What if we could weaponize air conditioning units to help pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere instead? According to a new paper in Nature Communications, it’s feasible.
Using technology currently in development, AC units in skyscrapers and even your home could get turned into machines that not only capture CO2, but transform the stuff into a fuel for powering vehicles that are difficult to electrify, like cargo ships.
— CityLab
“Air conditioning,” Eva Horn once wrote, “is one of the oldest dreams of mankind. It means creating a world without heat or cold, rain or snow, without suffocating humidity or dusty winds.” However, when considering the challenges facing the current era, air conditioning yields a... View full entry
On top of being known as a man of architecture and a man of letters, Le Corbusier can now also be known as a man of photography. View of Charles IV Bridge, toward castle, Prague, May 1911. Photo by Le Corbusier.LC Foto, a book released by Lars Müller Publishers, is an archive of the architect's... View full entry
Yves Béhar, the founder of the San Francisco-based design firm fuseproject, has teamed up with building startup ICON and housing charity New Story to bring about what they describe as "the world's first 3D-printed community." Last year, ICON and New Story went to SXSW 2018 and announced the... View full entry
Last year, residents of Atlantic Plaza Towers, a rent-stabilized apartment building in Brooklyn, found out that their landlord was planning to replace the key fob entry system with facial recognition technology. [...]
But some residents were immediately alarmed by the prospect: They felt the landlord’s promise of added security was murky at best, and didn’t outweigh their concerns about having to surrender sensitive biometric information to enter their own homes.
— CityLab
"Housing complexes of low-income residents may be one early testing ground for residential applications of facial recognition technology," writes Tanvi Misra for CityLab. "But they’re not the only ones. Amazon’s doorbell company, Ring, is coming out with a video doorbell that incorporates... View full entry
Joseph Choma, founder of Design Topology Lab and an architecture professor at Clemson University, is pioneering work into the field of foldable structures and materials. For the past few years, Choma has been focused on developing a fabrication technique that allows fiberglass to be folded by... View full entry
A colourful mural of a 35m-tall tree in Mexico City is one of three environmentally friendly new public works made using Airlite paint, which purifies polluted air in a process similar to photosynthesis.
[...] the mural aims to increase oxygen levels in one of the western hemisphere’s most polluted cities, where ozone concentration levels remain high despite government regulations on fuel and cars.
— The Art Newspaper
Image courtesy of Boa Mistura."Airlite paint chemically reacts with pollutants in the air, turning them into inert compounds," reports The Art Newspaper. "The roughly 1,000 sq. m mural should neutralise the same amount of pollution created by around 60,000 vehicles a year."The artists responsible... View full entry
Following World War I, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000) was tasked with the design of standard kitchens for a new housing project by city planner and architect Ernst May. The Great War left rubble and a desperate housing shortage in its wake, but it also opened the way for new ideas and new designs. — Citylab
Prior to World War II, the only homes to have complete kitchen spaces also typically had servants to make use of them, while apartments and tenement housing rarely had space for a room purely dedicated to cooking. The kitchen, in other words, was a luxury before a plan to make it more standard and... View full entry
The buildings, which resemble glass jars, preserve an image of Amazon’s supposed benevolence as a company and an image of neoliberal capital as growth, as opposed to absence and austerity... Amazon’s decision to abandon plans for its New York–based HQ2 still fresh in everyone’s mind, it’s hard to see The Spheres as anything but an oversized swear jar brimming with half-hearted promises and watery intensions. — Los Angeles Review of Books
Though the greenhouse is one of the oldest building types, its conflation with the office building types in the 20th century was still regarded as a wondrous spectacle. Kevin Roche's Ford Foundation building, for example, was a marvelous example of the combination of corporate modernism and... View full entry
Artificial Intelligence, as a discipline, has already been permeating countless fields, bringing means and methods to previously unresolved challenges, across industries. The advent of AI in Architecture is still in its early days but offers promising results. More than a mere opportunity, such potential represents for us a major step ahead, about to reshape the architectural discipline. — Towards Data Science
Stanislas Chaillou, a Master's candidate in Architecture and Fulbright fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, believes that artificial intelligence can offer in-depth analysis and alternative strategies to the design of floor plans. Orientation Diagrams, by Stanislas ChaillouChaillou... View full entry
This post is brought to you by ONE Lab Study Program ONE Lab’s study program is a four-week long architecture and urban design studio focused on coding, sustainable design and digital fabrication. ONE Lab is a non-accredited, industry affiliated teaching and research collective based in the... View full entry
If our recently published article featuring a computer mouse/Eames chair mashup didn't provoke you, this one might just do the trick. With his series of heavy utility trucks outfitted in Gothic ornament, artist Wim Delvoye conceived of a mashup of two elements nearly a full millennium apart... View full entry
As paying a tribute to the legendary designers, the design addresses the ergonomics and style of a computer mouse from the perspective of designing furniture. — Shane Chen Design
Shane Chen, a Brooklyn-based industrial designer, took two classic designs (well, one classic and one classically ubiquitous) and mashed them up into this compelling concept for a computer mouse. View full entry
It is often said that whenever one needs to assess a task at hand, the proper step is to look as far back as one can see. Airport Runways. Photo by Alex MacleanThis is the philosophy among certain aerial photographers, whose task has been making sense of the build environment after the... View full entry
The ai-art gold rush began in earnest last October, when the New York auction house Christie’s sold Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, an algorithm-generated print in the style of 19th-century European portraiture, for $432,500.
Bystanders in and out of the art world were shocked. The print had never been shown in galleries or exhibitions before coming to market at auction, a channel usually reserved for established work.
— The Atlantic
With the attention that AI has garnered in the last few years, it was only a matter of time before the capital behind art would seep its way onto the field. With contemporary art forever changed after the 1973 Scull auction, we may now find ourselves at the next nexus of the art world and its mean... View full entry
We have profiled many social media profiles on Archinect, but this may be the first haunted account we have come across. Cursed Architecture (@CursedArchitect) has showcased "The best of the worst in questionable design decisions, horrible DIY, and existential terror" through its twitter page... View full entry
