture' trend. new museums=starbucks".

Richard Florida used occupational data from the labor market data and research firm EMSI to map America's Leading Design Cit...

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...