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When it comes to designing commercial gastromic spaces, aspects like space efficiency, equipment distribution, materials, and organization are essential when considering the users' experience within the space.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

In 2005, while I was an architecture student at Columbia, visions of Bilbao danced through my classmates’ heads as they flocked to an architecture studio whose brief was to design an all-new Guggenheim Museum on Governors Island. I will admit that the prospect of exhibiting a spectacle for Columbia’s end-of-year show was seductive. But conducting field research for that class required only subway and ferry rides, while a studio offering in the historic preservation program promised a trip to Rome. I passed on creating another paper icon for New York and traveled to the Esposizione Universale Roma for one week that fall.

Floors, roofs, ceilings. Speaking in a very generic way, they are practically all the horizontal elements that we can find in the construction of a building. These three parts have a very similar way of modeling in Revit and this is the reason why when learning this software, they almost always appear one after the other. The order is usually a rather logical and therefore similar order: starting first with the floors, later the soffits and, finally, the ceilings. All this, clearly after having modeled the exterior and interior walls of our building.

Over the past decade, Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been widely adopted and become integrated to varying degrees into every aspect of the design, construction, and maintenance of buildings. But this isn’t where BIM stops, the future of BIM incorporates altered/virtual reality (AR/VR) and has the potential to go as far as automated and intelligent lifecycle management of assets. The concept of creating a “digital twin” to a physical building or system with the aim of making that real-world entity safer, more efficient, and more resilient begins by making our way towards fully-integrated BIM.

Newly built houses, with their sizable carbon footprints, don’t just contribute to climate change. For many Americans, they’re also too expensive—a bitter irony in cities rife with vacant buildings and record evictions.

Given the urgency of both issues, projects that retrofit livable housing into existing low-carbon shells (the initial embodied carbon was spent long ago) might be worth a closer look. We searched for them and came across a handful that promise a cure for housing insecurity and excessive greenhouse gas emissions.

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It’s been nine months since the world stopped spinning, only to restart at a different rhythm. And although we’d spotted this new style of work approaching on the horizon, we still weren’t prepared for it. In a blink of an eye, our work environments and lives were reduced to a screen and a keyboard. We were forced to go virtual.

Silvia Garcia Camps has presented a series of collages of renowned works of architecture to show that, nothing is ever really invented, it's simply borrowed and mixed. In this article, we highlight her presentation.

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Oregon holds some the most varied geography and private developments in the United States. Home to diverse landscapes and architecture, the state is defined by the Cascade mountain range, windswept coastlines, dense forests, and a high desert environment to the east. These varied geographies have shaped the state’s construction techniques and residential design. At the heart of these building efforts are timber and glass homes found throughout the state.

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This article was originally published on Common Edge

I am a relative newcomer to the Midwest, and of all the things that have captured my enduring attention, one of them is water towers. In my adopted home state, Minnesota, they are everywhere. These top-heavy engineering marvels rise to well over 150 feet tall and assume all manner of shape and metallurgical prowess, from the pedesphere and fluted column structures, colloquially known as the “golf ball-on-a-tee” and “flashlight,” respectively, to the multicolumned spheroid and ellipsoid tanks that, as legend has it, were the targets of frantic gunfire during Orson Welles’ broadcast of “War of the Worlds.” I can attest that when the day’s twilight settles in, those multilegged towers—or, rather, their silhouettes—can appear otherworldly.

The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.

A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.

This week David and Marina answer a hotline text asking for advice regarding attending architecture school during COVID. The two cover choosing to defer and taking a year off from school, aspects of education missing from remote learning, the differences between physical and virtual learning, how to overcome remote learning challenges, and more. Enjoy! Text or call our hotline: 213-222-6950 for any questions.

Wood is a material naturally associated with beauty, versatility, and comfort and is used in many different ways in architecture, from flooring to roofing. These qualities also stand out when used in window frames.

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The Master of Advanced Studies ETH Zurich in Architecture and Digital Fabrication (MAS ETH DFAB) is the educational program of the world’s leading interdisciplinary research cluster on digital fabrication and robotics in architecture, the National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication at ETH Zürich. It is organized by the Chair for Digital Building Technologies and the Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication (Gramazio Kohler Research), two pioneering research groups in the field.

This article was originally published on Common Edge as "The Genius, Heart and Humility of Indian Architect B.V. Doshi"

I’m sitting in a busy suburban coffee-and-donut shop with the quiet, grandfatherly Indian architect, Jitendra Vaidya. When I started my life as an architecture intern in the late 90s, Jitendra was one of the most experienced technical designers I knew. Equally comfortable weighing the relative merits of various flashing details as he is discussing abstract design concepts, Jitendra is an old-school, universal architect. After more than half a century in a profession famous for grinding deadlines, Jitendra still maintains a joyful twinkle in his eye when he talks about architecture. So it’s no surprise that Jitendra is visibly animated today as he tells me about his teacher, the man who was just recognized as one of the world’s greatest living architects, B.V. Doshi.

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Mexico's Valle de Bravo region, to the southeast of Mexico City, is characterized by the Presa Miguel Alemán lake, created in 1947 as a reservoir for Mexico City and Toluca's water supply. Thanks to its proximity to the capital, Valle de Bravo is a popular weekend destination for residents of surrounding cities. This in turn has sparked the interest of various architects, who have aimed to create projects that enhance visitors' experience such as offering an optimal view of the lake, or an immersive experience in the surrounding forest.