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
Facade Manufacturer Elicc Group Architect Miller Hull Partnership Structural engineer KPFF Consulting Engineers Civil engineer KPFF Consulting Engineers General Contractor Lease Crutcher Lewis Location Seattle Facade Installer Elicc Group Date October 2020 System 36″ Glass fins and 8″ aluminum fins on unitized curtain wall system Products Curtainwall and exterior shading by Elicc Group, precast concrete
In Arizona, the state with the fourth most dire affordable housing shortage according to National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC)’s recently released Gap report, the Central Arizona chapter of global nonprofit Habitat for Humanity is looking to pave the way for new modes of sustainable, scalable low-cost housing across the Grand Canyon State. How? With the aid of ample local largesse and a
Over the last few years, the Los Angeles area has seen a great influx of infrastructural and placemaking projects that emphasize the status of the pedestrian within the city, ranging from Frank Gehry’s reenvisioning of the L.A. River to the ongoing construction of Destination Crenshaw. The Arroyo Bridge, which wrapped up construction at the beginning of the pandemic but was only recently
Additive construction company Alquist and the Virginia Center for Housing Research (VCHR) at Virginia Tech have partnered to design, build, and study a 3D-printed single-family home that’s the first of its kind in the United States: funded by a private-public partnership grant. Work on the three-bedroom, 1,550-square-foot home broke ground earlier this week at 217 Carnation Street in Richmond’s Midlothian neighborhood.
ICON, the Texas-based robotics and advanced materials construction company with lunar ambitions, has announced a new series of (earthbound) 3D-printed homes designed in collaboration with a slew of top architects. San Antonio- and Austin-based Lake|Flato Architects is the first to be tapped for the so-called Exploration Series, which according to ICON, will “develop new design languages and architectural vernaculars” with collaborating architects
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you won’t be visiting Venice any time soon. But that’s fine, neither will I. You might have heard that the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, one year delayed, kicked off in late May to significantly smaller crowds—and presumably a significantly smaller Aperol bill—than usual. You might have also heard
The 1,428-foot-tall 111 West 57th Street, the latest addition to Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row, is finally on track for completion later this year. Designed by SHoP Architects, the residential supertall is clad in dazzling terra-cotta, glass, and bronze ornamental work that accentuates its pencil-thin profile towering over Central Park. Already, the building has become an iconic part of the New
Summer is approaching, and that means that schools are saying goodbye to another generation of students. At the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), that meant the creation of the Avery SPOT, a high-tech inflatable installation and wooden stage that were used to hold GSAPP events and commencement from April 29 through May 1.
Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip is a charming hodgepodge where buildings old and new jostle for space with palm trees and rotating billboards. Adding to this riotous scene is a new urban marker every bit as attention-grabbing as Hollywood blockbusters and architectural kitsch. At 67 feet tall, the West Hollywood Sunset Spectacular is somewhere between a billboard and
In recent years, experiments in architecture have produced forms, moods, and effects that resist easy labeling. Still, some have tried putting a name to this diverse, variegated work: the “postdigital.” The term was first popularized by the British architect Sam Jacobs, who considered postdigital drawing (often taking the form of collage) to be a meaningful
Two weeks before Kate Wagner published her scathing treatise of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) as simply an outgrowth of high-money architectural speculation, a Paul Rudolph-designed home in Westchester County, New York, hit the market as an NFT. The Edersheim Residence, located at 862 Fenimore Road in Larchmont, was originally built in 1958 and then later altered in 1982 by Rudolph at the
The media hasn’t been too kind to Elon Musk’s Las Vegas Loop over the last two weeks, as a special preview of the $52 million, subterranean convention center loop revealed … a system where you get in a Tesla and tell the human driver which station to let you off at. That’s a far cry from what was originally
Bologna- and Milan-based Mario Cucinella Architects (MC A) and leading Italian 3D printing company WASP have revealed a newly-completed TECLA, a high-performance prototype dome house that marries primordial materials and advanced construction technology. Built from locally sourced clay using Crane WASP, a newly developed modular 3D-printing system, the deeply sustainable two-room dwelling is the first 3D-printed structure to be realized using indigenous
The theme of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, still on track to open on May 22, asks attendees and observers, How will we live together? For Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), that answer appears to be “on the moon,” as the multinational design juggernaut will bring its Moon Village to Venice’s Arsenale. For the Life Beyond Earth exhibition, SOM and the European Space
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
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