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Today's featured virtual event happenings, from Archinect's Virtual Event Guide, address issues from the climate crisis, resilience, health and wellness, and diversity and inclusion to equity, economy and environment and much more. Are you hosting a virtual lecture? Presentation? Tour?... View full entry
The latest International Construction Cost Index has just been released, and the top spots don't really come as a big surprise: London, New York, Hong Kong, Geneva, and San Francisco are the planet's most expensive cities for construction. Compiled by design and consultancy organization Arcadis... View full entry
In recent years, 3D printing has become the go-to technology for designers looking to prototype and deploy new designs and products. Researchers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have made a great (tiny) leap forward in the technology by creating a groundbreaking... View full entry
Satellite images dating back to 1975 allow researchers to map how millions of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends have proliferated in street networks worldwide. [...]
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences charts a worrying global shift towards more-sprawling and less-hooked-up street networks over time.
— CityLab
The study's authors, Christopher Barrington-Leigh at McGill University and Adam Millard-Ball at UC Santa Cruz, were able to identify the global trend toward urban street-network sprawl by analyzing high-resolution data from OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery of urbanization since 1975 and then... View full entry
Throughout the 20th century, architecture in Antarctica was a pragmatic and largely makeshift affair, focused on keeping the elements out and the occupants alive. [...]
Construction in Antarctica, long the purview of engineers, is now attracting designer architects looking to bring aesthetics — as well as operational efficiency, durability and energy improvements — to the coldest neighborhood on Earth.
— The New York Times
The NYT looks at the increasingly maturing architectural designs of Antarctic research stations, from early, highly pragmatic shelters to Britain’s now iconic Halley VI, designed by Hugh Broughton Architects, all the way to the brand new (and very nice looking) Brazilian Comandante Ferraz... View full entry
Now that 2020 is here, many are looking to the new year with optimism and initiative to face the world's pressing issue of climate change. Amid the constant reminders of the globe's current climate crisis, a December editorial piece and report from Nature.com elicits a reason to reflect... View full entry
With 16 architects announced as shortlist winners back in October, the Architectural Review has announced Comunal Taller de Arquitectura as the winner of Architectural Review's 2019 Emerging Architecture Award. The Mexico-based architecture firm was applauded for a project submission... View full entry
It’s well known that the production of cement—the world’s leading construction material—is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for about 8 percent of all such releases...A team of researchers at MIT has come up with a new way of manufacturing the material that could eliminate these emissions altogether, and could even make some other useful products in the process. — MIT News
The research team is exploring the "idea of using an electrochemical process to replace the current fossil-fuel-dependent system" that relies on coal-fired ovens to convert limestone, clay, and sand to Portland cement. Through the new process, the need to burn coal will be avoided and the emitted... View full entry
The institutions have been jointly awarded £8m from Research England’s Expanding Excellence in England fund to establish the world’s first research Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE). It will lead to a whole new concept of the way we design and construct our buildings. — Northumbria University Newcastle
Maybe buildings of the future don't need to be AI filled structures face mapping our every move. Perhaps they need to be self-sustainable and responsive structures infused with a bit of biology. Architecture author, lecturer, and researcher Dr. Martyn Dade-Robertson shares new discoveries diving... View full entry
Faculty in the Department of Architecture have received a cash gift from Epic Games Inc. in support of their work on Virtual Places, a project that is adapting the company's virtual reality (VR) gaming engine, Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), for architectural and urban design. — Cornell University
Three Cornell professors used virtual reality to create and expand on their research project Virtual Places. The study of architecture and video games is a growing focus. Within academia and practice, VR is a tool which helps unpack architectural ideas for learning as well as creating... View full entry
A team of Boston University researchers recently stuck a loudspeaker into one end of a PVC pipe. They cranked it up loud. What did they hear? Nothing.
How was this possible? Did they block the other end of the pipe with noise canceling foams or a chunk of concrete? No, nothing of the sort. The pipe was actually left open save for a small, 3D-printed ring placed around the rim. That ring cut 94% of the sound blasting from the speaker, enough to make it inaudible to the human ear.
— Fast Company
"The mathematically designed, 3D-printed acoustic metamaterial is shaped in such a way that it sends incoming sounds back to where they came from," explain the Boston University researchers behind the discovery: Xin Zhang, a professor at the College of Engineering, and Reza Ghaffarivardavagh, a... View full entry
Researchers from Lanzhou University in China have shown that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum is able to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem, a combinatorial test with exponentially increasing complexity, in linear time. Using focused light stimulus as negative feedback to maintain the criteria of the task, the authors demonstrated that this model was able to reliably output a high-quality solution. — Sci-News.com
Through observing physarum polycephalum, nicknamed the "many-headed slime", researchers have used its natural network formation to help solve many spatial design problems. Slime mold has shown itself capable of recreating rail systems, solving mazes, and now, the Traveling Salesman Problem—a... View full entry
Cut peat blocks were already being used for building houses thousands of years ago. Now, scientists at the University of Tartu have developed a material which could make it possible to print energy-efficient houses out of milled peat and oil shale ash using a 3D printer. — Research in Estonia
"As peat and oil shale ash are not very expensive, house builders would be especially happy about the price of the material. According to Liiv, scientists calculated that the cost for the construction of a house shell printed from this material with a floor surface of 100–150 square meters could... View full entry
[...] iPhoto confused a human friend of mine – I’ll call him Mike – with a building called the Great Mosque of Cordoba. [...]
Rather than viewing this as a failure, I realized I had found a new insight: Just as people’s faces have features that can be recognized by algorithms, so do buildings. That began my effort to perform facial recognition on buildings – or, more formally, “architectural biometrics.” Buildings, like people, may just have biometric identities too.
— The Conversation
Peter Christensen, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, elaborates on his research with 'facial recognition' on buildings to unlock architectural secrets. View full entry
A team of researchers from Swiss university ETH Zurich is to use robots to help assemble prefabricated timber modules into a 100 sq m, three-storey house. [...]
The robots use information from a CAD model to cut and arrange the beams, then drill holes and connect them. Human workers bolt the beams together.
— Global Construction Review
Photo: NCCR Digital Fabrication / Roman KellerThe Spatial Timber Assemblies robotic research project, with support from Switzerland's National Centre of Competence in Research Digital Fabrication, is the first large-scale architectural application for the construction robots at the new Robotic... View full entry
