Archinect - News

29% Equal podcast explores the impact of women in architectural practice today

2023-03-08T08:00:00-05:00

Just in time for Women's History Month, a new podcast called 29% Equal recently launched, bringing attention to the influence of several women architects on the way the profession is practiced today.

Produced by Newcastle University doctoral candidate Sarah Ackland with support from the RIBA Research Fund, three episodes of the six-part series are available so far, featuring voices like Farshid Moussavi, 2021 MJ Long Prize winner Alice Brownfield, activist architect Elsie Owusu (herself a guest on Archinect's podcast in 2016), and others working in the UK — in close association with the Part W action group — towards similar goals aligned with gender equity and the representation of women in academia, professional practice, and architectural history.

“In an effort to eliminate this continual erasure of women, I have invited a young architect, designer, artist or activist from Part W (and friends) to have a discussion with a woman they feel deserves recognition, or perhaps more recogn...

A living breathing building: How biology and architecture will change construction and the built environment

2019-07-24T12:53:00-04:00

The institutions have been jointly awarded £8m from Research England’s Expanding Excellence in England fund to establish the world’s first research Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE). It will lead to a whole new concept of the way we design and construct our buildings.

Maybe buildings of the future don't need to be AI filled structures face mapping our every move. Perhaps they need to be self-sustainable and responsive structures infused with a bit of biology. Architecture author, lecturer, and researcher Dr. Martyn Dade-Robertson shares new discoveries diving into these possibilities. Along with his colleagues at Newcastle and Northumbria Universities Dade-Robertson comments on his excitement towards the project in a recent university press release. "This is an incredibly exciting opportunity to create a new field of research. By bringing together architects, engineers, and bio-scientists, working with industry and investing in state-of-the-art facilities, we are aiming to rethink the building industry."

With the hopes to address changes and better construction practices, the team aims to create a brand new system of "Living Buildings." This collaboration of bio-scientists, architects, and engineers will open new doors for experimental biological...

Beyond the Map: Spikescapes and Wild Strawberries

2018-04-10T15:30:00-04:00

Geography is getting stranger: the map is breaking up. Now we need to attend to the unnatural places, the escape zones and gap spaces, the places that are sites of surprise but also of bewilderment and unease.

Negotiating the hostile architectures of the modern city — from the anti-pedestrian cobbles of a median strip to the unloved landscape of a traffic island — geographer Alistair Bonnett reflects on the increasingly disciplinarian nature of public space, and by crossing roads and planting strawberries, experiments with modes of resistance.

Scientists are developing a 'digestive' building material that cleans wastewater and produces electricity

2016-08-08T13:28:00-04:00

“The best way to describe what we’re trying to create is a ‘biomechanical cow’s stomach’,” said Rachel Armstrong, coordinator of the Living Architecture (LIAR) research project. LIAR's aim is to develop a building block material that uses living microorganisms to clean wastewater, glean useful resources from sunlight, and even generate electricity.

To do this, the researchers are programming synthetic microorganisms, and inserting them into a microbial fuel cell (MFC), which is then placed inside ceramic blocks. The MFCs are effectively alive, and produce positive and negative charges, which allows them to be programmed in such a way to emulate the different metabolic stages of a cow's stomach.

In combination, the blocks could be used to form 'bioreactor walls', which could then help offset a structure's carbon footprint by keeping waste processing and power generation in-house: "like a digestive system for your home or office," according to Armstrong. In one successful test case, res...