CLB Architects is no stranger to public art installations in Jackson, Wyoming; take its mutable Town Enclosure from 2019, for example. This year, the firm has returned with Undercurrent, an eclectic collection of rods for the monthlong Glownights 2020/21 public art exhibition. This is the third iteration of Glownights, which aims to bring illuminating installations
In the fall of 2020 in Sunnyvale, California, Trimble, Sketchup’s parent company, announced PreDesign: A service that allows architects and designers to test design strategies and understand the effects of climate and lighting on a building from the outset. The Sketchup feature permits the designer to get the valuable data needed to weave contextual insights
Just an hour east of the first mass-produced suburb in the United States, a new model of affordable, quick-to-build housing has been realized—and is now for sale—in the town of Riverhead on Long Island’s North Shore. Boasting three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, and a spacious open floor plan, the suburban New York home in question
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
A 40-mile-long corridor reserved for autonomous vehicles may soon connect Detroit and Ann Arbor. Last Thursday, on August 13, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced the creation of the Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Corridor, which will be established through a public-private partnership. Mobility company Cavnue has been selected as the project’s Master Developer, and will help
ACADIA, the annual conference exploring technology in architecture, has announced its 2020 lineup and is now open for registrations. This year’s event, which will be entirely virtual because of the coronavirus pandemic, is titled “Distributed Proximities” and will focus on projects that “that demonstrate the resilience and ingenuity of the computational design community in the
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
The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) has named Daniel Fernández Pascual, a Spanish-born, London-based architect, urban designer, educator, and researcher as the recipient of the 2020 Wheelwright Prize. Now in its eighth year as an international open competition, the Wheelwright Prize, which first originated at Harvard GSD in 1935, is a research travel-based grant
Many architecture students have just wrapped up their final studios and exams, and what an interesting semester it has been. Social distancing has forced the closure of schools, sending design education fleeing from studio halls to online portals like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. The translation—or, indeed, migration—has posed serious questions to inherited models of architectural
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) might still be closed to the public, but thanks to its Virtual Views series of digital tours, “visitors” can check out what’s going on at the museum every Thursday night. By harnessing a combination of video, high-resolution images of every piece and didactics, a multitude of audio guides for
In an ironic turn of events, the threat of the novel coronavirus has forced Sweden’s national center for architecture and design to move WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD, what was supposed to have been an in-real-life manifestation of ASMR, totally online. The exhibition was originally supposed to have run in ArkDes’s experimental Boxen, an enclosed gallery