Founder of this wonderful platform called ArchDaily :) Graduate Architect. Jury, speaker, curator, and anything that is required to spread our mission across the world. You can follow me on Instagram @dbasulto.
Architects: Elton_Léniz
Associate Architects: Alvaro Ramírez, Germán Rodríguez
Client: Chilevisión
Renovation: 1211m2
Year: 2005-2007
Location: Inés Matte Urrejola 0825, Providencia, Santiago, Chile
Photography: Natalia Vial
Predominant Materials: Madera, Prodema, Vidrio, Piedra pizarra
Dear readers,
This has been an intense year at ArchDaily, and I’d like to look back and share what we’ve done during 2015, and give you a glimpse of what will come during 2016.
Our focus on the emerging countries is something intimately tied to our mission. I’m very happy to see that as a society we understand the importance of cities for the future of mankind, and that we are actively improving them through the traditional way of making architecture, but also more and more in an expanded field and in a multidisciplinary collaborative way.
We started this project in 2008 in a very instinctive way, but always understanding that we should provide value to architects. Today, we are publishing in 4 languages (including the new ArchDaily China!), reaching more than 400,000 daily readers who are viewing 120 million pages every month - and bookmarking thousand of projects on My ArchDaily. This scale has made us understand what is adding value - and what is not - to architects in a very insightful, data-driven way. Our analysis for our end of the year posts has shown us how important it is for you to have access to technology and resources than can help you on your work.
Iñaqui Carnicero and Carlos Quintáns have been selected as co-curators of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016, directed by Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, under the theme "Reporting from the Front."
Iñaqui Carnicero is an architect and a Visiting Professor at Cornell University, and has been recognized by numerous international awards such as the Design Vanguard Award, AIANY Housing Award, Emerging Architects Award, FAD and COAM Award.
Carlos Quintáns is Professor of the Architectural Construction Department of the A Coruña Architecture School and director of the Tectónica magazine, recognized with awards such as the COAG, FAD or at the Spanish Architecture Biennale.
During the 2015 Moscow Urban Forum, city experts from different regions and countries united to exchange practices, projects, and trends. The event fueled discussion on the city of Moscow, which is currently working on its expansion plans, new transport infrastructure, and a series of urban initiatives that are having a positive impact on the quality of life in the city.
Earlier this year we had the chance to interview Spanish-born architect Santiago Calatrava in his New York apartment. Trained first as a structural engineer, he has designed and completed over 50 projects, which include bridges, transportation hubs, theaters and even a skyscraper. Calatrava has built a career through public architecture, and thanks to open competitions he has received commissions for mostly large-scale, cultural and transport projects. Many cities around the world—from Europe to the US and Asia and beyond—can proudly lay claim to the structurally dramatic projects that Calatrava has dreamed up.
His architectural explorations fuse engineering and art, and result in impressive structures that are honest in revealing the forces at play. In this respect, he is a pioneer; when working on his earliest projects, he didn’t have access to software and tools that are ubiquitous today.
We asked him about his definition of architecture, his high-profile commission for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, and the challenges he has faced while running his practice. The WTC hub is one of Calatrava's most-anticipated projects in New York; though its inherent complexity has resulted in a long construction period, he has created a project rich in not only form, but also in spatial quality.
Some of Calatrava's projects use an almost modern-day gothic vocabulary—where big spans, vaults and thin lines define large spaces. Other works, such the St. Nicholas Cathedral in New York, mobilize larger masses and big, stacked walls.
Watch the interview above to learn how Calatrava sees the intersection of art and architecture.
.jpg?1441986671 "Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge / Santiago Calatrava © Alan Karchmer")
.jpg?1441986639 "AD Classics: Bac de Roda Bridge / Santiago Calatrava © Flickr littleeve / www.flickr.com/littleeve. Used under <a href='https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/'>Creative Commons</a>")
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Dear Readers,
Over the last 7 years we have built and maintained a huge database of thousands of buildings to provide you with the inspiration and knowledge that you need for your next project - an important part of our mission.
However this tremendous database lacked the structure that would allow you to use it with that purpose. Sure, you could navigate by building type or by country, you could use the My ArchDaily section to bookmark your favorite projects for reference, or you could browse an endless photo gallery. But this lack of a proper structure prevented us from delivering what you needed, and what you were constantly asking us for via emails or our contact form: a way to easily find the projects that inspire you.
But because ArchDaily started out by using an open-source CMS, we were confined to its features, and all of our ideas to deliver a better ArchDaily to you had to deal with that. So a few years ago we started working on our own platform, designed with the architect in mind. Buildings became objects, typologies became facets, and our database started to take shape. These features have been available at ArchDaily México and ArchDaily Brasil for a while now, but we had to overcome several other issues before migrating ArchDaily.com to our platform. As you can understand, dealing with hundreds of thousands of visitors who view millions of pages every day is no easy task, especially when you move them to a new platform with many new features.
But that day has finally come, and it will enable us to deliver new features and tools as we continue to develop them, without having to worry about legacy platforms. We are now in full control of our database, and we will continue to work to make it useful and accessible to you. At first, you won't see many differences, but under the hood is a completely new system.
What you will see over the coming days is a new faceted search that will allow you to quickly browse our buildings database, and a new version of My ArchDaily.
So in the next few hours some things won't work as expected, or might not work at all. But our development and editorial teams will be working around the clock to make sure that everything gets fixed quickly, and for that we need your help. Any errors that you find, missing images or drawings, messy text, missing videos, etc, please use the form below.
Thank you for trusting ArchDaily as your source of inspiration and knowledge, and rest assured that we will work as hard as we can to continue bringing you new features and tools to help you in the important duty of designing our built environment.
- David Basulto, Founder & Editor in Chief of ArchDaily
London’s Design Museum has announced the category winners of the prestigious “Design of the Year” award. The winner of this year's Architecture Category is the Anacleto Angelini UC Innovation Center designed by Alejandro Aravena.
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After two weeks of nominations and voting, we are pleased to present the winners of the 2015 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards. As a peer-based, crowdsourced architecture award, the results shown here represent the collective intelligence of 31,000 architects, filtering the best architecture from over 3,000 projects featured on ArchDaily during the past year.
The winning buildings represent a diverse group of architects, from Pritzker Prize winners such as Álvaro Siza, Herzog & de Meuron and Shigeru Ban, to up-and-coming practices such as EFFEKT and Building which have so far been less widely covered by the media. In many cases their designs may be the most visually striking, but each also approaches its context and program in a unique way to solve social, environmental or economic challenges in communities around the world. By publishing them on ArchDaily, these buildings have helped us to impart inspiration and knowledge to architects around the world, furthering our mission. So to everyone who participated by either nominating or voting for a shortlisted project, thank you for being a part of this amazing process, where the voices of architects from all over the world unite to form one strong, intelligent, forward-thinking message.
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After an exciting week of nominations, ArchDaily’s readers have evaluated over 3,000 projects and selected 5 finalists in each category of the Building of the Year Award.
Similar to last year, over 18,000 architects and enthusiasts participated in the nomination process, expressing what architecture means to them by highlighting the buildings that have inspired them the most.
This year’s finalists represent a diverse group of projects, coming from all corners of the globe and from firms of different sizes and trajectories. Yet they all capture architecture's capacity to improve people’s lives.
Remember that the firm behind the overall most voted project will receive an HP T520 Designjet T520 ePrinter, and the second and third most voted practices will receive an HP T120 Designjet ePrinter.
The winners of the two iPads from the nomination stage are: Linda Hinderdael (iPad Mini) and Sylvia Robert (iPad Air). We’re also going to give away two more iPads to our readers during the final voting stage so be sure to vote!
2014 was a great year at ArchDaily. As we grow to over 350,000 daily readers, our global network is leveling access to architectural knowledge, fostering an ongoing exchange between professionals from diverse locations and backgrounds. We are now able to see a new regionalism appearing, giving identity to emerging countries, and becoming a source of fresh ideas and innovations in the world of architecture.
With more than half of the world’s population living in cities today, a process that will only accelerate in the near future, the dynamics of large metropolitan areas --especially in the emerging world have-- have become an object of study and urban experimentation. India is one of the regions where this process is happening at a fast pace. With a current urbanization rate of 32%, it is expected to grow up to 40% in the next 15 years.
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Dear Readers,
Dear Readers,
Though the professional practice of architecture can be broadly defined, we often just focus on the design work in relation to the completed building, leaving behind other areas in which architects find more opportunities. In this infographic created by OMA in preparation for the Monditalia exhibition at the Venice Biennale, we see how the professional activities are distributed among these sub-areas such as planning, landscape design, interior design and feasibility studies--a relationship which can also allow us to extrapolate the outcomes and products that emerge from these countries.
Click the infographic to get a closer look and browse the projects we've published from the represented countries:
In Bahrain's pavilion for the 2014 Venice Biennale, the country uses its position on the eastern edge of the pan-Arabic region to investigate modernity's impact on the Arab world: first as a colonial imposition, then as a local attempt to reconcile global and Arabic culture, then finally as an acceptance of neoliberal ideals.
The exhibition collects 100 projects from across the Arabic states, with the intention of consolidating and preserving knowledge of this critical period. The installation itself, a giant bookcase, is the manifestation of this research, and will later be made available at the Arab Center for Architecture.
“We were sensitive to the way in which society was becoming more consumption-oriented and gave serious thought to how we ought to respond to that change without simply accommodating ourselves to it.” -Toyo Ito
“I was entering a dead world, which would never see the light of the day. I wanted to treat that dead world as if it were alive, or to put it another way, to try to create a different reality.” - Terunobu Fujimori
Under the title of Fundamentals, Koolhaas’ Biennale asked national pavilions to focus on their respective countries’ relationships with modernity, the movement that has, for better or worse, shaped the contemporary city. In the case of Japan, modernity was expressed in a unique way, as architecture was instrumental to the rapid industrialization and growth that the country experienced after World War II. This growth resulted in the first architectural avant-garde outside of the Western world. By the 70s, as this movement reached its peak, local architects, historians, artists and urbanists began to look at modernism in a critical way, questioning its impact.
In “The Real World,” the Japan exhibit at the Biennale, curator Norihito Nakatani unearths how this critical movement expressed itself through Osamu Ishiyama, Toyo Ito, Terunobu Fujimori, and other Japanese masters whose works strove to connect to the human of “the real world” rather than contribute to the failed utopias of modernism. Interviews with this group of architects bring to light the desire that they had to positively impact society, and how they attempted to materialize that desire in their early works. The objects found inside the pavilion articulate the storytelling behind the process, leaving their interpretation open to visitors.
“You’ve got to try to make an impact on the times you live in, and you’ve got to do it through your work, not through words.” - Osamu Ushiyama
“Actual objects continue to possess tremendous energy - much more so than photographs or models.” - Tsutomu Ichiki
More about the "In the Real World" after the break:
By the late 1960s, two dynamics were shaping a new urban reality in Italy: on the one hand, TV was heavily influencing Italian society, becoming an intrinsic part of daily life; on the other, the social tension resulting from student protests and accelerated immigration had begun to impact cities in a chaotic way. These dynamics paved the way for Milano Due, a new town on the outskirts of Milan, which promised a new, idyllic type of urbanism.
The complex, although traditional in appearance with its red pitched roofs, put into practice modern concepts: its 2,600 apartments, which had access to amenities for education and entertainment, were arranged around a giant artificial garden/lake and were connected via an elevated circulation system. Below ground, the complex housed the studios of the first private TV channel in Italy, a fact that would shape the lives of the inhabitants of Milano Due and eventually all of Italian society.
This interesting urban phenomena is analyzed by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation in “SALES ODDITY: Milano 2 and the Politics of Direct-to-Home TV Urbanism,” a project that was part of the Monditalia section at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Silver Lion for the Best Research Project. According to the jury “The project presents critically a fundamental aspect of modern societies: how the power of media occupies other social spaces, both physically and politically. It is based on innovative research combining surveys and interviews with planners and residents and re-appropriation of the mass media language. While based on an Italian case, this issue is present in many international contexts dominated by contemporary technological and neo-liberal cultures.”
Dossier, trailer, and more photos of the project by Miguel de Guzmán, after the break:
SALES ODDITY. Milano 2 and the Politics of Direct-to-Home TV Urbanism
by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation
Right at the start of this year's AIA Convention, we had the chance to sit down with the current AIA president, Helene Combs Dreiling (FAIA).
