San Francisco says Twitter needs permits for its office bedrooms

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

Architects design cultural venues for a Silk Road metaverse

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 debuts a new website

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

A new website from BIG has us missing the early 2000s like whoa

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

New renderings depict unbuilt Frank Lloyd Wright skyscrapers

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

Why write about architecture? ChatGPT has ideas.

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

Las Vegas helps us understand how virtual environments fall short

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

Twitter’s newest office amenity is a bedroom

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

This Revit plugin helps architects pick materials with less embodied carbon

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

NASA awards ICON contract to continue research on lunar habitation

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

Hood Design Studio creates an inhabitable landscape for NVIDIA’s campus

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

CLT shines in Rogers Partners’ renovation of a former shipbuilding factory

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

ICON and BIG break ground on the world’s largest 3D-printed community

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.

2022 ACADIA covers extra-disciplinary collaboration and artificial intelligence

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

Concrete.ai releases tool reducing cost of concrete construction

Concrete.ai, a Los Angeles–based data science startup describing itself as being “on a mission to avoid 500 million tons of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere annually,” announced last week the beta launch of a new software platform developed to reduce the cost and embodied carbon intensity in concrete construction. As detailed by the company, the

TECH+ returns to NYC on October 21

On Friday October 21, The Architect’s Newspaper presents TECH+ NYC. This forum celebrates the quantum leap of technology transforming the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industries. The full-day event is a continuation of our national Tech+ conference series, featuring case studies and firms from across the country. Back in person for the first time since

Microsoft will launch an AI graphics app powered by DALL•E

This summer text-to-image Artificial Intelligence (AI) softwares DALL∙E and Midjourney rose in popularity among architects, artists, and designers. With just a few descriptive keywords and phrases the models are able to collage together a visual representation of the input text using its memory database of visuals. While the results are sometimes memeable, the engineers are

Carlo Ratti Associati inserts a mock tokamak reactor into a gasholder

Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) and Milan-based architect Italo Rota have joined forces with Rome-headquartered global energy behemoth Eni to explore the carbon-free potential of magnetic confinement fusion energy at a pop-up exhibition installed at this year’s just-concluded Maker Fair Rome. The spherical pavilion is realized as an ersatz tokamak fusion reactor within Gazometro Ostiense, a

The 2022 ACADIA conference will explore new modes of practice

After two years of completely virtual events, the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) is returning to in-person proceedings for the first time since the onset of the Covid pandemic. While it was fitting that architecture’s technology caucus hosted online conferences that skirted Zoom fatigue with an interesting interface and meaningful content, there

Leah Wulfman shares their work, making buildings from digital garbage

A river so polluted it becomes cleansed—we are swimming amid trash. A land undisturbed by rainbows of gasoline—we are surrounded by toxic beauty ablaze. This summer, I have been using Midjourney to make buildings that appear just out of the realm of possibility and just out of the realm of the present. The results are

Can Liv-Connected crack the modular housing code?

Liv-Connected, a modular construction company, is hard at work trying to solve the country’s housing crisis. Their solution? A customizable, prefabricated home that can be assembled on-site in four hours. The company was founded in 2019 by physician Herbert Rogove—an early proponent of telemedicine—and his son Jordan Rogove, cofounder of the New York City–based architecture

Three experts discuss Midjourney’s promise and pitfalls

This summer, text-to-image AIs have captured the imagination of architects. The software is a powerful tool, but one that should be integrated into ongoing discussions of architectural image making, technology, representation, bias, education, and labor. AN gathered Kory Bieg, Shelby Doyle, and Andrew Kudless to discuss these issues. The Architect’s Newspaper: To start, could you

Graphisoft turns 40 and expands product offerings, support

In the warm night sky above Budapest, a fleet of drones spelled “GRAPHISOFT” as the software company celebrated its 40th anniversary. At Graphisoft Park—the company’s headquarters in Buda—attendees gathered outside with Aperol spritzes before CEO Huw Roberts took the stage. Roberts was joined by founder Gábor Bojár and chairman of the board and former CEO

Lake|Flato announced launches modular home company HiFAB

Lake|Flato Architects, a Lone Star State firm lauded for its enthusiastic embrace of sustainable design practices and emerging building technologies, is going full-on modular in partnership with a just-announced prefab homebuilding venture named HiFAB. Launched by Dallas-based real estate development and investment firm Oaxaca Interests, HiFAB recently debuted its studio and manufacturing… Read More… The

In Houston, work gets underway on a 3D-printed two-story home

HANNAH, an Architectural League Prize–winning experimental design and research studio led by Cornell University assistant professors of architecture Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic, has announced that construction work is underway in Houston on a story-story, 4,000-square-foot single-family home that, when completed, will stand as the first 3D-printed multistory structure in the United States. Serving as

An immersive LED entertainment venue coming soon to Hollywood Park

SoFi Stadium, host venue of Super Bowl LVI and anchoring site of the 2028 Summer Olympics, is getting a flashy new neighbor at Hollywood Park, the burgeoning behemoth of an entertainment complex-slash-mixed-use development located at the old Hollywood Park racetrack near Los Angeles International Airport in Inglewood, California. As recently announced, Cosm, a global experiential

Montana becomes first state to approve 3D-printed walls in construction

Montana, the first state to debut a luge track and send a woman to Congress, can now claim a new and somewhat unexpected first: the first state to give broad regulatory approval to the use of 3D-printed walls in new construction in lieu of concrete masonry units (CMUs) or standard cored concrete blocks. As reported

Advances in technology shape contemporary glazing applications

The following editorial from Aki Ishida kicks off the Focus section of the July/August 2022 edition of The Architect’s Newspaper, which showcases the latest and greatest innovations in glass. You can view the entire section, complete with product roundups and case studies, in full here. In recent decades, technological advancements in chemical coating, structural engineering,

Artificial intelligence can now make convincing images of buildings

There is a new craze in town. Recently, designers have been typing prompts into a diffusion-based artificial intelligence (AI) platform and waiting for images of never-before-seen buildings, logos, products, and more to materialize within seconds. Platforms like Midjourney are built on data sets of billions of existing images scraped from the web. In this vast