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Last Wednesday, on the eve of the AIA National Convention, I had the pleasure of talking with Miguel McKelvey, co-founder of WeWork. The conversation was held in Midtown Manhattan, in the Project 6 by AF showroom to an invited crowd of 75 architects. The event was co-hosted by Project 6 by... View full entry
A Menlo Park company called Katerra announced that it had acquired Michael Green Architecture, a 25-person architecture firm in Vancouver, British Columbia. On June 12, the company revealed that it had bought another, larger architecture firm, Atlanta-based Lord Aeck Sargent. This comes five months after Katerra raised $865 million in venture capital from funders led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, which has also invested heavily in the co-working startup WeWork. — City Lab
Startup Katerra looks to revolutionize the construction industry through streamlining the entire process with their design-build model. The company has acquired Michael Green Architecture, known for designing tall wood buildings, and Lord Aeck Sargent. With these two firms obtained, Katerra... View full entry
With more options that ever for getting around cities, and finite space, the question of how we use this infrastructure, and who controls it, is more important than ever. By regulating how these new transportation options evolve, cities can potentially bring about a more sustainable, multimodal, and less car-centric transit future. — curbed.com
Our city curbs are transportation battles for space in the flow of traffic. While private tech startups are producing popular transportation solutions, such as Bird's electric scooters, the city is the one paying to build and maintain these public spaces. An upswing in dockless vehicles has far... View full entry
A Crunchbase News analysis of residential-focused real estate startups uncovered a raft of companies with a shared and temporary housing focus that have raised funding in the past year or so.
This isn’t a U.S.-specific phenomenon. Funded shared and short-term housing startups are cropping up across the globe, from China to Europe to Southeast Asia.
— TechCrunch
Crunchbase reporter Joanna Glasner takes a look at the new crop of shared and short-term housing startups that have recently raised millions of dollars in funding, such as Common, Starcity, Roomi, Ollie, HubHaus, and others. View full entry
Sergio Mannino Studio recently completed a pharmacy retail project in Brooklyn. The space is a flagship for Medly, a healthcare startup offering a more efficient and enjoyable way for the community to order prescription medicine via an app. Medly pharmacy designed by Sergio Mannino Studio... View full entry
UNSense, a new arch tech startup based in Amsterdam, is being launched by UNStudio. Operating as an independent sister company to UNStudio, the company will explore and develop new integrated tech solutions specifically designed for the built environment. UNSense explores new technologies... View full entry
Using lidar-equipped robots, Doxel scans construction sites every day to monitor how things are progressing, tracking what gets installed and whether it’s the right thing at the right time in the right place. You’d think that construction sites would be doing this by themselves anyway, but it turns out that they really don’t, and in a recent pilot study on a medical office building, Doxel says it managed to increase labor productivity on the project by a staggering 38 percent. — IEEE Spectrum
"You could send in some humans with lidar backpacks, but that would be more expensive," IEEE Spectrum explains. "The company is also using drones in a limited capacity right now, since they require human supervision, but it’s easy to imagine how much more efficient this process could get as... View full entry
strict zoning laws in the Bay Area make it almost impossible to significantly expand the housing stock there. [...]
As a result, the tech boom simply means that housing gets less and less affordable for anyone who doesn't work in tech or already own a home.
A lot of people are blaming the tech boom itself for the Bay Area's housing problems. But the technology boom is only a problem because the region's housing markets are functioning so poorly.
— vox.com
Related on Archinect:Man living in plywood "pod" in SF apartment told to knock it off by housing inspectorSilicon Valley is set to get over 10K more housing units – is this the beginning of the end of its housing crisis?Exceeding height restrictions to break a housing logjam in San... View full entry
Since summer 2015, [Alex] Rodrigues and his team [at Varden Labs] have been tinkering with autonomous golf carts on university campuses...On the one hand, campus transit agencies, and particularly university ones, are uniquely posed to experiment with pricier autonomous vehicles...But these shuttles will also need maintenance...Plus, driverless shuttles will be the diving bell for a tricky, tricky question: how important are bus drivers? — CityLab
More on Archinect:Google's self-driving car hits bus and causes its first crashThe Ehang passenger drone might be another way people will get around town somedayU.S. says computers qualify as drivers in Google's autonomous vehicles; won't even have to go to the DMVThe U.S. just got $4 billion to... View full entry
For a fledgling startup, finding an office in San Francisco can be a real nightmare. Rents are now climbing past $60 a square foot, second only to Manhattan in the US [...].
This means young startups have to get creative if they insist on staying within the city. And Westfield, one of the world’s largest mall operators, has a solution for them: Bespoke, a 37,000-square-foot coworking and event space within its shopping center in downtown San Francisco.
— qz.com
As New York City’s burgeoning tech economy continues to grow, startups face the same challenges for office space they would anywhere else—but have the added challenge of Manhattan-level price tags, vying for space with law firms, banks, and other well-financed tenants.
An absolute lack of space is not the issue, however. New York’s low 10 percent office vacancy rate may be second only to Washington, D.C.’s 9.6 percent, but an enormous amount of inventory is going up [...].
— urbanland.uli.org
Related: Working out of the Box interview with Miguel McKelvey, Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer at WeWork. View full entry
Using digital fabrication and some clever tricks we're able to manufacture beautiful, low cost structures which easily bolt together. You design for it like it's a big imaginary 3D printer then you and your friends get together and bolt your house together! [...]
It works like a techno version of a barn raising.
— Arcology Now
Architecture start-up Arcology Now wants to provide an alternative to 3D printing building technologies, focusing on reliable materials and elbow grease. The Phoenix, Arizona group has developed a digital fabrication software that generates a framework for any 3D surface out of steel tubes and... View full entry
We’re supposedly in the midst of a design renaissance, where beyond the cliché Steve Jobs and Apple ecosystem example, we see a design-centric focus in everything from soap (Method) and thermostats (Nest) to email (Mailbox) and even baby food (Plum Organics).
And yet, there’s a dearth of designer founders.
— wired.com
