The intent is to save energy by controlling the temperature of an individual person, rather than an entire building, a goal that anyone who's ever turned on a personal space heater in a frigid office building in July can get behind. The team just won $10,000 from MIT's Making And Designing Materials Engineering Competition, which the inventors will use to improve the prototype and the algorithms that automate the pulses. — popsci.com
[Genie is] a platform with online-based planning applications to help architects and engineers in the design process, especially for skyscrapers and large buildings. The platform includes planning tools of expert architects and engineers and advance analytics and simulation tools. Genie standardizes and automates the design and construction processes with unlimited design options, enabling an architect to preserve the building's uniqueness in the urban environment. — Globes
Apple's proposed new spaceship-shaped headquarters got a super-charged blast-off Tuesday night when the Cupertino City Council voted unanimously to approve the 2.8-million-square-foot behemoth beside Interstate 280, fulfilling a dream of co-founder Steve Jobs, hatching an iconic landmark for Silicon Valley, and promising more congestion in an already traffic-challenged region for decades to come. — mercurynews.com
Plopped down on a former Marine Corp air station in the geographic middle of Orange County, nineteen solar-powered model homes line the runway to be judged in the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2013 Solar Decathlon. For its first year held away from the National Mall in Washington D.C., the Solar... View full entry
Amelia Taylor-Hochberg, Editorial Manager for Archinect, traveled to Aedes Network Campus Berlin as a fly-on-the-wall, and reported back with 7 Lessons from the 3rd International Architectural Education Summit. These were; 1) The relevancy of the “Architect” is fleeting, 2) Kids... View full entry
"The concept of the building,'' said Oppenheimer, "is collaboration and fluidity. It'll provide a very open-spaced system, so that at one point in the day you may be in offices on one side of the circle and find yourself on the other side later that day.'' — mercurynews.com
When Doris Sung was growing up she had several ideas about how architecture was supposed to be. From what she knew it was static, immovable, and didn't allow much room for experimentation and creativity. Fast-forward several years later, and Sung is now wildly experimenting with building mediums and metals, computer software, and nature itself to create interactive designs that respond to environmental stimuli, essentially coming to life. — The Creators Project
This sponsored post is brought to you by OpenAsset: OpenAsset has enabled Foster + Partners to create a world class, easy to use architectural image library. Image resources used in projects and for reference are now available to all staff at the click of a mouse, no matter where in world they... View full entry
I’m going to tell you exactly how I made this map. I hope that people with little or no experience making maps will be able to use this as a guide to getting started on a map of their own hometown. And I also hope expert mapmakers will chime in to tell us how we can improve our maps. — wired.com
My bewilderment quickly yields to a growing sense of dread. How is it that even in the heart of Silicon Valley it’s completely acceptable for smart technology to be buggy, erratic, or totally dysfunctional? ... We are weaving these technologies into our homes, our communities, even our very bodies — but even experts have become disturbingly complacent about their shortcomings. The rest of us rarely question them at all. — Places Journal
Electric car sharing in Paris, dynamic road pricing in Singapore, nationwide smart meters in the UK. “The technology industry is asking us to rebuild the world around its vision of efficient, safe, convenient living,” writes Anthony M. Townsend in an excerpt on Places from his... View full entry
Known as M-Blocks, the robots are cubes with no external moving parts. Nonetheless, they’re able to climb over and around one another, leap through the air, roll across the ground, and even move while suspended upside down from metallic surfaces [...]
As with any modular-robot system, the hope is that the modules can be miniaturized: the ultimate aim of most such research is hordes of swarming microbots that can self-assemble, like the “liquid steel” androids in the movie “Terminator II.”
— MIT News
MIT, you've done it again. And again. A team at CSAIL, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has developed M-Blocks -- robotic cubes that can self-assemble into practically any configuration, through a system of carefully aligned magnets and flywheels. Even at their... View full entry
The Planning Commission in Cupertino, where Apple has its current headquarters, endorsed the project this week. It now goes to the City Council, which is expected to vote on it on Oct. 15. — sfgate.com
As news spreads that Apple's new Cupertino headquarters moves closer to approval, Foster + Partners pushes forward with recruiting architects for the high-profile California project. See their current job openings here. View full entry
Look outside the world-class offices and luxury homes, and little works – not the sanitation, the power supply, or even the public transport. Every company is like a self-contained island. They have backups for everything – water, electricity and food — BBC Future
Shilpa Kannan visited Gurgaon, the centre of India’s outsourcing and IT services goldrush, to explore the effects of the economic boom. However, despite the economic growth, the city is unplanned and therefore faces numerous challenges when it comes to meeting the basic needs of it's... View full entry
The $120 million, 630,000-square-foot complex, called Anton Menlo, is a partnership between Facebook and Northern California residential real estate developer St. Anton Partners. Details of the financial arrangement, including Facebook's investment, were not disclosed.
Designed by Southern California KTGY Group, it will have a mix of studios and one, two and three-bedroom apartments. As part of Facebook's agreement with the city, 15 below-market-rate units are set aside for low-income tenants.
— sfgate.com
After 16 months of computational and fabrication research into building system technology, a team of students known as thinkTANK created "The Life Aquatech" for their thesis project at the AA Design Research Laboratory (AADRL). Prioritizing human comfort in terms of temperature, the structure has... View full entry
