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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
German elevator specialists thyssenkrupp just inaugurated a new plant and test tower in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China, only months after opening another high-tech test tower near the company's headquarters in Rottweil. At a height of 248 meters (or 31 floors above ground), the... 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
A multidisciplinary team of researchers from University of Oregon, Stanford and Dartmouth have co-developed a new digital archive. The collection contains nearly 4,000 drawings, prints, paintings and photographs of historic Rome from the 16th to 20th centuries that are now available online to... View full entry
“More and more people are living and working in high-rises and office blocks, but the true impact of vibrations on them is currently very poorly understood,” states Alex Pavic, Professor of Vibration Engineering at the University of Exeter.“Humans spend 90 per cent of their lives in... View full entry
Construction expert BAM has been chosen to partner with British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to modernise UK Antarctic and other research facilities, enabling British scientists to continue delivering world class research into some of the most important issues facing our planet. [...]
Commissioned by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), this long-term UK partnership will last between 7-10 years and is worth an estimated £100m.
— British Antarctic Survey
Construction near the South Pole comes with its own set of challenges which the winning bidder, BAM International, along with its UK arm, BAM Nuttall, promises to master with years of expertise in working in remote parts of the world. The British Antarctic Survey's announcement yesterday went... View full entry
Molecules 10,000 times narrower than the width of a human hair could hold the key to making possible wooden skyscrapers and more energy-efficient paper production, according to research published today in the journal Nature Communications. The study, led by a father and son team at the Universities of Warwick and Cambridge, solves a long-standing mystery of how key sugars in cells bind to form strong, indigestible materials. — University of Cambridge
"But just as this could improve how easily materials can be broken down, the discovery may also help them create stronger materials, he says. There are already plans to build houses in the UK more sustainably using wood, and Paul Dupree is involved in the Centre for Natural Material Innovation at... View full entry
The Royal Institute of British Architects announced today four winners of the 2016 President's Awards for Research, which recognizes top-quality architectural research from academics and practitioners...This year's competition received 75 applications from 14 countries on five continents, making it the most competitive to date... — Bustler
The winning research projects this year are:History and Theory: Dr Edward Denison, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, UK; Medhanie Teklemariam and Dawit Abraha, Asmara Heritage Project, EritreaProject: “Asmara – Africa’s Modernist City: UNESCO World Heritage Nomination”Cities and... View full entry
