Archinect - News

This video game tests your ability to handle the retail madness of an American mall

2018-02-19T15:17:00-05:00

With the rise of online shopping, we have all been watching the dead mall epidemic for many years now. Addressing those left hanging on in today's world, Bloomberg now brings us the The American Mall Game: A 2018 Retail Challenge. Try your odds at managing a failing mall in this retro 90's computer game.

First you must choose a player—I chose Colton, who made his fortune selling his beanie babies collection at the height of its craze and wants to prove to his parents he's an adult. Next you will choose a strategy of either modernizing, creating an alternative mall, or cutting costs.

The American Mall Game: A 2018 Retail Challenge with an irritated shopper.

Your broker, wearing flashy 90's shades, gives you advice on how to save your dying mall. Navigate through stores like "Victoria's Conspiracy" and "Marcy's" while you get rid of rats, trash, and cyberpunk delinquents.

I was too busy clicking on shoppers to read their irritated comments and failed quickly. See how you fare in thi...

A chess set that forms the New York City skyline

2017-06-20T13:53:00-04:00

First-name-only architects Chris and Ian of Skyline Chess have already rendered landmark buildings of London into chess pieces, and now they're trying to create a similar set of New York City, provided they receive enough funding via their Kickstarter.

Each building has been carefully chosen to represent a particular chess piece. As the architects explain:

"We gave careful consideration to selecting each piece on the board, to ensure that it both visually reflected the appropriate chess piece and also reflected the architectural status and scale of that building in the city.

King - One World Trade Tower
Queen - Empire State Building
Bishop - Chrysler Building
Knight - Flatiron Building
Rook - Guggenheim Museum
Pawn - Brownstone House"

Each piece has been weighted and given a felt bottom to make them enjoyable to hold and maneuver.

Touring Danish playground emphasizes multi-faceted nature of play with modular elements + a smoke machine

2017-04-20T13:06:00-04:00

In addition to conceptually representing the inherent creativity of play, this touring modular playground made up of 35 white cubes mounted on safety rubber also features inlaid LEDs and a smoke machine, making it ridiculously cool for its target demographic.

As Stephan Gustin, one of the designers behind architecture firm Gustin Landscape's playground explains, "Kids are like grown-ups – we are all different, and since the ‘classic’ playground design only considers physical play, it is this variation in personality that is a high priority for My Playground. We created a set of ‘building blocks’ that can be configured in several ways to fit different places. We created these white cubes with refined decorations that have the feeling of a 'non-specific' landscape, meaning that you can create your own story, your own drama and your own fantasy. The cubes will then transform and blend into different environments. This could not happen if it looked like a giant ladybug - or classic swing...

Better than SimCity: how architects benefit from games, ft. special guest Quilian Riano on Archinect Sessions #79

2016-09-01T18:35:00-04:00

Closing out August's special theme of Games, we're joined this week by Quilian Riano to talk through all the ways games can help architects reimagine not only their designs and design processes, but also their own role in the system and structures of city building. We discuss Quilian's recent piece for Archinect on his own work with games in pedagogy, practice and protest, and share our other experiences at the intersection of games and architecture.

Listen to episode 79 of Archinect Sessions, "Better than SimCity":

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Shownotes:

Gaming the System: role-playing spatial and political change, Quilian's piece on his work with games

Game designer Jane McGonigal's T...

Changing architectural ideals as illustrated through child literature

2016-08-23T14:22:00-04:00

In this fascinating piece by Rumaan Ali for Slate, he explores how children's picture books offer a fun historical survey of the ideal architecture and interior decor for each place and time, spanning from the early 20th century to contemporary times. Although the books usually incorporate some element of fantasy, the throw rugs, furniture, and division of space tend to be reflective of the real world of that era.

As Ali writes about the "Best Storybook Ever" by Richard Scarry:

"The silhouettes of the sofas in the living room and the attic den are similar. This is not a home of ostentatious decorative gestures, but one of comfort, a faith in the modern culture (the television, the record player, a single book, from the Book of the Month Club, no doubt, left out on the coffee table). We see the home at the start of the day: one son lacing up his shoes, mother working on breakfast. The house is awake, alive with an optimism about what the day, the decade, the century holds for the peopl...

A tour of experiential magical realism games from the Triennale Game Collection

2016-08-16T13:11:00-04:00

Among the discoveries in the magical realist-flavored experiential series of smartphone games from the Triennale Game Collection is just how compelling this format is for exploring the nuances of architecture, even if that architecture pushes the limits of physics (and is often heavily layered with surreal color and effects).

"The Worm Room" by Katie Rose Pipkin. Image: Triennale Game Collection.

With visual allusions to everything from Pixar to Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain," the games emphasize the experience (hence, "experiential") over a plot-driven, goal-oriented construct. Nonetheless, each game has its own internal logic and rules, and rewards players with different visual effects and paths the longer they explore each world.

"Neighbor" by by Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy and Ben Babbitt. Image: Triennale Game Collection.

Check out this video, which takes you through a quick tour of the five iOS/Android compatible games:

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:

Rio's streets clog with traffic as visitors arrive for the Olympics

2016-08-02T13:43:00-04:00

Special traffic regulations giving priority to athletes and VIP visitors to the Rio 2016 games have caused 20km (12.5 mile) traffic jams in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, days ahead of the opening ceremony. Since the new dedicated Olympic lanes opened on Monday, traffic during the morning rush hour has been reduced to a crawl with average speeds of less than 15 km per hour, according to O Globo.

Opening on Friday, the Rio Olympic Games aren't exactly going smoothly. Athletes are refusing to move into the apparently-incomplete Olympic Village. The city's favelas are "rapidly gentrifying", —displacing families, in the meantime. Workers are dying. Construction contracts for stadiums have been cancelled. And the government is in shambles.

But here at Archinect we're still going to focus on all things game-related for our special August theme, Games. Check out more relevant articles here. And submit to our open call for new versions of that classic real estate game, Monopoly, by Sunday, August 21.

Gaming the neighborhood: One-to-One #32 with Jose Sanchez, co-creator of Block'hood computer game

2016-08-01T15:35:00-04:00

Architect Jose Sanchez is the co-creator of Block'hood, a city-building computer game that runs on real city data. Under his practice, plethora-project (covering architecture and indie game development), he focuses on how play can initiate design practice.

In Block’hood, players build cities out of 80 preset block types, and are rewarded for thinking “ecologically” and creating diverse cities (check out some screen shots in the gallery below). Sanchez wanted the game to be accessible to everyone, not just urban planners or architects, and to ultimately be both a learning tool and fun in its own right. Sanchez's interview is part of our special August focus on Games.

Listen to One-to-One #32 with Jose Sanchez:

iTunes: Click here to listen and subscribe to the new "Archinect Sessions One-to-One" podcast
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Download: this episode

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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...