The Architecture of the City

Founded by Harvard and MIT, edX offers more than 800 free, online courses as well as certificates from top universities around the world, including Harvard, MIT and UC Berkeley. The courses cover everything from literature to poetry, medicine, biology, urban planning, engineering, history and architecture. 

Taught mostly in English, the courses have different weekly requirements, and generally require participants to be online at designated times of the day. There are also classes offered in other languages like Chinese, French, Spanish and Portuguese. They also offer certificates that can be purchased at the end of the course, costing between $50-$70.

It’s time for the profession to prepare. New software and hardware platforms are emerging that allow immersive environment representation—aka virtual reality, or VR—along with gestural modeling, or the translation of hand movements captured via computer vision into design information. Taken together, these two tools allow designers to visualize and virtually inhabit three-dimensional spatial conditions at “full scale,” where we can do design work with intuitive hand and body motions. The implications for architectural practice are dramatic.

First, it means we need to create new interfaces and custom workflows. The keyboard and mouse take a backseat in the design process. Second—and best of all, in my opinion—these platforms for augmented reality (AR) or VR stand to reengage the designer’s hands in the act of making, digitally.

Et si l’on redonnait de l’éclat aux étoiles ? Un peu fatigué par le poids des années, le célèbre centre-ville d’Ivry, constitué de logements triangulaires baptisés «Les Étoiles», va voir débarquer une horde de designers et d’urbanistes pour le lancement du premier festival d’architecture de banlieue.


Cette manifestation inédite, organisée à partir de samedi et jusqu’au 26 mars par le conseil d’architecture d’urbanisme et de l’environnement du Val-de-Marne (CAUE 94) et la ville, sera rythmée par des installations éphémères, conférences, ateliers, performances in situ.

Une idée soufflée par Serge, le fils de Jean Renaudie qui a imaginé avec Renée Gailhoustet ce cœur de ville peuplé de logements sociaux. Cet ovni post-mai 68 avec son allure de pyramide à pointes hérissées en béton brut, détonne alors par son audace. Mais, aujourd’hui, l’une de ses étoiles, le centre Jeanne-Hachette, peuplée de commerces, tombe en déshérence. Espaces en friche, magasins fermés...

In 1970, Japanese architect Shin Takasuga designed a house in the middle of the forest on the Pacific Ocean’s island of Miyake. Students of the New Left and members of Peace movements planned the construction of a communal residential building and retreat camp which was meant to be realised within minimum budget and with almost no skills by the same inhabitants. Takasuga decided the house to be built using old wooden railways sleepers for the whole structure as well as the interior furniture and affirmed that the building did not not have to be designed, but rather generated by the stacking and crossing of railway sleepers as a structural principle.

A concrete sub-structure lies under the three-floors. The public areas, kitchen, assembly room and bathrooms, are all located on the ground floor, while a long dining hall which takes the whole building height becomes the main collective space.
In the upper floors are located the sleeping rooms (all with the same surface), accessible only by ladders. The triangular roof, covered in wooden shingles, embraces the whole building defining its exterior appearance. This main element is a reference to traditional japanese houses which were mostly identified by their imposing roofs, the first built part after the structure was erected.

The interior is characterized by the strict three-dimentional grid of structural wood made by the intersecting sleepers which appear the same in plan and section.

Women are being driven out or held back from careers in architecture by long hours, childcare, unequal pay and the likelihood of being passed over for promotion, according to a major new survey by the American Institute of Architects released to coincide with International Women's Day.

More than 70 per cent of female architects and architecture students in the US feel that women are still underrepresented in the profession, according to the American Institute of Architects' (AIA) Diversity in the Profession of Architecture survey.

Half of all the female respondents also said that women were less likely to be promoted to senior positions within the profession.

Equal pay, which has been the focus of a number of high-profile campaigns in both the US and UK, was also still a serious issue in architecture, with 50 per cent of women reporting that women were less likely to be paid the same as men for the same role.

Jean-Paul Jungmann was born in 1935 in Strasbourg [France] and currently lives and works in Paris. He’s one of the avant-garde architects that experimented with inflatable architecture, structures and furniture and also developed different projects in between the 1960s and 1970s. He lead the creation of the group UTOPIA, with Jean Auberg and Antoine Stinco in collaboration with sociologist Hubert Tonka, Jean Braudillard and others, focused on the formulation of radical critique to architecture, urbanism and every day life in French society on those years. They published the eponymous journal Utopia from 1967 to 1969. We can read at the book The inflatable moment: pneumatics and protest in ’68:

The Utopie architects drew on technical and aesthetics sources as diverse as Buckminster Fuller, research by the American military, the London group Archigram, and American comic books, and were inspired by the political and philosophical writings of Henri Lefevre. In their work they presented a vision for a built world in which buoyancy, ephemerality and mobility would replace the inertia and represion that they believed characterized the architectural urbanism of the postwar.

Some of the projects designed by Jungmann included ephemeral structures for exhibitions and galleries and diverse theoretical projects as his researches on inflatable houses.

A glass-enclosed "skyslide" is being added to the US Bank Tower in downtown Los Angeles, offering thrill seekers the opportunity to glide down the building's exterior.

Called Skyslide, the glass chute will measure 14 metres in length and 1.2 metres in width, and will be installed approximately 304 metres above the ground below.

The enclosure will be made of 32-millimetre-thick glass panels. Renderings show the slide attached to the 72-storey building by a metal support system.

"Visitors will experience Skyslide's unparalleled views in a whole new way, as they glide from the 70th to the 69th floor of the US Bank Tower," said the developer, Singapore-based OUE Limited, which purchased the office building in 2013.

Franco Purini’s drawings, tangent to art, architecture and design, will be on show at the Casa dell’Architettura in Rome until April 17, 2015.  The show focuses on his work, but also draws attention to the Italian tradition of “architettura disegnata” and its role nowadays.

Foster + Partners, BIG and Grimshaw Architects have won a competition to design pavilions for Expo 2020 Dubai. Under the Expo’s 2020 theme of Connecting Minds, Creating the Future, the teams were selected from 13 invited practices to design three themed pavilions within the Expo's HOK-designed masterplan: Opportunity, Mobility, and Sustainability.

"A key criterion for the competition was ensuring that the designs not only embodied one of Expo’s core themes, but also had the flexibility and longevity to live on as landmarks and functional structures after the Expo is complete in 2021," said the organizers in a press release. 

The three winners of the Tokyo Pop Lab competition, which called for the development of an institution for popular culture, have been announced.

Centered on the phenomena of pop culture, the competition examined how “popular culture migrates and changes from person to person and place to place,” and invited entrants “to critically evaluate fundamental correlations between cultural production and architecture.”

Entrants varied in typology from pragmatic to ideological, with successful proposals including “a well considered and articulated definition of popular culture, clarity in representation of both architecture and culture, and a clear programmatic agenda.”

Yesterday, ArchDaily celebrated 8 years online. And, while every birthday is a special occasion, this year feels to us to be particularly special: in the past year we've achieved many milestones, including the launch of both ArchDaily China and ArchDaily Perú, a move to a new platform and a new design and so many other steps forward; at the same time, in the Pritzker Prize, the Venice Biennale, and other organizations around the world, we're seeing the acceptance of a type of architecture that has always been a key part of our mission statement.

With those things in mind, now seems like a very good time to look back at how we got here - in particular, to look at some of the most notable architectural projects that have defined our time so far on the web. Our selection of 50 projects includes buildings by Pritzker Prize winners (and a number of architects who are sure to be future Pritzker Prize winners), it includes Building of the Year award winners and runners-up, and of course it includes projects that have inspired architects around the world.

This collection of projects also demonstrates the power of ArchDaily's database - an immense library of over 21,000 projects which we are adding to every day, but one which we are also working hard to give you the tools you need to make use of. With our My ArchDaily platform and our faceted search, these and many, many other projects are always at your fingertips for your inspiration, education and enjoyment.

Beijing Design Week shines a light on the marginalised hutong population of Dashilar, but in so doing feeds the gentrification machine

For the fifth year in a row, at the end of September, a creative crowd descends on the Dashilar district, one of the oldest hutongs, south-west of Tiananmen Square. Yellow signage populates both commercial streets and residential alleys, providing the outsiders with information on the vast array of exhibitions and projects of Beijing Design Week.

Somewhere between an image of what they once were and an adapted response to today’s reality, the traditional labyrinthine hutong neighbourhoods currently rest in an uncomfortable in-between, unable to remain true to their historical significance yet struggling to redefine themselves and respond to present challenges. The timber frames are ageing and the hygiene infrastructure is crucially lacking - only a third of the families currently have access to a private toilet - but more than just a physical structure, it is the social structure, representing a culture in itself, that is in dire need of attention.

‘To effectively deploy the symbolic values of traditional building elements, they must be given relevant meaning and function’

Being an architect is hard. At times, you're expected to act as everything from a graphic designer to a handyman (or woman), from a data scientist to a writer, or from a computer programmer to a public speaker. And, you're expected to do all these things on little to no sleep and for a much lower wage than you're probably worth. But don't fear - the internet is here to help (it's not just a place to procrastinate, you know).

We've collected 22 free websites that can help you in the never ending quests for efficiency, knowledge and good taste. Whether you're selecting the perfect color scheme for a presentation or graph, tracking the price of your next big purchase, solving technical problems or simply trying to balance your sleep and caffeine intake, there's something in this list to help everyone. 

Last week marked the opening of Santiago Calatrava's Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro. Prior to the its opening, ArchDaily sat down with Calatrava to learn more about the museum's design and how the project's fruition resulted in the removal of an elevated highway that once isolated the city from the harbor.