It’s a well-known fact that buildings painted lighter colors reflect more light: it’s what made New York City’s plan to combat the urban heat island effect and lower cooling bills by painting roofs white so effective. Now, scientists have discovered a “whitest-white” paint that reflects 95.5 percent of light, a potential boon for passive cooling
Since 1981, the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, or ACADIA, has held conferences at academic institutions throughout North America, bringing together a network of designers, researchers, and practitioners under a single roof. That wasn’t an option for ACADIA 2020—the 40th conference in the series—and the reality of social distancing is reflected right in
Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2020 is a technological masterpiece. Reviews are nearly uniformly glowing, adopting tones both confessional (“the most incredible experience I’ve ever had on a computer”) and epochal (a “once-in-a-generation wow moment”). The game’s devotion to realism begins in the mechanical and aesthetic accuracy of the aircraft you pilot but is also extended, in
Two years after the Alphabet-owned Waymo launched a limited self-driving taxi service in the Metro Phoenix, Arizona, area (and two years after people started attacking the autonomous cars), the company has kicked off a fully driverless car service in and around Phoenix. Whereas in 2018 passengers would be assuaged by the site of a human
NASA is continuing the work started in its 2018 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge, which sought designs for 3D printing radiation-shielded Martian shelters from the surrounding regolith, a little closer to home. Participants SEArch+, 3D printing, robotics, and advanced materials startup ICON, and the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) have all been tapped to research how we might
New Rochelle, the seventh most populous city in New York, has introduced an immersive virtual reality platform that will serve as an instrumental public engagement and input tool as the city embarks on transformative planned redevelopment projects. The experience will enable residents to better experience, via 360-degree views, nearly 3 million square feet of proposed
Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Matter Design has unveiled its latest concrete collaboration, an outdoor “play-lab” at the Grayson School in Radnor, Pennsylvania, that balances hulking cast concrete forms with mix-and-match freestyle play. Explorations into play have always found their way into Matter Design’s projects, whether it be in the rollicking performances of Janus, or the rollable Walking
It should, perhaps, come as no surprise that the “city of canals” is being threatened by rising tides. It has been less than a year since Venice, Italy, experienced its highest level of flooding in half a century years, as two-thirds of the city was swamped in mid-November. Some areas saw as much as six
The following text was drafted in response to the first prompt in AN’s “Post-Pandemic Potentials” series. Two previous responses, by Mario Carpo and Phil Bernstein, reflected on the mostly seamless transition of architectural education from physical to virtual settings. Read more about the series here. Michel Foucault’s famous account of the plague described the partitioning
Mighty Buildings, a new San Francisco-based construction startup, is aiming to 3D print prefabricated housing. They’ve hit the ground running, and the company has already produced a number of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and partnered with EYRC Architects to design its new range of stylish, small homes. By producing lightweight, stone wall, flooring, and roof
