In just four years, the Silicon Valley start-up Katerra has grown from a sizable construction firm to one of the industry's biggest disrupters. Now, with support from one of the tech industry's biggest investors, the California-based construction company has announced plans for another investment... View full entry
The Arts District in downtown Los Angeles is filled with several must-see locations. Now home to one of the world's first fully immersive entertainment art park, Wisdome LA allows for visitors to enter into unforgettable audio and visual experience. The park features five fully immersive domes ... View full entry
Captivating audiences with their brief presentation at last year's 2018 E3 Expo, the game's development team Shedworks featured a strikingly captivating trailer that showed a world filled with beautiful desert landscapes, eye-catching color palettes, and of course beautiful renditions of towering... View full entry
What is the role of curation in today’s architecture & design disciplinary framework? The guest curator program aims to produce a conversation through making & curating that begins to analyze traditional modes and models of curating architecture & design. The Guest Curator Program... View full entry
To train the model, he identified known locations of tree canopy using lidar data and NAIP imagery over California. Using that as ground truth, the model was trained to classify which pixels contain trees in the corresponding satellite images. The result is a machine-learning model that has learned to identify trees just using four-band high-resolution (~1 meter) satellite or aerial imagery—no lidar required! — Medium
Former New York Times cartographer Tim Wallace describes how his current firm, Santa Fe-based Descartes Labs, has built a machine learning model to identify tree canopy from satellite imagery thus making accurate mapping of trees and urban forests far more accessible to cities worldwide. San... View full entry
Researchers at Columbia University have invented a digital "wood" using 3D-printing technology to replicate the material's external and internal structure. They believe the technique could be applied to other anisotropic materials, which are especially difficult to replicate due to their... View full entry
Due to an Amazon-fueled apartment construction boom over the last decade, Seattle has been an epicenter of [a] new school of structural simulacra. But Seattle is not alone. Nearly every city, from Charlotte to Minneapolis, has seen a proliferation of homogenous apartments as construction has increased again in the wake of the financial recession. — Curbed LA
Developer Modern, Plonkitecture, Contemporary Contempt, Blandmarks... These are just a few of the names offered for the ubiquitous apartment building design that has swept the nation in the last few decades. They differ marginally across the United States, for they all equally strive for the... View full entry
![Condensed potato peels. Courtesy Chip[s] Board](https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/7c/7c499d6f497fc454f676598e99077233.jpeg?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&enlarge=true&w=514 "Condensed potato peels. Courtesy Chip[s] Board")
London-based designers Rowan Minkley and Robert Nicoll along with research scientist Greg Cooper have developed a biodegradable alternative to resin-based building materials such as low- and medium-density fiberboard. Called Chip[s] Board, the new material is made from non-food-grade industrial potato waste and is free of toxic chemicals and formaldehyde. — Architect Magazine
Potatoes are truly the most versatile vegetable. Chips, hash browns and vodka are just a few of its miracles, but it has also recently been added to the list of innovative building materials. London-based designers Rowan Minkley and Robert Nicoll, along with research scientist Greg Cooper, have... View full entry
December may be the end of 2018, but that did not slow down the news and updates from the architecture world. December brought some architectural street cred from Congress, some thoughts on death and updates on post-modernism's mid-life crisis. The US Capitol Building↑ Architecture will be... View full entry
Astonishingly, the feel of the original emerged largely intact. [Darren] Walker, an aficionado of mid-century design with an eye for detail, spent serious money to salvage whatever was salvageable. Hanging brass lighting fixtures, door handles, granite-topped credenzas (some with embedded hot plates), Platner tables and chairs, black walnut bookshelves, bronze trim — 1,500 items in all — were given back their mid-century gleam. The Ford Foundation Building has become a museum of itself. — New York Magazine
After many years of detailed renovation, the Ford Foundation has been successfully renovated and is ready to house 2,000 occupants. According to New York Magazine, "[the Ford Foundation] has withdrawn into a fraction of its previous space, halving the size of the president’s once imperial, now... View full entry
The core issue centers around the idea that creatives will be replaced by super-intelligent robots to design buildings, create art, or design vehicles.
Yet even as AI evolves across other design-related industries, AI could prove to do more good than bad, tackling the mundane so that you can augment your creative process.
— Interesting Engineering
Artificial Intelligence has already changed the nature of industries like manufacturing and cybersecurity. However, where does architecture fit into this mix? A harrowing concern is super intelligent robots may replace the creative practice and take over the design process that architects and... View full entry
For years, suburbia has offered these companies acres of disposable, cheap, anonymous office parks: mostly one- or two-story concrete structures surrounded by loads of surface parking. These sites minimized costs, maximized security and allowed companies to scale up, contract or split into different units quickly — at the same time they promoted sprawl and traffic jams and transformed once-quaint bedroom communities south of San Francisco into phenomenally expensive places to live. — The New York Times
Even though Amazon's search for its new headquarters' locations has ended all the talks and negotiations about the company's potential impact on the cities it will settle in — New York and Crystal City, Virginia—have only begun. In ways, the choice comes as no surprise as tech platforms... View full entry
Architecture, creativity, and community. These are the themes that best summarize Apple retail in 2018. Over the past year, Apple has worked in new ways to expand its global and local reach. The company has challenged the traditional definition of brick-and-mortar stores during an uncertain time for many retailers. — 9to5mac
The multi-billion dollar company made moves this year with its heavy presence of retail stores through out the globe. From their new and newly remodeled stores every flagship highlights elements of accessibility, natural light, and energy efficient initiatives present. This year alone, nine brand... View full entry
Congratulations, you've made it all the way to the September roundup!Let's get started—so, so much happening that month on Archinect: ARCHITECTURE CULTURE ↑ Want to Join Studio Gang? Design Principals Share How Top Job Applicants Made a Strong First Impression As part of our popular "How To... View full entry
Recent computational tools that model the simulation of traffic, acoustics and heat conservation, among others, are allowing a more quantitative objective evaluation of forms.
The metrics could be expanded to include terrain maps, sun paths, existing trees and other environmental input, allowing the buildings to be highly adaptive to their context. The physics simulation could force certain boundary shape constraints.
— Joel Simon
Evolving Floorplans is an experimental research project created by a New York-based programmer, Joel Simon. When approaching floorplan design solely through the angle of optimization, a genetic algorithm arranges the rooms and the flow of people in a manner that minimizes things like walking time... View full entry
