Practice: Tools

During my first year of university, one of my professors said that you can easily recognize an archi tect on the street because he is the one who always looks up to see how the building ends. I recognized myself in this behavior, beyond the compulsion to knock walls and brush surfaces everywhere I am. But…

The igloo is surely one of the finest — and earliest — examples of modernism the world has ever seen . Louis Sullivan may have coined those famous words ‘form ever follows function’ back in 1896, but the Inuits of the Arctic North have been putting that principle into practice in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland for…

Shipping container architecture is not new in London. A pair of now-iconic projects demonstrate how the modules can be configured: Boxpark in Shoreditch has been the world’s first ‘pop-up’ mall, while Container City was the first of a series of successful projects to house apartments and offices like the BBC Broadcasting Studios. In the kingdom…

In the image-obsessed world of online profiles, the photograph is the make-or-break factor separatin g you from your perfect match. No no no, we’re not talking about your OkCupid profile. We mean your Airbnb listing. The startup that forever changed the world of vacation rentals is “developing a system to look at the photos of homes…

Reinterpretations is a new series of investigative articles that identifies a single construction co mponent and trace it across the body of work from an architecture practice. Each article identifies the component and elaborates on its development, noting a consistency or modes of reinterpretation in the reuse of normative construction components. While each of the articles…

If one didn’t know better, they might think that IKEA’s sole contribution to the world of architectu re is a liberal sprinkling of royal blue and lemon yellow boxes across the globe. They’ve brought a lot more to the flat-pack table than that though, and their latest playful addition is a 3D floor plan — or…