Practice

Although urban development often seems like a zero-sum game, the efficiencies of high density and th e fragile beauty of nature need not be mutually exclusive. Tokyo has long been a locus of high-rise housing experiments, where Japanese architects have addressed the lack of space by creating some truly extraordinary houses. Indeed, Tokyo’s citizens remain steadfast…

“The completion of the World Trade Center will finally restore the majestic skyline of Manhattan …” As a blockbuster collaboration between a massive, multinational news corporation and the building’s new architect — Bjarke Ingels, arguably the master storyteller of his profession — it should come as no surprise that the video for this week’s big…

One of the most practical new building products on display during ICFF, held at the Javits Center du ring the NYCxDesign festival, was a moveable wall system with the clever name of Tudelü. Designed and engineered in Brooklyn, Tudelü’s retractable roll-up walls create privacy or more space at the touch of a remote-controlled button. Intended for both residential and commercial projects, the material-layered wall comes in a variety of colors and materials, including felt, wood, faux leather, and two soundproofing options.

As in all great partnerships, the backstories of Eduardo Cadaval and Clara Solà-Morales overlap and intertwine in perfect harmony. Their journey from academia to practice has taken them thousands of miles over the years, but ultimately came full circle, culminating in the founding of Cadaval and Solà-Morales, based in the architects’ home countries of Mexico…

With last month’s bicoastal shows and NeoCon around the corner, we’re well into design-s how season at this point, and at least a few product trends have become … concrete. If you weren’t able to make it to ICFF last month, we’ve got a rundown of some of the most interesting new products from the show…

By James Biber, architect of the USA Pavilion at EXPO 2015. Expos, since their inception in the Vict orian London of 1851, have managed to rely on architecture as the leitmotif of modernity. Paxton’s Crystal Palace was the first truly modern building: fully demountable, entirely prefabricated of iron and glass, commissioned by competition, and realized from…

By modeling design in three dimensions, Building Information Modeling (BIM) can increase productivit y across the board for designers. It surpasses the 2D drawing process by streamlining coordination between collaborators and alerting all users to collisions between systems that previously would not have been detected until the field. If the benefits of BIM are well established,…

The lighting brand Ilex Architectural Lighting was founded on a made-in-America premise “in order to maintain our company’s domestic manufacturing base,” says Ben Duggan, who is Vice President of Product Development of both Ilex and its parent company Norwell Lighting. Yet the East Taunton, Mass.-based executive also notes that Ilex had perhaps branded itself too…

If there is one thing that Zaha Hadid Architects is known for, it’s standing out from the crowd with her signature style. From the swooping concrete planes of the MAXXI Museum in Rome to the gleaming white curves of the extraordinary Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, the British-Iraqi designer has made her name with the…