Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space By Fred Scharmen Verso Books, 2021 MSRP $27 As the world spins deeper into the third year of a global pandemic with no sign of abating, a new space race is forming over our heads. Entry is open to all, and the tickets are literal.

Robotics and advanced materials construction startup ICON has revealed its first completed home in its Exploration Series, which per the Texas-based company, sets out to “develop new design languages and architectural vernaculars” with collaborating architects “based on the opportunities created by construction-scale 3D printing.” First announced last May, the roughly 2,000-square-foot East Austin abode melds

Despite the flashy promises of supersonic rail travel through vacuum-sealed tubes and six years of work by Bjarke Ingels to envision rapid intercity transportation systems, Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop is reportedly struggling. The company has reportedly laid off 111 employees, about half of its staff, and will drop the passenger side of the business to

The Dubai Future Foundation’s long-awaited Museum of the Future, a “new global centre for future thinking, technologies, and innovation” housed within a 252-foot-tall toroidal structure, is finally open in the heart of the city’s Financial District. Rising seven stories above Dubai’s skyscraper-lined main artery, the Paul Bunyan-sized ring with sheik-penned quotes inscribed into its metallic,

Starting Friday, February 18, and running through April 17, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) is hosting Lucy McRae’s first solo show, a dystopian exhibition titled FUTUREKIN: Mental Health Machines for a Post-CRISPR World. McRae, who was born in the U.K. and raised in Australia, is a “science fiction artist and body architect” and

What do a video game designer, a conservation photographer, a reliability engineer, a fire scientist, a dancer-slash-roboticist, an astrophysicist, a digital archaeologist, a bat conservationist, and the CEO of an aquarium of all have in common? They are among the 100-plus women of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) who will be descending in statue form

A new book on architectural representation, Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image (Routledge Publishing) by Michael Young, co-founder of YOUNG & AYATA and assistant professor at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union, attempts to deal with the state of contemporary image culture by cutting across

Floating countries are nothing new—libertarians have been proposing going John Galt and fleeing to floating nations free from the rules of terrestrial governments for decades. No such seastead or self-sufficient island nation has ever actually been built, of course, but that hasn’t stopped cryptocurrency investors from floating their own proposals. Last week, the internet discovered

From reimagining city spaces to designing sustainable buildings, architecture firms and designers are tackling complex projects while navigating the remote workplace. But as we slowly return to what work life used to be before the pandemic, many of us have already adapted to a hybrid work environment. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), 87

For those on the ground at Expo 2020 Dubai looking to transport themselves to a far-flung tropical locale without leaving a once-barren expanse of desert abutting the Persian Gulf, the Brazil Pavilion has got you covered. Just don’t forget to bring aquatic footwear. Located in the Sustainability District between the Sweden Pavilion and the Azerbaijan

Earlier this week, additive construction company Alquist and Habitat for Humanity formally handed over the keys to the new owner of an otherwise ordinary-looking three-bedroom single-family home in Williamsburg, Virginia. Despite appearances, however, that building was recently completed as the first Habitat project on the East Coast to be constructed with the aid of a

Following a highly successful shift to a totally virtual experience in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, ACADIA (The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture), once again held their annual conference online in 2021. Titled “Realignments: Toward Critical Computation,” this year’s proceedings marked the 40th anniversary of a conference that brings together practitioners,

Nabr, a consumer-first housing startup that aims to bring a tech-driven, bespoke home designing and financing to the masses, has formally launched with the news that its first apartment building will debut in the summer of 2023 at 415 South 3rd Street in San Jose’s buzzy arts and culture quarter, the SoFA (South of First

The mid-20th-century writer and philosopher Marshall McLuhan first used the phrase “the medium is the message” in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. For McLuhan, the content of a television series or a picture book was less impactful than the way the message itself was delivered. In that same book he distinguished

After changing its national currency to Bitcoin and enforcing mandatory acceptance at businesses in September, El Salvador is looking to up the ante by building a “Bitcoin City” at the base of Conchagua volcano in the country’s eastern La Union region. Announced by President Nayib Bukele on November 20 as part of a weeklong promotional

What do a cloned ferret, a Bakelite baby monitor, biodegradable burial pods, genderless voice assistants, a century-old artificial limb, and a deli case stuffed with fake meat all have in common? They’re all among the dizzying assemblage of innovations past and speculative designs imagining a cleaner, greener, and more inclusive tomorrow showcased at the new

NEST, an ever-evolving experimental structure that serves as a testbed for emerging construction and energy technologies, has gained its eighth and newest temporary building module. The eclectic agglomerate sits on the shared campus of Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology) and Eawag (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology) in the

You’d be forgiven if, upon hearing the terminology quad-based remeshing, ngon-based meshes, open topologies, and tropisms, you wondered if you had been slipped the Zoom link to presentations of thesis dissertations at the ETH Zurich and not Parametric Architecture’s Computational Design: NEXT 6.0 conference. While we may begrudgingly add another webcast event to our calendars,

“How will we live in space?” is a question that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has already broached through its work for the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Moon Village.

Miami-Dade County is known for its art deco buildings, subtropical climate, and a youthful exuberance ready to embrace the moment as exemplified by Maurizio Cattelan’s 2019 Banana at Art Basel. Miami-Dade is also notorious for hurricanes, looming sea level rise, and pioneering rigorous structural building codes coined the “Dade County Code” that set global standards

NASA, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), SEarch+ and Apis Cor, and a host of other governmental bodies and design firms have made the news of late for proposals to 3D print Martian habitats from locally sourced regolith in-situ. These sorts of schemes all focus on easy-to-transport methods of construction with materials already on the Red Planet

In addition to the core exhibitions and dozen-plus commissioned architectural interventions now on view and activated at predominately city-owned vacant lots during the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, over 100 civic, educational, and cultural partners have launched a range of events—exhibitions, installations, lectures, tours, and more—to coincide with the central festival programming. Among these complementary festival

Europe has, as of late, become the site of robust environmental technological developments designed to reduce global waste and carbon emissions, from BIG’s waste-to-power plant in Copenhagen to a proposal for a mass timber neighborhood in Sweden. As of last Wednesday, it has also become the site of the latest advancement in carbon capture technology. 

In the last few years, 3D printing has become an increasingly plausible construction technique for the building industry thanks to the innovations of companies like ICON, a Texas-based robotics and advanced materials startup. This year alone, ICON has developed a house with Lake|Flato Architects, a mass-market development with real estate developer 3Strands, and collaborated with

For the last few years, the building industry has sought environmentally-friendly alternatives to steel production, estimated to cause 8 percent of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions annually. Cross-laminated timber (CLT) and other structural materials have been considered as relatively non-intensive stand-ins for the tried and true medium, leaving nearly a quarter of all steel companies

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Texan robotics and advanced materials company ICON have revealed their latest collaboration, the 3D-printed Mars Dune Alpha. The experimental habitat will be used by NASA to simulate long-term missions to Mars and document the effects on participants. As part of the space agency’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA)

In May 2020, facing mounting criticism from privacy advocates, Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel Doctoroff announced that the Google-backed company was scrapping its smart city project in the Quayside neighborhood of Toronto. With its passing, there was a sense among critics that some sort of evil had been defeated—that the little guy had won and Alphabet/Google had been

In September of 2020, Sebastian Aristotelis and Karl-Johan Sorensen, founders of SAGA Space Architects, embarked on a three-month mission to Northern Greenland in hopes of simulating the experience of living on the Moon. Drawing inspiration from the tradition of origami folding and the form of a budding leaf, SAGA designed a habitat specifically for the

A freestanding, unreinforced pedestrian bridge built from 53 3D-printed concrete blocks is now open for leisurely foot traffic in Venice. Although Striatus doesn’t carry pedestrians over one of the city’s famed canals, this first-of-its-kind structure is now open for park-bound traversing at the leafy Giardino della Marinaressa during the run of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. The roughly 40-by-52-foot arched footbridge was