Resources to help you find materials, perfect design details and master the tools you need to create better buildings.
This March is turning out to be a splendid month for Thomas Heatherwick Studio. Just a week after th e firm unveiled its ambitious plans for a super-green Googleplex in collaboration with BIG, one of its largest projects to date has now been completed in Singapore: The Learning Hub is a cluster of 12 sculpted towers,…
rom enduring ancient monuments to a tradition of excellent products, no country in the world can boa st artisans with a deeper historical connection to fine stoneware than Italy. Within Italy, however, no one can beat the quality and innovations of manufacturer Casalgrande Padana. To celebrate their commitment to exceptional stoneware and its uses in contemporary architecture, they are now accepting entries for their 10th Grand Prix, recognizing the most technically accomplished and expressive uses of their materials in projects from 2012 to 2015.
There is much debate among architects and theorists about what exactly architecture can do as a poli tical mechanism. Can it change the world? Or is it merely a manifestation of larger political, legal, and economic forces, played out in concrete and glass? Most of it is probably falls squarely in the latter category, but Bolivia’s…
The next building you build may contain sources of fungus, invasive alien plant species, mutant frui t, or weeds. But in a good way. These materials and more are some of the main ingredients in the new generation of biopolymers and biocomposites, products that mainly comprise plant, animal, fungal, and bacterial sources that can now be…
McMansion /məkˈmanʃ(ə)n/ noun: a large modern house that is considered ostentatious and lacking in a rchitectural integrity. A single, all-encompassing definition of the word ‘McMansion’ is hard to come by, but there seems to be a broad consensus over its negative connotations: in the early 1980s, American suburbia saw a rise in expansive luxury homes, often…
The carbuncle at the World Trade Center site is well-documented and as the Transit Hub inches along, its mid-2000s aesthetic looks more and more ancient everyday. The dinosaur-like structural expressionist sculpture is eight years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget. It is set to become the crown jewel in Santiago Calatrava‘s overbudget and questionably…
Most everyone is familiar with the standard university typologies — lecture halls, dorms, libraries, gyms, student centers, etc. — but how many campuses can boast a “contemplative center?” San Francisco-based Aidlin Darling Design has recently completed The Windhover Contemplative Center at Stanford University, a uniquely programmed building meant expressly as a spiritual retreat for the…
Architizer continues to explore how architects experience the emotional realm during the process of creation, presenting the points of view of some of the profession’s most actualized practitioners. Today, Saxon Henry, author of Four Florida Moderns, interviews Guy Peterson, FAIA — Founder and Principal of Guy Peterson | Office for Architecture — whose forthcoming book…
Why is everyone watching and looking at ruin porn these days? Is it because it is so readily availab le on the internet? Is it because it is free? Or is it because it no longer means a shameful trip to the library or bookstore to seek out magazines and books full of abandoned architectural eye…