With the end of the pandemic hopefully in sight, many companies are contemplating a return to the office. However, most are unsure of how to do so. Will these shared spaces be the same as they were before we went into quarantine? While many employers have altogether forgone their dedicated offices in favor of permanent
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
One morning in July 2020, architectural designer Aaron Schiller was in his New York offices directing a project installation in London. “It was my first-ever FaceTime install,” he said, wincing at the mention of the iPhone app. “It was the middle of the pandemic, but I’d really like to avoid anything like it in the future.” He
BQE Software, a cloud-based staple of architecture and engineering firms, has announced that it has secured a significant investment from Serent Capital, a growth-focused private equity firm headquartered in San Francisco. Founded in 1995 by Shafat Qazi, an engineer by trade, and currently headquartered in the coastal Los Angeles County city of Torrance, BQE’s signature product is all-in-one accounting and
There is a prevailing sense among proponents of mass timber that building with wood is inherently good. This enthusiasm is largely premised on a key assumption that if a tree sequesters carbon as it grows, then mass timber building components must count as stored carbon. But if the source of that wood—a forest—is a source of carbon emissions, as is beginning
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
Architectural designer Jennifer Bonner and engineer Hanif Kara have a beef with mass timber, or, rather, the singular meaning its proponents ascribe to the term. The sustainability benefits of engineered wood products like cross-laminated timber (CLT) have overtaken the discourse around them, the duo finds. Manufacturers have an overwhelming influence on the design of timber buildings, many of which simply
Every summer, photos of otherworldly pavilions, tricked-out steampunk cars, and dusty hula-hoopers ingesting empathogens slide onto Instagram feeds worldwide thanks to Burning Man, the nine-day worldbuilding experiment in the remote Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Soon, though, burners won’t have to wait all year to meet up as Burning Man organizers have released design proposals for a permanent
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has announced that it will colead the design of a community gathering place/small business incubator/“eco-food hub” in Englewood, a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. TnS Studio, a self-described “Black-owned, Woman-powered” Chicago architecture firm headed by Taylor Staten and Courtney Harris, will spearhead the design of the space—dubbed Englewood Connect—alongside SOM as part
Just a year after Austin, Texas–based construction technology startup ICON first unveiled a half-dozen 3D-printed homes at a 51-acre community established to provide affordable, permanent housing for formerly homeless residents of the city, the fast-growing (and Bjarke Ingels Group–backed) company has announced, in partnership with Kansas City, Missouri–based real estate developer 3Strands, the arrival of a new development in East Austin populated by two-to-four-bedroom homes that