A multidisciplinary team of researchers from University of Oregon, Stanford and Dartmouth have co-developed a new digital archive. The collection contains nearly 4,000 drawings, prints, paintings and photographs of historic Rome from the 16th to 20th centuries that are now available online to... View full entry
Last week, we covered the newly released designs for a landmark sculpture that would be built at Flint Castle in Wales. The sculpture, designed by George King Architects, was to be a cantilevered bridge structure made of weathering steel and engraved with words chosen from the local community. At... View full entry
The Sound and Matter in Design exhibition at the Design Museum Holon in Israel explores the relationship between sound and design, as well as how sound influences our everyday environments and experiences. From site-specific installations to dozens of historic objects on... View full entry
Built in 1896 for piano dealers M. Steinert & Sons, Steinert Hall is a magnificent six-story limestone and brick building tucked 40 feet below the street level. Appropriately nicknamed “The Little Gem”, it was designed by Winsell&Weterell and incorporated a Beaux Arts-style facade... View full entry
OPEN Architecture's “Dialogue by the Sea” recently won a top accolade in the German Design Council's honorable Iconic Awards 2017. Located on a quiet beach along the coast of Bohai Bay in China, the project comprises two separate but related... View full entry
This is a two-part series on housing policy in Vienna and how it could be a model for progressive housing policy in Seattle, where I live, or other American cities struggling with affordable housing. The first part is an overview of financing and subsidies. Part two, coming tomorrow, looks in detail at how zoning and development supports housing affordability. — cityobservatory.org
Mike Eliason, passivhaus designer with Seattle-based Patano Studio, penned an insightful two-part commentary for City Observatory, looking at issues of financing, zoning, affordability, sustainability, and quality of life in a side-by-side comparison of Vienna and Seattle. View full entry
PlansMatter is a new travel website that offers vacation rentals for design-minded individuals. The accommodations are hand-picked by two architects, Scott Muellner and Connie Lindor, the founders of the website. The site is not just another Airbnb—listings for each property point to various... View full entry
David Capener penned an entry in the Practice Diaries series. It is in part, a reaction to deadly Grenfell Tower blaze, wherein he argues What we do as architects is not neutral: it is political. ubu loca summed up the mood of many I suspect "Thank you David. Architects of conscious must speak up... View full entry
Those biophysical forces are like universal zoning rules for the biofilm cities: they govern how the inhabitants obtain food and building materials, how they can move and how they interact with one another. Just as urban planners use their knowledge of civil engineering principles and regulations to build better cities for people, microbiologists and bioengineers can use these rules to make objects more or less hospitable to the billions of cells that live in and around us. — Quanta Magazine
Biofilms are, essentially, omnipresent clusters of bacteria that foul everything from sewer lines to our teeth—99.9 percent of the simple cells called prokaryotes default to living in those close quarters among millions of their compatriots. Extracelluar matrix, a sticky combination of... View full entry
Pseudo-public spaces – large squares, parks and thoroughfares that appear to be public but are actually owned and controlled by developers and their private backers – are on the rise in London and many other British cities, as local authorities argue they cannot afford to create or maintain such spaces themselves. — The Guardian
The abundance of pseudo-public spaces, namely outdoor, open and publicly accessible locations owned and maintained by private companies in London is alarming. To this day it's largely unclear what regulations people passing through privately-owned 'public' land are subject to, and where members... View full entry
Xiang Guan, a recent graduate of Central Saint Martin's Industrial Design program, made a collection of furniture that can only function in the presence of its users—featuring a desk and chair that can't stand without support, and a lamp that only turns on when worn as a hat, his work... View full entry
It’s also striking that for all its fame Silicon Valley makes little impression on the visual consciousness of the world – there’s not a strong sense of what it actually looks like. Until now it has lacked landmarks. But that much power and that much money will not always be happy to be unobtrusive. We are only just beginning to see the ways in which it can change the landscape of cities. — The Guardian
Architecture critic Rowan Moore analyzes how tech giants Apple, Google, and Facebook are appointing world-famous architecture firms to design their increasingly extravagant office campuses, as symbols of their global power. “For the tech giants are now in the same position as great powers in the... View full entry
The Roomba robotic vacuum has been whizzing across floors for years, but its future may lie more in collecting data than dirt.
That data is of the spatial variety: the dimensions of a room as well as distances between sofas, tables, lamps and other home furnishings. To a tech industry eager to push “smart” homes controlled by a variety of Internet-enabled devices, that space is the next frontier.
— Venture Beat
Most of the available on the market 'smart home' devices, including lighting, thermostats and security cameras are still quite primitive when it comes to understanding their physical environment. All robovacs use short-range infrared or laser sensors to detect and avoid obstacles, but iRobot in... View full entry
When built, Union Station was called the "Last of the Great Railway Stations." Designed by father and son team John and Donald B. Parkinson, the landmark opened in 1939 at a time when railway service was already beginning to wane. Combining Art Deco, Spanish Colonial, and Mission Revival styles... View full entry
Architectural platform Archtalent and Budapest's Sziget Festival teamed up to establish the “Structures of Freedom” competition. Architects younger than 40 were invited to submit their best proposals for a temporary pavilion for the festival, focusing on... View full entry
