Global architecture and design firm NBBJ announced its acquisition of experience design studio ESI Design today. Founded in New York by Edwin Schlossberg, ESI Design has been a leader in interactive design for over forty years, dating back to their work on the Brooklyn Children’s Museum in 1977. Schlossberg will become a partner at NBBJ and continue to lead the studio
Kerenza Harris is the director of design technology at Morphosis, where she works across the firm to integrate advanced computational techniques and high-tech simulations throughout the design process. Ahead of her presentation on system-based design processes and extended reality at TECH+ in Los Angeles next week, AN caught up with Harris to get her takes
Doctor Upali Nanda is reimagining the role of the architect. Where design today is often top-down and architects move on to new projects before doors of the project open, Nanda believes the role of architecture is to create living systems that respond to inhabitants’ changing needs, and architects have to stay involved during occupancy to
Sidewalk Labs, the Alphabet subsidiary focused on urban technology, has been working on a new software tool for generating optimized city layouts. In an effort to combat the disconnect between various stakeholders in the urban planning process—architects, planners, engineers, and real estate developers—and their software, product manager Violet Whitney and designer Brian Ho have created
Home to 19 million people, Delhi has some of the most polluted air on the planet. With some toxic elements present in excess of 25 times the World Health Organization’s guidelines and with a growing population, new solutions are urgently needed. Studio Symbiosis has begun testing its own speculative project, Aura, as potential new “lungs
In West Philadelphia, SOFTlab has realized a six-pillar installation called Spectral Grove. The fanning canopy was realized with the help of three custom computational solutions. Made of powder-coated aluminum, the interlocking metal fins direct light and shadow throughout the day for an animated visual effect. Getting the angles of the canopy just right proved particularly
“There’s so much modern and contemporary art that isn’t shown,” the mononymous artist Damjanski said as we walked around the fifth-floor galleries of MoMA, iPhones in hand. “What if we could bring even more in?” Along with Monique Baltzer and David Lobser, Damjanski has come up with a solution to these limitations with MoMAR, an
The presentations and activities at this year’s ACADIA (Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture) conference gave attendees a glimpse of potentially disruptive technologies and workflows for computational architectural production. The conference was held this year in Austin from October 12 through 14 and was organized by The University of Texas School of Architecture faculty members Kory Bieg, Danelle Briscoe, and
The Boston Planning & Development Agency (BPDA) has long kept 3D models of its city. However, cobbled together over the years, the files are at times cumbersome and as firms increasingly turn to 3D printing for model making and testing, not so useful. Printers don’t know how to process them or they are not designed
Researchers at Rice University have developed a technique that makes 3D-printed common materials diamond-hard. Inspired by the theoretical form of tubulanes—a carbon nanotube structure that scientists predicted in the 1990s would have tremendous strength but have been unable to produce—the researchers scaled the structures up and found that these larger-scale imitators still maintained many of
