Some people love New York. Others fancy London, Sydney, or Hong Kong. While preferences for cities are split, science says that all of us may in fact be hard-wired to love the natural world. Interface, Inc. (NASDAQ: TILE), the world’s largest manufacturer, designer and marketer of carpet tiles, today launched a global competition named “Reconnect Your Space” that calls for architectural, interior or urban landscape design entries that put this affinity for nature, or biophilia, at the forefront. Biophilic design incorporates natural elements into manmade environments in order to help people feel and perform better.

Interface’s “Reconnect Your Space” competition invites architects, designers and students of these disciplines to submit their visions for how biophilia can influence the design of a new or existing space, either inside within built environments or outside in cities. One winning submission will be selected as the most unique, inspiring and purposeful way of reconnecting this space with nature. “Reconnect Your Space” is also intended to foster dialogue, spark ideas and pique global interest in biophilic design for working, playing and living.   

Parametrica [Digi Fab School] invites you to BREATHING PROTOTYPES Workshop (19-25 February 2013) to participate in the digital design build workshop, seeking to create an inventive collaborative environment. The workshop is part of a series of PARAMETRICA events aimed in promoting and exploring the world of parametric design. 

The workshop is aimed at: students, postgraduates, architects, interior, product and urban designers, engineers, anybody interested. All the details after the break.

In its third year, the AA Istanbul Visiting School, Vertical Interventions, in collaboration with Istanbul Technical University, will continue to rediscover verticality through novel generative design techniques and large-scale physical prototypes. Abstracted as a fusion of various sub-systems, each subsystem of the tower will be investigated in relation to their various performance criteria. The correlations between the separate sets of performance criteria and evaluation methods will be analyzed, leading to the generation of unified design alternatives for a vertical system typology. In addition to the custom-made digital design and evaluation tools supporting the core methodology, Vertical Interventions will also highlight the fabrication and assembly of a large scale working prototype integrating the performative characteristics of each system in examination.

As in 2012, the design agendas of AA Athens and AA Istanbul Visiting Schools will directly create feedback on one another, allowing participation in either one or both Programmes.

Following the initial challenge of amplifying connectivity, adjustability and interaction for its Correlations cycle, AA Athens Visiting School scales up its design intentions in order to investigate links among discrete individual architectural systems in its 2013 version, Recharged.

Recharged with interconnectivity on different levels, the theme of investigation will revolve around the design of semi-independent design prototypes acting together to form elaborate unified results. The driving force in Cipher City: Recharged is the synergistic effect behind complex form-making systems where interactive design patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple rules. 

GRAPHISOFT has developed another tool for your BIM toolbox. This tool – the EcoDesigner Star – creates a streamlined energy analysis workflow. Essentially – architects can use their ArchiCAD BIM as a Building Energy Model (BEM). 

What does this mean for designers and energy consultants? Implementing BIM in your everyday design practice already requires less timeto complete and deliver an architectural project. Now, with EcoDesigner Star coordination and collaboration are further enhanced as those processes are shortened and more productive. Additionally, EcoDesigner Star offers standard-compliant energy analyses on the BEM and produces a detailed building performance report, all within the familiar ArchiCAD design environment. EcoDesigner supports authoring tools in ArchiCAD by fully inegrating energy evaluation and reporting, according to international energy standards into the BIM. 

From the recent information overload concerning Zaha Hadid’s Wangjing Soho being pirated in China, one might think that copying was a new phenomenon in architecture. Is this really that shocking or even worth mentioning? 

It must be because, for the next few hundred words or so, I’m going to be mentioning it quite a bit. Copying can be a complicated issue. In Western culture, in particular, the status of the copy is fraught with contradictions. It is a problem that has existed since long before Walter Benjamin wrote about it in “The Work of Art in the Age of the Mechanical Reproduction”. 

Opportunity. Challenge. Innovation. These words form the backbone of RMIT University (Melbourne Institute of Technology University) in Australia. Too often, architecture schools become enamored of the aesthetics in the field to the detriment of all else. Not so at RMIT. Here, the approach is an ideal combination of meaningful research with design solutions. The architecture program achieves this by teaching design skills based in their practical application and framed by social idealism and cross-disciplinary training.

I remember the smog in Beijing rendering the most beautiful skies. There was an innocence to the air pollution back then, before the engines of economic development really got going. 

It was just a pretty sunset, or a delicate brown haze that romantically softened the edges of things—while wrecking your lungs, of course. But, like the sand storms, pollution gave the city a different, rarified quality. 

At almost a mile long Superkilen wedges through one of the most ethnically diverse and socially challenged neighborhoods in Denmark creating a truly unique urban space with a strong identity on a local and global scale. The park is divided into three zones: the red square, the black market and the green park and is conceived as a giant exhibition of urban best practice - a collection of global everyday objects from the 60+ home countries of the local inhabitants. Initiated by the City of Copenhagen and Realdania Foundation, the project started construction in 2009 and opened to the public in June 2012. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected Superkilen as one of the winners of the 2013 Institute Honor Awards, the profession’s highest recognition of works that exemplify excellence in architecture, interior architecture and urban design.

Junichiro Tanizaki’s (1886-1965) book In Praise of Shadows has been haunting me lately. There it sits on my shelf, as it has for years, ever since it was part of a reading list for an art history course I once took as an undergrad. 

It’s a thin volume. Ever so slight, it easily gets lost amongst more substantial books. But every time I’ve gone through my library and thought I don’t need it anymore, I hesitate and then put it back on the shelf. 

In his 2008 book, The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton argues that architecture has an extraordinary power when it comes to influencing who we are. In giving shape to our living environments, it plugs into our emotional existence. I would take it a step further and say that as we reside in architecture we so reside within ourselves, emplacing ourselves in both physical and psychological worlds.

But this is by no means a new argument. As de Botton explains in his most recent collection of essays, Religion for Atheists, the Catholics and Protestants have been elaborating on this theme for centuries. The world around us has a profound impact on how we think, feel, and perceive. Without this underlying logic there could be no architecture.