Month: December 2019

Kansas City has become the first major city in the United States to approve free public transit. Last week, the City Council voted unanimously to make the city’s bus system fare-free alongside the existing streetcar system that was launch in 2016. The Zero Fare Transit proposal aims to be a universal and system-wide fare-free scheme.

Seeking projects that combine sustainable construction with architectural excellence, the LafargeHolcim Awards are open for entries through February 25, 2020. The international competition offers a total of $2 million USD in prize money to projects and concepts from architecture, engineering, urban planning, materials and construction technology, and related fields. 

At the beginning of 2019, we identified 3D printing as a trend that would influence architecture in 2019. This was not a difficult prediction to make. Aside from noting a 70% increase in reader interest in 3D printing throughout the previous year, we saw how the architectural community has had a long-running engagement with 3D printing, from using the technology to tackle homelessness, to creating affordable yet complex structural connections.

Portes Bonheur – le Chemin des Carrières, the Quarries’ Track, is a lace undulating in the landscape, an invitation to travel as our ambition behind the reconquest of the Rosheim-St Nabor railway in Alsace, France. Ominous, sometimes hidden, the vestiges of the railway still mark the reading of the site. The desire to create a route to serve the quarries had to adapt to the undulating landscapes of the sub-Vosges hills and the very form of the tracing tells the history of the landscape and the men. The journey to discover forgotten landscapes or to take a different view on everyday landscapes is addressed to both local users and tourists. Like the old track that offered a dual function (industrial and passenger transport), the route has a double vocation where the functional must rub shoulders with the imaginary of travel. 

Forward-thinking architectural firms, infrastructure consultancies, and interior design businesses are increasingly leaning on real-time architectural visualization to explore, evaluate, and present designs. By affording clients and project stakeholders the opportunity to experience future spaces in interactive and immersive environments, real-time technology provides a compelling immediacy that 2D drawings cannot. 

Not so many offices of architecture have the chance to put hands on their own work after this is implemented. Less have the chance to deal with the re-use of a temporary architecture of their own. Practically no one has the chance to deal with the dismantling. That is, it is very unique to give birth and death to a building as a matter of design.