Technologies, such as building information modeling and integrated-product delivery, have enabled architecture firms to design better buildings and deliver them more quickly and more efficiently. Yet in today's fiercely competitive global marketplace, efficiency and speed alone are not enough to guarantee market viability. The real differentiator is design—as an engine of innovation and a productive force for creating economic value. — Michael Speaks, archrecord.construction.com
Architect, engineer, and director of the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carlo Ratti will focus on (you guessed it) the Senseable City—merging the digital and the physical realms by understanding how we sense and act on our built environment, and how the latter then responds to us. — blog.bmwguggenheimlab.org
...the city should reverse its approach, zoning neighborhoods like Midtown, Lower Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by thinking first about the shape of public space instead of private development. — New York Times
Finally, toasteroven has recently "got word from a couple local arch programs that enrollment has dropped this past year" and asks if anyone else has heard the same? To which jordans99 replies "Based on what I've heard, I expect that applications will be stagnant if not decrease.
In the latest installment of Archinect’s Contours feature EDD DE 1101 I, Guy Horton cops a David Wallace and his writing takes a biographically satiric turn from recent Contours. "Hello! Author here. Just interjecting at the onset of this article to make it clear that, yes, I am... View full entry
Listing some 4.5 meters (15 feet) from the perpendicular, the disused structure is sliding ever closer to collapse. Bad Frankenhausen has repeatedly put forward ambitious and expensive plans, but none could guarantee success, and some could even have damaged the building. — Der Spiegel
For years, the spa town of Bad Frankenhausen, in the eastern state of Thuringia, has fought to save the dangerously tilting tower. But after the state this week rejected the town's latest proposal to stabilize the landmark, citing concerns over the long-term viability of the plan, there is no... View full entry
For many Americans who bought more home than they could really afford in the giddy days before the crash, the big-house dream has become a nightmare in the ashes of foreclosure and regret.
So after all that, how does 84 square feet sound?
— New York Times
Thomas Unterseher is on a mission to make South Dakota's small towns more attractive, and he's starting in the place he knows best: his hometown of Mobridge.
Like many small towns in the state, Mobridge has been on the decline for decades and is struggling to maintain its population. [...]
But since there's little money in the city budget to pay architects or designers to develop a long-term plan to pitch to residents, Unterseher is turning to an untapped resource: architecture students.
— businessweek.com
Once again this December 1st the world's attention turns to the global issue of HIV/AIDS. Typically media coverage focuses on the role of education and redoubling efforts to prevent transmission among at-risk groups. However one aspect of the disease that has received less attention is the extent to which housing conditions affect both the risk of infection and the wellbeing of people living with HIV/AIDS. — globalurbanist.com
It is not uncommon today for an architect to give a public lecture about a building and gloss over the parameters of its program or the specific needs of its users, speaking instead mostly about the building's site — its measure, tendencies, desires, structure, mythologies, meaning — as if the problem of architectural design was primarily one of site response. — Design Observer
Is there such thing as a building that is "sensitive" to landscape, or are they all various forms of aggression? View full entry
Oftentimes, United States' military men and women carry the physical and emotional wounds of their service home with them, "find[ing] workarounds to cope with their surroundings based on individual capabilities and preferences." Today, IDEO and Michael Graves Associates see their work come alive as the U.S. Army Fort Belvoir and Clark Realty Capital unveil a new model for building accessible homes on military installations: the Wounded Warrior home. — core77.com
If you're in Miami Beach later this week to attend Art | Basel | Miami Beach, don't miss this exciting event: Volume 29, ‘The Urban Conspiracy’ launches on Friday, December 2, with a special event at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Join Printed Matter, Jeffrey Inaba, and guests to... View full entry
What is the function of gossip in architecture? Let’s face it, architects don’t openly criticize or debate each others work in public; they prefer to gossip within their chosen networks, aiding social bonding through subtle passive aggression. Gossip has always been around in... View full entry
Structural issues have emerged at another school being constructed by the Neenan Co., a major builder of rural Colorado schools that already has admitted making mistakes that closed an $18.9 million school in Meeker. — Denver Post
The winners of the Architect's Eye Awards, which celebrates architects' passion for photograph, were announced on Tuesday, November 22, during a ceremony hosted by the competition organizers, International Art Consultants, at their gallery in London, UK. — bustler.net
In London's case the practicality of the architecture is a reaction to the economic rather than the political excesses of the recent past. The 2012 Games are shaping up, in fact, as one of the clearest signs yet that the architectural boom years of the last decade or so in the West have definitively ended. — latimes.com