Archinect - News

Market for architectural services to reach $523.2 billion by 2030, new study projects

2024-02-09T17:09:00-05:00

A new study conducted by the group Grand View Research Inc. has indicated a likely rise in the global demand for architectural services to a market share of $523.2 billion by the end of the decade.

The study cites the rates of urbanization in countries such as Brazil and India alongside a worldwide focus on the creation of affordable housing as the main factors supporting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.8% from 2023 to 2030.

The development of Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality technologies was also indicated as pivotal factors driving growth. A demand to deliver green building designs across all sectors and design more humane and user-engaging spaces in the Healthcare, Residential, and Hospitality segments is also expected to favor business.

Urban Planning services are likewise predicted to grow to a CAGR of 6.4% over the same time period thanks to an increase in smart city projects and the threats posed by climate change on the built environment worldwide.

Rel...

Town over gown: Local zoning holdups could be preventing the expansion of America’s elite colleges and universities

2023-08-09T17:59:00-04:00

[The] quintessential local issue of zoning squabbles ends up generating a national scarcity of elite college admissions slots, fueling zero-sum competition and ultimately reducing America’s ability to increase global “exports” of its best-in-class high-end higher education product.

The Washington Post has a useful primer on the zoning hangnail stimying elite American higher-ed institutions from expanding their enrollment in response to societal outcries and prospective applicants' increasingly high standardized test scores.

The issue dates to the mid-1990s when municipal planning began to disfavor most top-tier institutions. Author Matthew Yglesias then goes on to argue that officials in states like Massachusetts, Maine, New Jersey, and Connecticut ought to curtail their parochialism in deference to the overall economic betterment of the country.

This year was supposed to offer a turning point in the delivery of student housing nationwide, according to prognosticators looking at overall decreases in enrollment. The University of California and other state systems, meanwhile, are still very much in the throes of their own deepening crises despite the sector's reputation as a "bright spot" for investors.

A case for Brooklyn YIMBYism

2018-09-12T17:09:00-04:00

At its current rate of growth, Brooklyn is about to be more populous than the entire city of Chicago. Saying “we need more housing” is a given, but no one agrees on where, how high, and for whom. And New York has been later to that discussion than San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles: While the city is building housing, technically, it is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of 144,000 new Kings County residents since 2010.

Alexandra Lange takes a closer look at Brooklyn's contested 80 Flatbush mixed-use development and argues why it's good for the borough.

Activating vacant land: a conversation about Detroit's potential and challenges

2018-07-13T15:34:00-04:00

Maurice Cox grew up in Brooklyn, a borough whose name has since become a global shorthand for gentrification. An urban designer, architectural educator, and former mayor of the City of Charlottesville, VA, in 2015 Cox became head of the planning department of Detroit, where he hopes to prevent the forces that have reshaped his childhood home from taking over the Motor City. [...] Cox is using design to catalyze growth that’s incremental and closely in line with the city’s strong sense of self.

Urban Omnibus presents an insightful conversation between Maurice Cox, Director of Planning and Development for the City of Detroit, and Marc Norman, founder of the consulting firm “Ideas and Action” and Associate Professor of Practice at UMich's Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning. Discussed issues range from tactical preservation, vacant land as asset, smooth growth, gentrification, and preserving Black spaces:

Detroit still has capacity for a population of 1.8 million, and we’re at less than 700,000. So part of our challenge is, how to prevent buildings turning into blight, to the point of having to demolish them?

On the other hand, if it does make sense to tear some things down, what do we put in their place? The architect’s mindset is often that the only thing that can replace a structure is another structure. But in Detroit, that makes no sense financially; it makes no sense in terms of the population. So we have to turn to other disciplines for an answer.

That’s...

Airbnb reveals its top 17 trending city neighborhoods for travel

2016-12-15T18:09:00-05:00

The hottest Airbnb deals are—surprise!—a little bit out of the way. The home-and-room rental platform has revealed the top 17 neighborhoods whose bookings grew the most this year, based on 140 million arrivals at 3 million homes. Peppered throughout are terms like “off the usual tourist path” or “a tranquil outpost” and “though detached from city proper.” [...] While smaller than many of Airbnb’s major markets, these neighborhoods could be in for even more growth in 2017.

In a data analysis report unveiled yesterday, Airbnb summarizes what travelers are allegedly looking for this year:

"In cities like Miami and Seoul, travelers to this year’s trending neighborhoods can connect with Experience hosts for local access you won’t find in typical tourist guides: In Miami’s Midtown neighborhood, guests can experience the fun, mindful side of Miami with yoga by the beach, paddleboarding and fresh dining; near Daehangno in Seoul, visitors can book a journey through the underground food scene, getting front and center in the kitchens of some of the best restaurateurs in the country. Coming soon are Experiences in New Orleans, Seattle, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Prague, Madrid, Dublin, Provence, Sydney, Bangkok and Osaka [...]."

Looking at the travel patterns of more than 140 million total guest arrivals at 3 million homes on Airbnb from 2015 to 2016, these city neighborhoods are reported as the 17 most trending for travelers in 2017:

Milneburg in New ...

Anti-growth zoning codes exacerbate economic disparity, racial segregation

2016-07-07T13:15:00-04:00

To most people, zoning and land-use regulations might conjure up little more than images of late-night City Council meetings full of gadflies and minutiae. But these laws go a long way toward determining some fundamental aspects of life: what American neighborhoods look like, who gets to live where and what schools their children attend. And when zoning laws get out of hand, economists say, the damage to the American economy and society can be profound.

"Studies have shown that laws aimed at things like “maintaining neighborhood character” or limiting how many unrelated people can live together in the same house contribute to racial segregation and deeper class disparities. They also exacerbate inequality by restricting the housing supply in places where demand is greatest."

In related news:

We Need Smarter Ideas On How To Grow Our Cities

2016-07-04T13:03:00-04:00

These days, you can find a Steve Pomerance in cities across the country — people who moved somewhere before it exploded and now worry that growth is killing the place they love. But a growing body of economic literature suggests that anti-growth sentiment, when multiplied across countless unheralded local development battles, is a major factor in creating a stagnant and less equal American economy.

Latest NCARB survey indicates architecture is a growing profession in the U.S.

2014-11-21T19:03:00-05:00

The architecture profession is back on the rise as the American economy recovers, according to NCARB's 2014 Survey of Architectural Registration Boards. For starters, the number of architects has grown by 3.1 percent since 2011.

Collecting data from all 54 U.S. territories (including District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands), the 2014 survey states that there are 107,581 architects in the U.S., which is a 1.6 percent increase from last year. California is listed with the highest total number of added architects at 20,595, followed by New York at 16,809. Data collected for the fall 2014 survey also reflect registration levels from July 2013 to June 2014.

Findings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show similar upward trends. In just the last two months, architecture and engineering services added 5,000 new jobs in September and 2,900 new jobs in October.

Earlier this year, NCARB made major announcements regarding licensure upon graduation as well as major mo...

The Canadian Company Drowning in Phnom Penh’s Garbage

2014-06-09T13:22:00-04:00

In 2002, CINTRI, a branch of Canadian firm Cintec Environment Inc., was granted an exclusive 50-year contract to collect commercial and residential waste in Phnom Penh and keep the city’s main streets clean. The exact details of the company’s agreement with city hall have never been made public, but since the deal was inked, Phnom Penh’s population has swelled from just over one million to two million people. The population boom and its attendant urban sprawl seem to have caught CINTRI off-guard

Watch Los Angeles's Road Network Grow, From 1888 to 2010

2014-06-06T14:15:00-04:00

A new video by doctoral student and an associate professor at Arizona State University visualizes the expansion of LA's roads, starting in 1888 and running all the way up to 2010 [...] Variations in color denote the age of the thoroughfares, with green being the oldest roads and red being newest. Watch as the map blooms with color in the fifties and the trend carries on through the eighties to the present.

"Growth of the Los Angeles Roadway Infrastructure, 1888 - 2010", by Andrew M. Fraser and Mikhail V. Chester, Ph.D., of Arizona State University:

Compare with the following video of Los Angeles' overall growth as a city during the 20th century, from NYU's Stern Urbanization Project:

Animated map shows America's love of shopping malls, 100 years in the making

2014-05-30T12:56:00-04:00

[The American shopping mall] has its own traceable lineage, from the earliest planned shopping centers to the first regional hubs for shoppers traveling by car, to the novel post-war enclosed malls of Victor Gruen [...] Malls, in short, have spread across the American landscape -- and defined it -- with remarkable success, adapting to our changing tastes along the way.

The below animation shows the spread of shopping malls across the U.S. throughout the twentieth century, and was created by Sravani Vadlamani, a doctoral student in transportation engineering at Arizona State University. Including numbers of strip, outlet, indoor and outdoor malls, growth really starts to pick up in the 1950s.

Lessons from North Korean urbanism

2014-01-08T15:43:00-05:00

They conceive of urban space as space owned by the public, not space for real estate development.

Much of the North Korean news that reaches the United States reads like tabloid hearsay, as glimpses of a totalitarian dictatorship rife with human rights violations are peeked through Dennis Rodman and military showboating. NK News, an independent and private news source based in Washington, D.C., is unique to both online journalism and treatment of its subject, in its rigorous and impressively connected focus on North Korean life and policy. Written from sources both in and out of the DPRK, NK News will most certainly get you to think differently about North Korea.

In part one of his interview with Dongwoo Yim, founder of the firm PRAUD and author of Pyongyang, and Pyongyang After, NK News' Academic / Research Director Gianluca Spezza takes a step back from current politics to ask Yim about the past and future of capital city Pyongyang's urban development. If Korea were to reunify, how would Pyongyang posture itself against Seoul, South Korea's megapolis capital?

Most of Nor...

An Ever-Expanding House of Architectural Salvage

2012-08-16T14:22:00-04:00

When Mr. Archer, 62, finds something intriguing (and it’s usually a very large something), he often builds a new wing around it. His house, which he bought 30 years ago for $135,000, was once a 3,000-square-foot, two-story box. Now it is somewhere between 11,000 and 13,000 square feet, with wings flying every which way, a pterodactyl of architectural detritus.

China's ghost towns and phantom malls

2012-08-14T16:56:00-04:00

As growth slows, China's huge investment in infrastructure is looking ever harder to sustain, leaving a string of ambitious projects - towns, shopping malls and even a theme park - empty and forlorn.

Pods of forced civilization: The problem with China’s architectural boom

2012-01-25T12:12:00-05:00

Evidently an impressive transformation is taking place – creating a truly modern metropolis. However Mr Hopkinson alludes to an almost cancerous growth on the outskirts of the nation’s capital city, and states that new builds fail to represent Chinese culture and imagination. Building projects on the outskirts of the city are viewed on an individual basis, without context and appear to result in “grids of square buildings of equal height, in a square plot, with uniform facades”.