The American Medical Association (AMA) has just adopted an official policy statement about street lighting: cool it and dim it.
The statement, adopted unanimously at the AMA's annual meeting in Chicago on June 14, comes in response to the rise of new LED street lighting sweeping the country. An AMA committee issued guidelines on how communities can choose LED streetlights to "minimize potential harmful human health and environmental effects."
— CNN
There are two basic issues at hand. First, new, "white" LED lighting, which have a color temperature of between 4000K and 5000K, can cause discomfort and glare. This is because the light is concentrate and has high blue content, which can cause severe glare and force pupillary constriction... View full entry
Potential employers don’t pose design challenges with the expectation that you blow them away with your ingenuity or clever solutions. They want to see if you ask probing questions that uncover constraints, or if you rush to the whiteboard without deeper understanding. — Muzli
Design challenges are often used by companies to asses potential employees’ problem solving skills. This Google interview challenge in particular seems to have captivated the design community —How do you design an interface for a 1000 floor elevator? Dozens of designers around the world... View full entry
Spotted by The Mercury News, it’s designed for “densely populated” areas. The tower allows drones to fly in and out, acting like a giant beehive, with robotic arms that help snatch them out of the sky. Inside, the core features layers of spokes around one central hub. The spokes are specialized for various purposes, like repairing the drones, or loading them with goods. — Fast Co. Design
Amazon has been experimenting with the use of delivery drones for some time now though this approach to shipping has yet to take off for the e-commerce giant. As they continue testing this prospective delivery method, it is clear the retailer takes the particular vision quite seriously. On... View full entry
In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles. (Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect profiles!)... View full entry
In more RIBA announcements, the longlist for the 2017 House of the Year Award was revealed today. Established in 2001 as the Manser Medal, the UK's most prestigious award for housing design distinguishes a new home or home extension for stellar architectural design. Over the last... View full entry
Almost 20 years since Frank Gehry’s $100m titanium-clad Guggenheim Bilbao opened, another city on Spain’s north coast is getting a major contemporary art centre designed by an internationally acclaimed “starchitect”. — The Art Newspaper
Renzo Piano's first big commission in Spain, The Centro Botín, is opening today. The architect claims that its comparisons with the museum that became a model for culture-driven regeneration schemes worldwide are too simplistic. According the president of the Fundación Botín’s visual arts... View full entry
The effort to convert the old Penn Central rail yard on the Far West Side of Manhattan into high-rises has bumped along since being proposed in the mid-1970s by a developer named Donald J. Trump.
What was proposed for the area often rankled neighbors, who found the buildings to be too tall, too close together and too pricey. But, after welcoming its first residents in the late 1990s, the controversial mega-project is entering its homestretch.
— The New York Times
The site includes buildings by architects like Richard Meier and the soon-too-be-completed Three Waterline Square by Rafael Viñoly. While Donald Trump is no longer the landlord, his name still appears on façades. View full entry
We have had so many fantastic applications over the past month we have extended the deadline for entries to June 26th, 2017 at 11:59 pm (BST). Make sure you apply this weekend if you haven't already. Portfolios take a lot of effort and can be a hard thing to master so we have gathered a... View full entry
Featuring a talk by Dr. Ann Rubbo on the artist and architect Marion Mahony Griffin, this screening of "A Girl is a Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright" at the Center for Architecture in New York on June 28th at 6 p.m. investigates Wright's history of working... View full entry
For those of you in the Los Angeles area, you are already aware of the Arroyo Seco Weekend music festival, taking place in Pasadena this weekend. The festival is a new event hosted by the same people that run Coachella, Desert Trip, and other amazing art/music/culture events. For this... View full entry
Docomomo US' Modernism in America Awards recently concluded another successful competition for 2017. Established to raise awareness of the importance in preserving America's postwar-era architecture, the awards competition is yet another reminder of the lasting... View full entry
Turning iconicity on its head, MVRDV have designed a striking building that purposefully refuses easy categorization. Depending on the angle from which it is viewed, the Baltyk Tower seems to assume different forms, a look that is achieved by a series of scenic terraces and a rippling... View full entry
Looking for a job? Archinect's Employer of the Day Weekly Round-Up can help start off your hunt amid the hundreds of active listings on our job board. If you've been following the feature on our Facebook, Employer of the Day is where we highlight active employers and showcase a gallery of... View full entry
The Fundació Mies van der Rohe has launched an app so that anyone with a mobile phone can find on a map, and visit, the nominated works of this year's European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture. The app suggests routes for visiting the sites and even allows it's users to propose new ones... View full entry
“It would be quite fun to be on Mars because you would have gravity that is about 37% of that of Earth, so you would be able to lift heavy things and bound around,” [Elon Musk] adds, predicting that journey times could eventually be cut to 30 days. — The Guardian
Aside from the money, specific technology, and solid timeframe, Elon Musk has figured out a way to get to Mars. The colonization plan, which is designed to place about 1 million people on the planet in 40-100 years using a yet-to-be constructed ship that would carry 100 passengers per trip, needs... View full entry