Archinect - News

Repair of natural environment: Australia's creative team for 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale announced

2017-08-23T13:19:00-04:00

Australia's creative team for the 16th International Venice Architecture Biennale has been announced at events in Sydney and Melbourne. Baracco+Wright Architects will collaborate with artist Linda Tegg to cultivate and nurture thousands of temperate grassland species within the pavilion alongside large-scale architectural projections. Visitors will enter a physical dialogue between architecture and endangered plant community. Reminding us what is at stake when we occupy land.

Explicitly addressing the theme of Freespace, 'repair' responds by encouraging new ways of thinking and seeing the world, ‘of inventing solutions where architecture provides for the well-being and dignity of each citizen on this fragile planet’. 'Repair' will frame and reveal an architectural culture in Australia that is evolving through processes that integrate built and natural systems to effect repair of the environment, and in so doing, repair of other conditions such as social, economic and cultural ones.

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Nothing constant but change in The Open Workshop's "Malleable Monuments"

2017-03-16T17:33:00-04:00

With a stated goal of "reconciling and choreographing how the human and environmental subject and their individual, transforming, ephemeral, and often contradictory characteristics continuously recompose a permanent work," The Open Workshop's Malleable Monuments exhibition is a tour of three years worth of work by the Toronto/San Francisco-based collective.

Photo by Abraham Chan

With projects including consulting on the redesign of Bruce Mau's office and accolades like the Architectural League of New York Young Architects Prize and the Emerging Leaders Award from Design Intelligence, The Open Workshop is building a solid reputation while delving into the ephemeral. With taxonomic drawings divided into four categories (Frameworks, Living Archives, Articulated Surfaces, and Rewiring States), the exhibition also investigates its constantly evolving territory through two large installations.

Photo by Abraham Chan

The exhibition,...

reEarth: Hortum machina, B goes for a walk

2016-04-22T14:20:00-04:00

Harnessing the collective intelligence of plant behaviour, the reEarth project explores new forms of bio-cooperative interaction between people and nature, within the built environment. Echoing the architecture of Buckminster Fuller, the geodesic sphere, is both exoskeleton and ecological iconography. Its core of twelve garden modules, each carrying native British species on outwardly-extending linear actuators allow the structure to become mobile by shifting its centre-of-gravity.

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Fuller Challenge winner says his GreenWave 3D ocean farm concept "could feed the world"

2015-11-20T13:15:00-05:00

So Smith invented the world’s first 3D ocean farm. Not only does his model aim to reduce overfishing, but it also attempts to mitigate the effects of climate change. [...] With scalability in mind, Smith wanted his model to be simple and replicable. To that end, GreenWave supports other fish farmers to get create their own 3D ocean gardens. “If you were to take a network of our farms totaling the size of Washington state, technically you could feed the world,” Smith said.

Learn more about Bren Smith's award-winning GreenWave farming system when Archinect first announced him winning the 2015 Fuller Challenge last month: GreenWave's 3D ocean farm initiative wins the 2015 Buckminster Fuller Challenge

GreenWave's 3D ocean farm initiative wins the 2015 Buckminster Fuller Challenge

2015-10-22T16:04:00-04:00

The non-profit group GreenWave, which won the prestigious 2015 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, is gaining attention for designing reportedly the world's first 3D multi-species ocean farms. Much like the group's marine-oriented initiatives, the ocean farm project aims to restore ocean ecosystems and biodiversity, and work toward a blue-green economy. Another objective is to create more jobs for coastal communities that will turn fishermen into restorative ocean farmers. Restorative aquaculture was a favorite in last year's Fuller Challenge, wherein SCAPE's "oyster-tecture" proposal scored the $100,000 grand prize.

The GreenWave ocean farms are designed as zero-input "vertical underwater gardens" that consist of layers of seaweed, scallops, and mussels that grow on floating ropes, which are stacked above oyster and clam cages. These crops enable the ocean farmers to produce food, fertilizers, animal feeds, pharmaceuticals, biofuels, and other products.

A single acre of the farm would remo...

Jeanne Gang praises San Francisco's architecture 'ecosystem' as context for new residential tower

2015-02-04T14:46:00-05:00

“San Francisco is really focused on getting things right on the ground, creating a rich fabric,” said Gang... “You have your own ecosystem.” [...] She’s at work here on a 40-story tower proposed at Folsom and Spear streets, one block in from the Embarcadero. The form would be simple, a lean rectangle, but the silhouette would be a ripple of angled bay windows, jagged and subtle at once. “Some designers focus on the profile. We’re looking more at the elements, starting from the inside out,”