SOM and The University of Manchester envision the space habitat of the future
“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.
“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.
Miami-Dade County is known for its art deco buildings, subtropical climate, and a youthful exuberance ready to embrace the moment as exemplified by Maurizio Cattelan’s 2019 Banana at Art Basel. Miami-Dade is also notorious for hurricanes, looming sea level rise, and pioneering rigorous structural building codes coined the “Dade County Code” that set global standards
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
In addition to the core exhibitions and dozen-plus commissioned architectural interventions now on view and activated at predominately city-owned vacant lots during the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, over 100 civic, educational, and cultural partners have launched a range of events—exhibitions, installations, lectures, tours, and more—to coincide with the central festival programming. Among these complementary festival
Europe has, as of late, become the site of robust environmental technological developments designed to reduce global waste and carbon emissions, from BIG’s waste-to-power plant in Copenhagen to a proposal for a mass timber neighborhood in Sweden. As of last Wednesday, it has also become the site of the latest advancement in carbon capture technology.
In the last few years, 3D printing has become an increasingly plausible construction technique for the building industry thanks to the innovations of companies like ICON, a Texas-based robotics and advanced materials startup. This year alone, ICON has developed a house with Lake|Flato Architects, a mass-market development with real estate developer 3Strands, and collaborated with
For the last few years, the building industry has sought environmentally-friendly alternatives to steel production, estimated to cause 8 percent of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions annually. Cross-laminated timber (CLT) and other structural materials have been considered as relatively non-intensive stand-ins for the tried and true medium, leaving nearly a quarter of all steel companies
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)
In May 2020, facing mounting criticism from privacy advocates, Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel Doctoroff announced that the Google-backed company was scrapping its smart city project in the Quayside neighborhood of Toronto. With its passing, there was a sense among critics that some sort of evil had been defeated—that the little guy had won and Alphabet/Google had been
In September of 2020, Sebastian Aristotelis and Karl-Johan Sorensen, founders of SAGA Space Architects, embarked on a three-month mission to Northern Greenland in hopes of simulating the experience of living on the Moon. Drawing inspiration from the tradition of origami folding and the form of a budding leaf, SAGA designed a habitat specifically for the
A freestanding, unreinforced pedestrian bridge built from 53 3D-printed concrete blocks is now open for leisurely foot traffic in Venice. Although Striatus doesn’t carry pedestrians over one of the city’s famed canals, this first-of-its-kind structure is now open for park-bound traversing at the leafy Giardino della Marinaressa during the run of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. The roughly 40-by-52-foot arched footbridge was
Just days before billionaire Jeff Bezos is due to be blasted into the cosmos (or close to it) aboard a suborbital space vehicle with an all-civilian crew, the Amazon founder and former CEO again emphasized his passion for all things astronautic with a $200 million donation to the Smithsonian Institution. The money will solely be
Just weeks after it announced a partnership with the Virginia Center for Housing Research at Virginia Tech to design, build, and study America’s first 3D-printed, private-public partnership grant-funded single-family home in Richmond, Alquist has revealed another unprecedented project underway in Williamsburg, Virginia. This time, it’s the East Coast’s first 3D-printed Habitat for Humanity dwelling. The project, spearheaded by additive construction company Alquist with Habitat for