The management of hotels, from general room keeping to office administration, requires scores of employees coordinated around the clock to service guests needs. Multinational-hospitality company Intercontinental Hotels Group is experimenting with artificial intelligence to streamline customer service across its hotels. In July, the company rolled out the AI hotel rooms for its Sanlitun, Beijing location,

Imverse, a Switzerland-based 3D computer graphics company, is pushing forward with immersive virtual reality experiences with potential architectural applications. Imverse’s Elastic Time, which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, is a mixed reality documentary experience that allows the user to see their own body hologram with unlimited freedom of movement. The volumetric 3D environment provides

Syracuse-based APTUM Architecture has designed and fabricated Thinness, an ultra-light concrete pavilion in collaboration with international concretemanufacturer Cemex Global R&D. Concrete is one of the most ubiquitous construction materials in the world. Its advantages are many: it’s easy to produce, is remarkably strong, and can take on a variety of forms. It does, however, have one rather weighty constraint: it’s

The University of the West of England’s Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR) is experimenting with a six-axis Mitsubishi Electric MELFA RV-Series to create 3D printed forms that move beyond simple CAD models and slicing algorithms. Unlike conventional 3D printers which deposit material according to rigid algorithms, the six-axis Mitsubishi robotic arm is geared for

In 2018, San Francisco-based software company Monograph launched its project-planning platform, Dashboard for Architects. The objective of the platform is to shift the myriad planning tools used by architects to a singular and cohesive application. The Dashboard for Architects allows firms to manage their practice and projects in a visually straightforward format, with an emphasis

With a quarter million members in 283 buildings across 75 different cities (and another 183 locations in the pipeline), WeWork is on an expansion tear that’s grown to include retail, education, and maybe even full neighborhoods somewhere down the line. With the company’s first ground-up building, Dock 72, nearly complete in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, AN spoke with the designers and researchers who are making

On July 18th, Chattanooga-based architectural fabricator Branch Technology unveiled the world’s largest 3D-printed structure, a bandshell pavilion measuring 20-feet-tall and 42-feet-wide. The pavilion was first announced in Cambridge, Massachusetts during MIT’s 2018 International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures. The structure is located in Nashville’s emerging smart-city neighborhood, OneC1TY. Reported by Architect Magazine, the carbon

Open-plan offices are all the rage. Companies continue to strip away walls, push desks together, and create higher energy environments in the name of fostering face-to-face interaction, but a new article titled “The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration” published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences presents findings

On July 19th, GRAPHISOFT’S “By Design” series amassed a series of recognitions from Architectural Record, the Academy of Interactive & Visual Artists (AIVA), and the Summit International Award (SIA). The awards, such as Best Branded Content Series from SIA and Highest Social Media Management from Architectural Record, highlight the series’ strength in both publishing and

Ithaca-based studio HANNAH has installed a series of 3D printed seats across Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria, Queens, for the summer, extending their architectural experiments in large-scale 3D printing to sectional furniture. RRRolling Stones is the 2018 winner of Folly/Function, an annual competition held by the Architectural League of New York in partnership with the sculpture

  Lyft has gone multimodal and acquired most of bike-share company Motivate, supplementing its car-for-hire business model with ownership of the country’s largest network of docked bicycles. The purchase means that Lyft is now the owner of New York’s Citi Bike program and will continue to maintain Motivate’s existing bike-share programs across eight cities. Lyft’s purchase, coming in at a rumored $250

ACADIA, or the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, established the ACADIA Awards of Excellence to recognize outstanding individuals and practices that think critically about the impact and possibilities of computer-aided design. This year, the ACADIA Awards recipients, including Mónica Ponce de León and Oyler Wu Collaborative, will present their work at the conference titled Recalibration: On Imprecision and

On Wednesday, SITU Research, an interdisciplinary practice within the Brooklyn-based firm SITU, launched a new collaboration with Amnesty International detailing the systematic destruction of the Rohingya Muslim population and its villages by the Myanmar military. This interactive digital platform weaves together evidence collected from maps, satellite images, testimonies, as well as verified photographs and videos to

Amsterdam-based firm MX3D has completed the full span of its 3-D-printed stainless steel bridge, designed by Joris Laarman Lab, a multidisciplinary team located in the Netherlands. The bridge will cross one of the city’s oldest canals, the Oudezijds Achterburgwal, and is approximately forty feet in length and over twenty feet wide. Often using digital fabrication and

Sketchfab, an online platform for the publication and exchange of 3D models and content, has just launched the Sketchfab store. The store, which has been operating in beta up to this point, will allow the 1.8 million member community to effectively monetize and share their 3D products. Since launching in 2012, the Sketchfab platform has

The growth of smart technology is fundamentally reshaping urban systems and planning. Through the expansion of wireless networks, interactive surveillance systems, autonomous vehicles, and reactive environmental infrastructure, cities are further attached to a new form of tech management. Reported by MIT Press, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is launching a new Urban Science major in

The process of drawing up architectural plans is in flux. For more than a decade, assorted software programs have attempted to bridge the gap between two and three dimensions by taking flat drawings or field data collected onsite and migrating them into modeling platforms, which create photorealistic renderings or 3-D virtual reality walkthroughs of a

Founded in 2003, Alice Technologies is a construction engineering software used by developers and contractors to improve the efficiency of construction projects. As reported by Construction Today, the development of Alice Technologies’ software required mapping out the relationship between building sequence and schedule. First, the software trawls through building information software to collect data related

ORDERFOX, the Lichtenstein-based online platform for the CNC industry is now expanding its services to the CNC Woodworking marketplace. Launched in 2017, ORDERFOX allows for the seamless order of CNC goods across the world. Specifically, this expansion into CNC Woodworking will allow for buyers to directly place orders for customized furniture or wood parts. The

Amsterdam’s MX3D-printed bridge, designed by Joris Laarman Lab in collaboration with ARUP, has been awarded the STARTS Prize 2018. The STARTS Prize recognizes innovative projects built along interdisciplinary principles combining art, science and technology. Crossing Amsterdam’s Oudezijds Achterburgwal, the stainless steel pedestrian bridge is approximately forty feet in length and over twenty feet wide. The

In Constructuring: An Unstoppable Trend, a white paper by Borealis Ventures’ Ian Howell, speculates as to which practices holdback the construction industry’s ability to build housing on-time and within budget. Citing a McKinsey & Company study which found that “large projects across asset classes typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are

There’s a perfect storm brewing in the AEC industry with respect to technology, and startup tech companies are stoked because the waves are finally rolling in. A number of factors are contributing to the sudden surge. An increasingly urban population along with a changing climate is placing unprecedented pressure on the built environment, according to

Hot off of a flamethrower fundraising sale for Elon Musk’s side project, the Hyperloop tunnel digging The Boring Company, Musk has announced that the muck, rock, and detritus produced by the company’s tunneling would be turned into usable bricks. The first announcement from Musk came on March 26, when he tweeted that the rock mined from the company’s California test tunnels would be

Meet the incubators and accelerators producing the new guard of design and architecture start-ups. This is part of a series profiling incubators and accelerators from our April 2018 Technology issue.  Located on the first two floors of a concrete-framed former army base in South Boston, Autodesk’s BUILD Space (BUILD stands for building, innovation, learning, and design), which opened in

Meet the incubators and accelerators producing the new guard of design and architecture start-ups. This is part of a series profiling incubators and accelerators from our April 2018 Technology issue.  Located in a former shipbuilding space at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, New Lab is an 84,000-square-foot collaborative tech hub dedicated to entrepreneurs working on scalable technologies and products. New Lab supports companies in nine

Artist Mel Chin is bringing two new installations to Times Square’s Broadway plazas this summer. Wake and Unmoored are part of Mel Chin: All Over the Place, a multi-location exhibition produced by the Queens Museum and the public art nonprofit No Longer Empty. Other locations involved with the citywide exhibition are the Queens Museum and the Broadway–Lafayette/Bleeker Street subway station, which is hosting a May

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, are giving timber construction a mechanical leg up with the introduction of prefabricated, robotically-assembled timber frame housing. Together with Erne AG Holzbau, a contracting firm that specializes in timber, researchers at the institute’s Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication have developed Spatial Timber Assemblies, a system for digitally fabricating and constructing

This year’s Tech+ conference—an upcoming and groundbreaking event showcasing technological innovators in the AEC industry taking place on May 22 in New York City—will feature pioneering speakers that are rethinking existing technological paradigms. Among them is Iffat Mai, practice application development leader for Perkins + Will, who will be co-presenting a discussion about enhanced realities and immersive experiences. As

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera has filed a cease-and-desist order targeting the privately-operated dockless scooters that have seemingly taken over downtown San Francisco streets in recent weeks.  In a letter sent to the three dockless scooter companies currently operating in the city, Herrera decried the upstarts for “continu(ing) to operate an unpermitted motorized scooter rental