Architectural case studies and material exemplars to spark your creativity and inspire your next project.
“Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity.” So said Renzo Piano, but, however unreasonable he may believe this premise to be, the architect has come closer than ever to achieving the feat with an astonishing new structure in Athens, Greece. The Energy Canopy is a huge roof…
Through much of the 20th century, architecture gave an upper hand to technology over nature. Buildin gs were sealed off from fresh air and were primarily accessible by car. In retrospect, this era will register as an anomaly: while movements like sustainability and biophilia may sport cutting-edge monikers, in reality, they represent a return to age-old…
An oculus is an eye of a building, generally an opening in the center of a dome or a wall that was a common feature of Byzantine and Neoclassical architecture. It allows natural light into the building, representing a sun lighting the earth. The classic oculus has since been transformed into variations of skylights incorporated…
Following the completion of the largest building in the Netherlands, OMA has returned to its spiritu al home with another conceptual curiosity in Rotterdam. The mixed-use Timmerhuis building has arrived in the heart of the Dutch city, its cascading terraces of glazed cubes now visible above the skyline not far from the distinctive curved form of…
On the one hand quotidian and functional, faucets can also be imbued with design intent and imaginat ion. As demonstrated by the sophisticated styles in this collection, their functional purposes and archetypal forms provide a launching point for the contemporary imagination. The intimate and domestic scale of the faucet allows for subtle design details with big…
Lebbeus Woods' architectural drawings are among the most arresting in history.
Every day, throngs of people use public transit, be it in the form of a bus or train, rarely thinkin g about the depots, stations, or stops that they traverse along the way. But there’s change underfoot as architects and designers focus more on enhancing the commuter experience, as well as revitalizing urban areas, by building…
These eight examples of modern mountain houses provide all of the coziness and warmth of traditional structures, but do so with a modern twist and minimal environmental impact.
One of the ironies of modern “green” architecture and design is that in attempting to build more sus tainable and comfortable structures and make use of the positive aspects of natural daylight we can sometimes accomplish the opposite. All that glass allows us to reduce energy used to light and heat buildings, and there are documented…