Romullo Baratto is an architect with a PhD from FAUUSP, member of the curatorial team for the 11th São Paulo Architecture Biennial in 2017. Former Managing Editor of ArchDaily Brasil, he guided the platform to win the FNA Award, the first media outlet to receive this honor. In 2023, he became Project Manager for ArchDaily Global, leading initiatives like the Building of the Year Awards and ArchDaily New Practices. Combining academic and professional experience, he communicates architecture through texts, interviews, lectures, curatorship, and photography. Follow him on Instagram: @romullobf
Dismantling the system of slave and child labor in the architecture and construction industry does not seem like a simple task, especially on a global scale. However, this is precisely the mission of the Design for Freedom (DFF) initiative, created by CEO and founder of the Grace Farms Foundation, Sharon Prince, along with Bill Menking, professor and editor-in-chief of The Architect's Newspaper.
Through events and freely available tools, Design for Freedom seeks to "raise awareness and inspire responses to halt forced labor in the construction materials supply chain," offering paths to ensure transparency and ethics in the architectural production process.
With a coastline of 832 kilometers facing the Atlantic Ocean, Portugal has a long and deep relationship with the sea, which was for many centuries considered the country's main means of communication with the rest of the world. Today, the Portuguese coast attracts millions of tourists every year from across Europe and around the world, who arrive in search of warm weather and beautiful seaside scenery. The main destinations are the southern beaches which are warmer than in the North however, the number of tourists has increased throughout the entire country over the past decade.
The Portugal pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia 2023 will present the Fertile Futures project, curated by Andreia Garcia and assistant curators Ana Neiva and Diogo Aguiar. The project aims to address water resources issues in seven Portuguese hydro geographies and encourage reflection on building a sustainable, equitable, and fertile future. The exhibition will take place at Palazzo Franchetti from May 20 to November 26, 2023.
Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira was chosen by the Holy See to create the installation that will represent it at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which will take place between May 20 and November 26, 2023. In collaboration with Studio Albori from Italy, the pavilion of the Vatican, curated by Roberto Cremascoli, will be dedicated to the theme of social friendship. This is in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the pontificate of Pope Francis.
Few architects in history have had the honor and privilege of intervening in the famous St. Mark's Square in Venice — a tourist landmark of incomparable historical value to humanity. Sir David Chipperfield is one of them. As if that was not enough, he also left his mark on another project of inestimable value: the Neue Nationalgalerie, designed originally by Mies van der Rohe in Berlin. The four centuries that separate the design from its restoration seem to pose no difficulties for the 2023 Pritzker Prize winner, who rejects an international style of architecture in search of a trait that highlights local qualities.
The idea of "Biophilia" was defined as "love of life" in ancient Greece. Although the term may seem relatively new, coming across as a trend in the fields of architecture and interior design, the concept of biophilia was introduced by psychologist Erich Fromm for the first time in 1964 and then popularized in the 1980s by biologist Edward O. Wilson, who studied the lack of connection with nature caused by urban life.
The guiding principle is quite simple: connect people with nature to improve their well-being and quality of life. How could architecture do that? By seeking alternatives to integrate nature – either through natural elements or techniques – into its designs.
Carbon footprint, circularity and environmental sustainability are terms that are increasingly present in many professional fields, but what do they mean? How do they relate to architecture and the built environment? We spoke with civil, environmental and sanitary engineer Lucas Rosse Caldas about these and other emerging architectural issues.
Lucas is a professor at the Graduate Program in Architecture at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Civil Engineering Program at the same institution. He participated in chapter 9 of the sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on buildings. He wrote several scientific and technical articles about architecture and sustainable construction.
Somewhere between 1914 and 1915, Le Corbusier designed the Maison Dom-Ino, a groundbreaking modular structure that replaced the heavy load-bearing walls with reinforced concrete columns and slabs. The open floor plan with minimal thin elements, coupled with large glass facades, would ensure healthy natural daylight for the interior spaces as well as desirable architectural transparency that could blur the boundaries between interior and exterior —at least metaphorically.
Villa Malaparte in Contempt. Image: movie screenshot
There are many ways to get to know a place. Ask a group of people who know Venice; chances are good that everyone has some mental image of the city and its canals. Once again, ask how many have already visited the Venetian capital. Few or no one may have done so. While traveling is a complete way to experience a place, it's not the only way - images of cities, areas and buildings are everywhere, from advertising to the arts, from Instagram to cinema, and they leave deep impressions on our memory and imagination.
Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967). Via film screenshot
Of all arts, there is one that is truly capable of embracing architecture, and that is the cinema. The ability to represent spaces, moving in the course of time, brings cinema closer to architecture in a way that goes beyond the limitations of painting, sculpture, music - for a long time considered to be the art closest to ours - and even of dance. Both in cinema and in architecture space is a key subject, and although they deal with it in different ways, they converge by providing a bodily - and not only visual - experience of the built environment.
If you haven't gotten a chance to visit Brasília, Joana França's photographic projects offer a comprehensive interpretation of the capital of South America's most populous country. França has dedicated a significant part of her career as an architecture photographer to the pursuit of amassing an impressive archive of images of the city planned by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer.
We recently published an exceptional selection França's aerial photographs of Brasília divided by scale - residential, monumental, gregarious and bucolic. These overhead views solidify what, in theory, is already evident: the city lacks human scale, or the human scale of Brasília is just vast and (perhaps) not very human at all.
"What characterizes and gives meaning to Brasilia is a game of three scales... the residential or everyday scale... the so-called monumental scale, in which man acquires a collective dimension; the urbanistic expression of a new concept of nobility... Finally the gregarious scale, in which dimensions and space are deliberately reduced and concentrated in order to create a climate conducive to grouping... We can also add another fourth scale, the bucolic scale of open areas intended for lakeside retreats or weekends in the countryside." - Lucio Costa in an interview with Jornal do Brasil, November 8, 1961.
Photographer Joana França shared with us an impressive series of aerial photographs of the national capital of Brazil, Brasilia. The photoset is divided into four sub-series each presenting a scale: residential, monumental, gregarious and bucolic.
It is a great privilege to amplify the voice of architects and other built environment professionals. It is also an enormous challenge as it requires a lot of investigation and time from our content team. However, the effort is gratifying. It puts us in contact with some of the most prominent talents in our field who have been discussing subjects such as cities, metaverse, community, environment, democracy, sustainability, building technology and interiors, to mention just a few.
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Screenshot from the movie "Women in Architecture". Image credit: Boris Noir
In architecture, context is what concerns human existence in a given place. Climate, culture, geography, and pre-existences, to name just a few. For Toshiko Mori, a Japanese architect based in the United States, context is everything that arouses curiosity about the people we design for. In almost four decades as the head of her office in New York, Mori has had the opportunity to exercise her interest in design practice and academia, managing to build her buildings in contexts as diverse as China, U.S., and Senegal.
It is becoming a priority for architects to optimize projects that require increasingly smaller spaces, especially when building in urban areas where land value is often the most critical factor. This happens in countries like Portugal, for example, where urban plots are scarce and the properties available for remodeling are usually very small.
Working on a small scale offers somewhat playful flexibility. From adaptable interiors to urban installations and treehouses, one must use the imagination to solve the issues of limited space or budget. Check out the following 15 projects in Portugal —from stores to small pavilions— that show that spatial limitations do not diminish the quality of architecture.
The Lisbon Architecture Triennale announced as the winner of the fourth edition of the Début Award the São Paulo office Vão, formed by Anna Juni, Enk te Winkel and Gustavo Delonero. The office is known for a transdisciplinary practice that seeks to dilute the boundaries of the professional field in order to enhance architectural reflection. In previous editions, the award recognized the work of Bonell+Dòriga (Spain, 2019), Umwelt (Chile, 2016) and Jimenez Lai, from Bureau Spectacular (USA, 2013).
Image: achassignon via VisualHunt / CC BY-SA. Assembly with image of John Cunniff via Visual Hunt / CC BY
Jean-Luc Godard, through his films, talks about architecture almost as easily as he talks about cinema itself. In honor of the nouvelle vague icon, who passed away today at the age of 91, we revisit How Architecture Speaks Through Cinema.
There are several ways of making films. Like Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, who make music. Like Sergei Eisenstein, who paints. Like Stroheim, who wrote sound novels in silent days. Like Alain Resnais, who sculpts. And like Socrates, Rossellini I mean, who creates philosophy. The cinema, in other words, can be everything at once, both judge and litigant. — Jean-Luc Godard [1]
.jpg?1611324153 "Memorial Cemetery Parque das Cerejeiras / Crisa Santos Arquitectos. Photo © Isis de Oliveira")
