Author: jhilburg

Medusa Pioneer Works 159 Pioneer Street Brooklyn, New York Through April 16 High in the rafters of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, a digital display too kinetic and dynamic to exist in the real world swims through space. As Medusa ebbs and flows, seafoam-green square slats shoot from the 40-foot-tall ceiling all the way to ground

Never Alone Museum of Modern Art New York Through July 16 As the world around us becomes more and more integrated with technology, it’s easy to overlook how much our interfaces, and the programs we use, have evolved. From Windows and Mac icons to the ubiquitous power symbol, the design language of interactivity has become

Software company Morpholio, which blends virtual hand drafting with virtual reality features in its Trace programs, launched Shadow Maker on March 22. A new feature for the iPhone and iPad app Morpholio Trace, Shadow Maker can place models in their real-world solar conditions. Trace is just one part of the company’s app suite and is

In January of 2022, the city of Brighton in the U.K. went viral for requiring new buildings to integrate ‘bee bricks’ as a means of increasing biodiversity in the built environment. Artificial bee habitats, commonly called “bee hotels,” are a popular form of intervention in gardens and parks around the world. They’re intended to cater

A new book by Andrew Witt provides an in-depth, refreshing look at the historical applications of mathematics within architecture. Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture, published by MIT Press as part of the Writing Architecture Series by Anyone Corporation (the publisher of the popular architecture journal Log), explores the methods of mathematical and scientific analysis as proto-computational

Summit Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah, is an ultra-exclusive community for billionaires with good taste. The mountain resort is a preserve for refined, and in some cases adventurous, residential architecture by the likes of Olson Kundig, MacKay-Lyons, and Studio Ma. The most ambitious and beguiling design comes from the Los Angeles–based office Tom Wiscombe Architecture

Difficult as it is to choose, I do have a favorite episode of Frasier. Season 10, episode 11, titled “Door Jam,” revolves around La Porte d’Argent, a new Seattle day spa frequented by high-profile socialites that Frasier and Niles are dying to get into. They eventually scheme their way into the club and have the

Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space By Fred Scharmen Verso Books, 2021 MSRP $27 As the world spins deeper into the third year of a global pandemic with no sign of abating, a new space race is forming over our heads. Entry is open to all, and the tickets are literal.

Despite the flashy promises of supersonic rail travel through vacuum-sealed tubes and six years of work by Bjarke Ingels to envision rapid intercity transportation systems, Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop is reportedly struggling. The company has reportedly laid off 111 employees, about half of its staff, and will drop the passenger side of the business to

A new book on architectural representation, Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image (Routledge Publishing) by Michael Young, co-founder of YOUNG & AYATA and assistant professor at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union, attempts to deal with the state of contemporary image culture by cutting across

Floating countries are nothing new—libertarians have been proposing going John Galt and fleeing to floating nations free from the rules of terrestrial governments for decades. No such seastead or self-sufficient island nation has ever actually been built, of course, but that hasn’t stopped cryptocurrency investors from floating their own proposals. Last week, the internet discovered

From reimagining city spaces to designing sustainable buildings, architecture firms and designers are tackling complex projects while navigating the remote workplace. But as we slowly return to what work life used to be before the pandemic, many of us have already adapted to a hybrid work environment. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), 87

Following a highly successful shift to a totally virtual experience in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, ACADIA (The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture), once again held their annual conference online in 2021. Titled “Realignments: Toward Critical Computation,” this year’s proceedings marked the 40th anniversary of a conference that brings together practitioners,

After changing its national currency to Bitcoin and enforcing mandatory acceptance at businesses in September, El Salvador is looking to up the ante by building a “Bitcoin City” at the base of Conchagua volcano in the country’s eastern La Union region. Announced by President Nayib Bukele on November 20 as part of a weeklong promotional

You’d be forgiven if, upon hearing the terminology quad-based remeshing, ngon-based meshes, open topologies, and tropisms, you wondered if you had been slipped the Zoom link to presentations of thesis dissertations at the ETH Zurich and not Parametric Architecture’s Computational Design: NEXT 6.0 conference. While we may begrudgingly add another webcast event to our calendars,

“How will we live in space?” is a question that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has already broached through its work for the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Moon Village.

NASA, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), SEarch+ and Apis Cor, and a host of other governmental bodies and design firms have made the news of late for proposals to 3D print Martian habitats from locally sourced regolith in-situ. These sorts of schemes all focus on easy-to-transport methods of construction with materials already on the Red Planet

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Texan robotics and advanced materials company ICON have revealed their latest collaboration, the 3D-printed Mars Dune Alpha. The experimental habitat will be used by NASA to simulate long-term missions to Mars and document the effects on participants. As part of the space agency’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA)

The 1,428-foot-tall 111 West 57th Street, the latest addition to Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row, is finally on track for completion later this year. Designed by SHoP Architects, the residential supertall is clad in dazzling terra-cotta, glass, and bronze ornamental work that accentuates its pencil-thin profile towering over Central Park. Already, the building has become an iconic part of the New

Summer is approaching, and that means that schools are saying goodbye to another generation of students. At the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), that meant the creation of the Avery SPOT, a high-tech inflatable installation and wooden stage that were used to hold GSAPP events and commencement from April 29 through May 1.

Two weeks before Kate Wagner published her scathing treatise of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) as simply an outgrowth of high-money architectural speculation, a Paul Rudolph-designed home in Westchester County, New York, hit the market as an NFT. The Edersheim Residence, located at 862 Fenimore Road in Larchmont, was originally built in 1958 and then later altered in 1982 by Rudolph at the

The media hasn’t been too kind to Elon Musk’s Las Vegas Loop over the last two weeks, as a special preview of the $52 million, subterranean convention center loop revealed … a system where you get in a Tesla and tell the human driver which station to let you off at. That’s a far cry from what was originally

The theme of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, still on track to open on May 22, asks attendees and observers, How will we live together? For Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), that answer appears to be “on the moon,” as the multinational design juggernaut will bring its Moon Village to Venice’s Arsenale. For the Life Beyond Earth exhibition, SOM and the European Space

With Bitcoin hitting a record high value of $63,100 (at the time of writing), the ongoing climate crisis created by the mining of cryptocurrency, which is inherently baked into using said online currency as verifying purchases on a blockchain requires mining for more coins to verify it, is only accelerating. As the BBC reported earlier this year, the University

NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are the hottest thing in art right now; digital artist Beeple sold an aggregated collage of his work, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, for $69.3 million on March 11 (though there are questions of whether the buyer also made money on the sale), and even media companies are turning their articles into sellable NFTs. Now, Toronto-based artist Krista Kim has

Prospect, the first virtual reality program for architects and engineers that allows users upload design files from Rhino, Revit, and more and explore them digitally and at human-scale, has a new home. Today, February 25, The Wild, a company focused on collaborative AR and VR for the architecture, engineering, and construction industries, announced that it had acquired. Prospect from parent company IrisVR.Prospect’s

New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) has followed up its 2019 New York City and the Path to Freedom explorable story map just in time for Black History Month. Today, the commission released Preserving Significant Places of Black History, an interactive survey of historic and cultural African American landmarks throughout New York over the

AquíAquí, the latest collaboration between Cambridge’s Matter Design and multinational CEMEX Global R&D (a frequent partner in realizing the firm’s monumental and kinetic concrete designs) is a speculative community gathering space along the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez border intending to bridge both cities. In AquíAquí (Here Here), Matter Design has envisioned an outdoor “community center” for Parque

CLB Architects is no stranger to public art installations in Jackson, Wyoming; take its mutable Town Enclosure from 2019, for example. This year, the firm has returned with Undercurrent, an eclectic collection of rods for the monthlong Glownights 2020/21 public art exhibition. This is the third iteration of Glownights, which aims to bring illuminating installations