Archinect - News

AI could help create more hurricane-resistant buildings, NIST research says

2023-04-14T15:06:00-04:00

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a new method to digitally simulate hurricanes. Using data derived from 100 years of hurricane monitoring, infused with modern AI techniques, the researchers suggest that simulating the trajectory and wind speeds of storms can help develop improved guidelines for the design of buildings in hurricane-prone regions.

The research, published recently in Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems, envisions a scenario where designers are directed to standardized maps by their local building codes. On these maps, designers can find the level of wind their proposed structure must handle based on its location and relative importance. For example, the resilience standards of a hospital would be regarded as higher than that of a self-storage facility.

The wind speeds in the maps are derived from scores of hypothetica...

Shaped Touches by Sean Lally features an interactive video game for the Venice Biennale

2021-07-22T20:03:00-04:00

As part of this year’s Venice Biennale, architect Sean Lally of Switzerland-based Sean Lally Architecture has paired a physical installation with an immersive simulation video game.

Shaped Touches is an investigation into the ways architecture and space can be perceived, showcasing the inherent subjectivity of the craft. The project is centered around climate change, specifically the impact it will continue to have on the way future environments are experienced. Using a virtual platform, Lally provides unfamiliar and potential perspectives to its users.

“Architects are in a position to foreshadow the opportunities and implications these pressures will have on shared public spaces,” reads the project description. “Shaped Touches offers a proposition for how architecture will define its shape and the relationships of people and communities touching that space.”

Within the video game, players explore a design space. Every minute, the game restarts in the same space but with new senso...

City-building games highlight humanity's grim toll on nature

2019-04-29T17:37:00-04:00

Two recently released video games are updating the SimCity model to better incorporate the complex relationship humans and cities have to nature and its precious resources.

The first, Islanders, has users generate a city on an island with a limited amount of resources. Users are given a set of building-type choices—lumber mills, farm plots, mansions, fisheries, and so on—that they then put down somewhere on the island. Ultimately a game about land use, points are generated based on how optimal the placement of each building is. For examples, homes generate the most points near city centers, while fisheries generate the most points near clusters of homes.

20 Minute Metropolis, on the other hand, is a game much more focused on speed. Users are given 20 minutes to try to build the best city they can. While players are given a finite amount of resources (stone, wood, metal and plastic) to build up their cities, points are gained from making parks.

Both games are about striking a bala...

SimCity's lasting impact on architects and city planners

2019-03-06T15:25:00-05:00

Along the way, the games have introduced millions of players to the joys and frustrations of zoning, street grids and infrastructure funding — and influenced a generation of people who plan cities for a living. For many urban and transit planners, architects, government officials and activists, “SimCity” was their first taste of running a city.

"It was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned, and that it was someone's job to decide where streets, schools, bus stops and stores were supposed to go," writes Jessica Roy for the Los Angeles Times.

Happen to look for a real life urban planning opportunity? Check out our Archinect job board for available positions.

Watching a real Architect tour his dream house built in "Minecraft"

2018-09-11T14:12:00-04:00

While normally used by online gamers to create a generated world for exploration and combat, the world-building computer game Minecraft has been noted for its architectural capabilities. BlockWorks, a design studio in the UK, uses the game as a design tool to create materials for marketing, media, and education; a competition in Australia a few years back invited students to design a national park using the block-building program; and Bjarke Ingels has proselytized at length that the architecture field should become more like the game as well.

Providing an online platform to build the world we want to inhabit, Minecraft's great distinction is its offer of complete freedom from real world constraints—there's no clients, no engineers, and no financial restrictions. Testing those limits, architect and designer Andrew McClure of Nomad Design set out to build something using Minecraft. Educated on the program by his young cousin, McClure picked a site in the desert, laid out a foundatio...

Watch an urban planner play SimCity with real world commentary

2018-08-17T14:45:00-04:00

In this extended short, City Beautiful takes on the old school classic SimCity from the perspective of a professional planner 20 years later. Along the way, City Beautiful provides pertinent observations of game play versus reality.

Urban Design Ph.D student Dave Amos circles back around to the game that sparked his passion as a kid playing computer games. An advocate for sustainable living and diverse cities, Amos plays through the old school SimCity game providing relevant insights learned over the years in his career.

A fake Harlem in Sweden and other architecture illusions documented by Gregor Sailer

2018-07-13T16:01:00-04:00

The caption to the photograph reveals that this isn’t New York at all, of course, but Sweden: a life-size replica of Harlem in a forest in the west of the country, near Gothenburg. The asphalt and snow are real enough, but nearly everything else is fake. The streets are void of people and cars; the store fronts are life-size photographs, printed on canvas and hung on steel frames. Welcome to the Potemkin village: a place of clones, impostors, facsimiles, frauds. Maybe don’t plan to stay.

Why is there a life-size replica of Harlem in Sweden? This bizarre space turns out to be a test track for self-driving cars. Why Harlem? Even Austrian artist Gregor Sailer who photographed the space doesn't know. Sailer traveled around the world to capture 25 of these false architectural landscapes for his project titled “The Potemkin Village”.

Check out some of these unreal images below:

“Carson City VI/Vargarda, Sweden, 2016” © Gregor Sailer

“Jeoffrécourt, French Army, France, 2015” © Gregor Sailer

“Holland Town VI, Gaoqiao New Town, China, 2016” © Gregor Sailer

“Complexe de Tir en Zone UrBaine II, French Army, France, 2015” © Gregor Sailer

Find out more on these imitation spaces captured by Sailer from Andrew Dickson.

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What SimCity 2000 teaches us about urban planning today

2016-06-15T13:58:00-04:00

Although the game was simulating an environment from 1989, urban planners these days still run into problems trying to get officials to think about their city in the long run. Climate change and sea level rise is a very crystalline example of the way city officials get in their own way and set themselves up for larger obstacles later on [...] Playing SimCity 2000 nowadays is a strange but wonderful way to realize what defines a city is not what it currently is, but what it could be.

More on simulations and gameplay for city planning:

Raphael Sperry, President of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, on the "hauntingly real" computer game, "Prison Architect"

2015-11-11T12:45:00-05:00

space and building costs are just as much of guiding principles in designing real prisons as they are in Prison Architect. [...] "Prisoners themselves are generally not included in the conversation where the prison construction budget is allocated to different priorities, so their needs come last and cell size is generally set at the legal minimum," Sperry said. "The legal standard only bars 'cruel or unusual punishment'—a cell can be punitively small as long as it doesn't cross that limit."

More on the discussion around prison architecture:

Play "Inside the rent", and become a virtual developer in NYC

2015-06-09T13:24:00-04:00

Different policy debates come into play throughout the game and the player is tasked with making choices that will affect the final rent – for instance build in high-cost neighborhoods, pay workers prevailing wages, expend public money to subsidize the building, or to give in and accept higher rents than desired.

The rent is too damn high, but so are a lot of other development costs. In this simulation game by NYC's Citizens Housing Planning Council, players go through the steps of planning a NYC rental in the current economic climate – complete with housing shortage and gentrifying neighborhoods.

After choosing a site, players must set targets for rent, construction wages, amenities, building size – and as they outfit their property, they see costs go up, and whether their target rent will actually yield a profit. Or (gasp!) whether they'll need to apply for government subsidies. According to the CHPC, the figures used in the game "are based on interviews with developers, appraisers, architects and underwriters, and are current as of 2015."

Play Inside the rent here, and see if you can fix the housing crisis. My $4,000 / mo 2BR in a new Harlem mid-size only exists thanks to government subsidies and minimum construction wages. If you're interested in other real estate development-based games, ...