structures rising in the nevada desert

Check out these ten wild proposals for a permanent Burning Man in the Nevada desert

Every summer, photos of otherworldly pavilions, tricked-out steampunk cars, and dusty hula-hoopers ingesting empathogens slide onto Instagram feeds worldwide thanks to Burning Man, the nine-day worldbuilding experiment in the remote Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Soon, though, burners won’t have to wait all year to meet up as Burning Man organizers have released design proposals for a permanent

a modest suburban home

3D-printed home on Long Island’s North Shore hits the market for $300,000

Just an hour east of the first mass-produced suburb in the United States, a new model of affordable, quick-to-build housing has been realized—and is now for sale—in the town of Riverhead on Long Island’s North Shore. Boasting three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, and a spacious open floor plan, the suburban New York home in question

A prototypical mighty buildings home, a single-story adu

Mighty Buildings is 3D printing prefabricated accessory dwelling units

Mighty Buildings, a new San Francisco-based construction startup, is aiming to 3D print prefabricated housing. They’ve hit the ground running, and the company has already produced a number of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and partnered with EYRC Architects to design its new range of stylish, small homes. By producing lightweight, stone wall, flooring, and roof

A dam being deposited by robots

Because of labor shortages, this Japanese dam is being built by robots

Japan is facing a labor shortage: As the country continues to age, with 35 percent of the workforce is over 55, the construction industry is looking towards new ways to fill its widening labor gap (Japan has been relaxing its notoriously strict immigration policy towards lesser-skilled workers, but very slowly). One of those solutions is

A Matter Design-made walking concrete system

Matter Design looks to the past to design a more animated architecture

The Cambridge, Massachusetts–based practice Matter Design, directed by Brandon Clifford and partners Jo Lobdell and Wes McGee, is rethinking what performance and sustainability mean in architecture. “In the past few years the conversations we were having were falling outside of the conventional discipline of architecture,” Clifford said. “If you start to talk about sustainable building

Looking at Ashen Cabin, concrete on the bottom and slivered wood facade up top

HANNAH’s Ashen Cabin turns waste into structure through robotics

Deep in the forests of Ithaca, New York, a short drive from the Cornell University campus, lies the newly completed Ashen Cabin, a practical example of how new manufacturing methods can turn what used to be waste into useful materials. The small cabin was built by HANNAH, the small practice headed by Leslie Lok and

A white building with large lit letters reading ARTLAB.

Barkow Leibinger and Sasaki create a radiant, net-zero ArtLab for Harvard

The Berlin-based Barkow Leibinger, with the help of the Boston-based architect of record Sasaki, has created the adaptable, translucent ArtLab for Harvard. As the university expands across the river into Boston’s Allston neighborhood, they’ve been developing an ArtYard—a contemporary, arts-focused answer to the walled Harvard Yard in Cambridge. Barkow Leibinger’s brief was to create an adaptable,

A segment of a gray tower with lattice designs at center on top of a wider gray building.

Sidewalk Labs unveils digital model for the world’s tallest timber tower

Sidewalk Labs, the architecture and urbanism spinoff of Google parent company Alphabet, has detailed a new model for designing tall timber towers on their Medium page. The “digital proof-of-concept,” designed in Revit and hosted in BIM 360, is called PMX (proto-model X), and is intended to show how a modular 35-story tower could be designed

A concrete cube pavilion with puzzle piece–like panels that has bulbous forms made of white circles growing out of it.

Gerardo Broissin creates a lush microclimate inside a puzzle pavilion

Mexico City-based architect Gerardo Broissin has created a jigsaw puzzle-like concrete structure for the courtyard of the celebrated Museo Tamayo. Built for Design Week Mexico this fall, the pavilion, known as Egaligilo (Esperanto for equalizer), forms its own porous microclimate full of ferns and shrubs.  In order for the pavilion to successfully keep the plants healthy,

The Architect’s Newspaper announces the best in high-tech design

The Architect’s Newspaper has granted its 2019 Best in Design Awards to a number of standout projects, with the TWA Hotel refresh coming out on top as the Building of the Year. AN also recognized the best uses of innovative materials, digital fabrication, and other tech-forward AEC innovations this past year. In Research, LAMAS’s Delirious

A cellar-like room is filled with printed piles of soil.

ACADIA 2019 showcased the state of digital design

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

A curving concrete facade with thin, tall windows that was 3D-printed by Apis Cor

Apis Cor claims to have created the largest on-site 3D-printed building

Dubai is now home to what is claimed to be the world’s largest on-site 3D-printed building. The 31-foot-tall, two-story government agency was printed in on-site three weeks using a single printer developed by the Boston-based Apis Cor, which has previously garnered attention for their sub-$10,000 printed home and for winning NASA’s 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge along

Four 3D-printed blocks, two gray stacked, the top with a dent, at right a gray block with a dent over a broken yellow block. These demonstrate the structures of Tubulanes

3D printing nano-tech inspired forms could lead to stronger, lighter buildings

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

Aerial rendering of a floor clad in "Granito," recycled terrazzo

French researcher “quarries” on site for a new type of recycling and restoration

“The mass-production of rubble constitutes one of modern architecture’s main legacies,” said the French designer and researcher Anna Saint Pierre. So much of what gets built gets demolished, or decays and needs to be restored or renovated. She explained that “The building sector accounts for 50 percent of natural resource consumption and almost 40 percent

A white smokey cityscape. Skanska is proposing a tool to cut down on embodied carbon emissions.

Skanska rolls out a new tool to evaluate embodied carbon

Construction remains one of the most carbon-intensive industries, with materials often contributing significantly to the final project’s total pollution (concrete production, for example, is responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions). A report from the Carbon Leadership Forum, a network of academics and industry professionals hosted at the University of Washington to focus on reducing

A render of gray refugee housing in rows topped with solar panels.

Could flatpack refugee housing be safer, faster, and more durable?

While refugee camps are generally designed to be temporary, they often end up staying up for many years and become full, functioning cities in their own right, housing generations of people—Dheisheh camp, in Palestine, for example has been continuously occupied since 1949. However, because the materials they are built with—often just tents or tarps over

A wide angle shot of a concrete roof structure foregrounded with trees and with the city in the background.

SOM shows off the sustainable potentials of robotic fabrication

For the Chicago Architecture Biennial opening on September 19, SOM debuted a concrete pavilion called Stereoform Slab to showcase the latest in material and manufacturing technology. As much as 60 percent of a building’s carbon footprint can result from the creation of concrete slabs, according to SOM. By developing new fabrication methods and integrating robotic

A render of a pedestrian bridge stretching over a canal.

A collaboration of Dutch companies wants to 3D print an entire pedestrian bridge

Three Dutch organizations—the materials company DSM, the engineering firm Royal HaskoningDHV, and the 3D printer manufacture CEAD—have teamed up to create a printer capable of printing continuous glass- or carbon-fiber-reinforced thermoplastics. Currently, they are demonstrating the capabilities of printing structural elements, and even, they hope, entire pedestrian bridges, with CEAD’s CFAM Prime printer which can create

A robot in the form of a metal box is attached to various red cables and suspended a few feet in the air, unveiled for the Bauhaus centennary

To celebrate the Bauhaus centennial, German researchers show off new robot printer

This summer, to celebrate the centenary of the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in Weimar, Germany, hosted an exhibition called sumaery2019. At the exhibition, the university showcased some of the latest innovations in robotics, displaying a cable-driven robot that 3D printed cementitious material, designed by a team led by professor Jan Willmann, in cooperation with the

A person sits on interlocking benches in Times Square.

New 3D-printed, crash-proof benches debut in Times Square

This May, designer Jou Doucet x Partners, working with the Times Square Design Lab (TSqDL), debuted a 3D-printed concrete alternative to the now-common heavy concrete planters, bollards, and more traditional “Jersey” barriers that surround public places and prominent buildings across the country. Anti-terror street furniture is the often ugly urban peripheral that plugs into our

Nine concrete columns are lit below in front of a mountain in a nighttime scene thanks to the team from ETH Zurich

Researchers and students at ETH Zurich print complex columns for dance festival

For the Origen Festival in Riom, Switzerland students in the Masters of Advanced Studies in Architecture and Digital Fabrication program at ETH Zurich, guided by researcher Ana Anton, 3D printed nine unique, computationally-designed columns with a new layered extrusion printing process developed at the university over the past year and a half. ETH students and

A blue drone made for 3D printing with pink and blue glowing blades floats in front of a glass building.

GXN thinks the future of construction could be flying 3D printers

Most 3D printers, no matter their size, operate in a pretty similar way: they move along a grid to deposit material, sliding on axes in a fixed manner within a frame. Even those with more flexible arms remain fixed at a point. GXN, the research-focused spinoff of the Danish architecture firm 3XN, is looking to

An image of a large gray building with a sweeping concave roof on the water.

Why doesn’t the U.S. design buildings to survive earthquakes?

Earthquakes have been in the news lately with increasing regularity: Southern California recently experienced a July 4th quake registering 6.4 on the Richter scale followed by one just a day later at 7.1. It’s predicted that within the week there’s an 11 percent chance that a major quake could follow, and, of course, there’s the

An upward shot of an interlocking, biomorphic fiber structure presented at Exhibit Columbus

Exhibit Columbus’s inaugural fellow program to feature high-tech pavilions

Exhibit Columbus, the annual celebration of mid-century and contemporary design in Columbus, Indiana, will be showing off new possibilities of materials that unify support and envelope. This August,  two of the festival’s six University Design Research Fellows will present this work as part of a brand new fellowship program.  Marshall Prado, a professor at the

Photo of stage set with green platforms in the foreground, a large lit web in the back, and to the right side a domed chamber

Björk enlists Arup engineers to design musical chamber for her latest tour

When I visited Arup’s New York offices, I was taken from the sunlit open areas on the fifth floor, down some stairs, through dark corridors, and into a windowless room with painted dark walls. There was a projector screen, someone by a computer, and a person in all black sitting off to the side. In the center of