While up to thirteen percent of museums worldwide are expected to close permanently due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a digital art museum is opening in lower Manhattan. Hall des Lumieres is an immersive exhibition space that is being planned for the first floor of the former Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank building, a 15-story tower at
Japan is facing a labor shortage: As the country continues to age, with 35 percent of the workforce is over 55, the construction industry is looking towards new ways to fill its widening labor gap (Japan has been relaxing its notoriously strict immigration policy towards lesser-skilled workers, but very slowly). One of those solutions is
A group of 25 largely United Kingdom-headquartered architecture firms including Grimshaw, Zaha Hadid Architects, Wilkinson Eyre Architects, and Rogers, Stirk, Harbour + Partners have sent Andrew Anagnost, president and CEO of Autodesk, a five-page open letter censuring the Silicon Valley-based design software and services giant for the mounting ownership costs—an increase as much as 70
At the age of 26, eight years after I had left the comfort and safety of my parents’ mid-90s brick-and-vinyl ranch, I moved into my first apartment with central air conditioning. For many of us in the United States, central air is a given—a background whisper to contemporary life, acknowledged only when it stops working
The Provincial Centre for Sustainability and Innovation in Construction (better known as Kamp C) in the Belgian municipality of Westerlo has completed work on a two-story model home, measuring just shy of 970 square feet, that was produced as a single piece by a fixed 3D printer—a world’s first. The concrete printer in question is
The Cambridge, Massachusetts–based practice Matter Design, directed by Brandon Clifford and partners Jo Lobdell and Wes McGee, is rethinking what performance and sustainability mean in architecture. “In the past few years the conversations we were having were falling outside of the conventional discipline of architecture,” Clifford said. “If you start to talk about sustainable building
Much has been made about the physical separation necessitated by the novel coronavirus. But the pandemic has also laid bare the digital divide separating communities across the country. Over the past few months, millions of Americans have had to shift their daily activities online with the help of web-based applications, productivity tools, and videoconferencing platforms.
If you mingle within the spheres of design and architecture, I’m sure you’ve seen them. They dwell within endlessly scrollable design websites and social media feeds; some even make it to print. Slick renderings of tree-lined balconies and floating cities; design “solutions” involving AI or 3D printing or bitcoin or whatever the new tech buzzword
Despite all the news of re-openings, lifted restrictions, al fresco options dining, and a return to something more closely resembling “normal,” COVID-19 is still very much with us. And despite the defeatist/downplayed/nothing to see here stance embraced by the current presidential administration, the United States is still in the midst of an unprecedented public health
There is a slide I like to show at the beginning of the architecture courses I teach that provides an overview of the last hundred years or so in design and technology. In the left column, a car from the beginning of the 20th Century (a Ford Model T) is poised over a contemporary car
