Archinect - News

Exercise parks for senior citizens are popping up in cities worldwide

2019-11-04T15:42:00-05:00

[A]lthough culture does play a role, it is park location, design and amenities that most influence use among senior citizens. “Often older adults feel not welcome in parks that are primarily designed for younger populations,” [Professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a professor of urban planning at UCLA] says. “In other words, parks are not psychologically accessible to them.”

Inspired by the exercise “playgrounds” for senior citizens that are common in China, similar parks are being designed in cities worldwide. The article takes a look at the specific design elements that are needed to make these parks appealing to older adults, as well as why these parks should be more of a priority in urban design.

What past designs for outer space can teach us about the future

2018-08-20T14:45:00-04:00

A drawing in [Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's] 1883 manuscript Free Space might be the first depiction of humans in orbital weightlessness. Four figures float in a spherical spaceship, each pointed in a different direction, disoriented... This basic design — primary thruster, secondary retro rockets, axial gyros for orientation — has been used by all crewed Russian and American spacecraft to date, including the International Space Station.

Looking back at the history of outer space design, Fred Scharmen brings past innovations into the present with applications for our future. Starting back in 1883 with the first design for humans in outer space (seen below), Konstantin Tsiolkovsky imagined a new way of thinking about spatial design.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Free Space, 1883. Image: Russian Academy of Sciences.

Scharmen follows this path of design up through 1975 with Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill's project, funded by NASA, to develop habitats for civilization in space. A team of engineers, space scientists, physicists, artists, urban planners, and architects were assembled to create isolated and controlled interiors for humans to live in.

Bernal Sphere, 1975. Image: Rick Guidice/NASA Ames Research Center.

Habitats like the Bernal Sphere were created as exercises in imagining completely new systems of design. Scharmen advocates that these outer space design exercises are the key to innovation for design both on and...

Win a copy of Joseph Choma's “Études for Architects”, a book of pedagogical design games for architects

2018-08-08T12:25:00-04:00

Design Topology Lab founder and architectural educator Joseph Choma is back with a new pedagogical book called “Études for Architects”, which comes a few years after his acclaimed “MORPHING: A Guide to Mathematical Transformations for Architects and Designers”.

If you're a new student to design or maybe you want to refresh your skills, this book features a series of pedagogical games that architects can play as a means to design. Thanks to publisher Routledge and Joseph Choma, Archinect is giving away five copies of the book to our readers!

Photo courtesy of Joseph Choma.

Written in straightforward text and featuring explanatory diagrams, the book's learning objectives include: computational thinking and making; introduction to design as an iterative, reflective, and rigorous process; ideas of continuity and discontinuity; and understanding the bias and constraints of analog and digital tooling. It also includes compelling examples of student work to e...

"Active design" movement wants to trick you into taking the stairs

2015-06-03T12:42:00-04:00

As we move through our cities each day, we make dozens of small decisions, based on dozens of small reasons. [...] The choices we make while navigating cities are influenced by subconscious factors that planners, architects and designers are beginning to mine and leverage. Some are wielding that insider knowledge to create places that will play mind tricks — to get us to make healthier decisions.