3D printing a visor component for a DIY face shield

Operation PPE creates 3D-printed equipment for the COVID-19 front lines

Things right now are undoubtedly, brutally rough. And when the going gets rough, the architecture and design community gets 3D printing. As part of a sweeping grassroots mobilization effort that expands and evolves daily, architects, designers, makers, and a small army of displaced students have banded together and fired up their 3D printers to produce

Side-by-side portraits of Doris Sung and Alvin Huang.

USC Architecture appoints Doris Sung, Alvin Huang as program directors

The University of Southern California (USC) School of Architecture has announced the appointment of its newest program directors: Effective May 16, 2020, associate professor Doris Sung will serve as director of Undergraduate Programs, and associate professor Alvin Huang serving as the director of Graduate & Post-Professional Architecture Programs. As program directors, Sung and Huang will oversee the

A tall building with a sweepiing facade made of interlocking white Ts, designed by Morphosis. The building continues at a lower height as a undulating gray roof with some irregular fenestration.

Morphosis’s Kerenza Harris talks tech and integration

Kerenza Harris is the director of design technology at Morphosis, where she works across the firm to integrate advanced computational techniques and high-tech simulations throughout the design process. Ahead of her presentation on system-based design processes and extended reality at TECH+ in Los Angeles next week, AN caught up with Harris to get her takes

A black-and-white photo of a woman in a dark suit smiling and holding papers.

Upali Nanda uses neuroscience to understand buildings as living organisms

Doctor Upali Nanda is reimagining the role of the architect. Where design today is often top-down and architects move on to new projects before doors of the project open, Nanda believes the role of architecture is to create living systems that respond to inhabitants’ changing needs, and architects have to stay involved during occupancy to

An audience at a conference

TECH+ Expo and Forum is back in 2020

AN Media Group, the publisher of The Architect’s Newspaper, has announced its upcoming 2020 TECH+ Expo and Forum events in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. The conferences showcase the latest in AEC technological innovation, with presentations by industry thought leaders and hands-on demos from an array of companies both new and established showcasing the

A virtual hand and paintbrush over facades painted with a watercolor effect, in a Michael Graves-designed landscape.

You can paint unbuilt Michael Graves projects in VR

The late Michael Graves has seen his previously unbuilt work finally realized in a virtual reality environment thanks to Imagined Landscapes. The interactive sightseeing experience was created by Kilograph, a Los Angeles creative studio that has worked with firms like Gensler and Zaha Hadid Architects. Based on Graves’s painted plans for the unbuilt Canary Islands

A rendering of an impressionistic image of buildings on all surfaces of a room with thin columns, created by ARTECHOUSE.

ARTECHOUSE’s Chelsea Market space will let visitors experience architectural hallucinations

ARTECHOUSE, a technology-focused art exhibition platform conceived in 2015 by Sandro Kereselidze and Tati Pastukhova, has been presenting digitally inspired art in Washington D.C. and Miami. Now they’re coming to New York, “a clear next step for [their] mission,” with an inaugural exhibition by Refik Anadol. The Istanbul-born, Los Angeles-based Anadol is known for his

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

A gif of a woman jumping rope, while two robots twirl the rope

Could jump roping robots change how we think about architectural drawing?

“Movement was always an underlying instigator to how I look at form,” explains architect Amina Blacksher, who began ballet at age six. Her work crosses boundaries and unifies seemingly disparate practices, as she now, among many other things, uses the tools and methods of an architect to investigate the place of robots in our lives

Virgin Hyperloop One hits major bumps in the wake of Saudi controversy

One of the world’s most dogged transportation professionals—and former head of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)—will now head up Virgin’s venture into high-speed rail service. The Verge reported that Jay Walder has left his role as CEO of bike-sharing company, Motivate, in order to lead Los Angeles–based Virgin Hyperloop One, which appears to be in financial trouble after it

Self-driving homes could be the future of affordable housing

The convergence of new technologies including artificial intelligence, the internet of things, electric cars, and drone delivery systems suggests an unlikely solution to the growing housing crisis. In the next few years, we may use an app on our smartphones to notify our houses to pick us up or drop us off. Honda recently announced the IeMobi

Amazon Go opens a second retail location

Amazon’s march forward into brick-and-mortar retail continues with the opening of a second Amazon Go store on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Marion Street in Downtown Seattle. The store operates on the same high-tech principles as the Amazon Go pilot store that opened in January. With the installed Amazon Go smartphone app, customers swipe

Electric scooter companies receive cease-and-desist letter from City of San Francisco

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

For L.A.-based start-ups, a downtown tech incubator offers a boost up

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.  At the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), participating members get a lot of bang for their buck. Originally started in 2011, the outfit moved in 2016 into a 60,000-square-foot

R/GA stays ahead of the curve with its global accelerator network

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. With a cutting-edge client list that includes Nike, Google, and YouTube, digital agency R/GA is committed to staying way, way ahead of the competition. So,

Elon Musk to bypass environmental review for test tunnel in L.A.

Billionaire Elon Musk and his Boring Company are moving forward with plans to build an underground network of personal vehicle tunnels below the streets of Los Angeles. After drilling a preliminary tunnel below the Tesla and SpaceX company headquarters in nearby Hawthorne, California, the company is now moving forward with an additional 2.7-mile “proof-of-concept” tunnel

Elon Musk does a 180 on mass transit and makes Hyperloop buses his first priority

The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s Hyperloop tunnel-digging side company, may have a new mission after Musk claimed that he would be shifting towards expanding mass transit. Although research into digging a traffic-bypassing “urban loop” under Los Angeles will continue, Musk tweeted that instead of moving cars and personal pods, the Hyperloop network would focus on moving 150-mile-per-hour buses before anything

How does technology influence facade design today?

From Grasshopper scripting to smart materials, technology is constantly changing the way architects and designers think about facades. Ahead of the Facades+ Los Angeles conference this month, The Architect’s Newspaper (AN) spoke to three industry leaders: Satoru Sugihara, principal and founder of computational design studio ATLV; Alvin Huang, founder and design principal of Synthesis Design + Architecture; and Doris Sung, principal of DOSU Studio Architecture,

Boeing to sell flying taxis

Boeing’s announcement is the latest in an explosion of news—and corresponding excitement—around driverless cars and other forms of transportation previously found only in science fiction