Archinect's Architecture School Lecture Guide for Fall 2018 With a new school year upon us, it's time for Archinect's latest Get Lectured, an ongoing series where we feature a school's lecture series—and their snazzy posters—for the current term. Check back regularly to keep track of any... View full entry
The National Building Museum's Summer Block Party installation Fun House has been one of the hottest events this vacation season in D.C. Designed by New York design studio Snarkitecture, the installation turns a conventional household into a sequence of interactive rooms inviting play. From a... View full entry
This weekend's bank holiday gives us the chance to spend a little more time roaming the city and enjoying the summer's exhibitions in the cool galleries. Make sure you use this long weekend to catch the Picasso exhibition, a showcase of the artist's work in 1932, and The Mastaba at Hyde Park.Check... View full entry
Once the crane arm locates and hooks onto a concrete block, a motor starts, powered by the excess electricity on the grid, and lifts the block off the ground. [Designed to withstand wind, the crane arm] can smoothly lift the block, and then place it on top of another stack of blocks—higher up off the ground. The system is “fully charged” when the crane has created a tower of concrete blocks around it. — Quartz
A tower of the concrete blocks — weighing 35 metric tons each — can store a maximum of 20 megawatt-hours (MWh), which Energy Vault says is enough to power 2,000 Swiss homes for an entire day. According to Quartz, the Swiss startup is planning to build their first commercial plants starting... View full entry
Before the advent of AutoCAD and other drafting softwares, the engineering drawings were made on sheet of papers using drawing boards. Many equipments were required to complete a given drawing such as drawing board, different grade pencils, Erasers T-squares, Set square etc. — vintag.es
Check out this fun collection of photographs from the pre-CAD era... View full entry
...the center, known as Runway, is being remade as a place where pedestrians will be more inclined to hang out, shop and eat — without having to dodge vehicles.
After seeing the closed-off streets packed with people during farmers markets and other special events, manager DJM Capital Partners Inc. concluded that Runway’s autocentric ethos was outdated and has decided to make the ban full time, even though the center was built only three years ago in the recently developed community.
— latimes.com
The Runway, a 220,000 square foot retail space in Los Angeles neighborhood Playa Vista, will undergo a $9.1 million renovation lead by local architect team Design, Bitches. The complex is located next to Marina Del Rey, Venice, and Santa Monica making it part of the Westside area known as... View full entry
This week, Ikea opened its first store in India–a feat the company has been planning for many years. But while the big, blue exterior of the store looks the same, the interiors, from the displays to the products themselves, have been subtlety tailored to accommodate cultural differences. It’s a strategy Ikea has used to expand from its origins in Sweden, now reaching 30 markets in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia... — fastcompany.com
As Ikea expands into Asia, the brand recently opened their first store in India tailoring their products to the county's culture. This is part of how Ikea introduces their brand to countries around the globe, by keeping their designs mostly the same with subtle, pointed changes for specific... View full entry
Archinect's Architecture School Lecture Guide for Fall 2018 With a new school year upon us, it's time for Archinect's latest Get Lectured, an ongoing series where we feature a school's lecture series—and their snazzy posters—for the current term. Check back regularly to keep track of any... View full entry
A drawing in [Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's] 1883 manuscript Free Space might be the first depiction of humans in orbital weightlessness. Four figures float in a spherical spaceship, each pointed in a different direction, disoriented... This basic design — primary thruster, secondary retro rockets, axial gyros for orientation — has been used by all crewed Russian and American spacecraft to date, including the International Space Station. — placesjournal.org
Looking back at the history of outer space design, Fred Scharmen brings past innovations into the present with applications for our future. Starting back in 1883 with the first design for humans in outer space (seen below), Konstantin Tsiolkovsky imagined a new way of thinking about spatial... View full entry
UC Berkeley Professor Nezar AlSayyad has been suspended for three years without pay for engaging in a pattern of sexual harassment and abuse of faculty power, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. AlSayyad, a tenured architecture professor and Middle East scholar, sexually harassed his former... View full entry
It's time for another Archinect Employer of the Day weekly round-up! Check out the latest profiled firms amid the thousands of active listings on our job board. If you don't already, follow Employer of the Day on Facebook, where we showcase a firm every day, along with a gallery of their... View full entry
Epic Games, the creators of the Unreal Engine, the standard for VR and AR exploration, experiment and implementation has unveiled its Academy. Understanding that understanding and exploring their medium is not as easy as picking up a pencil. Unreal is looking to change this by launching its own... View full entry
For now, the austere structure—and everything it symbolizes about the African American experience—awaits for a buyer while it sits quietly in Guernsey’s storage facility in upstate New York. As of this writing, the home’s destiny looks promising if uncertain. “There are 1,500 monuments to the Confederacy, which is absurd,” Mendoza says. “There are 76 monuments to the civil rights movement. Let this be the 77th.” — Artnet
When Rosa Parks' Detroit home went up for auction a few weeks ago, the auction house Guernsey's struggled to find a buyer, despite the wide media attention the house has received. “If all else fails, theatre and visual artist Robert Wilson and his Watermill Art Foundation in Long Island, New... View full entry
On this latest issue of the Archinect Sessions podcast Ken, Paul and Donna talk with Peggy Deamer and Shota Vashakmadze, from the Architecture Lobby. For those of you unfamiliar, the Architecture Lobby is a non-profit organization run by and for architectural workers that advocate for the value... View full entry
After the tragedy, [a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va.] and another honoring Stonewall Jackson were shrouded, but only temporarily. Around the country, similar monuments have been removed. In some cases, only their pedestals remain.
We asked artists to contemplate these markers of our country’s racist and violent history — the space they take up, physically and psychically — and imagine what should happen when they are gone.
— The New York Times
Around the US many statues and monuments celebrating racism in our country's history have been removed, either partially or fully. The question currently remains on what we as a culture should do concerning the spaces these historical monuments inhabit[ed]. The New York Times asked artists to... View full entry
