Archinect - News

Structure that uses sunlight to tackle the world’s clean water crisis unveiled

2021-05-03T12:07:00-04:00

Researchers at the University of South Australia (UniSA) have unveiled a structure aimed at tackling the global issue of water shortages. The cost-effective technique uses a floating module and highly efficient solar evaporation to extract freshwater from contaminated or sea water, potentially eliminating water shortages for millions of people around the world.

It is estimated that 1.42 billion people around the world are living in areas of high water vulnerability – a figure which is expected to grow in the coming decades due to the pressures of climate change, pollution, and shifting population patterns. In response, researchers at the UniSA’s Future Industries Institute have focused their efforts on a solution for eliminating water stress, with a focus on areas housing vulnerable or disadvantaged communities.

Led by Associate Professor Haolan Xu, the team has unveiled a structure that derives freshwater from seawater, brackish water, or contaminated water, through highly effi...

Norman Foster reimagines global infrastructure strategies in new essay

2016-09-22T13:36:00-04:00

Back in May, Foster + Partners unveiled their design for the Droneport, a modular shell-like structure that is constructed with local labor from earthen bricks and thin compressed tiles to create loading areas for food and medical-aid bearing transport drones. A version of the Droneport was built at this year's Venice Biennale (which is open until November 27th). Now, in the freshly unveiled thematic supplement to the 2015 Annual Statistical Report on United Nations Procurement, Norman Foster has written an essay which builds upon the idea of Buckminster Fuller's "trim tab" to help foster enormous change in Africa and other countries with relatively small, if holistically conceived, gestures such as the Droneport.

Norman writes: "There is a moral imperative to provide more globally available energy while seeking to conserve its consumption. The answer to this apparent paradox is to adopt a holistic approach to the design of sustainable communities in which the infrastructure and indi...

An analysis of donut-shaped buildings in modern work culture

2015-11-20T17:54:00-05:00

That’s not to say that all circular buildings represent some emergent 21st-century order. It is interesting, though, that past precedents have usually been buildings designed for spectatorship: sports stadiums or, more resonantly, panopticon prisons, where inmates’ cells are arranged in a ring so they’re visible to guards in a central observation tower. Take away that tower and you have the Apple campus.

Circles are an emerging form of office buildings (e.g. Apple HQ, Zappos, Government Communications HQ) and organizing people (Holacracy), as they convey positive qualities like transparency and open collaboration. But, as one New Zealand artist warns in his work, what sinister undertones linger within these structural concepts?

K O S M O S asks: is architecture merging with other media?

2015-07-15T18:11:00-04:00

Telephone poles, scaffoldings, abandoned utility plants: like taxpayer-sponsored dark matter, these elements form the largely ignored visual majority of our daily urban experience. K O S M O S, a self-described "virtual firm," whose four partners occasionally physically convene in New York, Basel, or Moscow, has spotlighted and transformed these otherwise drab infrastructural elements into a ribbed foil pop-up in Moscow entitled EMA. Described as "a temporary installation and renovation of ex-industrial territory in Moscow," EMA essentially repurposes an abandoned eyesore into an event space. We emailed Leonid Slonimskiy a few questions about K O S M O S' global approach to revitalizing forgotten infrastructural elements, as well as the selfie-savvy aesthetics and corresponding media-blurring issues of EMA's design.

Archinect: You describe EMA as "reveal[ing] and leverag[ing] the hidden infrastructure of the city." In what other cities would you like to attempt similar infrastructura...