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MVRDV has unveiled its vision for a major masterplan in the Gagarin Valley in Armenia. The 34,000-hectare area is home to 11,000 people spread across several villages, with about one-third of the landscape consisting of patches of land owned by the local community. MVRDV’s masterplan seeks to... View full entry
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has once again come together with American artist Janet Echelman for a site-specific sculptural installation in Munich’s historic Odeonsplatz Square. Images courtesy of Studio Echelman The atmospheric sculpture is in constant motion, activating the public space below... View full entry
The Museum of Modern Art has appointed curator, writer, and educator, Carson Chan, as the first director of the museum’s Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment. He will also serve as a curator in the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design... View full entry
Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual of the London-based studio Cooking Sections explore food systems through architecture, ecology, visual arts, and geopolitics. Featured in the second issue of Archinect's print publication Ed Issue 2, The Architecture of Disaster... View full entry
Expanding a park usually means modifying an existing landscape. The designers of Pier 26 faced a far more daunting challenge: creating an entirely new one in the swift current of the Hudson River. [...]
The latest addition to Hudson River Park, this 2.5-acre expanse is the city’s only public pier dedicated to river ecology.
— The New York Times
Join us at Archinect Outpost on March 6th, from 7-9pm to host Lydia Kallipoliti and her newest book, The Architecture of Closed Worlds: Or, What Is the Power of Shit? Published by Lars Müller Publishers and Storefront for Art and Architecture, the book accompanied an eponymous exhibition... View full entry
Megacities—those urban centers crammed with more than 10 million people—would be well served to double down on their arboreal assets, according to a new paper in the upcoming issue of the journal Ecological Modeling.
A team of researchers led by Theodore Endreny of SUNY’s College of Environmental Studies and Forestry sought to quantify how leafy infrastructure pays dividends in 10 chock-full cities—and the extent to which those benefits could compound if those urban areas planted more trees.
— Citylab
You can check out the research paper here, as well as this 2015 report about the health benefits of more greenspace in urban centers. View full entry
Australian practice McGregor Coxall had the winning scheme to transform a degenerate landfill site into a new migratory-bird wetland sanctuary park in Tianjin, China. The Asian Development Bank and the Port of Tianjin co-launched the park design competition in response to the increasing loss of... View full entry
“We are simply not making significant strides in crucial metrics that predict building performance,” states Greg Mella, FAIA, Director of Sustainable Design at SmithGroupJJR and co-chair of the AIA 2030 Working Group, in a new report that gauges the progress made by firms voluntarily... View full entry
“By accident, we’ve created the perfect habitat there. People don’t think about that because they think that this part of the river is ugly and concrete, but it’s a critically important habitat for these shorebirds.” [...]
As the city makes its decisions about the river’s future, it is called upon to be sensitive to all life that has managed to grow around it, despite its not-so-green surroundings.
— kcet.org
For more on the LA River's redevelopment:Will Gehry's L.A. River plan result in water savings?Gruen Associates, Mia Lehrer, Oyler Wu appointed to design L.A. River Greenway in San Fernando ValleyWhat's happening with Frank Gehry's masterplan for the LA River?Before the masterplan gets underway... View full entry
Surveys have revealed that 93% of the almost 3,000 individual reefs have been touched by bleaching, and almost a quarter – 22% – of coral over the entire Great Barrier Reef has been killed by this bleaching event...
Since tourists usually go diving and snorkelling in the middle and southern sections, there are plenty of spectacular corals for them to see there. But they shouldn’t be fooled by that – the reef is in the midst of a major environmental catastrophe.
— the Guardian
"Many scientists are now saying it is almost too late to save it. Strong and immediate action is required to alleviate water pollution and stop the underlying cause: climate change."For other news from the front lines of our warming planet, check out these links:America's first "climate refugees"... View full entry
The idea is that perhaps we should be looking at these mentors, at these biological elders. They have figured out how to create a sustainable world. So rather than inventing it from scratch, why don’t we take our cues from them?
Watch the full video here, "brought to you" by none other than Leo DiCaprio:For more information on biomimicry, take a look at some past Archinect articles or visit the documentary website:"Architecture Follows Nature" lecture focuses on biomimicry and collaborative researchHuman organ-mimicking... View full entry
Rikers is built on a landfill. The ground underneath the facilities is unstable and the decomposing garbage emits poisonous methane gas. In addition to extreme heat and poor air quality, flooding and crumbling infrastructure pose a serious threat, especially when superstorms like Hurricane Sandy strike. As the violence and human rights violations worsen, so do the environmental circumstances surrounding Rikers. — Grist
The article details flood-risk, extreme heat, a lack of air circulation and other air quality issues among other problems plaguing the prison.For related content, check out some of these links:How one California prison is betting on architecture to decrease recidivism ratesArchitecture of... View full entry
An influential group of scientists led by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist often credited with having drawn the first major attention to climate change in 1988 congressional testimony, has published a dire climate study that suggests the impact of global warming will be quicker and more catastrophic than generally envisioned. — the Washington Post
James Hansen, an indisputably important climate scientist and activist, alongside a group of other influential experts, has released a new, 52-page paper that revises much of mainstream expectations for global warming. Hansen has called it the most important work he's done.A synthesis of... View full entry
![“Often people think of [data centers] as almost like cathedrals of servers. Very clean computer equipment, white walls and things—the reality is, these are factories,” states Tate Cantrell, CTO of the data-center company Verne Global, in this article by Ingrid Burrington. Credit: Wikipedia](https://archinect.imgix.net/uploads/1d/1d54j3zthigxg3yq.jpeg?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&w=514 "“Often people think of [data centers] as almost like cathedrals of servers. Very clean computer equipment, white walls and things—the reality is, these are factories,” states Tate Cantrell, CTO of the data-center company Verne Global, in this article by Ingrid Burrington. Credit: Wikipedia")
The impact of data centers—really, of computation in general—isn’t something that really galvanizes the public, partly because that impact typically happens at a remove from everyday life. The average amount of power to charge a phone or a laptop is negligible, but the amount of power required to stream a video or use an app on either device invokes services from data centers distributed across the globe, each of which uses energy to perform various processes [...] — the Atlantic
"Still, it seems weird that most people—most engineers building the platforms people use every day, even—lack the basic comprehension that different online activities have different energy impacts, or that an individual’s online activities have energy impact at all beyond a laptop’s... View full entry
