AquíAquí, the latest collaboration between Cambridge’s Matter Design and multinational CEMEX Global R&D (a frequent partner in realizing the firm’s monumental and kinetic concrete designs) is a speculative community gathering space along the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez border intending to bridge both cities. In AquíAquí (Here Here), Matter Design has envisioned an outdoor “community center” for Parque
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
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
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
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
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
Deep in the forests of Ithaca, New York, a short drive from the Cornell University campus, lies the newly completed Ashen Cabin, a practical example of how new manufacturing methods can turn what used to be waste into useful materials. The small cabin was built by HANNAH, the small practice headed by Leslie Lok and
There was a time when the internet, then new, and untested, was widely welcomed as a revolutionary technology that promised to alleviate—even fix—many of the evils then affecting late modern societies. That brief, juvenile spell was followed by almost 20 years of remorse and misgivings: from the early 2000s to this past month the internet,
Things right now are undoubtedly, brutally rough. And when the going gets rough, the architecture and design community gets 3D printing. As part of a sweeping grassroots mobilization effort that expands and evolves daily, architects, designers, makers, and a small army of displaced students have banded together and fired up their 3D printers to produce
