Archinect - News

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.

This online street designing tool, Streetmix, lets you play urban planner

2018-04-06T13:58:00-04:00

Streetmix is an online tool that lets you play with street design, allowing you to widen sidewalks, add public transportation, move around bike lanes, and more. Created by a small team of fellows at Code for America, a non-profit dedicated to finding ways to apply modern technology practices to city governments, the app allows players to imagine their dream streets and partake in the urban design process.

The idea came about when Lou Huang, back in 2013, attended a community meeting about redesigning a street in San Francisco. To help brainstorm ways of improving the corridor, planners handed out paper cutouts, allowing participants to visualize their ideas. Huang, who was an urban designer at the time, got the idea that this exercise would make for a great web-based application where citizens and planners alike can mockup city street designs.

Streetmix lets users redesign a street by dragging elements around the screen. Through the online tool, users are able to edit and arrange ...

Designing through cognitive architecture.

2017-12-11T02:16:00-05:00

Architects know best, as they often claim. With conviction, they’re sure certain details will make a space more hospitable, more beautiful, more preferable, and more enjoyable...But an emerging field of research is now uncovering and quantifying our psychological response to buildings: cognitive architecture. The hope is that by better understanding through science what exactly it is people like or dislike about our built environment, designers can truly improve it.

What does it mean to see a building? As we approach a building, what is that calls our attention? The door? The entry? That corner detail that is doing something we have never seen before?

Architect Ann Sussman and designer Janice M. Ward are two leading researchers studying how our brains see buildings. Their interest arose from their own observations and curiosity about how architects could create places that encouraged walkability and lingerability. Their results give us a glance into the fascinating and potentially freeing manner in which our brains and conscious really see architecture.

Kids play with virtual skyscrapers in new app

2016-08-04T19:08:00-04:00

"Spark a blackout, fix a pipe, or clog the toilets. Test your building’s engineering when dinosaurs invade, lightning strikes, or the earth quakes. Find out what keeps skyscrapers standing tall and people happy in them all." So says the description of the newly launched Skyscrapers by Tinybop, a game app for kids that allows users to essentially play in and around skyscrapers, like an urban-planning minded King Kong. Players can construct their own towers and then wreck havoc (or try to maintain order) with their creations. Here are a few screenshots of the game in action:

For more on games (it's Archinect's editorial theme this month):

And here's a video:

Interdependent city design video game Block'hood launches Thursday

2016-03-09T20:03:00-05:00

The complexities of designing at the scale of a city could take years to enumerate, but with Block'hood, a game where players design neighborhoods in various modes of complexity with over 80 pre-set blocks, it takes only minutes to start encountering these challenges first hand. Developed and designed by Jose Sanchez and Gentaro Makinoda, Block'hood's players are encouraged to think "ecologically," which is to say, designing an environment that not only sustains itself but can work interdependently with other neighborhood designs. If a design does not have enough resources, it can become victim to decay.

The perpetually evolving game, which has its public launch March 10th, has five modes: "Sandbox," which allows players to build a resources-constrained neighborhood without any particular goal in mind, "Challenge" which limits the number of blocks and resources a player can use to construct a neighborhood, "Education" which focuses on real-world city problems, "Research" which incor...