Designer and director Joshua A. Dawson has published his latest short film which strikes a cautionary note on the confluences of climate change, architecture, and capitalism. Titled Spa Sybarite, the three-minute-long film is set in a futuristic wellness spa in which users are offered treatments... View full entry
The Biden Administration announced a plan to help decarbonize the industrial manufacturing sector through a new $6 billion investment it says will eventually help lower emissions while signaling a newfound demand in the “marketplace for clean products.” As part of the government’s... View full entry
Ultimately, removing containers from the circular economy by retrofitting them into usable spaces could put a strain on the industry and result in the need to use more iron ore, causing even more harm to the environment.
Even as the tiny house movement continues to gain popularity and shipping containers are beloved both for their aesthetic appeal and supposed sustainability, it’s worth asking if they’re the right material for this purpose.
— Fast Company
While shipping containers do generally keep project costs down owing to labor hours saved, the fit-out of their interiors can add between $20,000 and $150,000 to each construction. Materials such as spray-on foam insulation used in making a container design habitable are rarely among the... View full entry
Copenhagen-based 3XN has been included in Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies 2023 list. The 50-company-strong list is described by Fast Company as the “definitive chronicle of the novel ideas transforming business and society,” ranging from ChatGPT creator OpenAI to the art collective... View full entry
Multidisciplinary designer Jozeph Forakis has unveiled the concept for a luxury superyacht, christened Pegasus, that he described as “invisible both in design and in her environmental impact.” When completed in 2030, the futuristic 288-foot ship will become the world’s first 3D-printed sea vessel that produces zero emissions and can cruise with near-infinite range. — Artnet News
Forakis says the inspiration behind the yacht is Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Blur Building, a pavilion that sat above Lake Neuchâtelin in the Swiss municipality of Yverdon-les-Bains during Swiss Expo 2002. The structure was concealed by a mass of fog that was formed by pumped lake water and... View full entry
In preparation for the Fall 2023 academic term, Brown University shares details of its new Deborah Berke Partners-designed Brook Street Residence Halls. Located at the southeastern edge of the University’s 143-acre historic urban campus, the 125,00-square-foot development has room for... View full entry
The material is essentially free, or at least locally available for a fraction of the cost of concrete...Mud construction contributes little to global warming. And concrete tends to be a gateway, once people can afford it, to another fossil-fuel-guzzling invention: air-conditioning. — National Geographic
Peter Schwartzstein explores the work of folks such as Clara Sawadogo, Francis Kéré and Salima Naji who are trying to rekindle an interest in materials and methods that have a long tradition in Africa and the Middle East. View full entry
The U.S. Pavilion at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, which opens in May, will feature an examination of worldwide plastic dependency through the work of five artists and designers who will deliver site-specific commissions as part of the overall exhibition curated by Lesley... View full entry
It is also the rare skyscraper designed with climate change in mind. It holds a self-contained, catastrophe-resilient power plant capable of generating as much energy as six football fields of solar panels. The building captures every drop of rain that falls on it, and reuses that runoff to heat or cool its 9,000 daily visitors.
But One Vanderbilt is also something else. It is already out of date.
— The New York Times
New York City’s recent ban on fossil fuels is making the green technology built into the merely two-year-old KPF-designed tower obsolete in terms of energy sources, the NYT's Ben Ryder Howe writes. Foster + Partners’ nearby 270 Park project is cited as an example of the forthcoming... View full entry
British firm Architecture for London has recently completed the extension and refurbishment of a traditional Edwardian terrace house into a modern, energy-efficient home. Photo: Lorenzo Zandri and Christian Brailey, courtesy of Architecture for London Called Low Energy House, the residence... View full entry
A new metric measuring the amount of carbon reduced in reuse projects is changing the way practitioners of the built environment can quantify the success of retrofit projects of all types and sizes. Architecture 2030’s new CARE (Carbon Avoided Retrofit Estimator) Tool is a way of providing... View full entry
A Swiss research team from Empa's Building Energy Materials and Components Lab explores the potential for using raw, plant-based materials as insulation for buildings. Led by scientist Dr. Jannis Wernery and researchers from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, the project is... View full entry
Barcelona’s IAAC has collaborated with Italian 3D printing company WASP on the creation of a 3D printed earthen wall. The element was printed from a mixture of clay and rice fibers, with interlocking timber beams providing support for stair and floor structures. The 15.7-inch-thick wall was... View full entry
Researchers from the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have published details of a new material that can auto-regulate its environment by changing its infrared colors and liquid-solid state. In the future, the ultra-thin material film could be added to a... View full entry
The center’s main objectives are to research, develop and test novel building-integrated systems for on-site energy generation, air cleaning, water purification and food growing [...] the CEA is a 'consortium that unites researchers in the R&D of novel building research,' bringing together the resources of multiple departments on campus. — Yale Daily News
The four-year-old Center for Architecture and Ecosystems (CEA) was founded as a collaboration between Yale School of Architecture, the School of Environment, and four other colleges. The Center has thus far conducted prototyping projects in Guatemala and South Africa... View full entry
