A new creative digital suite promising itself as the "Getty Images of premium spatial assets" has just been launched by San Francisco-based design technology startup Treasury Spatial Data in response to the growing influence of spatial computing in nearly every segment of the design industry... View full entry
Future city dwellers could beat the heat with clothes made of a new fabric that keeps them cool. The textile, made of a plastic material and silver nanowires, is designed to stay cool in urban settings by taking advantage of a principle known as radiative cooling – the natural process by which objects radiate heat into space. — New Scientist
The material was designed by a team of researchers at the University of Chicago led by Po-Chun Hsu, an Assistant Professor of Molecular Engineering. They designed it to block more than half of the radiation from the buildings and the ground. As reported by New Scientist, the material emits heat in... View full entry
A shimmering monolith seemed to appear in the Nevada desert this week, captivating the imaginations of hundreds of thousands and spurring news reports in the U.S. and abroad.
But the object may have been there for years.
According to Monolith Tracker, an online community that maintains a map of monolith appearances across the globe, the monolith spotted by the Metropolitan Police Department over the weekend was first identified in December 2020.
— Las Vegas Review-Journal
Whoever did place the eerily Kubrick-esque mirrored 77-inch-tall object did so deliberately at Gass Peak, one of the highest points in the massive Desert National Wildlife Refuge north of Las Vegas. The police removed it on Thursday without naming a culprit. (I think it resembles the original... View full entry
Techxplore.com has some interesting insights concerning flaws in the AI-led architectural image generation of historic Islamic architecture after a report about its inaccuracies surfaced in the journal Buildings this March. "[The] inability to obtain precise visual representations of... View full entry
The value of smart building deployments is projected to grow by 95 per cent to $14bn by 2026 globally. This growth, up from $7bn in 2024, will be driven by sustainability initiatives and the need for cost reductions in building management, said Juniper Research, which has published the report. — Smart Cities World
As reported by Smart Cities World, the study found that artificial intelligence-based building management solutions will be key to both achieving sustainability and energy goals and securing a return on investment in smart buildings. Through in-depth data analytics, AI is capable of identifying... View full entry
This month, Autodesk announced a record-setting $5 million donation to the College of Engineering and Architecture (CEA) at Howard University, a gift it says is meant to ensure the school's new state-of-the-art Design and Make lab will be operated with the most cutting-edge software and other... View full entry
Data centers, data centers, and more data centers (and sports facilities). Those are the industry's leading commercial projects, according to a CoStar.com analysis of the financial data included in the Architectural Record’s new accounting of the 300 top-performing firms globally. The agility of... View full entry
A team of researchers from Japan’s Tohoku University has developed a new mechanoluminescent construction material they say can be used in infrastructure to monitor daily use stress information in real-time in order to avert potential future catastrophes that may result from its aging stock of... View full entry
Engineers at Princeton University have developed a new cement composite, inspired by the material found within certain shells, that is 17 times more crack-resistant than standard cement and 19 times more able to stretch and deform without breaking. The research team was led by Reza Moini, an... View full entry
“There is a harm to having these 32-foot- tall futuristic towers, often with large video display terminals on them, in residential neighborhoods in historic districts” — The New York Times
The New York Times picks up on the growing “visual distraction” that the appearance of 5G towers has created, along with a debate about their existence vis-à-vis the historic street-level visual character of neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village. LinkNYC is planning to add up to 2,000 more... View full entry
Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill has announced a new partnership with the Swiss energy storage company Energy Vault Holdings that will produce a series of prototype designs for deployable structures and vertical energy storage units up to 1,000 meters (3,280 feet). Led by SOM Partners Adam... View full entry
This post is brought to you by TECH Perspectives New York The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is on the cusp of a technological revolution, driven by the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). On June 20, 2024, Microsol Resources will host the TECH Perspectives... View full entry
Overall, across Europe and the US, stuff is still built in a pretty manual fashion - not very different to the way it would have been built 100 years ago [...] Construction is a bit of a digital laggard compared with many other industries. It's been slow to adopt digital in the widest sense — BBC
Consultant Sam O’Gorman and other experts speak to the BBC about the confounding gap between digital technology and the analog process for delivering residential architecture. Interesting projects mentioned are the University of Maine Advanced Structures and Composites Center’s attempts to... View full entry
Niall Patrick Walsh wrote the final (of 26 features) chapter of Archinect In-Depth: Artificial Intelligence. Therein “New contributions on the topic from Autodesk's Mike Haley and Superusers author Randy Deutsch are joined by earlier reflections from throughout the series by Richard Saul Wurman... View full entry
This month at New York's Guggenheim Museum, artist Jenny Holzer is having her landmark 1989 light projection restaged in the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building’s rotunda. The installation celebrates her innovative text-based art alongside pieces from the early 70s to today that... View full entry