eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of the 2012 Skyscraper Competition. The annual contest—now in its sixth year—honors visionary ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the use of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, along with studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution. — bustler.net

The Self-Assembly Line is a large-scale version of a self-assembly virus capsid, demonstrated as an interactive and performative structure. A discrete set of modules are activated by stochastic rotation from a larger container/structure that forces the interaction between units. By changing the external conditions, the geometry of the unit, the attraction of the units and the number of units supplied, the desired global configuration can be programmed. — http://sjet.us

The way to find the sort of transcendence Coulter is looking for is to achieve "flow" [...]. Simplistically, flow is when someone becomes one with an experience, whether that be contained in a game or a building.

This type of flow is present in "Snake the Planet!", which merges interaction design and architecture. — huffingtonpost.com

Gehry Technologies serves architects, engineers, builders and others with their design software and services, including 3D modeling and building information management. IDG News Service quizzed Chief Technology Officer Dennis Shelden on his priorities, challenges and insights. — pcworld.com

In theory the mechanism is really quite simple:

1. A sensor detects the rumblings of an earthquake.

2. Within .5 to 1 second an air tank pushes air in-between an artificial foundation and the actual structure of the home, lifting it as high as 3cm off the ground.

3. While the earth below violently shakes, the levitating home quietly and patiently waits, returning back to the ground once the tectonic plates have settled. — spoon-tamago.com

The glasses will use the same Android software that powers Android smartphones and tablets... equipped with GPS and motion sensors. They will also contain a camera and audio inputs and outputs.

Through the built-in camera on the glasses, Google will be able to stream images to its rack computers and return augmented reality information to the person wearing them. For instance, a person looking at a landmark could see detailed historical information and comments about it left by friends. — nytimes.com

Tina Uznanski, a student in the interior design program at the Pratt Institute, has recently been announced as winner of the 2012 Gensler Brinkmann Scholarship competition. Along with this award, Tina will receive an academic scholarship and a summer 2012 internship with Gensler’s London office. — bustler.net

Openarch is a real prototype of a smart home. The first home designed from scratch to incorporate a digital layer connecting the house and its elements to the Internet. Its inhabitants lead a new digital and connected life. It is flexible and thanks to its ability to transform, it can adapt to any condition that the user requires. — openarch.cc

The Buckminster Fuller Institute has published 103 entries to this year's Buckminster Fuller Challenge in the IDEA INDEX— BFI's ever growing repository of whole systems solutions to the world's most pressing problems. Entries were submitted from all parts of the world— the US, the UK, India, China, the Sahel, the Arctic, South Africa, Rwanda, Barbados, Haiti, and Afghanistan, among others. — bustler.net

Developed by Jaewoo Chung at MIT's Media Lab, Guiding Light consists of a wearable badge with magnetic sensors and a software app that makes use of a projector built into many Samsung smartphones to cast arrows onto the ground in front of you as you walk.

The system relies on a map of the building based on fluctuations in its magnetic field, created by the presence of steel in the walls, floor and ceiling. In tests, Guiding Light was able to determine a user's position to within a metre. — newscientist.com

The project of Lacaton-Vassal-Druot is a brilliant contemporary example of working within built-up heritage, solving with an exceptional industrial and even adaptable solution the problem which many European cities face. — Domus Magazine

...will re-examine the built environment of the arid and semi-arid west as a vast field of opportunities for design innovation at a range of scales, from building systems to infrastructure and landscape spaces. The conference will present and debate a portfolio of design strategies generated in response to the challenges set forth in ALI's Drylands Design Initiative... — Arid Lands Institute

Yu is a soft-spoken engineer with great power: He sets the timing for all of L.A.’s stoplights. His department has to take it all in: bikes, trains, big events and, of course, lots and lots of cars. Los Angeles has one of the nation’s worst reputations for automobile congestion, but that’s a simplistic way of looking at things. Its freeways are still the most congested in the nation, but L.A. has 36 times as many miles of surface streets as it does freeways. — forbes.com

....breakthrough ideas still come from individuals, not committees. “There is nothing democratic about innovation." — New York Times

David Galbraith has embarked on a fascinating journey, exploring the notion that the flow of people and their interactions inside buildings, is similar in design to the flow of data and user interaction of Web apps.

Could best practices in Web app design be applied to architectural design? — zdnet.com