Archinect - News

The Rendering of Modern Life

2019-03-29T13:18:00-04:00

“Paris changes! But nothing in my melancholy Has changed. New palaces, scaffolding, blocks of stone, Old neighbourhoods, all turn to allegory And memories weigh more than stone.” - from The Swan by Charles Baudelaire

A tragicomic cultural and architectural critique of consumer modernities by Will Bradley.

"Every architect in Europe (and beyond) is hustling for a piece of the future Oslo. Their visions are wildly, overtly, perhaps clinically at odds with reality."

A must read, h/t Ron Linden via Peter Plagens.

MVRDV makes 5 proposals for resiliency in San Francisco Bay Area

2018-09-13T19:00:00-04:00

At San Francisco's Global Climate Action Summit yesterday, MVRDV presented a report offering 5 recommendations to Bay Area officials on the region’s plans for a resilient future. Their report, titled Too Much + Too Little, was created as part of the NL Resilience Collective. Below are the firm's 5 proposals for the city:

1. Update long-term plans to include water management and climate adaptation
2. Install a Bay Area Resiliency Commissioner
3. Understand your system
4. Develop a set of design principles for local communities across the bay
5. Start both big and small

Read the full descriptions for each recommendation here.

Projected statistics on building for massive urban density in 2050

2018-08-27T13:28:00-04:00

If you live or work in a city, then you probably see the impact of growing urbanization every day—gridlock traffic, construction cranes peppering the skyline, soaring housing costs. Sure, these are major challenges and annoyances for city dwellers, but they also represent a huge opportunity for the global architecture, engineering, and construction industry: one that requires building the future for a 10-billion-person planet.

According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 68% of the world population are projected to live in urban areas by 2050. Autodesk explores the implications for architectural growth in this timeframe with market research firm Statista. Take a look at the projected statistics on building for this massive upcoming urban density.

The Arab City

2016-06-01T15:00:00-04:00

In a region at once feared and exoticized, we have been witnessing for more than a generation the devastation of old centers and the rise of new ones. Today there is no better context in which to investigate the complexities of global practice in architecture than that of the rapidly changing Arab city.

How does the deeply traditional meet the hypermodern in the older centers of Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo, and in the emerging new cities of Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi? In Amale Andraos’ new article on Places, and in the new book, The Arab City: Architecture and Representation, she explores the region’s complex relationship with modernity, questions the risks of essentialism in the enlisting of its cultural heritage, and asks what architecture has to do with identity in today’s Arab cities.

A Couple Travels the World in Search of "the Human City"

2015-03-31T18:15:00-04:00

...Fernando Casado and Paula García, the founders of the Towards the Human City project, [are] travelling the world to find how cities are trying to be more people-oriented...Trends like smart cities make us believe that large structures are needed to change urban spaces, yet there are countless examples of transformative bottom-up initiatives that have come from a simple idea and flourished without public money. It is this citizen-led type of urbanism that they hope to highlight and champion.

Süha Özkan Looks Globally to Find Architectural Innovation

2015-02-20T11:12:00-05:00

What is the architectural legacy of May 1968? The question framed Süha Özkan’s talk last Tuesday at SCI-Arc, which he began by invoking his own memories of being a young man in Paris during that year's turbulent month of student-worker protests. “Let us be reasonable and ask for the impossible,” Özkan said, quoting the famous slogan that was “uttered in the streets of Paris while stones were thrown.”

For Özkan, the demonstrations of ’68 introduced a new set of values into “the architectural agenda.” He described the preceding parts of the twentieth century as defined by “polarities and oppositions”: west vs east; capitalism vs communism; developed vs underdeveloped; blue vs red; north vs south; conservative vs progressive; right vs left. With ’68, a set of new values were introduced, disrupting this binary structure. According to Özkan, these new values included participation, plurality, freedom, non-discrimination and peace. Today, during the beginning decades of the 21st century, Ö...