Mention: ECOLE/AAKAA (Adrien Durrmeyer, Martin Le Bourgeois, Nicolas Simon, Max Turnheim, Nicolas Violette). Image Courtesy of Young Architects Competitions
In our progressively digitized world, factories are often left behind. Outdated and no longer capable of serving their original purpose, these vast spaces become vacant and full of potential. A recent Young Architect Competition (YAC), entitled Space to Culture, recognized this trend and called upon young minds to turn such a factory in Granarolo, Bologna into a center for culture and entertainment. The competition asked entrants to focus on the idea of temporality and ensure the re-purposed factory's longevity through dynamic and flexible spaces. To see the winning entries, continue after the break.
Project example from MIT OpenCourseWare's Geometric Disciplines and Architecture Skills: Reciprocal Methodologies by Isabel Collado and Ignacio Peydro. Image Courtesy of Luisel Zayas-San-Miguel
Learning doesn't necessarily need to be formal – or expensive for that matter. Thanks to the Internet and some generous benefactors, you can further your education for free from the comfort of your own home. Top schools such as MIT and Harvard University are affiliated with free online learning resources, allowing people from all over the globe to connect and audit courses at their own pace. In some cases, these services even provide self-educators with proof for having completed courses. Keep reading after the break to check out our round-up of four free online learning resources.
How can the city be reinvented to save the world? Chinese business magnate Zhang Yue and Finnish professor Eero Paloheimo are two men with very contrasting answers to this loaded question. Zhang Yue's answer puts trust in pre-fabricated, high-density vertical development, whereas Paloheimo envisions a built-from-scratch, clean-tech sprawling utopia. Their grand ideas, met with both skepticism and excitement, are documented in a new film by Anna-Karin Grönroos. To watch the trailer and learn more about the bold proposals, continue after the break.
Workers in Chengdu, China, assemble the Hualin Temporary Elementary School, designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Image Courtesy of Forgemind ArchiMedia
British writer Tim Abrahams finds Shigeru Ban's architecture "kooky, Middle Earthy, Hobbity" – an opinion which earns him the title of "idiot" in the eyes of newly appointed Architecture for Humanity Executive Director Eric Cesal. In an article for the Boston Review, Stephen Phelan uses the pair's opposing opinions to illustrate the Pritzker Prize winning architect's perceived failures and successes. Read his very engaging take, here.
Multigenerational homes are nothing new. But with life expectancy increasing, young people staying longer in their childhood homes, and Baby Boomers aging, children, parents, and grandparents under the same roof might soon become the norm. To explore this possibility, Metropolis Magazine asked four design firms to consider what multigenerational living might look like in the future. Check out each unique take on sharing resources and space by reading the article here.
Ten years after closing its doors, the Brooklyn Domino Sugar Refinery's iconic forty-foot tall yellow sign is still legible along the waterfront, even from parts of Manhattan. The refinery, built in 1882, was once the largest in the world, producing over half of the sugar consumed in the United States. Sadly, the historic landmark will soon be demolished, making room for luxury living — and a handful of apartments for affordable housing, at mayor Bill de Blasio's insistence. As time runs out, a photographer, photography editor, and historian are vying for the opportunity to thoroughly document the site and publish a book entitled Sweet Ruin: Fossils and Stories of the Brooklyn Domino Sugar Refinery.
The photographer, Paul Raphaelson, was recently given a day's worth of access to the site by its owner, real estate development company Two Trees Management. Raphaelson was able to visit and photograph three of the refinery's buildings, capturing the sugar-coated interiors of the hauntingly cavernous spaces. He hopes to revisit the site before it's too late to take more photographs with the guidance of his two collaborators, photography editor Stella Kramer and historian Matthew Postal. For the compelling images and more details about the future publication, keep reading after the break.
For small firms, design competitions can often feel like a Catch22 - enter and lose precious time and resources (usually for nothing) or avoid them - at the risk of losing out on the "big break." Now a new class at Harvard's Graduate School of Design takes on just this quandary, as well as the many other practical, theoretical, and moral implications of architectural competitions for the profession. Learn more at this article at the Harvard Gazette.
Do you get excited when you discover a game-changing command on AutoCAD? Don't worry, us too - which is why we're recommending five AutoCAD YouTube tutorials selected by Line//Shape//Space. To learn something new (like importing point cloud data or searching for text within your drawings), or just to brush up on your skills, click here.
The Morpholio Project's latest iPhone application, Morpholio Frame, "is like having a DJ booth for your photos." The application allows users to merge, crop, and filter photographs before posting them to social media outlets like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Sounds typical, right? Not so fast.
The application gives users more control than most thanks to an interactive matrix approach. Users can select up to three filters and three related masks, creating an image with one of 64 million unique filter combinations. One of the most interesting filters for architecture fans is "sketch" – as seen in the image after the break.
The University of Sao Paulo's communal bathroom proposal for post-disaster relief. Image Courtesy of Pillars of Sustainable Education
Interdisciplinary teams from the University of Sao Paulo, Delft University, and five other post-secondary institutions are currently exploring sustainable innovations in design, materials, and building systems thanks to the support of Pillars of Sustainable Education – a partnership between Architecture for Humanity and the Alcoa Foundation. The collaborative effort was founded as a way to “educate the next generation of architects, engineers, and material designers while supporting real-world design-build projects that positively impact both the environment and the local community.” Months into the project, the schools’ proposals are turning into reality as students collaborate with NGOs. To learn about what each school is working on, keep reading after the break.
Knud Lonberg-Holm (1895-1972), a criminally overlooked but highly influential Modernist architect, photographer, and pioneer of information design. Image Courtesy of Metropolis Magazine
Who is Knud Lonberg-Holm? An overlooked modernist architect, photographer, author, researcher, and teacher praised by the likes of Buckminster Fuller - one of his good friends and biggest advocates. To learn about the architect's unsung accomplishments and the people determined to preserve his memory, check out Metropolis Magazine's article by clicking here.
Videos
A screenshot from the GoPro City Tour of Pyongyang. Image Courtesy of YouTube
Singaporean Aran Pan is one of the only people in the world to have filmed Pyongyang, North Korea's largest (and perhaps most inaccessible) city. The video, captured via a GoPro attached to the windshield of a vehicle, is part of Pan's project "DPRK 360°," an initiative to document and reveal the people and landscapes of the secretive country.
When discussing the project's beginnings with The Huffington Post, Pan said "North Korea has always intrigued me. We know so little about what's on the ground and all the images coming out from the state seem to show little of the life inside. I wanted to find out for myself and share what I see while I'm there."
TAC tableware – designed in the 1960s by Walter Gropius and influenced by the Bauhaus style – has been given new life by BIG and the industrial design studio Kilo. The new tableware set features the heritage blue skylines of twelve cities, including Copenhagen, London, and New York. To check out the full set and spot the likes of Big Ben and the Statue of Liberty, head to the manufacturer's website by clicking here.
Videos
Iwan Baan on the unexpected in his travels as an architectural photographer and documenter. Image via TED Talk on YouTube
Are you feeling short on inspiration today? For a jump-start, try watching one of these twenty TED Talks – a follow-up to last year's post "The 10 Most Inspirational TED Talks for Architects." Wherever your interests lie, the passionate people featured in these videos - from WikiHouse founder Alastair Parvin to famed photographer Iwan Baan and architectural great Moshe Safdie - will get your creative juices flowing. See them all, after the break.
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), with its advantages and disadvantages, has dominated the green building certification market for a long time. But now alternatives - like the GBI's Green Globes, the Living Building Challenge, and Build It Green – are beginning to emerge. So how does a competitor like Green Globes shape up in comparison to LEED? And what does this developing competition mean for green rating systems in general? To learn more, keep reading after the break.
In Kuku Town, dwellings were rearranged to face a communal courtyard - where people can gather for activities and keep an eye on their neighbors and shared facitilies.. Image Courtesy of Future Cape Town
The city of Cape Town has adopted a new strategy for improving informal settlements - re-blocking, "the reconfiguration and repositioning of shacks in very dense informal settlements in accordance to a community-drafted spatial framework." Re-blocking serves to create communal spaces, make neighborhoods safer, and improve dwelling structures - among many other things. To see how it has been implemented and where, head to Future Cape Town and continue reading here.
During this year's Architecture Biennale in Venice, homes rented through AIRBnB (although not the company itself) will host an independently curated pavilion. AIRBnB is a six-year old platform through which home owners can rent out rooms, apartments, and entire houses, allowing "the fortress of the family and the individual" to be infiltrated. The pavilion will take advantage of this "infiltration" and how it reveals "the house, the home and today's life." To learn more, follow @airbnbpavilion on instagram and twitter.
According to the most recent national census in Canada, almost half of Toronto residents are immigrants, one-third of whom arrived in the past ten years. To allow the city to adapt to this surging flow of immigrants, Architecture for Humanity Toronto (AFHTO) has called upon students and professionals from various backgrounds to rethink Toronto's urban fabric - and, in particular, its high-rise developments - by establishing a series of lectures and workshops entitled "Incremental Strategies for Vertical Neighborhoods."
At the inaugural event a few weeks ago, Filipe Balestra of Urban Nouveau* was invited to speak about his work and contribute to a design charrette inspired by the City of Toronto's Tower Renewal program. For more on Balestra and the event, keep reading after the break.
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