Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
At our peril, we have ignored Nightingale’s prescriptions. The history of the hospital contains clear lessons about the importance of air movement through buildings, the public health risks of poor design, and the dangers of technological reliance. Architecture professionals should look back to see what else has been forgotten or ignored in the race to merge art and technology. Whose lives might be at stake if they don’t? — Fast Company
Murphy is a principal at Boston-based MASS Design Group and the author of The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity, which accompanies the firm’s recent exhibition Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics on view at the Cooper Hewitt until... View full entry
National consulting group Appleseed Strategy has released the results of their 2021 Financial & Economic Survey, a U.S. business study of AEC firms to gauge the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the sector. 43 individuals and 39 companies in architecture, engineering, landscape... View full entry
What would the news be without controversy? You could say it’s way too much of a focus in the overall media landscape, and our small corner of the business certainly is not immune to its pull either. Coming out of the pandemic-dominated 2020 has provided us with quite a bit of contentious... View full entry
Months of isolation made people rethink the way they wanted to live. That meant their buildings would change. That meant construction, and architects became useful again, after being abandoned. But the craziness of a new era has made all builders and architects simultaneously empowered by their new in-demand status while fully threatened by costs and availability of all the products and people necessary to build. — CT Insider
Earlier in the year, labor and supply chain issues had caused markets in steel and timber to skyrocket, delaying many commercial and residential projects industry-wide, in addition to triggering what some think will be a boom in demand once the pandemic subsides. However bright the prospects are... View full entry
Museums in Denmark and the Netherlands will close as part of new coronavirus lockdown measures being imposed in both countries in reaction to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant of the disease. The announcements have been met with resignation and disappointment as it will mean further strain on the already stretched museum sector after nearly two years of sporadic closures and reduced capacity. — Artnet News
In London, the Natural History Museum is closed until December 27th due to staffing shortages caused by Covid. The Wellcome Collection and the Foundling Museum in London have also decided to shut down amid the surge. These closures come without the UK government declaring any mandates for these... View full entry
The latest edition of the Dodge Momentum Index indicates a 4% decrease in November from October. Commercial planning fell 8% while institutional planning moved 5% higher. The value of nonresidential building projects continues to move in a sawtooth pattern, in which month-by-month measures... View full entry
The third edition of AIA’s Small Firm Compensation Report has been released detailing how sole proprietorships and firms with fewer than three architectural staff employees fared during the tumultuous period between 2019 and 2021. The report includes data on compensation trends, employee... View full entry
At the end of September, we released the results of our survey of the architectural community’s plans to return to the office after the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, only 29% of respondents said that their firms required all staff to return to in-studio working, with 15% still required to work... View full entry
The transit agency that oversees New York City’s subway, buses and two regional commuter rails will postpone fare increases for at least six months and defer drastic service cuts now that it anticipates receiving billions of dollars from the federal infrastructure bill, officials said on Monday. — The New York TImes
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said that the newly-enacted $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed by President Biden today would allow the state and the MTA to avoid harmful price and service changes. The influx of money comes as the MTA is aggressively trying to lure back ridership, which... View full entry
According to an Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) analysis of the recently-released U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Producer Price Index data, construction input prices increased 1.5% in October. Nonresidential construction input prices have increased by 1.4% in the month. ... View full entry
As part of a program at the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Design, a cohort of students retrofitted twelve shipping containers to serve as private housing for homeless people during the pandemic. The project, located at Kansas’ Lawrence Community Shelter, is called... View full entry
With the work-at-home lifestyle likely here to stay, people are taking things outdoors, creating spaces meant for privacy and comfort. [...]
More than a year and a half into the pandemic, working from home seems like an increasingly permanent proposition. Nearly 80 percent of business leaders and 70 percent of the general public said people would likely never return to offices at the rate they did before the coronavirus [...]
— The New York Times
Isolated working structures as small as 3x6 feet have been cropping up in high-density areas like London where the office and home have switched places, leaving opportunity at both ends for designers and manufacturers to meet the demands of remote workers whilst also providing space to answer... View full entry
This post is brought to you by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis Climate change, COVID-19, the fight for social justice. In disruptive times, how can architecture help to chart new paths and implement far-reaching solutions? That’s the... View full entry
Construction will be an engine of global economic growth in the decade to 2030, with output expected to be 35% higher than in the ten years to 2020, according to a new global forecast. — Global Construction Review
The report, titled Future of Construction, by Oxford Economics and Marsh McLennan subsidiaries March and Guy Carpenter projects that growth in construction output will average 3.6% per year from now until 2030, outpacing that of the manufacturing and services sectors. According to the study, this... View full entry
Alleging that vaccine mandates for contractors are unconstitutional, the Colorado Contractors Association is suing the city of Denver for requiring workers on public contracts to get inoculated against COVID-19. — Construction Dive
The Colorado Contractors Association, along with six other construction associations, believe the mandate violates the U.S. Constitution’s contracts clause because it substantially impairs their existing contract rights with the city. As reported by Construction Dive, the associations expect the... View full entry
