Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
Musk had warned me that the scale of the place would be overwhelming. "It will blow your mind. You see it in person and then realize, Fuck, this is big."
He was right. It was impossible not to feel awestruck by the sprawling, 71-foot-tall structure stretched out, miragelike, before me as I drove into a shallow canyon. [...] When the Gigafactory is finished, it will be only slightly smaller than Boeing’s Everett, Washington, plant, which is the world’s largest building by volume.
— fastcompany.com
Related news on Archinect:Tesla Announces Plans to Build $5 Billion Battery 'Gigafactory'Dawn of the self-driving car: testing out Tesla's autopilot functionDid Tesla almost go bankrupt without anyone noticing? View full entry
That’s why a team from the Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) is turning to the next best option—using technology to protect cultural heritage.
Founded in 2012 by Roger Michel, IDA is a joint effort between Harvard University and Oxford University to create an open-source database of high-resolution images and three-dimensional graphics of things like paper and papyrus documents, epigraphs and small artifacts.
Work on what IDA has named the Million Image Database began in early 2015.
— newsweek.com
The photo shows the Baal Shamin temple prior to its destruction. Volunteers of the Institute for Digital Archaeology were able to digitally archive the 2,000-year-old structure for the Million Image Database project just in time before ISIS fighters seized control of Palmyra's historic... View full entry
In the near-future, Dubai Civil Defence officers may be zooming in on to the scene of building fires using futuristic personal jetpacks.
Designed by New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Company, the jet-packs can be operated by a single pilot for 30 minutes at ranges of between 30 and 50 kilometres at altitudes of up to 3,000 feet.
The pilot stands on a platform in a 'pilot module' between two propeller engines, which look like large versions of those commonly found on civilian drones.
— Khaleej Times
I'm not sure when or how it happened, but apparently jet packs are a real thing now. On Tuesday, the Dubai Civil Defense service signed a deal with Martin Aircraft for the future delivery of jetpacks, training material, and spare parts. Dubai's towering skyline necessitates a degree of vertical... View full entry
But some designers are toying with another idea—that there’s a different way to build that exploits randomness rather than avoids it. This kind of building will rely on new kinds of granular materials that when tipped into place, bind together in ways that provide structural stability. [...] Sean Keller at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and Heinrich Jaeger at the University of Chicago explain how this kind of “aleatory architecture” is finally becoming possible. — technologyreview.com
That will have a profound effect on the process of design. “As a result, preplanning is freed from considering the local structural detail,” say Keller and Jaeger. “Instead, the main task now becomes generating the proper particle shapes as well as the overall boundary and processing... View full entry
Cities are everywhere. Billions of us live in them, and many of us think we could do a better job than the planners. But for the past 26 years dating back to the original SimCity, we've mostly been proving that idea false. [...]
And now, here, I'm going to take you on a whirlwind tour through the history of the city-building genre—from its antecedents to the hot new thing.
— arstechnica.com
Related on Archinect:The issue of homelessness in SimCityHow video game engines may influence the future of architecture (and everything else)Three guiding principles for a fine fake metropolis View full entry
In the arid plains of the southern New Mexico desert, between the site of the first atomic bomb test and the U.S.-Mexico border, a new city is rising from the sand.
Planned for a population of 35,000, the city will showcase a modern business district downtown, and neat rows of terraced housing in the suburbs. It will be supplied with pristine streets, parks, malls and a church.
But no one will ever call it home.
— CNN
Planned by the telecommunications and tech firm Pegasus Global Holdings, the CITE (Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation) is a $1 billion plan to build a model city to test out and develop new technologies.With specialized zones for agriculture, energy, and water treatment, the city would... View full entry
at least some part of architectural practice needs to move on from having buildings as the only output. The answer to every urban question cannot always be a building, clearly. Whilst buildings may be part of some solutions, there are broader, deeper questions in play—good architects see this, but the practice (from education up) is still not exploring this implied question broadly enough. — cityofsound
A call for architecture, for architects, their schools, their buildings and their cities via the technology they still struggle to grasp regardless of their software driven shaping skills, a valuable read by Dan Hill of City of Sound. Technological effect is elsewhere. View full entry
Apple has announced a range of new products, including a new larger iPad, two new smartphones and a long-awaited update to Apple TV.
In a now traditional September event, this time held at San Francisco’s 7,000 seater Bill Graham civic auditorium, 2,000 engineers, advertisers, executives and journalists saw Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller reveal a new 12.9-inch screen iPad that the company hopes will appeal to both professional creatives and committed tablet users.
— The Guardian
With a $799 price-tag, the new iPad Pro could offer a more affordable option for creatives than a MacBook Pro or a desktop. The tablet will have a 10-hour battery life and a faster, more efficient A9X processor, as well as a 12.9-inch Retina display. In addition, the iPad was introduced alongside... View full entry
As 3D printing advances from its plastic roots, we’re seeing more and more materials passing through its nozzles. Metal, glass, random gunk—each new filament opens the door to new manufacturing applications.
Now researchers have made a printer they claim can use up to ten different materials at once. The “MultiFab,” made by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), could offer a relatively low-cost option for the multimaterial 3D printing market.
— motherboard.vice.com
Click here to read the full paper, MultiFab: A Machine Vision Assisted Platform for Multi-material 3D Printing.Related on Archinect:Amsterdam could get a new 3D-printed bridge built by robotsUC Berkeley team unveils "Bloom" 3D-printed cement structureThe future of 3D printing will... View full entry
While wind may be one of the most economical power sources out there, photovoltaic solar energy has a big advantage: it can go small.
While wind gets cheaper as turbines grow larger, the PV hardware scales down to fit wherever we have infrastructure. In fact, simply throwing solar on our existing building stock could generate a very large amount of carbon-free electricity.
— Ars Technica
But, as many homeowners already know, installing solar panels can be quite cost-prohibitive. New research might just have solved that problem by incorporating solar hardware into the most basic light filter used in architecture: the window.According to a study, solar windows could filter out a... View full entry
Canadian space and defense company Thoth Technology is attempting to make reaching the stratosphere as simple as riding an elevator up a tower about 23 times taller than the world’s tallest building.
The Thoth space elevator patent, approved by the US patent office on July 21, specifies that the tower could be built on any “planetary surface,” (i.e. not just Earth), a sign that Thoth is thinking pretty far ahead. [...] the top of the tower will serve as a rocket launch site.
— qz.com
In slightly more recent-technology elevator news:ThyssenKrupp's cable-free elevator test tower tops out in less than 10 monthsJapan's simple logic for putting toilets in elevatorsInstallation of UltraRope elevators begins at Kingdom Tower View full entry
Like all supertall skyscrapers, Tapei 101 has a mechanism inside to help stabilize itself in high winds. [...]
At 6:59 am, in the winds of Typhoon Soudelor, the damper moved by a full meter from its center position, farther than it has ever moved in the building's decade history. [...]
Soudelor brought sustained winds of 100 mph, with at least one confirmed gust of 145 mph .
— popularmechanics.com
[...] the drought is a gusher for a growing number of tech startups in the emerging world of the Internet of Things, the buzzy term for the trend of connecting devices and data in the physical realm to the Internet. Getting more sensors into the environment will help thousands of farms, businesses and cities figure out where water is going and how it can be diverted for the most efficient use. Agriculture is the area most ripe for collecting more and higher-quality data. — forbes.com
Related news on Archinect:California Water Crisis? Now there's a board game for that!California Farmers Using Oil Wastewater during DroughtCalifornia Governor Mandates Water Restrictions View full entry
A microdevice called Human Organs-on-Chips is engineered with the astounding ability to mimic the complex structures, functions, and mechanical motions of whole human organs. Fabricated by scientists Donald Ingber and Dan Dongeun Huh at Harvard University's Wyss Institute, Human Organs-on-Chips... View full entry
MX3D, a research and development startup company, will use robots to 3D print a pedestrian bridge across one of Amsterdam’s canals. The versatile six-axis robotic arms will ‘draw’ steel structures in 3D, starting from one side of the canal and building across until it reaches the other end. The robot will also print its own support, which allows it to work autonomously. The location of the bridge will be announced soon and construction is set to commence in 2017. — iflscience.com
More on Archinect:New Googleplex will be built by robotsLiquid metal discovery paves way for shape-shifting robotsRobot gives a helping hand as Taubman College breaks ground on new school additionSelf-Folding Robot Based on OrigamiGensler LA wants to use drones to alleviate the scale limits of 3D... View full entry