Author: theeditors
Architects design cultural venues for a Silk Road metaverse
Four architecture firms have envisioned virtual words for pax.world, a metaverse platform that invites users and brands to host and attend live events, including concerts, gallery exhibitions, business conferences, and more. Each of the firms, Grimshaw, HWKN, Farshid Moussavi and WHY, has designed a Metaserai, a trade and culture destination, hosted within pax.world, that takes
A new website from BIG has us missing the early 2000s like whoa
Earlier this month, BIG debuted a new website. The change, announced on Twitter yesterday, noted that the firm’s original website was made during the 2000s Flash era: Our original website was conceived during the flash era nearly 20 years ago! Check out the new https://t.co/ZjfcuHqLg0 which reflects our built… Read More… The post A new
Why write about architecture? ChatGPT has ideas.
The updated version of ChatGPT, released last month, has launched a thousand thinkpieces about how artificial intelligence (AI) should be used. This chat bot, powered by OpenAI, responds to questions via text with conversational answers. It has been trained using the internet, and though it doesn’t answer questions using hate speech, it has internalized the
Las Vegas helps us understand how virtual environments fall short
A few months ago, I visited Las Vegas for the fourth time. Not much has changed: It is still a battleground of corporate brands vying for attention. Do you want to buy a Prada bag in Venice, see a concert from hologram Michael Jackson, or try one of Taco Bell’s new Cantina Margaritas? Architecture supports
This Revit plugin helps architects pick materials with less embodied carbon
A new plugin for Revit offers architects the opportunity to make informed material choices for building designs that put carbon reduction at front of mind. Tally Climate Action Tool, or tallyCAT for short, is a free open-access digital tool launched by nonprofit organization Building Transparency, Perkins&Will, and C-Change Labs. Work on Tally began in the
NASA awards ICON contract to continue research on lunar habitation
Just weeks after ICON, the 3D printing technology company, broke ground on what is slated to be the largest 3D printed neighborhood, the Texas-based company is using its expertise and construction systems on an even larger project: lunar habitation. Yesterday, NASA, through its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program dolled out a nearly $60 million
Hood Design Studio creates an inhabitable landscape for NVIDIA’s campus
In California, the ideal of indoor-outdoor living has never loosened its hold. Even with ever-pressing environmental issues and ballooning population growth, the dream of a seamless integration between inside and out continues to captivate designers and clients alike. Three recent landscape projects in the Bay Area demonstrate this fact, while also illustrating the particularities of
ICON and BIG break ground on the world’s largest 3D-printed community
Texas-based 3D technology company ICON, has broken ground on what will become the world’s largest 3D-printed community. The neighborhood located North of Austin in Georgetown, Texas will consist of 100 3D-printed homes codesigned by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and implemented by Lennar, a large construction company based out of Florida, was first announced in 2021.
2022 ACADIA covers extra-disciplinary collaboration and artificial intelligence
It’s easy to leave a week jam-packed with cutting-edge research feeling optimistic about the various futures that the architectural discipline holds before us. But maybe that optimism has less to do with the power of any one standout or breakthrough (though there were many) and more about what it means to come together—in person, finally!—to
TECH+ returns to NYC on October 21
On Friday October 21, The Architect’s Newspaper presents TECH+ NYC. This forum celebrates the quantum leap of technology transforming the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industries. The full-day event is a continuation of our national Tech+ conference series, featuring case studies and firms from across the country. Back in person for the first time since
Microsoft will launch an AI graphics app powered by DALL•E
This summer text-to-image Artificial Intelligence (AI) softwares DALL∙E and Midjourney rose in popularity among architects, artists, and designers. With just a few descriptive keywords and phrases the models are able to collage together a visual representation of the input text using its memory database of visuals. While the results are sometimes memeable, the engineers are
The 2022 ACADIA conference will explore new modes of practice
After two years of completely virtual events, the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) is returning to in-person proceedings for the first time since the onset of the Covid pandemic. While it was fitting that architecture’s technology caucus hosted online conferences that skirted Zoom fatigue with an interesting interface and meaningful content, there
Leah Wulfman shares their work, making buildings from digital garbage
A river so polluted it becomes cleansed—we are swimming amid trash. A land undisturbed by rainbows of gasoline—we are surrounded by toxic beauty ablaze. This summer, I have been using Midjourney to make buildings that appear just out of the realm of possibility and just out of the realm of the present. The results are
Three experts discuss Midjourney’s promise and pitfalls
This summer, text-to-image AIs have captured the imagination of architects. The software is a powerful tool, but one that should be integrated into ongoing discussions of architectural image making, technology, representation, bias, education, and labor. AN gathered Kory Bieg, Shelby Doyle, and Andrew Kudless to discuss these issues. The Architect’s Newspaper: To start, could you
Advances in technology shape contemporary glazing applications
The following editorial from Aki Ishida kicks off the Focus section of the July/August 2022 edition of The Architect’s Newspaper, which showcases the latest and greatest innovations in glass. You can view the entire section, complete with product roundups and case studies, in full here. In recent decades, technological advancements in chemical coating, structural engineering,
Artificial intelligence can now make convincing images of buildings
There is a new craze in town. Recently, designers have been typing prompts into a diffusion-based artificial intelligence (AI) platform and waiting for images of never-before-seen buildings, logos, products, and more to materialize within seconds. Platforms like Midjourney are built on data sets of billions of existing images scraped from the web. In this vast
Elden Ring has a lot to teach architects about immersive digital space
To play through Elden Ring is to take on a grave and foolish challenge. It took 135 hours of my life to finish the admired action role-playing video game directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki with narrative content from Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. I didn’t beat it just for the bragging rights, but for
Space Perspective unveils balloon-like spaceship for outer space tourism
Launching in late 2024, Space Perspective, a space tourism company, will bring thrill-seeking travelers and wannabe astronauts alike to the “edge of space.” In its recently released renderings the company shared the design for the exterior of the orbiting capsule, Spaceship Neptune, which features a bulbous shape with panoramic windows. The space shuttle is being
Image generator DALLE mini produces amusing architecture content
Social media is abuzz with screengrabs from Dall•E mini, an online platform from Hugging Face that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to collage together images based on keywords and phrases input by its users. The developer behind the project is Boris Dayma, who has programmed and trained the model to peruse millions of online images and
As conversations about NFTs proliferate, lessons about algorithmic collaboration abound
On the main east-west drag in Marfa, Texas, the Art Blocks house/gallery sits between an upscale prix fixe restaurant and a church. With four bedrooms, three baths, a large yard, and a freestanding garage, it’s a fairly large house for the town. It would be a rather inconspicuous one were it not for the large
FUTUREKIN at SCI-Arc brings awareness to futuristic norms
Starting Friday, February 18, and running through April 17, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) is hosting Lucy McRae’s first solo show, a dystopian exhibition titled FUTUREKIN: Mental Health Machines for a Post-CRISPR World. McRae, who was born in the U.K. and raised in Australia, is a “science fiction artist and body architect” and
Two new book and film projects take the contemplative approach to the climate crisis
The mid-20th-century writer and philosopher Marshall McLuhan first used the phrase “the medium is the message” in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. For McLuhan, the content of a television series or a picture book was less impactful than the way the message itself was delivered. In that same book he distinguished
Experience the best student projects in these virtual end-of-year exhibitions
Many architecture students have just wrapped up their final studios and exams, and what an interesting semester it has been. Social distancing has forced the closure of schools, sending design education fleeing from studio halls to online portals like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. The translation—or, indeed, migration—has posed serious questions to inherited models of architectural
Alaska’s Cold Climate Housing Research Center is rethinking how the Circumpolar North builds
The Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC) describes itself as “an industry-based, nonprofit corporation created to facilitate the development, use, and testing of energy-efficient, durable, healthy, and cost-effective building technologies for people living in circumpolar regions around the globe.” Aaron Cooke, the architect who leads the Sustainable Northern Communities Program at the CCHRC in Fairbanks, Alaska, is
The Architect’s Newspaper announces the best in high-tech design
The Architect’s Newspaper has granted its 2019 Best in Design Awards to a number of standout projects, with the TWA Hotel refresh coming out on top as the Building of the Year. AN also recognized the best uses of innovative materials, digital fabrication, and other tech-forward AEC innovations this past year. In Research, LAMAS’s Delirious