Archinect - News

Serpentine Galleries, Google, and David Adjaye launch augmented-reality architecture competition

2019-02-06T20:28:00-05:00

Serpentine Galleries teamed up with Google Arts & Culture and architect David Adjaye to launch the “Serpentine Augmented Architecture” competition, which is currently accepting proposals for an augmented-reality installation that will be developed and experienced on-site at the Serpentine Galleries — and located next to the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion — this summer.

The competition is seeking speculative proposals and imaginary city spaces that explore the role and utility of AR in public-space design: How can augmented reality rethink spatiality? How can AR be used to develop new ideas about the way our cities are designed?

The international call is open to architects, designers, games developers, artists, and the like, at any stage of their career. Individuals, teams, and studios can submit. The submission deadline is February 25, 2019 at 10 a.m. GMT.

Give it your best shot, as the winning commission will be selected by an esteemed jury that includes: David Adjaye, Architect and Tru...

Architects, have you recently finished a remodel? Send it to us!

2017-07-05T13:25:00-04:00

Architects love the freedom presented by a blank sheet of paper (or CAD window), but the reality of practice inevitably puts limits on the imagination. This is doubly true when it comes to remodels, which require working around somebody else’s design. But constraints can also encourage creativity as new ideas are shaped by pre-existing parameters. Sometimes, the most difficult challenges—a wall that can’t be moved or a budget that won’t budge—breed the most inventive solutions.

We want to take a look at what goes into designing around an existing structure. Specifically, we’re interested in residential projects with unusual backstories and imaginative design choices. Did you modernize a traditional home? Strip things bare or keep them intact? How did you relate to the original design? How did you relate to the clients’ demands?

Have a project that fits the bill? Post the project to your individual or firm profile, then submit it for consideration by filling out this form. We will be...

“Gateways to Chinatown” initiative accepting proposals for a new landmark at NYC's Canal Street Triangle

2017-04-20T12:34:00-04:00

“Gateways to Chinatown” is a newly launched initiative seeking design proposals for a new neighborhood landmark at New York City's Canal Street Triangle, between bustling Chinatown and the southern entrance to Little Italy’s Mott Street. The NYC Department of Transportation, the Chinatown Partnership, and Van Alen Institute are inviting design teams everywhere to submit their most innovative proposals for the new landmark and public space.

Initiated by the Chinatown Partnership, the project responds to decades of neighborhood advocacy and planning and a widespread desire for an iconic district marker along one of NYC's busiest thoroughfares.

Views of the Canal Street Triangle. Photo credit: Sigurjon Gudjonsson, NYC DOT.

In August 2016, the three organizations hosted a public forum to allow community members and stakeholders to share their opinions for a suitable district landmark. Following the forum, NYC DOT Street Ambassadors reached out to residents and visitors on-site to gather ad...

Call for Submissions now open for 'Ed', Archinect's upcoming hybrid print-digital publication!

2017-04-04T12:13:00-04:00

The deadline for submissions has been extended until May 9, 2017 at 11:59 pm (PST).

The meaning of architecture might appear as common sense, but it’s far from a given. Even the word itself is unfixed, denoting at once a profession, discipline, environment, and object. And, in turn, both signifier and signified are constructed, mutating over time and across geographies. There is an architecture of architecture—a set of political and economic forces, social and cultural configurations, as well as ecological and material conditions that delimit architectural practice and thought. The possibilities of architectural thinking and practice are thoroughly circumscribed.

Archinect is excited to announce the launch a new hybrid print-digital publication, Ed. For the inaugural issue, we’re considering this architecture of architecture—how architecture is constitutively enmeshed within ecologies, economies, socio-politics, technological regimes, and patriarchal structures. A series of texts will...

MADWORKSHOP announces open call for 2017 fellowships

2017-03-14T14:01:00-04:00

The Martin Architecture and Design Workshop, aka MADWORKSHOP, has announced an open call for 2017 design fellowships. The proposals should comprise “innovative and life-saving design solutions in the areas of product and fashion design”. Specifically, projects should address either the ‘emergency kit’ (for earthquakes, floods, fires, etc.) or extreme weather, or disaster situation, apparel. Each selected fellow will receive a grant of $5,000 to prototype their idea.

The call is part of MADWORKSHOP’s 2017 design theme, Emergency Architecture. “In an era of increased environmental and political uncertainty, creative responses from designers has never been more important,” they write.

If you’re an East Coast applicant, you’ll have the chance to work with renowned industrial designer Carl Magnusson and the editor and entrepreneur Barbara Heizer. If you’re on the West Coast, you could work with Karen Hoffman from Art Center, Frank Novak from Modernica, Edie Cohen from Interior Design Magaz...

Open Call for Submissions: 'Faith'

2016-11-17T14:50:00-05:00

Religion and spirituality have always been a huge driver of architectural history, its institutions being some of the clearest realizations of ideology through structure, and belief through design. Architecture practice in itself, operating over years and through dense bureaucracies, also requires its practitioners to have faith—in themselves, the market, and their clients. So as the winter holiday season rolls around, we’re asking architects to consider the role faith, and its institutions, play in their practice.

Our open call for 'Faith' is interested in both places of worship, and the ‘commandments’ that make for good rules of practice.

》PROJECT SUBMISSIONS: House of Worship

Design a structure for worshiping anything you feel demands it. Whether a new Presbyterian Church for your suburb, a Mosque for Mars, a glass orb for feminism, a bunker for the Patron Saint of Climate Change, we want to see your imaginations for a new kind of spiritual architecture.

There is no set budget or re...

Open Call for Submissions: "XS"

2016-10-18T12:23:00-04:00

Last time, we went XXL. Now, we want the opposite—the tiny, the slight, the subtle and obscure: the XS. We're looking for the small but fierce interventions, tweaks, ideas and yes, even buildings that push architecture in a constructive direction by going small.

》PROJECT SUBMISSIONS: Small World

Working in architectural scale can be thought of along the same lines as eating an elephant—a big meal, one small bite at a time. But some bites can stand alone as their own project, operating on a smaller scale than usual, perhaps with a surprising new function. Send us the projects (built or not) you consider to be part of architecture's smaller working scales—the XS creations making an XXL impact.

》EDITORIAL SUBMISSIONS: Napkin Critic

Good criticism makes its points clearly and succinctly. Hooking readers also means establishing a perspective and communicating ideas economically. So, this editorial call challenges your critical editing skills to produce the most compelling pieces of architect...

Open Call for Submissions: "XXL"

2016-09-27T12:26:00-04:00

It’s going to be “yuge”. It’s an inflated descriptor thrown around a lot these days, but architects have always been trained to think big, whether laying out bathroom plumbing or master planning cities. Sometimes those ideas get built; sometimes others build on those ideas. This October on Archinect, we’re exploring the many ways architects go big, with XXL.

Our open call for submissions under XXL focuses on one of the biggest strokes of architectural expression: infrastructure.

》PROJECT SUBMISSIONS: Map It

Transportation infrastructure is getting an unanticipated overhaul. As new networks like on-demand or ride-sharing services begin to intermesh with older, more static ones, updated expectations of living and getting around have emerged. Speed, access, and sustainability are obvious concerns, as are how they’ll encourage (or prohibit) future urban development.

Whatever your chosen mode of transportation, create a fantasy transportation map in the city (or country, or planet) of your c...

Open Call for Submissions: "Learning"

2016-09-07T12:07:00-04:00

As the role of “the architect” seems to expand ever outwards, the architect’s education hasn’t exactly kept pace. While the profession delves into new territories, its optimism and diversification run parallel to the bloat of inflated degrees, unpaid labor and student debt that have come to characterize educational institutions at large. What’s an aspiring architect to do? As current academic models appear less and less adept at teaching architecture as we know it, perhaps a pedagogical break is needed to better understand: “How on Earth should we teach architecture?”

This September on Archinect, we’re considering all aspects of 'Learning' from pedagogy to continuing education to psychology. And under our open call for submissions, we’re looking for projects and writing that reconsider one of the core aspects of architecture education: the studio.

》PROJECT SUBMISSIONS: A New Studio

There weren’t always Kuka robots on every corner. The studio space where architects do the majority of th...

Open Call for Submissions: "Games"

2016-07-28T12:25:00-04:00

Monopoly is an undeniable classic. Originating over a century ago in the U.S., in the era of Rockafellers and Carnegies, it was first known as “The Landlord’s Game”—a didactic tool protesting the power of, well, monopolies. Its current form of winner-takes-all buyouts has dominated since the 1930s, providing a place for family and friends the world over to fight tooth and nail for every last dollar and property on the board.

Monopoly’s structure is simple enough, and its sheer ubiquitousness places its ideas of property and ownership firmly within our globalized collective unconsciousness—that it is also almost entirely a game of chance is one significant vestige of its original anti-monopolist didacticism.

To architecture, Monopoly can be thought of as a frame of mind—a perspective through which to model the economic mechanisms (for good or evil) behind growth, and decline, of urban development, eventually leading to the infancy of a city. Games and simulations offer architects ferti...

Open Call for Submissions: "Domesticity"

2016-06-28T10:22:00-04:00

Your dream home is not your grandmother’s, and it certainly won’t be your granddaughter’s. As the modern family evolves in an increasingly unaffordable housing market, with populations pushing out of the suburbs towards downtown, current models of the single family home don’t seem so tenable, or desirable, anymore. ‘Smart’ devices and shared ownership options add invisible degrees of customization, while perhaps at the expense of domestic ownership as the key to financial stability.

With this shift in mind, architecture should undergo a Case Study 2.0 program. How can we define and design what “domesticity” can be for today’s modern family?

The Call for Submissions under our July editorial theme, "Domesticity", is open immediately. We're accepting both editorial and project submissions. Details below:

》Project Submissions: Case Study 2.0

The Case Study homes of the post-war era became icons of architectural idealism and pragmatism, while also setting the tone for what familial domestici...

Open Call for Submissions: "Privacy"

2016-05-30T10:53:00-04:00

Privacy: just the word is probably enough to elicit a cringe. Boundaries transgressed, information accessed, space trespassed—whether digitally or spatially, our private selves are vulnerable in more ways than ever, while simultaneously, our ability to connect and communicate with everything other than ourselves has expanded fantastically. The potential, and the paranoia, is immense.

How then might architecture respond and adapt to imposing structures of privacy? Effective immediately, we're accepting submissions to our editorial theme for June 2016: "Privacy".

》Editorial Submissions: Privacy Trespassed

Not too long ago, the notion of a glass home was scandalous. Within the last decade, commercialized cooperative models of living and working (i.e. “co-working” and “co-living” spaces) have removed many of the traditional arenas for privacy in homes and offices worldwide. In what other ways has our notion of privacy been rearranged by shifts in architecture? Send us your reflections, ana...

Open Call for Submissions: "Help"

2016-04-27T13:56:00-04:00

Inspired by recent conversations concerning architecture's engagement in social and humanitarian issues, as well as "Reporting from the Front", Alejandro Aravena's theme for this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, Archinect is adopting the special editorial theme of "Help" for the month of May. The theme will focus on how architects and designers are helping imagine and build a more equitable society.

"More and more people in the planet are in search for a decent place to live and the conditions to achieve it are becoming tougher and tougher by the hour," Aravena states in his introduction of the Biennale's theme. "Any attempt to go beyond business as usual encounters huge resistance in the inertia of reality and any effort to tackle relevant issues has to overcome the increasing complexity of the world."

The world of humanitarian work is complex and fraught, and architecture has no easy answers. But, at the very least, the profession has a unique vantage point to help create envir...

Open Call for Submissions: Sex Aware Design

2016-04-13T15:32:00-04:00

With April comes springtime, and a proliferation of reproduction symbols laden with the sticky pollen of the universal allergen – sex. We're devoting our next editorial issue on Archinect to themes of sex and sexuality in architecture, and we want you to submit (to our open call).

Effective immediately, we're accepting written and design work under the following guidelines:

》EDITORIAL SUBMISSIONS: Architecture "Penthouse" Letters
A skyscraper is never just a skyscraper – architecture, in its lines and curves, interiors and textures, is a sensual object. Its space and substance are all around us, and we spend our lives in a passionate, long-lasting relationship with it. Now, we want to hear how that admiration, devotion, fantasy, fetish, straight-up procreation – or whatever gets you going – intertwines with architecture. However architecture and sex become one in the same, send us your tales of architecture erotica.

》PROJECT SUBMISSIONS: Sex Aware Design
We're looking for projects that w...

Open Call for Submissions: Architectural Survival

2016-03-01T19:29:00-05:00

Even more than the laws of physics and building codes, money rules everything in architecture. The architect is the canary in the recession's coal mine; skyscrapers and starchitectural gems stand as allegories for wealth; descriptors like "quality" and "affordable" at times seem mutually exclusive. But whatever the economic reality, there are always stories of architects that manage to make things work.

As Archinect turns to issues of Money in architecture this month, we want to hear your stories of how architects can survive, and thrive, when money is tight – how to make more, from less.

》Editorial Submissions: Stories from the Recession
What sustained, or broke, you? What advice do you have for weathering the next recession? How did your practice change? Stories can be from the perspective of firms, individual architects, recent grads or nervous students during the latest recession.

》Project Submissions: Tightly-Budgeted Work
Show off your small-budget built projects that didn’t compro...