Tips and tricks to help you specify the right building-products and design better buildings.
Although humans have long looked to nature for inspiration, the concept of biomimicry has only been around since the middle of the 20th century. Decades before Otto Schmitt coined the term, Rene Binet’s Esquisses Décoratives (1904) predicts speculative designs that prefigure many of the forms we see today. This largely forgotten anthology of illustrations, viewable…
Five years shy of its centennial this year, the Brooklyn Army Terminal spent the first half of its l ife fulfilling its original purpose as a military hub. Sited just opposite the northern tip of Staten Island, the industrial park was the largest concrete building when it was completed in 1919 and subsequently the U.S.’s largest…
The Royal Institute of British Architects has been reinventing itself of late: The esteemed organiza tion has recently announced a newly elected president, a new website, and a new approach to exhibitions as it attempts to modernize and reaffirm its relevance to a fresh generation of millennial architects and students. Some things, though, need only be…
After a weekend in which so many people were getting hot and bothered with roses, champagne and nume rous shades of gray, perhaps it isn’t such a surprise to find that certain projects conceived at this time of year might invite a little architectural innuendo. With that in mind, we present to you Eduardo Camarena’s master…
National libraries are amongst the most symbolic icons of modern-day countries
Love ’em or hate ’em, there is no denying that Apple is a true technological Goliath, th e likes of which the world has never seen before. According to Forbes, Apple is currently the 15th largest company on earth, and comfortably the most valuable, with an estimated worth of $483 billion. It comes as no surprise,…
The value of public open space versus that of cultural institutions was thrust into the spotlight in the Windy City last week when the Chicago Park District board voted to transfer some 20 acres of parkland to the city if the University of Chicago is successful in its bid to host Barack Obama’s Presidential Library.…
Like architecture, street art is embedded in its context. But in too many instances, entire walls ha ve been removed and exhibited in a gallery setting, effectively obliterating the artwork’s relationship with place. Londoner Rafael Schacter, creative director of the two-year-old collaborative arts organization Approved by Pablo, wanted to investigate how graffiti and street art’s site-specificity…
In his chef d’oeuvre The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard explores the innate psychological connection between our childhood home and the house of our dreams: “Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to…