Former ArchDaily's Managing Editor. BA in Architecture from Newcastle University, and interested in how overlooked elements of architectural culture —from the media to competitions to procurement processes can alter the designs we end up with.
It's no secret that architects are often fascinated by maps, and in the age of Google - where access to accurate maps of almost anywhere in the world has become universal - maps have become one of the most powerful ways to understand our cities. Interestingly, Google has in a way enabled a new way to interrogate maps from the past, as historic maps can be more easily overlaid with the Google interface to make comparisons to the present day. That's just what the website Locating London's Past has done, creating a tool to compare three maps: the current version of Google Maps, the first Ordnance Survey map from 1863-80, and John Rocque's 1746 Survey of London, allowing web users to see the growth of the UK capital over the past 270 years.
The movement towards gender equality in the architecture profession has been gaining attention for some time now, led in large part by surveys of the profession such as the AIA’s recent diversity study or of course the annual Women in Architecture survey by The Architectural Review and The Architects’ Journal. However, recently the debate around gender has taken on a different form; in a response to the AR's most recent survey published in RIBA Journal, for example, the curator of Turncoats and founder of the practices Interrobang and Studio Weave Maria Smith argues that it is time to move on to a more nuanced depiction of the problem. “I’d like to see a radical change in how this discussion is framed,” she says. “We must move away from generic indignation and start to properly interrogate why both men and women practice architecture the way they do.”
In light of this slow movement towards action in place of indignation, on International Women’s Day last month we asked our readers what exactly should be done to eliminate gender inequality in the field of architecture. The question provoked a broad and at times incredibly heated discussion - read on to find out what our readers had to say on the topic.
Using photogrammetry to capture and model existing buildings is a fantastic way to share cultural treasures with the world, and with VR features cropping up everywhere even enables us to give people virtual tours of a site of cultural significance from thousands of miles away. But beyond that, capturing a model of a building is also a great way to digitally preserve that structure at a given point in time - this technique is even being used by Harvard and Oxford to protect structures placed at risk by the ongoing wars in Syria and Iraq.
In that spirit, our friends over at Sketchfab have compiled a selection of cultural treasures that have been immortalized on their platform. Read on to see all seven models, and don't forget that you can view all of them in virtual reality using Google Cardboard.
Moleskine has announced a new product which it hopes will allow users to "bridge their analog and digital worlds." The Smart Writing Set is a system that includes the Paper Tablet, a specially-made Moleskin sketchbook which works in tandem with the Pen+, a digitally-enabled pen that recognizes the notebook and tracks the user's movement. The Pen+ then sends this information to the new Moleskine Notes App (for Apple users) or Neo Notes (for Android) in order to record the user's notes digitally, in real time.
Of course, the top story in recent weeks has been the sudden death of Dame Zaha Hadid, who passed away last week in Miami. At just 65 years of age, and at the height of her powers as an architect, the news of Hadid’s passing was a shock to many and unsurprisingly was met with grief from many of our readers. Read on to see what tributes those readers left, along with opinions on other stories from recent weeks.
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court of Sweden ruled against Wikimedia Sverige in a landmark case over “Freedom of Panorama,” a ruling which The Wikimedia Foundation has “respectfully disagreed with” in a blog post. The Swedish Supreme Court’s ruling, in short, states that Wikimedia Sverige is not entitled to host photographs of copyrighted works of art on its website Offentligkonst.se, which provides maps, descriptions and images of artworks placed in public spaces in Sweden.
The concept of freedom of panorama describes a provision in copyright law which extends the right to take and to disseminate photographs of copyrighted works provided those photographs were taken in public spaces. Most people who own a camera (in other words, most people) have probably given very little thought to their freedom of panorama, or any restrictions that may have been placed upon it. But the reality of this little-known copyright-related oddity is something that many people, and architects especially, should find very concerning indeed.
The 2016 Pritzker laureate Alejandro Aravena has announced that his firm, ELEMENTAL, has chosen to release four of their social housing designs to the public for open source use. Speaking in a panel discussion held by the Pritzker Prize earlier tonight titled Challenges Ahead for the Built Environment, Aravena stressed the need to work together to tackle the challenge of rapid migration that is taking place all around the globe, a message closely tied to the theme of the upcoming Venice Biennale which Aravena is directing. In this spirit, DWGs of these four designs - which offer the basic elements of a house at a low budget and encourage the residents to expand into an adjacent space as they find the money to do so - will be available for architects worldwide to learn from.
UPDATE: The news has now been confirmed. David Chipperfield Architects has been officially selected to convert the US Embassy near London's Grosvenor Square into a "world-class" 137-room hotel, after the building's current occupants relocate. According to a new report from AJ, restaurants, retail, a spa and a 1000-person ballroom will also be included in the design. The first images of the project have now been released.
As reported by the Architects' Journal, David Chipperfield Architects has been selected in an invited competition to remodel the US Embassy in London, once the building's current occupants move into the new embassy building currently being constructed in the Nine Elms. The existing building, a Grade-II listed design by Eero Saarinen dating back to 1960, is set to become a hotel after developers Qatari Diar purchased it in 2009.
While there are many different approaches creating architectural space, most architects agree that the primacy of the human is paramount to the creation of a successful design. We perceive architecture through our senses, interpret its scale in comparison to our bodies, and of course require architecture to protect our bodies from the forces of nature. For these reasons, designers often include human figures in their sketches to give a better sense of the scale and atmosphere of their design.
However, often these figures can be even more revealing. "Architects project themselves into the human figure," explains Noor Makkiya, who has collected a selection of figures from the sketches of the world's best-known architects. "So if we compare drawings from different architects, we frequently find differences in body shape and body activity, for practicing architects often represent their own ideologies as a reference for understanding the human physical condition."
From the scientific body proportion studies used by Da Vinci and Le Corbusier, to the primitive figure used by Glenn Murcutt, to the creative explosion that is Frank Gehry's deconstructed human, read on to see the full set collected by Makkiya.
The Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize has announced five finalists for its biannual MCHAP.emerge awards, celebrating the best architecture in the Americas by emerging practices. The five projects were selected from a list of 55, coming from 95 different nominators, that were announced last week. The projects represent the best architecture completed by young architects over the past two years in both North and South America, with finalists coming from Canada, the United States, Mexico, Chile and Paraguay.
The winner of the prize will be announced on the evening of April 1st at a symposium at the S. R. Crown Hall in Chicago, after an afternoon in which the finalists present their work to the jury, and the Architecture faculty and student body of IIT. Read on to see the list of finalists.
TAKTL's ultra-high-performance concrete panels on the Waikiki Business Plaza by MGA Architecture. Image Courtesy of TAKTL
It's no secret that among the architecture profession's biggest sources of guilt is our reliance on concrete in a huge number of the buildings that we have a hand in creating. Architects are more likely than most to be aware of the environmental implications of the material, and yet we continue to use it at an alarming rate. But what alternatives are there in order to do our job? In an article for Forbes, Laurie Winkless runs down a list of three alternatives that stand a good chance of changing the face of concrete construction.
When we began these bi-weekly round-ups of readers' comments back in October, we did so with one key aim: to encourage open, democratic debate with a very low barrier for entry - the type of internet-enabled debate that many architecture critics and publications have given up on. This week, we got a taste of just that kind of rational, professional debate as our readers picked apart the popular opinion in the wider media that the renovation of Cádiz Castle was "a perfect example of how not to restore an old castle." Alongside debates on whether architecture is a form of art and what the AIA should be doing about sustainability, read on to see what our readers had to say after the break.
"In my practice I try to have fun doing architecture and designing architecture, and I try to play with architecture at the same time," explained Moon Hoon in ArchDaily's recent interview with the architect at the Chicago Architecture Biennial. "So sometimes my clients are very jealous—how come you're having fun getting paid—so I try to hide a little bit and say I'm a very serious guy, but most of the time I have great fun with architecture."
In this new video produced by Moon Hoon and Tomeny Kisilewicz, that sense of fun isn't being hidden much at all: the 5-minute film, which constructs a fantasy narrative around the existence of Moon Hoon's recently completed Wind House, is 50% surreal formal association, 50% sci-fi horror and 100% architectural fever dream.
The Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize has announced the nominees for this year's MCHAP awards, the biennial prize hosted by the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) to award the best projects in the Americas. Following on from their inaugural prize in 2014 which awarded the best projects of the 21st century up to 2013, this year's awards will focus on the best architecture from 2014 and 2015, and the nominee list features 175 projects in the main MCHAP awards and 55 in the MCHAP.emerge awards.
Fabric is viewed as a material which is flat and two-dimensional and thus, until recent times, it has been used in architecture as a surface sheet. However the material has not been fully exploited.
Developed by four Masters students from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, FaBrick is a prototype for creating sturdy structures out of textile-based materials. So far consisting of a stool made from a fabric impregnated with cement and a chair made of a felt composite, the project aims to develop a "technique of designing fabric to become the new brick, the new concrete in the invention of architecture."
Today, on International Women's Day, we wanted to open up a discussion among ArchDaily readers to see what else could be done. What more could architects, institutions and indeed even the media do to close the gender gap in our profession? Let us know in the comments below and the best responses will be featured in an upcoming article.
The Architectural Review has announced the final winners in its 2016 Women in Architecture awards, awarding Mexican architect Gabriela Etchegaray with the Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture, and Jeanne Gang with the Architect of the Year award. In honoring Gang and Etchegaray, the AR noted that both "have demonstrated excellence in design and a commitment to working both sustainably and democratically with local communities." The pair join other Women in Architecture Award winners Odile Decq and Julia Peyton-Jones, who last week received the 2016 Jane Drew Prize and Ada Louise Huxtable Prize, respectively. Read on for more about the awards.
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