On May 9, dozens gathered to watch as a ten-story tower in northeast San Diego juddered and swayed under the forces of back-to-back simulated earthquakes. The building, an experimental mockup of a mass timber tall building, was built atop the Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table at UC San Diego. The so-called table to which

RE-ordering architecture UsagiNY 163 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, New York Through May 25 Like so many, the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns, as defined by Vitruvius in the first century BC, hold my very first memories of learning about the history of architecture. Centuries later, during the Renaissance, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola would famously add the

Shape to Fabrication Robert McNeel & Associates University of Westminster April 26–27 Shape to Fabrication is a biennial gathering of industry specialists, architects, artists, and fabricators in the architecture, engineering, and construction fields. Coordinated by Robert McNeel & Associates, the unusually independent developer of Rhinoceros (a.k.a. Rhino), the event’s main focus is the software and

Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67, a project the architect designed for his master’s thesis at McGill University that was later spun into the 1967 world’s fair in Montreal, has been fully realized as a digital model through software from Unreal Engine and Reality Capture. Creative agency Neoscape was approached by Epic Games—the developer behind the game

There are nearly 7,000 structures undergoing a shared process of repair in the city of Detroit. This number reflects the amount of previously abandoned houses people have purchased from the Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA) and are currently renovating into livable homes under the guidelines of the DLBA’s compliance program. Within this milieu of construction,

By now, most of us have been exposed to the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. Since the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT from U.S.-based artificial intelligence research company OpenAI, the subject has inundated mainstream media with opinions from everyday users, designers, and even “congressmen who code.” For those unfamiliar, the titular GPT is an acronym

Like a lab rat who can’t shake his cocaine addiction, I mercilessly bashed my Power-Up Wristband™ against a golden question mark block to hear that familiar Mario coin sound. Joined by photographer Iwan Baan, who looked on in curious but loving horror, I bathed in the dopamine fountain of nostalgic immersion. Super Nintendo World™ at

Medusa Pioneer Works 159 Pioneer Street Brooklyn, New York Through April 16 High in the rafters of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, a digital display too kinetic and dynamic to exist in the real world swims through space. As Medusa ebbs and flows, seafoam-green square slats shoot from the 40-foot-tall ceiling all the way to ground

Architecture After AI University of Texas at Austin Symposium February 3 Exhibit Jan 30—February 24 In certain circles, 2022 will be remembered as the Year of the Text-to-Image Model. Last April, OpenAI launched DALL-E 2, an update to DALL-E released the previous year, which produces highly detailed and often surrealistic images from text descriptions in

With a slew of in-process projects, ICON and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) are making a name for themselves in the world of 3D printed architecture. The team recently broke ground on the world’s largest 3D-printed community and has plans to land 3D-printed habitations on the moon. In their latest collaboration, announced yesterday, they will work

The Exchange building will be a regular mixed-use building when it is completed later this year. The 16-story-tall structure—one of the tallest in Greektown, a vibrant historic neighborhood near downtown Detroit—will provide 165 living units atop a two-floor podium containing retail and office spaces. Most of Exchange’s facade is clad in alternating vertical stripes of

Conferences appear to be back to nearly full swing based on attendance numbers and foot traffic at Geo Week 2023, held last February 11–13 at the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver. Billing itself as “the Intersection of Geospatial and the Built World,” Geo Week 2023 saw its attendance rise 44 percent over last year,

In March 2015, Jamie Diamond, a photo-based artist, received an email from one Richard “Dick” Stanley. Mistaking Diamond for Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., Stanley stated that he had been a Chase customer in Columbus, Ohio, since 1996, but had recently moved to Albuquerque, where he had to bank long-distance. He

Never Alone Museum of Modern Art New York Through July 16 As the world around us becomes more and more integrated with technology, it’s easy to overlook how much our interfaces, and the programs we use, have evolved. From Windows and Mac icons to the ubiquitous power symbol, the design language of interactivity has become

A new degree program at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design is already beginning to bear fruit in the world. Deep Relief, a large-scale sculptural wall installation, was recently completed by students in the school’s Master of Science in Design: Robotic and Autonomous Systems (MSD-RAS) program. It is installed in the atrium

Back in December, Twitter employees posted photos of makeshift bedrooms company leaders erected in conference rooms at Twitter’s San Francisco Headquarters. Some dismissed the bedrooms as a sick joke, a could-this-really-be manifestation of Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” vision for the social media giant. It turns out that the bedrooms really are here to

Four architecture firms have envisioned virtual words for pax.world, a metaverse platform that invites users and brands to host and attend live events, including concerts, gallery exhibitions, business conferences, and more. Each of the firms, Grimshaw, HWKN, Farshid Moussavi and WHY, has designed a Metaserai, a trade and culture destination, hosted within pax.world, that takes

Herzog & de Meuron has a new website design. (Herzog & de Meuron) According to the firm the new website “reveals the extensive and sometimes surprising connections within the world of the practice through fluid navigation and features including a robust search tool and… Read More… The post Herzog & de Meuron debuts a new

Earlier this month, BIG debuted a new website. The change, announced on Twitter yesterday, noted that the firm’s original website was made during the 2000s Flash era: Our original website was conceived during the flash era nearly 20 years ago! Check out the new https://t.co/ZjfcuHqLg0 which reflects our built… Read More… The post A new

In his lifetime, architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed almost 1,200 homes, public buildings, and city plans (plus at least one doghouse). More than half of those works remain unbuilt, their designs captured only in models or 2D plans. Now, thanks to Spanish architect and 3D artist David Romero, three of these works are more visible to the

The updated version of ChatGPT, released last month, has launched a thousand thinkpieces about how artificial intelligence (AI) should be used. This chat bot, powered by OpenAI, responds to questions via text with conversational answers. It has been trained using the internet, and though it doesn’t answer questions using hate speech, it has internalized the

A few months ago, I visited Las Vegas for the fourth time. Not much has changed: It is still a battleground of corporate brands vying for attention. Do you want to buy a Prada bag in Venice, see a concert from hologram Michael Jackson, or try one of Taco Bell’s new Cantina Margaritas? Architecture supports

It’s well-known that, like architecture, the tech field is known for a grueling work culture where 60-plus hour workweeks are the norm. Even in these environments, employees usually leave the office to sleep in the comfort of their own beds. But with a new amenity, Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk seems to be taking this

A new plugin for Revit offers architects the opportunity to make informed material choices for building designs that put carbon reduction at front of mind. Tally Climate Action Tool, or tallyCAT for short, is a free open-access digital tool launched by nonprofit organization Building Transparency, Perkins&Will, and C-Change Labs. Work on Tally began in the

Just weeks after ICON, the 3D printing technology company, broke ground on what is slated to be the largest 3D printed neighborhood, the Texas-based company is using its expertise and construction systems on an even larger project: lunar habitation. Yesterday, NASA, through its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program dolled out a nearly $60 million

In California, the ideal of indoor-outdoor living has never loosened its hold. Even with ever-pressing environmental issues and ballooning population growth, the dream of a seamless integration between inside and out continues to captivate designers and clients alike. Three recent landscape projects in the Bay Area demonstrate this fact, while also illustrating the particularities of

If you were to glimpse inside Building 20 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (née the New York Naval Shipyard) some 150 years ago, you would have witnessed a spectacle of mechanical brawn and mind-boggling ingenuity unfolding within a machine shop that ranked as the most ultra-modern of its kind in the late 19th century. Completed

Texas-based 3D technology company ICON,  has broken ground on what will become the world’s largest 3D-printed community. The neighborhood located North of Austin in Georgetown, Texas will consist of 100 3D-printed homes codesigned by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and implemented by Lennar, a large construction company based out of Florida, was first announced in 2021.

It’s easy to leave a week jam-packed with cutting-edge research feeling optimistic about the various futures that the architectural discipline holds before us. But maybe that optimism has less to do with the power of any one standout or breakthrough (though there were many) and more about what it means to come together—in person, finally!—to