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Dutch social renters wanting to move to a new apartment can now use an app to swap houses with other renters. One precondition, both renters need to ‘like’ each other’s apartment to get a match. [...]
Young renters with small apartments may swap with older residents who live in bigger apartments. In this way, the issue of scheefwonen (skew living — when people live in apartments that do not match their needs and desires) within the Dutch rental sector could be solved.
— Pop-Up City
"After two apartments are matched, the users are introduced to each other, after which they have to find out if their rental agreements are compatible enough for the renters to swap house." View full entry
This post is brought to you by Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). New technologies come and go at a rate never seen before. Their capacity for substantially affecting a field and a discipline like architecture, long thought to be excessively slow and even conservative at... View full entry
New virtual reality tours are giving Muscovites the chance to see the Russian capital as the socialist utopia envisioned by the city’s Soviet architects.
The new project, The Moscow That Never Was, lets visitors glimpse shelved Soviet landmarks as they should have appeared on Moscow’s streets using VR goggles.
— Calvert Journal
The 2-hour virtual/augmented reality tours through central Moscow feature utopian architectural projects that never quite saw the light of day, including the infamous Palace of the Soviets (imagined as the world's tallest building, crowned with a 300-ft Lenin statue), an alternate Lenin... View full entry
In San Francisco, autonomous crime-fighting robots that are used to patrol parking lots, sports arenas, and tech company campuses are now being deployed to keep away homeless people. [...]
Last week, the City of San Francisco ordered the SF SPCA to keep its robot off the streets or be fined up to $1,000 per day for operating on sidewalks without a permit [...]
— Business Insider
When you're in Silicon Valley, everything looks like a tech solution. The same logic has been increasingly applied to San Francisco's overwhelming homelessness crisis where a growing legion of security robots — armed with lasers, sensors, cameras, and GPS — have been autonomously patrolling... View full entry
This post is brought to you by Autodesk Pave the way to project success The AEC industry is changing. Technology is opening up new opportunities, but for a lot of firms, increased productivity seems just out of reach.But when you start to upgrade to a smarter way of working, you can easily break... View full entry
Within 40 hours of the project being announced in 2016, over 100,000 people had applied for citizenship on Asgardia's website. After three weeks, Asgardia had 500,000 applicants. — CNN
On November 12, a hard drive 'nanosat' containing the information of 18,000 newly naturalized citizens of Asgardia took off for its two-day flight to the international space station. The nanosat — it is roughly the size of a loaf of bread — contains 0.5 TB of data such as family photographs... View full entry
This post is brought to you by Autodesk Reality Capture Unless you’re designing a new building that’s slated for construction in the middle of a flat and empty landscape, context matters. Whether it’s a renovation, an addition, or new construction, the as-is geometry of adjacent buildings... View full entry
Photovoltaic (PV) concrete cladding is set to outperform rooftop solar, according to LafargeHolcim, which has developed a façade system with partner Heliatek.
The team said that the photovoltaic energy-generating concrete facade has the capability to double the energy generation traditionally achieved by roof-based solar systems.
— The Construction Index
"A prototype of this new photovoltaic facade system will be presented at Batimat, the French construction fair in November, and a pilot project is planned in 2018," LafargeHolcim writes in a recent announcement. View full entry
This post is brought to you by Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Tom Wiscombe, Chair of the Undergraduate Program at SCI-Arc, hosts a series of B.Arch Salons—informal Friday gatherings held at Cafe Americano across the street from the school. A recent conversation was... View full entry
Two entrepreneurs have figured out how to heat their homes for free: bitcoin mining.
Bitcoin transactions require a lot of processing power, which creates a lot of heat. So Ilya Frolov and Dmitry Tolmachyov built a wooden cottage in the Russian Siberian town of Irkutsk, and they’re heating it with two bitcoin mines. The men pocket about $430 a month from bitcoin transactions, while keeping the 20 square meter space warm.
— Quartz
It’s 2027 (or 2037) and the age of the self-driving car. City-dwellers have traded in their car keys for ride hails. Street parking has been replaced by wider sidewalks and bike lanes, while developers are busy converting garages into much-needed housing.
That’s one vision of how self-driving cars will affect U.S. real estate, laid out in a report by MIT’s Center for Real Estate. But it’s not the only one.
— bloomberg.com
"Even as reclaimed parking spaces fuel a downtown building boom," Bloomberg reports, "autonomous vehicles will encourage builders to push deeper into the exurban fringe, confident that homebuyers will tolerate longer commutes now that they don’t have to drive, according to the report [...]."... View full entry
Apple's latest mobile operating system, iOS 11, just released today. One of the biggest updates that should get the attention of architects is ARKit, Apple's new augmented reality framework. ARKit provides the opportunity to for Apple and 3rd party developers to create AR experiences anew, or to... View full entry
Hyperloop One just announced the winners of its global challenge, unveiling ten teams from five countries with their proposals of the strongest routes for future Hyperloop connections. As a next step, the company plans to work with the teams and expert business and engineering partners to... View full entry
But what if there were a way to see gentrification long before the coffee shops, condos and Whole Foods appear? What if city planners and neighborhoods had an early warning system that could sniff out the changes just as they begin?
[...] neighborhood advocates would have the opportunity to implement policies ranging from reserving affordable housing units to educating residents of their renting rights to helping small businesses negotiate long-term lease extensions.
— NPR
In his NPR piece, astrophysics professor Adam Frank explains how various big data sets, like housing prices, eviction records, census data, or social media usage, can be utilized for "predictive analytics" to detect early onsets of gentrification for specific neighborhoods at an increasingly high... View full entry
Essey is an engineer at Uber and an early adopter of the Internet of things. He can control his lights with his Amazon Echo or an array of touchpad sensors he has installed throughout the home. Sensors tell him when there's water in the basement or a leak under the sink.
While Essey's setup might sound a little like science fiction, it's a prototype of the future. Some critics are worried these devices won't be secure and that companies will use them to spy on us to make money.
— NPR
As the Internet of things becomes more ingrained in our daily lives, some people are turning ordinary homes into smart homes. One way of doing that is by integrating smart appliances (dishwasher, fridges, microwaves, toasters, etc). That strategy, however, can be expensive and not very... View full entry
