Archinect - News

Google updates Open Buildings data sets using AI

2024-10-28T10:46:00-04:00

In 2021, the Google Research Africa team launched Open Buildings, an open-source dataset of building footprints across the Global South produced using AI and high-resolution satellite imagery. The team had a simple vision: to fill a major gap in data for population and density in the developing world. Now in its third version, their dataset contains polygons for 1.8 billion buildings over an area of 58 million km² in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The data is useful in determining population size and other factors to solve urban density problems.

Google's Research product manager Olivia Graham says: "About 2.5 billion more people could move to cities by 2050, most of them in the Global South — this could be a real step change for governments and organizations working through that growth. If a city is planning where to put essential services like healthcare and education, or where to develop infrastructure like water and energy supplies, this dataset shows the areas that are actively growing."

The data can be explored via a searchable map using that's accessed here.

Building tall isn't necessarily better for the environment, according to new research

2021-08-19T13:05:00-04:00

Vertical living may not be the most environmentally friendly way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the built environment, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Colorado, Edinburgh Napier University, and the University of Cambridge. The study, published in the journal npj Urban Sustainability, suggests that low-rise, high-density cities are more environmentally friendly than their high-rise, high-density counterparts, though both are still more sustainable than low-rise, low-density sprawling suburbs.

The researchers arrived at their conclusion through an analysis of an urban environment’s life cycle GHG emissions (LCGEs), which include both embodied and operational emissions. By feeding 5,000 urban environment simulations into an algorithm, with varying height and densities, researchers concluded that taller urban environments significantly increase LCGEs (+154%), while low-density urban environments significantly increase land use (+142%).

The tea...

Making the case for more density, not less

2020-05-12T13:42:00-04:00

The further threat is that the pandemic becomes a rallying cry to maintain our sprawling fortress neighborhoods designed to foster exclusion rather than inclusion. We have an obligation to ignore the short-term reactionary impulse to blame density for the spread of the coronavirus and instead use this opportunity to rethink the policies that impede the construction of new housing, at more price levels, in the places where housing is most needed.

Writing in an Op-Ed published by The New York Times, Carol Galante, professor in affordable housing and urban policy and faculty director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California Berkeley, makes the case for reinvigorating American approaches to affordable housing and urban density in a post-pandemic world.

Galante argues that instead of viewing density as an condition that fuels the spread of disease, the close proximity of goods, services, and people created by urban life, if guided by economic diversity, can actually help societies make it through troubled times.

Galante writes, "This pandemic is reminding us that we need communities where teachers, child- and elder-care workers, nurses, doctors, janitors, construction workers, baristas, tech executives and engineers all share in the prosperity and the comfort of an affordable home."

Density in life and in death: A look at Hong Kong's towering cemeteries

2019-09-09T16:15:00-04:00

[Finbarr Fallon's] photo series Dead Space explores how these monuments are designed, and how their history contrasts with Hong Kong’s more modern developments. “I have always been intrigued by how city-specific cemetery design can be,” Fallon says via email. “While death is universal, its memorialization practices are not. I found it fascinating that extreme density and verticality continue to be a defining characteristic of Hong Kong’s dwellings for both the living and the dead.”

Hong Kong's towering high-rise cemeteries can reach up to 60-stories in height. Regarding the photo project, Fallon writes, “The images juxtapose residences for two diametrically opposed groups—the high-rises for the living, and graves for the dead."

HSR could come to Colorado's Front Range

2019-06-05T17:33:00-04:00

Grauberger says they've already ruled out light rail because it would be too slow to travel the 173-mile route. "We need higher speeds to be competitive with the interstate system," he says.

Regional governments in Colorado are studying ways for boosting the Front Range Urban Corridor region's interconnectivity. Officials expect the regional population to grow by 1.7 million inhabitants over the next 25 years and are looking to position that future growth to take advantage of forthcoming non-automobile-dependent transportation infrastructure.

Project director Randy Grauberger tells KDVR, "All of those people aren't going to want to be traveling on I-25 at that point, so this will give them options."

A 100-mile corridor between Fort Collins, Denver, and Pueblo, Colorado could see a new high-speed rail line take shape over the next five years, according to officials. Acquiring the appropriate right-of-way is a key concern, as is the price tag. A cost estimate for the proposal has not been released, though Colorado officials will be working through the summer to fine tune their ideas.

Michael Wolf, whose photographic works captured the architecture of high-density megacities, has passed

2019-04-26T17:16:00-04:00

Michael Wolf, a German photographer whose work showed how people live in major cities such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Chicago and Paris, died this week at the age of 64. He is best known for his 2003-2014 series, Architecture of Density, which captured the repetitive architectural patterns of Hong Kong's massive tower blocks.

Born in Germany in 1954, Wolf moved to Hong Kong in 1994, where he worked as a photojournalist. In an interview with the New Republic, he said it was there that he became interested in architecture, and the larger umbrella topic of "life in cities."

Over the course his career, his work has captured rush hours in Japan (Tokyo Compression), the back alleys of Hong Kong (Informal Solutions), the Blade Runner-like scenes of Chicago's downtown (Transparent City), and quirk scenes discovered via Google Street view (A Series of Unfortunate Events). His latest project, Cheung Chau Sunrises, is a compilation of photos of sunrises taken between 5:30 AM and 7:30 AM each mornin...

Can a commute be beautiful? These colorful rendered maps show us they can

2018-12-05T20:25:00-05:00

Everyone can relate to daily commutes. Whether it's fifteen minutes or an hour, infrastructures in various cities dictate how transportation affects our daily lives. Through the use of data visualization, Craig Taylor, Data Visualization Design Manager at ITO World uses color and form to portray commute distances in an artistically beautiful way.

Coral Cities: European Cities © Craig Taylor

A project that depicts city infrastructure in a whole new light, Taylor blends art, urban planning, and science together to create beautifully rendered images of street networks in 40 major cities. The project appropriately called, Coral Cities, showcases how far one can travel by car 30 minutes from the center of major cities across the globe. Growing from the inside out, the visual depiction of city infrastructures resembles the form of growing coral.

Early idea of plinth renders © Craig Taylor

Depending on the geological features of the city, each "Coral City" is unique to its region. According...

Dubai aims for one-quarter of its buildings to be 3D printed by 2025

2018-08-27T13:31:00-04:00

Now, Dubai has taken a step further along the road to making such dreams a reality by announcing that 25% of the city-state’s new buildings will be made using 3D printers by 2025. The move is part of an ambitious 3D-printing strategy announced in 2016 by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Dubai.

According to the Dubai Future Foundation the city aims to reduce labor by 70% and cut overall costs by 90% with their 3D-printed construction plan. The strategy not only aims at addressing the UN's projected density for urban areas in the future, but also holds potential to solve Dubai's severe homelessness crisis.

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.

“No More Free Space?”: Singapore's 2018 Venice Biennale Pavilion explores designing welcoming public spaces in a dense cityscape

2018-05-07T15:56:00-04:00

Despite limited physical space in Singapore's dense urban landscape — with a population of 5.6 million squeezed into about 278 square-miles of land, the country's architects and urban planners are coming up with unique solutions to create delightful spaces that help enhance everyday life. So is there truly “No More Free Space?”; the Singapore Pavilion exhibition team for the 2018 Venice Biennale explores this very question.

Marking Singapore's sixth showcase at the Biennale, the Pavilion highlights 12 Singapore-based projects that draw inspiration from nature and “turn constraints into possibilities”. With these projects, the Singapore Pavilion team wants to share their country's design approaches with other cities that are dealing with similar challenges.

“No More Free Space?”, © Singapore Pavilion, 16th Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition.

Side elevation, “No More Free Space?”, © Singapore Pavilion, 16th Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition.

The c...

Herzog & de Meuron plans "Horizontal Skyscraper", perched on top of stilts, for Moscow

2018-03-23T14:57:00-04:00

The Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron has unveiled plans to redevelop a six-hectares old factory area in the heart of Moscow. Located at the former Badaevskiy Brewery that sits along the river, the project will renovate and repurpose the remaining clusters given the site's cultural heritage status. In addition, the firm will also raise two residential blocks above the site.

The result is a "horizontal skyscraper"—described as a "piece of city lifted up in the air,"—that sits on many slender stilts. According to the firm, the choice to elevate the additional buildings 35 meters in the air brings three key advantages: "first, the new green area, an urban park, emerges in the vacated land under the hovering structures, between the heritage buildings and the river front; second, despite the substantial densification of the site, the historical buildings retain their direct connection to the river and their clear visibility and access to the city; and third, all the flats in the hovering str...

How social equality is linked to health, as manifested in the built environment

2017-08-29T14:13:00-04:00

Residents of the outer suburbs tend to travel much longer distances between home, work and the services they need daily. Getting around necessarily defaults to the car, which has serious long-term implications for health. Driving is particularly associated with extended sitting in a confined space and, as a result, not getting enough exercise each day. When poorer communities are located in areas of lesser amenity due to lower housing costs, this exacerbates their health problems.

The close correlation between socioeconomic status and health has long been out of question. The built environment and the environmental context serve as direct social determinants of health.

Due to lower housing costs, poorer communities are often restricted to residing in areas of lesser amenity that exacerbate the obstacles to mental and physical well-being—lack of quality services and infrastructure, scarcity of green space and long work commutes challenge health. Additionally, poor building design and construction, and the excessive noise that it causes, can significantly contribute to stress, anxiety, sleep deprivation, and sometimes even neighbor conflict and violence. What might appear as light threats, such as sleep deprivation which is linked to obesity, serve as risk factors for many chronic diseases.

While high-density living is increasingly trumpeted as “healthy,” health and well-being of poor communities in high-rise housing heavily depends on the specifics—geographic...

MVRDV's Ilot Queyries blends history + modern sustainable density in Bordeaux, France

2017-06-16T19:10:00-04:00

How can architects create livable, breathable spaces that not only honor the history of a region, but anticipate the global population increase? This is partly the mission of MVRDV's 300-unit residential apartment/mixed use Ilot Queyries, which is located adjacent to the ZAC Bastide-Niel masterplan East of the River Garonne, and is designed to create a new neighborhood that prizes density and green, sustainable features while organically integrating the history of the region.

Aerial view

As MVRDV's Winy Mass explains, "For the Bastide Niel master plan we make an update of the European city: based on the values of the historic city that is intimate, dense and mixed, whilst at the same time proposing new objectives like sunlight for all, even on the ground floor, new energy supplies with solar panels, integrated water system and more green spaces. The concept of the cuts of the volumes is introduced here at Ilot Queyries which can be interpreted as a pilot project of the master plan Ba...

Designers want to transform elevators into "fashionable and functional room(s)"

2017-01-05T20:25:00-05:00

Forget climbing stars, or even walking laterally--in the increasingly dense and rapid reality of urban life, elevators have become a major part of daily living. According to The Guardian, major elevator designers like Otis are considering re-designing the elevator to become a more comfortable and friendly space. Precisely what form this will take is a bit unclear, but it may involve more stylish decor, and perhaps even a change in elevator culture itself (the reason most elevators have the floor number display up so high is to give people an excuse not to have to make eye contact with each other).

Elevators, making news:

The absorbing design of China's anti-flood "sponge cities"

2016-10-11T13:08:00-04:00

Is flood mitigation the new frontier in urban planning? China, whose urban centers have regularly been experiencing infrastructure-shuttering floods, is actively encouraging its metropolises to start reshaping themselves to handle the new reality via the so-called "sponge city" program. As an article in The Guardian notes:

The sponge city programme takes inspiration from low impact development in the US, water sensitive urban design in Australia and sustainable drainage systems in the UK.

But nothing at this scale has ever been attempted before. “The sponge city programme is more comprehensive and ambitious,” says WenMei Ha, head of the China water management team at Arcadis, an international urban consultancy which was appointed to this plan by the government.

For more on flood mitigation and the entities trying to rise above it:

Los Angeles gets dense (housing-development-wise, at least)

2016-09-01T14:14:00-04:00

Once known as the city of single family homes, Los Angeles is now developing high-density housing complexes, not only in downtown, but according to this Urban Land article, on the traditionally reluctant-to-develop West Side.

The developments mark a shift in how Los Angeles conceptualizes living, trending away from its iconoclastic, sprawling roots into a more traditional urbanism. The developments come at a time when Los Angeles is also investing heavily in public transit partially to help alleviate the city's signature traffic congestion.

For more on new urban development trends in Los Angeles:

How autonomous vehicles will accelerate suburban sprawl

2016-06-21T13:21:00-04:00

If Mr. Ratti’s projections are correct, and self-driving cars can radically reduce traffic without cannibalizing existing mass transit—the hypotheticals pile up—it is possible that self-driving cars will make many cities livable in a way they aren’t now. Imagine if every U.S. city had a hybrid public-private mass-transit system on par with those in New York City or Washington, D.C., comprised entirely of self-driving vehicles.

Will tall towers and sky walks populate the Stockholm of the future?

2016-01-12T13:34:00-05:00

Could roof-straddling “sky walks” soon be coming to Stockholm? A new plan proposed for the Swedish capital would see a large slice of its city center built over with densely packed towers, joined at their peaks by a dramatic zigzag of tree-lined, open air gangways... Sweden’s capital is one of the fastest growing cities in Europe... If it isn’t going to sprawl unmanageably or become overcrowded, it’s going to have to find somewhere to put everyone...

Proposed by Anders Berensson Architects, the "Klarastaden," or "clear city" plan, was commissioned by the Swedish Center Party, a center-right party with an environmental focus and neoliberal bent. The Swedish capital is poised to grow 17 percent in the next nine years, putting pressure on its historic infrastructure and architecture.

If you want to avoid sprawling out, you're best options are to go in and up, increasing urban density and height. The Klarastaden proposal does just that, weaving together a matrix of towers of different heights and widths with a series of pathways. Following what is increasingly becoming the go-to trend for marking a project as "green," the building roofs would support a fragmented park.

But, as is noted by CityLab, the Center Party isn't in power at the moment. So Anders Berensson Architects have also crafted a diagram for how their strategy could be retooled as a retrofit instead of a massive development.

Related:

Left to rot: abandoned Swedish mid-cen...